Whispers of the band returning to the studio have been around for months and months but The Offspring are still busy taking their latest album, Days Go By, around the world. With a massive back catalogue that is heavily weighted with singles, riff-man Noodles (Kevin John Wasserman) admits that the setlist is becoming a mammoth task.
“We’ve been playing stuff as far back as Smash and moving forward to Days Gone By,” Wasserman says of the recent tours. “It’s not so much audience expectation, but we know there are certain deep cuts, you know ones that never got played on the radio, that certain fans in certain countries have come to expect to hear. I feel like it’s more frustrating when I think about what we don’t get to play. I’ve been putting our entire playlist on shuffle and certain songs come on and I think, ‘Why don’t we ever play that song?’”
They’re not flogging a dead setlist horse though – thankfully – and for their upcoming tour Wasserman assures that there’ll be a few surprises. Those deep cuts – the songs that had no machine behind them, no radio push or MTV pull and yet still resonated with the audience – are a unique reminder to a band like The Offspring that sometimes it still can be just about the music.
“It can be so surprising you know? We still will bust out a song, the audience will go off and we’ll be surprised at an audience’s reaction,” he teases. “We just played South America, that’s where you get some of the craziest audiences in the world – they’re passionate and loud and moving. How we feel about the song though, that doesn’t change. How we feel about it now is how we felt about it when we wrote it. I probably feel differently about some songs than what Dexter does or what Greg does though, you know? But when we give it to the world, we let them feel how they want about it, we don’t have any control over how the audience relates to it and we don’t try to. Well unless they greatly misinterpret the lyrics.”
The most notorious example for The Offspring would have to be their breakthrough single. “Yeah, like with Come Out & Play people thought the ‘You gotta keep ‘em separated’ line was about separating races and we were like, ‘Whoa no, no no. That is wrong!’”
While it may seem laughable that The Offspring’s lyrics were misinterpreted as some white power bullshit now, racial tensions were at an all-time high in their backyard of Southern California around the time Smash was released. The fires of the Rodney King riots were still smouldering and SoCal was on edge. Around that time The Offspring were pushing forward with their music, trying to fit into the hardcore scene but existing on the fringe with the like of Sublime and Bad Religion. Wasserman is transported back to that time and place when I suggest that the release of Pretty Fly was a tenacious and hilarious but potentially disastrous move.
“Ha yeah,” he begins with a laugh. “I think having played for years as a band in a hardcore punk rock scene where we really didn’t fit, trying to do songs that were melodic when that just wasn’t the scene we figured we never fitted in in the first place so why ever bother you know?”
Fast forward to 2013, they’re still here, still making music and still trying to get just a little bit better at what they do. “When we’re working on songs we’ll notice if we’re repeating patterns,” he says. “I might say to Dexter, ‘Hey that’s like a song we did on Ignition’ but if we love it we keep going. We do try new styles, we try to take what’s good about The Offspring and mix it with other styles of music that we really enjoy and use that to occasionally try and break those habits. But we just love playing music, we really do, we travel the world and play music for crazy fans for a living.
“I think when we start to over-intellectualise it then that’s when you have to step away and listen to it with fresh ears. Sometimes you write something and in two days it’s done but with other things you labour over things and change it and change it and something can get lost when things all start to sound the same.”
While Bob Rock’s production credits are long and distinguished, they are heavily littered with metal albums with his most famous crafting the self-titled Metallica album (yes, yes, The Black Album). So what did he bring specifically to The Offspring fold with his second round in the studio?
“Once we met with him, he and Dexter just started bouncing songs off of each other and Bob would give him his feedback. Bob would say, ‘This could be a really great song now go fix it’, you know?” he breaks laughing. “They would discuss it and somehow he could do that without making it sting….That’s not to say that there weren’t times where we didn’t disagree. We would sometimes have to give it some thought to come ‘round and realise something needed to be better.”
With Pete Parada having joined the band many years ago, Days Go By is the first full studio album he’s played on. Not much changed for the band in the studio but the energy and happiness of the band has increased. They’re doing what they have done, and will always do. “Pete’s awesome,” he says. “He lives just outside of Nashville so it’s hard to get him out sometimes but he’s super easy to work with and he’s a great guy. He’s helped us move our game up in a lot of different ways. Pete’s been with us for a long time even though this is the first full album he’s been on. We’ve done tonnes of touring with Pete and played with him in on the radio so it wasn’t really new to have him on this record for us. It’s the second time we’ve worked with Bob and really there wasn’t anything we did drastically different except maybe take a little more time to get the songs right. We’re not prolific writers, we’re really not, we don’t labour over this stuff for a long time. We just kinda get in there and do it.”
BY KRISSI WEISS
