Simple Plan – June 2009

If you have never been to a Virgin Festival (the label, for those sniggerers out there with dirty minds) you really must.  Held at Parc Jean Drapeau over two days, this first installment of the V fest blew every other festival to hit the city out of the water.  Where else could you see Black Eyed Peas, New Kids on the Block, Simple Plan, Hedley, Jess McCartney and the Jabawokeez (to name but a few) in the same show?  I hadn’t been so excited to attend an outdoor show in years.

When I sat down at the old picnic table set up outside Simple Plan’s trailer, I didn’t know how this interview was going to go, and I was a little leery.  We wanted to feature the band on the cover of our July Issue but with only five days to go before it hit the virtual newsstands, our margin for error was small.  If we couldn’t get enough material together for this article, we were out of luck and with no backup.   I’ll admit that I was nervous; I wasn’t sure what we would have to talk about as their latest album has been in stores for almost a year and given that they’d been touring almost non-stop since its release, there were no new major events to report.

We had been in a similar situation the last time we had spoken with the band, almost three years ago, and I had found the interview difficult.  Not for lack of trying on the band’s part, but what do you ask, a year after a release, when everything’s been talked about?  However, my fears were assuaged the minute guitarist Sebastien Lefebvre and drummer Chuck Comeau came to greet us, smiles wide and obviously enjoying the day despite having to do tons of press and those pesky mosquitoes.

One of the advantages of interviewing huge well-known bands is that you can skip the ‘how did you guys get together’ part and get right into what they are doing at the moment.  “Are you currently in the studio?” I asked as a means to start the conversation.  “No, right now we are outside. We are outside at Virgin Fest.!” Sebastien answered with mischief; an answer that would set the undertone for the rest of the interview.  “No, we are the kind of band that writes before and then go into the studio.  Some bands write in the studio, we write before.  Basically right now we are putting together another amazing masterpiece.”  Of course I laughed at his mock-arrogance but given the millions of albums they have sold throughout their career, who could dispute such a statement.

“Today we are 42 days in….  oh SHIT…” he attempted to elaborate as a nesting red winged blackbird took a nose dive seemingly straight for us and caused a panic.  With nightmarish visions of Hitchcock’s The Birds, I closed my eyes and braced myself for impact.

When I felt nothing, I chanced a glance only to see the bird had b-lined with the force of a heat seeking missile and was now heading straight for guitarist Jeff Stinco, who was getting ready to do an interview of his own, near the bird’s nesting tree.   Ducking out the way, Jeff was yet again targeted as the bird took another swipe at his head, forcing him to run in every direction.

“Ever since this morning, these birds have been attacking us.” Sebastien finally said, once the chaos had subsided.  Oh but to have had a video camera to film the scene… the bribes we could have made.  Jeff running in circles; Pierre, Chuck, Dave and Sebastien pointing and laughing at their band mate’s plight; it was one of those moments you never really forget.

Eventually things calmed down.   ”Basically we just write, write, write, when we think we have the songs we call, call, call and book, book, book and then record, record, record, then Mix, mix, mix, then master, master, master  and then put out, put out, put out.” Sebastien was finally able to say, concluding that: “You don’t want to repeat yourself,” – oh the irony – “and you don’t want to do something that’s sub-par.  Every time you achieve something, the next time you want to be better.  It’s the only way you can progress and be a better.  So we feel the same way about this new album we’re writing.  We don’t know yet what it’s going to sound like, but we know we aren’t going to be happy until we feel we have a collection of songs that’s better than the last.”