Man Overboard's Justin Collier on Pop Punk, New Jersey, and New Found Glory

Man Overboard, a Garden State pop punk group, is enjoying a whirlwind career. After touring with New Found Glory last year, the band just wrapped up a series of shows in the UK, and is gearing up for its first American headlining tour.

The group has released 50 or 60 songs since it formed in 2008 and continues to tour constantly. Through August 5, the last day of Warped Tour, Man Overboard is planning on playing 110 shows this year.

One of those stops is Wednesday, February 29 at The Underground, so we caught up with guitarist Justin Collier to discuss New Jersey music scene, touring, and the nature of pop punk.

Up on the Sun: How was the UK?

Justin Collier: It was great. We actually just got back a couple hours ago. I landed at noon, so I've been home for like two hours now after running around dropping everybody off. But the tour was great, it was thirteen shows and they were all awesome.

Were there any cities you liked in particular?

There's a couple places that we always have really good shows like London, Kingston, Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow, and then we played some newer places on this tour. We played Bristol, Liverpool, Brighton, some places that we really haven't played before and those were a total delight, also really good.

Tell me a little bit more about the Pop Punk the Vote Tour that you have coming up.

It's our first proper headline tour and it's not full US, but it's most of the US. We picked the Pop Punk the Vote Tour name because we wanted kids to get interactive and involved with the tour, so you can go online to the poppunkthevote.tumblr.com and vote for the songs we that play, the tour t-shirt and stuff like that. Kids can...they're not just buying a ticket and coming to see some bands play a show, they're actually getting involved in the songs that they're going to hear and the things they can buy and stuff like that.

Are all of your songs fair game?

We've put out four LPs worth of material in the last two or two and a half years, so we have like 50 or 60 songs. We picked about a dozen songs that we're definitely going to play every night, and then we picked about 15 songs that we put up for vote. Of those 15, we'll probably pick 5 or 6 of those, so we play 18 songs or something like that every night. Definitely not every song is up for vote, but a pretty fair amount of them.