Was it at all related to your departure from Island Records? Well there was always a little part of you that wants to make the record company smile and kind of be on your side. I think we’ve dropped a lot of that burden, that “what if people don’t like it? What if it’s too mellow? Or too heavy? Or what if they don’t get it?”. I think that’s more what it is, I think we said “fuck it”, honestly I think it just comes with age. Even if I was an accountant somewhere, I’d be going through the same type of maturation – thinking you know what, I don’t care if people don’t like my shoes, or whatever it is. You get to the point where you know who you are, you know what you’ve done and you’re confident in what you do, and you just don’t care anymore. I think that’s what I was trying to say.
Not to dwell too much on your departure from Island Records, but can you tell us how you came to this decision after over a decade with the label? It was two things really. When we signed in 2000, there was a certain group of people starting at the top and the whole team (including the A&R guy) that really believed in us and that was the company we signed onto. Then, the revolving door that is the music industry started, by mid-2004, L.A. Reid had taken over and had pretty much started to replace everyone on our team. It was a different team and they were all great people, but it wasn’t the same company. We could tell in the way they went about promoting things and the philosophy as far as artist development, it was a totally new thing that really wasn’t our cup of tea. Then, after the first two albums under what we originally signed with, and the two newer albums in which we were under this new model, we were really unsatisfied. Ironically the label came to us and said “alright, we’re up for album five, but before we do this album we want to totally restructure your deal,” and it was an insult to be honest. As far as we were concerned we weren’t asking for anything more, we just wanted them to go through with us what they had agreed to, but they just wanted to slash everything. We weren’t happy with everything that happened over the last five or six years and honestly we think we can do it better elsewhere.
What was it like to record the album after releasing your greatest hits, also do you think that maybe this mark a new chapter or rebirth for Hoobastank? I think purely on a band level, yeah in some sense, because we’ve been playing with our bass player Jesse for a little over three years and he’s a member now, and not a hired guy. There was this two-record span where all of the writing was done with me playing the bass and sure I can play, but I’m not a bass player so then we’d have a studio bass player come in and fill in the gaps during the recording. When you write a song you can play it from the start to finish and you can sing all the right lyrics and all the right melodies, but at that point the song is not done. You go out on tour and you start playing the song and it evolves, over the next few weeks or months, however long it is, that song that you can play from start to finish in January sounds like a completely different song by June and then it grows into what it really is. For two records we never got to do that because I was the bass player. With this record, it was a return to how we were used to writing, as an actual four piece, where we would write a song and then we would all let it evolve into its final state. Even though there were some songs that we’re really proud of from the last couple of records, I listen back and think “man, what if? What if we had had time to let these songs grow?”, it might have been better.
You recorded the new record with Gavin Brown, he’s worked with some big acts like Billy Talent, so do you think he left his influence on the record, and how was it to work with him? Yeah for sure, I think any producer you work with will put their finger-prints on it. It was interesting, and it was different, we’ve worked with Howard Benson for the last three records, so anyone would have been a different experience to what we’re used to. We wanted to make sure, first-and-foremost, before we even started to write for this record, that it was going to be different. We used a different producer, and we recorded in Toronto, which is the first time we’ve recorded anything outside of Los Angeles, and even in the writing process when we would write material and think “that’s great,” we’d think “maybe that sounds great because we’re so used to doing it that way? Let’s do some songs that don’t sound as great to us and see what happens from that point.” Gavin has a totally different approach than Howard Benson, as he has a much more hands-on approach with the band aspect. He was there pretty much the whole time for Dan’s guitar playing and the drumming, as well as the bass playing. Ironically, probably the least input was put into the vocals, which with Howard Benson it’s the exact opposite. So I would say that Howard Benson definitely focuses on the vocals and the lyrics, whereas Gavin is much more “let’s craft music stuff and you can sing whatever you want on it”.