Doing What Feels Right

As a band, building a name for yourself can't be easy, especially when you're on your own. Canada's Nickelback - Chad Kroeger (guitars/ lead vocals), Ryan Peake (guitars / vocals), Mike Kroeger (bass) and Ryan Vikedal (drums) - are a strong band with an awesome future in the U.S. Their second CD, The State, may play tunes you think you've heard before, but listen carefully because these are well-crafted songs, new music, and there might even be some great meaning behind the music. You are sure to hear the tune "Leader of Men," as it has been playing on the radio for a while, and it is one of those songs you love to sing in the car, regardless of who's watching you at the stoplight. You can tell that with their strong background and solid handle on their current, rising situation, that they are not just here for the run-around; Nickelback is a name you will hear a lot of, and that's not a bad thing.

Some people are seriously cool. Nickelback guitarist Ryan Peake is one person who you immediately recognize as pretty damn cool, especially when he starts with the jokes and crazy stories. Absorb it all: this is an uncommon story about a small band reinventing a common path. From Canadian cracks that will make you laugh to a background that includes cattle ranching, Peake recently spilled the goods about the reality of building a record from scratch and getting known in a neighboring country.

So how's the United States treating you so far?

The U.S. has been absolutely amazing… it's way more than we expected. The response we've been getting down here is fantastic. We've been touring in Canada for a while and we get a decent response up there because we've been there for three or four years. It's overwhelming, just open arms and we couldn't ask for more.

Where's your bigger fan base: Canada or the U.S.?

It depends. We've got parts in Canada [that like us]. We're from Vancouver, and so to get to Toronto and get exposure out there, it's quite a drive so we only get out there maybe two times a year. So [in Toronto] it's not as strong as the west, that's super strong for us. But down in the States we've got some hot spots, like Detroit is great, Chicago, every where in Florida has been amazing, Texas is great.

So how do you like touring, has it been good for you?

I think it's great. It's definitely got its days where you want to pull your hair out sometimes 'cause you gotta drive 22 hours somewhere. We always wanted to do fly dates; we've been doing a lot of [them] where we'll take the bus to this show and then hop on a plane do this show 1200 miles away then bounce across the country again another 1600 miles away (or whatever it is), and then meet the bus somewhere else on the third day. Those are great 'cause you think of flying, "Oh it's going to take me only three hours to get to this gig instead of 20-some hours." But, you gotta get up at 4:30 in the morning, to catch a 6 o'clock flight to catch your connection so you get there at three to do a sound check so that you can do your show, finish up at around 1 AM so you can get up at 4 AM… not to be a bitch about it, but no, we love it.

Hasn't radio exposure been really good for you guys?

Radio was definitely the first step because "Leader of Men" just seemed to just take off down here, it didn't take off like a boom - from what it tested in Canada - it was a slow grower. It did the same exact thing in the States, people are people. It grew and grew and finally people recognized after three months, then it was one of those blessings and a curse at the same time, where it didn't really go away, and we wanted people to get on the next single. It didn't explode out of the box, but it's not just going away. But that's a great problem to have. Working hand in hand with that, we've had some pretty cool tours. We think our live show gets it across a lot better than any tracks on the CD. We're happy with the product we made, but our live show sells the band. A compliment that we get a decent amount of times and that we appreciate so much is when someone comes up to us and says, "I like your CD, but you guys sound way better live." That's the best compliment in the world.

Where does your sound come from?

We grew up in a smaller town so we only had an AM station for quite a while. We basically had one major station that was a country station that played church music at like, 9 o'clock at night. We've drawn a lot of things, I guess. We listen to a lot of CCR, Rage Against the Machine - Chad is a big fan of Rage. I'm a fan of more melodic stuff. We wanted to the band to have a harder edge obviously, cause we're big fans of rock.

That's how I categorized the band, as melodic rock. It is melodic, but it's not soft.

Exactly, that's kind of the angle I personally wanted to take. I grew up listening to country, I love rock, but I listened to a lot of country. One band in particular was called Blue Rodeo; they were big in Canada, kind of a cross between country and rock. You really couldn't pigeonhole those guys. Unfortunately for them, radio didn't really know what to do with those guys. Country wasn't sure if they were going to play them, rock wasn't sure; they had so many harmonies and so many melodies you walk away with and sing in the shower the next day. You remember that kind of stuff. I think it's quite important, from our perspective, that we try to get decent melodies for the tunes. It's not that we can't do anything lighter, but you know, we like to rock.

Has anyone ever said that you sound like Bush?

We've had that, yeah. Everyone is going to say, when they talk about new bands: What do they sound like? You have to describe them sometimes by throwing out some sort of comparison. We've heard Bush, but we weren't really influenced by them. If somebody wants to draw a comparison like that, it doesn't really bother me.

Who writes the lyrics?

Chad does. He pulls most of it out of his ass. When we're jamming with a riff, the whole band will jam it out, we'll build a bridge, we'll do this and that to it, and he will just start mumbling over the top. He won't have any lyrics written for it. Then he'll pull out maybe two or three words or a phrase. They will almost sound ridiculous, they might not go together and then he'll write something that he has absolutely blurted out. No real pre-conceived idea, and then the idea just forming around that. I wouldn't say that the music itself actually brings out an idea; more as the riff comes out, the music starts to come together, then song comes together and then we can build dynamics in the song, as the lyrics go. If the lyrics call for a more quiet tone, we bring stuff down. A lot of the songs are split in twos and threes, where, like in "Leader of Men," the first part is about taking mushrooms - he was on some sort of a mushroom trip - and then the second half is from an experience he had jumping off these cliffs in Alberta and somebody got caught down stream or something, and he had to pull her in, and he supposedly saved her. She thought she was in some dire straits so she gave a ring to him for that, because he lost his ring; so that's why it says "Now the ring that's on my hand was given to me by her. And to this day we all sit around and dream of ways to get higher." He loops them all back together at the end of the song. Some songs are one fluid idea from start to finish, and some are patched together ideas that end up working in the end.

So is it true that you built your own label?

Well, we did, yes we did. But we didn't have Nickelback records, we didn't even think that far ahead. What we did is put the album out on our own. We fired our management halfway through the recording of The State and it was a time of turmoil, so we just thought, if we're gonna get the act, we gotta do it now, we gotta move on, this is the right choice. It was like, what do we do? Should we radio-track the album ourselves? Well, great, Chad radio-tracked the album. We got the money on our own, around $30,000 to record the album and start pressing. Mike distributed the album to wherever we were playing across Canada, I took care of the Internet and the touring. We just kind of took on everything on our own. In that sense we had our own label going, and I thought we did quite well for a while. We were like, okay, what do managers do again? What the hell do we need them for? It worked out.

When did you sign with Roadrunner?

A year ago last July. We could be a bit under their skin once in a while 'cause we don't let anything slide. We made mistakes when we had our managers, and even when we didn't. We made some mistakes, signed something we shouldn't have signed, we suffered for that for maybe two, three years. Fortunately it wasn't forever. I'm really glad that we made those mistakes on that level because they weren't forever. Note to self: Never do that again. You just try to make sure you have a handle on things.

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