02 June 2011
While it’s difficult for most to think of Simple Plan without affixing the group to the dreaded emo fad, for angst- ridden adolescents, they were the prophets of a new power-punk revolution. Even today, the quintet are largely recognised as the band who birthed Chuck Taylor stomping tracks like Welcome To My Life, Addicted and Shut Up, despite their osmosis through electro, rock and the occasional ballad over the past decade.
Their upcoming release, the punning Get Your Heart On, is the first since their eponymous album in 2008 and according to lead guitarist Jeff Stinco, it’s a chance to break sobriquets and become known for more than the now detrimental emo tag.
“We had to decide, how do you stay relevant? What do you do on your fourth record?” Stinco, 33, is nursing a hangover after a charity event for the Simple Plan Foundation when he calls from his Canadian home. “We’ve been around for ten years, we were known for certain things but we don’t necessarily want to stay in the same place either, so it’s kind of a balancing act.”
With albums like Still Not Getting Any and Simple Plan behind them, the band have bounced back from the brink, and as the title of the opus suggests, they’re ditching the woe-is-me burden for a lighter carriage.
“What really sticks out when you hear the whole record is that we’re here to have fun. We’re here to bring the party down and we want to make sure we do it right; that’s our art, we try to basically bring party music to an art form.”
In 2009, just as the band were riding worldwide success and had recruited an army of panda-eyed zealots, Simple Plan took some time off. Now on the verge of releasing album four, the band could not have picked a better time to come back. Bands like Yellowcard, Blink 182, Sum 41 and Panic! At The Disco are all back on the pop-punk scene, but despite the obvious parallels between Simple Plan and the aforementioned, Stinco avers the band are fabled enough to trounce any genre pigeonholing.
“I hope that with the years, it’s not about the genre anymore, it’s about recognising the band. I want to say this with all the modesty in the world,” he cautions. “I think that when you hear our sound, when you hear Pierre (Bouvier) singing, you recognise us rather quickly.”
Although they’ve yet to become a worldwide sanctioned icon, they’re already one step ahead with a band line up that has remained unchanged from their embryonic years but perhaps this is the reason for enlisting Rivers Cuomo to sing on their first single, Can’t Keep My Hands Off You. Artists like B.o.B, Best Coast, Julian Casablancas, Lil Wayne and Katy Perry have all piggybacked on the Weezerfrontman’s fame, so Simple Plan’s endeavor to tap into an unchartered niche is entirely apposite. The band even penned a few quirky lyrics for him and had Cuomo singing about toe jam and roll ups.
“A lot of the quirky lyrics that he’s singing were actually written by Chuck (Comeau) and Pierre,” says Stinco. “They had that lyrical twist before working with Rivers.”
The final product made the list of 15 tracks the band plucked from 70. Recording ensued and took the band six months, “We’re very slow at making records,” says Stinco. This was also due to a new method they decided on where they treated every track as if it would be a single and finished each individually before moving on to the next. Although Stinco says this was the biggest hurdle of
Get Your Heart On, the biggest is yet to come. Simple Plan are still yet to prove they have outgrown the pop-punk image along with their now matured fan-base.
“Are we a pop-punk band only? I don’t think so anymore,” he rebuts. “It’s definitely our roots, it’s where we come from and we’re definitely known to be part of that scene, but there’s a lot more to it now.”
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