Nickelback Choose “Long Road”
Nickelback‘s upcoming album, The Long Road, due September 23rd, features some of the heaviest songs the Vancouver-based rock band has ever recorded.
“It sounds like Pantera meets Metallica,” says Nickelback
frontman and songwriter Chad Kroeger. “That comes out of my roots.
I’m a metal guitar player at heart.”
But Road‘s first single, “Someday,” is a lighter track.
“It’s a very ‘How You Remind Me’-esque song,” explains Kroeger. “It
will appeal to the largest audience . . . That’s what record
companies are for.”
While Kroeger has been the songwriter over the course of
Nickelback’s three albums — 1996’s Curb, 1999’s The
State, and 2001’s multi-platinum Silver Side Up — he
says he allowed his bandmates, brother Mike Kroeger (bass), Ryan
Peake (guitar) and Ryan Vikedal (drums), more input lyrically this
time around.
“On the single, I allowed contributions from other people,” he
says, “which I don’t really like doing — I’m the one who sings
them and I’m the one that has to believe in the words. But they
came up with some really tasty stuff.”
Kroeger approaches songwriting like a science — he actually
dissects the ingredients of a hit song. “If you study songwriting,
you can learn so much,” he says. “That’s why there are so many
one-hit wonders — they don’t know how to write. They stumble onto
it by accident once. I study everything — everything sonically,
everything lyrically, everything musically, chord structure.”
Nickelback also decided to produce the album themselves, after
sharing credit for Silver Side Up with Rick Parashar. “Too
many producers are glorified engineers,” Kroeger says. “For me, the
ultimate producer can play the guitar better than I can, can play
the drums better than I can, can sing better than I can — which
isn’t that tough — can arrange songs better than I can, and can
come up with hooks better than I can. That’s the only way I’m going
to have respect for somebody’s opinion.”