Over the past few months, we’ve been swimming in raving reviews about the current 15th anniversary No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls tour, we’ve been reminded by thousands of fans how important that record was for them in their teenage years and how proud of it the band is.

But what was the making of this record really like? And what were the initial reactions to Simple Plan getting popular with their more pop than punk, yet still pop-punk music? If you’ve read Simple Plan’s official book ‘Simple Plan: The Official Story’ (2012), you already know the answers to these questions, but in the recent interview for Alternative Press, the members of Simple Plan gave a bit of a deeper insight into the process of creating their debut album and the hardships that went along with it. Besides the SP members, some past and present key collaborators took part in this interview as well: Andy Karp (A&R for Atlantic Records, Simple Plan’s record label), Arnold Lanni (producer of NPNHJB) and Eric Lawrence (Simple Plan’s manager, co-founder of Coaliton Music).

This interview is definitely worth reading – and when you’re done, check out also a bunch of behind the scenes photo from Cleveland attached to this article, taken by Bryce Hall.

Check out the whole interview below:

Simple Plan tell the real story
behind ‘No Pads, No Helmets… Just Balls’
[original article]

Fifteen years after No Pads, No Helmets…Just Balls launched Simple Plan from obscure Canadian pop-punkers to mainstream hitmakers, the band are spending the majority of 2017 on the road, revisiting the album by playing it front-to-back each night.

Before heading to Europe this month and coming back to the States for continued touring in August, the band and some of their inner circle caught up with AP to recount the often tumultuous processes by which No Pads came together. As guitarist Jeff Stinco notes, “There’s a tendency to unify the story and recollect what happened in a very glorious way, and make it sound as if it was one unified front. But I think what’s important is that it was five guys, who had completely different situations getting into the studio.” He pauses to add, “We had to survive.”

JEFF STINCO: The process itself was long. Arnold challenged us a lot. That record could have taken, at the most, two months to make; it took a year. We were living in very close quarters, sleeping in a windowless room with bunkbeds. We were cooking for ourselves, which is normal, but nobody knew how to cook, so it was horrible. It was a tedious process. Arnold had this vision where he would say, “You guys record yourself, I’m going to come back and criticize and edit it,” and that’s exactly what he’d do. He would leave us days at a time in the studio, I would record the whole album, he would come back and be, like, “Yeah, you could do better,” and scratch everything I did. It was frustrating.

ARNOLD LANNI: It may have appeared that way, but when I was a musician, I never wanted people looking over my shoulder. I’d want the producer to say, “Here’s the song. Here’s what I’d like you to do. How much time do you need? An hour-and-a-half? I’ll come back in an hour-and-a-half because that way, I’m not looking over your shoulder as you track it.” It was just to get them to chase what they wanted to chase. If you aim for a target and you don’t hit the target, I have to at least mention it. On some occasions, I’d say, “Here’s what I want you to do. I’ll be in the next room, or I’ll come back in three hours after you have a chance to lay this down.” If it wasn’t what we as a group talked about, I’d come back and say, “Yeah, this is unacceptable.” It was never anything personal; it’s just hard sometimes to explain to a young person what they don’t know. Because Jeff’s such a talented musician, I would have him do things that were probably just a little bit outside of his comfort zone—not in a technical sense, because there’s probably nothing that Jeff can’t play, because he’s just that good—but I was doing things to have him create tension and atmosphere within a track. Things like that, I don’t know if he, at the time being so young, understood Continue reading Read more