The front man for Pennsylvania pop-punk standard the Starting Line came home from his high school track practice one day to some good news.

Kenny Vasoli hadn’t been promoted to team captain. Instead, Vasoli’s band had been signed by pop-punk powerhouse label Drive-Thru records.

“As soon as I walked in the door, I got a call from Mike and he told me we were on Drive-Thru and I was like, I was just freaking out – I couldn’t believe it.”

Only a few short years after that day, the band’s popularity and fan base have skyrocketed, and it has been promoted from up-and-comers to pop-punk royalty.

The band’s newest album, “Based On A True Story,” even peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard chart, which is a far cry from its first album, “Say It Like You Mean It,” which peaked at No. 109.

This accomplishment helped earn them a spot on the main stage of the Vans Warped Tour in 2003 and again in 2005.

“[Warped Tour] is way hot. There’s a lot of kids; that’s the biggest thing. You got to get used to playing for a shit-ton of kids every night,” Vasoli says.

Regardless of the tour, the band can be found traveling the country almost nonstop, playing venues that run the gamut of sizes and locations.

No matter where it is playing, the band always likes to mingle with its tour mates.

“We actually hang out in each other’s dressing rooms a lot of the time,” Vasoli says. “Motion City always keeps their beer in our dressing room – they’re always in there drinking with us and hanging out. And the Boys Night Out guys are always playing video games.”

After touring and hanging out every night with bands that fans would die to meet just once, it may seem like the band has grown numb to the excitement of meeting the artists who keep their headphones warm. Vasoli, however, says he still blunders from time to time.

“I met Ben [Gibbard] from Death Cab [for Cutie] once backstage at a show and I was really nervous and I was such an idiot around him,” he says.

“That was the most nervous I can remember being in a really long time.”

He may not be totally accustomed to meeting his peers, but Vasoli says the band is well-versed with the live show. The band members don’t really get nervous before shows, he says – they just like to enjoy themselves.

“I like to play ‘Ready’ a lot because at the beginning of it, kids hold up a lot of lighters and they sing along to it,” he says. “It’s cool; I like that song a lot.”

Vasoli does most of the writing for the band and the song “Ready” was special to the members, helping them deal with some of the obstacles they were facing as a young band, he says.

“‘Ready’ was a really special song for us because we were writing about the tribulations that we were having with our record label and it was right when we were at a standstill with putting out the record,” he says.

“So it was a difficult thing to write about without them knowing about it, so I always thought it was pretty cool.”

While on stage and playing the songs they have written and love, they also take the time to appreciate their surroundings. For the Starting Line, the feeling never gets old.

“When you take that moment and really look at the crowd and see what they’re doing and see them like singing something you wrote, then it, like, for a second, becomes really, really, really special,” he says.