 |
| |
|
| |
Interview
by SashaS
17-12-2004
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
|
| |
More on: Three Days Grace
|
| |
|
|
|
|
 |
| 3 Days Grace: from Canada, rockingly |
|
An auspicious strut
Three Days Grace and the grassroots method
It certainly has been a strange year for Three Days Grace: this Canadian band’s self-titled debut album was released in the UK some six months ago but it might as well not: appearing originally on Music For Nations, it came out at the time when the indie label was going through the takeover by BMG, the conglomerate’s Jive label handles their career in the rest of the world. In meantime, the trio have sold close to a million copies in the USA.
Their success has come primarily from touring, ‘Net and word of mouth.
“We’ve been touring for two years and that’s what we wanna do, play live as much as we possibly can. It is tough being away from home but it is great to be doing the thing we love. That has resulted in a well selling album and we are happy to have done so but we are more focused on performing and live work…”
The words are spoken by singer and guitarist Adam Gontier, sitting at the back of the bus parked behind the tonight’s venue [Forum, London]. Facing us are also the other two band members, bassist Brad Walst and drummer Neil Sanderson.
“It’s a pleasant but a huge surprise to us,” Gontier continues, “it was never our ambition, we never ever dreamt of becoming famous and successful, our goal was never set as selling million albums in the States. We’ve always been focused on writing good songs, performing them the best we can; being signed by a label has allowed us to make a really good sounding record, the way we wanted to… A lot of people are buying and relating to the music and stuff… We especially like meeting and talking with our fans, signing albums…”
Beat-full/melodic psycho-sofa
Three Days Grace originate in Norwood, Ontario but have relocated to a more vibrant Canadian city of Toronto few years back. The band’s hard-edged rock, filled with melodic choruses and lyrics that explore deeper and bleaker side of human nature, has found plenty of appreciative public all over the world. But, their native land seems to have somewhat overlooked them judging by the recent Juno [Canucks’ Grammy/Brit] Awards, where no trophy got engraved with their name despite several nominations.
“Awards are usually bullshit, especially the Canadian ones,” Sanderson points the finger. “It all comes down to how much time you’ve spent in the country but we haven’t as we travelled the world and played places like Australia, Brazil, America… We haven’t concentrated on Canada over the past few years and that reflects on our status back home.”
The self-titled debut album was inspired by the small-town [Norwood’s population is 1500] experiences whilst the new songs are informed by the global trips; at the same time, lyric writing comes from within…
“Yeah, that’s what balances it, actually,” Gontier confirms. “Inspirations may be wider, larger and global but all of it is a personal experience, songs are about different struggles and everything one goes through and that’s what makes people relate to our songs. We’ve always written about issues and we use music as an outlet for negative feelings, negative emotions, it is like talking to a shrink with more beat and melody.”
“Coming from a small town you tend to experience things at closer quarters,” the singer expends. “We’ve had drugs, murder and suicide, like in any big city, but you tend to personally know the people involved that allows you deeper understanding of what it could have caused it. Instead of reading about it in a newspaper you get a phone call from a friend who tells you what happened and you have to deal with it; it is not like you can ignore it, run away from it but have to face it.”
American music genus
Any superficial listen to the album may lead to a conclusion that this is related to the Nickelback crew but the band will argue their influences are Kyuss, Sunny Day Real Estate, as much The Beatles as Led Zeppelin, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, Alice In Chains, Tool, Rush…
With an extra-guitarist onstage, Barry - with the tallest/gel-assisted Mohican we’ve seen in a long while, as we mentioned in our review at the beginning of the year - ‘They are not prepared to just ride into the rock rodeo and take that bull by the horns but hold it down.’ But, where are we heading?
“Who knows and it is getting very sad…” Gontier muses. “American music scene is very fickle, based on profit-chasing, radio-driven and is all about selling one song to as many kids as possible. Labels used to spend time and money on a band but now it is a matter of a song finding public for a short period of time and then being replaced with another one by the next one-hit wonder.”
With Downloading taking over as the main sound carrier, are we going to see the death of album as the prime source of music consumption?
“Hopefully it will turn around…” Gontier doesn’t sound convinced. “Or, it can signal the end of CD… All I can speak of is from our own experience and that is to say that we’ve gone the grassroots route of playing live to establish a fan-base and that’ll be down to every band. That’s the way to make a connection with people and I think fans like to own your whole album. It is as simple as like writing 12 good songs and not one, or two.”
“The industry is so quick to blame technology,” Walst joins in, “when it really is a Catch-22 situation: one good piece of music is surrounded by a lot of fillers and it is normal the kids will download that one song. When you look at the records of the past, be it Led Zeppelin [‘III’?] or Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’, they were not only amazing but were a concept and you couldn’t just extract one song, it was pointless.”
“I’m a huge Beatles fan,” Gontier admits, “and have two of their albums on my laptop, ‘The White Album’ and ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ and you can’t pick a single song but enjoy the albums in their entirety.”
The band continues to tour and their last date of the year was supposed to be on the 23 December but 3DG have just added three dates in Canada between Chrimbo and New Year’s Day… Only then the tour-without-end will grind to a halt. After some rest the members will dedicate themselves to recording their second album for a possible Summer release.
“We’re always working on new music,” the guitaring vocalist concludes as the label rep waves a ‘two minute warning’, “and have a studio set-up in the back of the [tour]bus and have been coming up with a lot of ideas. Plan is to get back into a studio in February and cut our second record. We’ve got a lot of song ideas, everybody’s been coming up with ideas and, very soon, we’ll have to sit down and get it all together.”
SashaS
17-12-2004
Three Days Grace album ‘Three Days Grace’ is available now on Jive/BMG
|
|
|
