Tag Archives: French

Recap of the webchat with Chuck

As it was advertised earlier today, Chuck did about an hour long webchat tonight via a livestream on Facebook, where he answered quite a lot of fans’ questions regarding touring, new songs, new album and his band in general.

Since I know some of you couldn’t watch the webchat or it just didn’t work for them, as usual I took notes during the webchat and gathered them all up into this recap that I present you below. However the video from the webchat is now available online, so you can check it out here.

In any case though, if you don’t wanna watch the full hour of the video, here’s the recap of just the most important or most interesting things from Chuck’s webchat on Facebook from September 18th 2015. I definitely recommend you to read through the “about new album” info.

About new album: Chuck defines it as very diverse with all kinds of sounds. He noted that some fans tend to draw conclusions from the songs they’ve heard so far and he wants to assure them that there are still a lot of fast songs on the album. During their recent tour in Europe they talked to a lot of fans and know exactly what their fans want to hear from them. There should be 2 or 3 ballads/slower songs and also some pop-punk songs. Besides that however, the band does not want to get stuck and wants to try different new things, which is another theme we will find on the album, which makes it even more diverse. One interesting scoop is that apparently the band wants to make another French version of one of their new songs as it has previously worked with songs such as Jet Lag or Summer Paradise. Next week, him and Pierre should start working on writing some more rock songs for the record. Chuck also confirmed the band aims to release the album in either January or February 2016. Regarding the album title, the band currently has a list of about 25 ideas but are still not sure of any of them.

About “Saturday”: Once again, Chuck confirmed that the song “Saturday” will not be featured on the record. It was just a song they had ready at the moment of its release but it won’t make it to the final cut.

About “I Don’t Wanna Be Sad”: The song was written in Pierre’s home studio during a Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and after that when Chuck was driving home (about a 2-3 hour drive), he had the song on repeat in his car and absolutely loved it.

About this year’s Simple Plan Foundation benefit event: Chuck had a meeting about it recently and the event will take place in Montreal in November again and it’s supposed to be a very big event.

About a new DVD: Chuck let the fans in on a little secret: the band apparently had a movie project in works, which was rather expensive and while they were very close to making it work it eventually didn’t work out. However the band still hopes that one day they will find a way to bring the fans some of the footage from the past years they haven’t seen yet.

About touring: Simple Plan will tour massively all over the world starting in the beginning of 2016. Chuck mentioned he would love to do a world tour with All Time Low and said they already had some talks about that with the guys from ATL and hopes it works out one day.

About people he’s like to work with: Chuck mentioned that on the list of people he’d like his band to collaborate with one day are people such as Tyson Ritter (The All-American Rejects), Lynn Gunn (PVRIS), Ellie Goulding or Pierce The Veil.

About the setlist: It keeps getting harder and harder to fit all the hits on one setlist, but they always try to put in all the fans’ favorites and some new songs. On the upcoming tour though, Chuck plans to switch things up a little bit and change the setlists more often, so that every show there may be a different song on it – maybe even play some less known songs for their old-school fans.

About the most difficult moment in the band for him: Chuck said it was probably during the third album era, when touring wasn’t as fun as on the first and second record for them and they knew they were in trouble. So they sat down and talked about it and decided they want to keep going. And for that they needed a new fun record, which is how GYHO was born.

About huge fights / disagreements in the band: The band hasn’t had any massive fights, but there are times when they do not all agree on certain things. And when there is a situation like that, what they like to do as a band is to lock themselves in a room and not let anybody leave the room until all is resolved and everybody’s happy. This is what made them keep the band strong and going all these years.

About collaboration with 5 Seconds Of Summer: Chuck and Pierre wrote 2 songs in total with the guys from 5SOS, which were meant to end up on the new 5SOS record but they didn’t make the cut. It is now up to 5SOS if they use it elsewhere.

About playing with Linkin Park in Rome: Chuck mentioned how nice it was from Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington to invite SP to hang out with him before the show. According to Chuck, Chester was “nice and classy” and he thanked him very much for being such a class act towards them.

About dealing with depression: Chuck said he and his band have luckily never been in a position when things were super super dark, but they definitely do get sad sometimes when things get hard. What they try to do in those situations is to help out each other because each of them has 4 best friends in the band who they can always rely on. Plus Chuck also added that fans help them a lot overcome these hard times, and so do other bands.

Simple Plan address critisism of their French communication on Twitter

Yesterday, Journal de Montreal’s journalist Sophie Durocher wrote an article on her blog on the online newspaper’s website entitled “Simple Plan killing the French language”. In this article, Durocher criticised the Canadian band for a tweet that was sent from the official account (@simpleplan) on Saturday, which included a message – in French – iniviting fans to buy tickets for the Foundation event. It wasn’t the message itself that outraged the reporter, it was the grammar, which included a few discrepancies. Durocher argued that the band doesn’t care enough for their “1% of French” tweets.

This caused a series of tweets from both Chuck Comeau and Jeff Stinco apologizing for the grammatic errors in the tweet (which has since been deleted), mentioning the tweet hadn’t been written by them, but by one of the employees of their management, who didn’t know the language perfectly. Read Jeff’s and Chuck’s statements below:

“On behalf of SP, I assure you it will not happen again. We all share a great love for the French language.” – Jeff Stinco

“It’s been a few days since the official Simple Plan account published a message containing several unacceptable faults in the French language. An employee of our management company, who obviously did not master the language, took the unfortunate initiative to send this message without consulting us. We’re really sorry. It will not happen again. I think everyone knows that we are proud to be from the province of Quebec and to speak French.” – Chuck Comeau

Simple Plan to sing in French on the new album

We all know verz well that even though English is not the mothertoungue of the members of Simple Plan, it fits much more to the pop-rock style of the band. That’s why Simple Plan sing all of their songs in English. Well… until now. According to MusiquePlus, Patrick Langlois, a long-time friend of Simple Plan and today a videoreporter for MusiquePlus came with a very interesting scoop right from the main source: the new Simple Plan album, which is due this spring, will feature a song in French!

But if you can’t speak French, don’t worry! You will not miss the English version either! The guys wrote the original song, just like the other songs, in English, but in order to spice up the album a little bit, they’ve decided to record it in their first language as well. That’s why we will hear this yet unknown song on the album twice: in English AND in French. Chuck officially confirmed this scoop on his Twitter.

So, what do you say? How is it gonna be for you to sing along in French? Or shall I ask.. how is it gonna be listening to French?

I guess it’s time to dust off the old French dictionaries and start learning fast, cause the release date of the new SP album is (pardon me) Just Around The Corner!