Today marks exactly 11 years since Simple Plan released their third, eponymous record ‘Simple Plan’, on which the band brought us a number of deeply personal songs as well as many international chart-toppers.

While initially struggling with a writer’s block during the process of creating this 2008 classic, Pierre and Chuck eventually managed to dig deep inside their own personal experience and came up with the 11 songs that became the record we now know as ‘Simple Plan’. These personal experience can be heard in the lyrics of songs such as ‘Your Love Is A Lie’ (Chuck’s story about how he got cheated on by his former girlfriend), ‘Save You’ (Pierre’s recollection of his feelings of desperation when his younger brother went through cancer) or ‘I Can Wait Forever’ (song about Pierre’s love for his then girlfriend now wife Lachelle).

Interestingly enough, alongside ‘Still Not Getting Any’, ‘Simple Plan’ is the only other album by Simple Plan that does not feature any special guests on any of the songs – that is if we don’t count Chuck Comeau, who made his rap/spoken word debut on the song ‘Holding On’.

From the start even until now, this Simple Plan album has sparked many debates amongst the fans, some seeing a major departure from the band’s previous music efforts with the album’s more electronic and alternative style and lack of pop-punk songs, while others saw this as an interesting and mature creative choice from Simple Plan, while still keeping the core Simple Plan style present.

But the music style wasn’t the only thing that made the fans argue. Prior to its release, the band revealed the album art, which featured the band members emerging from the ruins of a city destroyed by fire. This interesting choice of an album cover made many fans on MySpace (the social network the band primarily used in that time to communicate with their fans) express their (often) negative opinions, which eventually made the band second-guess this choice and decided to let the fans choose the album art on their own by offering a second, less controversial, black&white option, which the fans eventually went with.

Tell us, 11 years on, how do you find the self-titled album in the context of all of Simple Plan’s discography? Do some of your favorite songs appear on this album? What does this album mean to you? Let us know in the comments below!