Mike Herrera, the lead singer and bassist of MXPX, released a brand new episode of his podcast the Mike Herrera Podcast today, which features a very in-depth interview with Pierre Bouvier.
This interview, which I wholeheartedly recommend listening to in full, reveals a number of interesting stories and insights into the life of Simple Plan’s lead singer. First and foremost, it partially serves as a promo for MXPX’s new upcoming Christmas song, which is to be released tomorrow (Friday, November 29th), and will be featuring Pierre Bouvier and singer Emily Whitehurst.
In the interview, the two musicians discussed a number of issues including the way Simple Plan approach the song-writing process. Here, Pierre confirmed that him and Chuck have already begun writing – not only separately but also together with outside song-writers, naming Fil Thorpe-Evans, the recently departed member of the pop-punk band Neck Deep, as one of their current collaborators:
“So I’ve been writing for the last few months but a little slowly, kinda here and there. And Chuck and I like to get together to do some sessions with some outside writers just to throw some ideas around, you know… cause we’ve been writing together for so long, it gets… sometimes you just kinda get like yeah, I can write a song, but it would be nice to have someone to be like: ‘’Yeah, this is cool.. or think about this or…’ So we have a couple sessions in LA, we’ve been doing that for the last few albums.
So we do some of that on our own, we do some of it with some people… So I’m up here for a session with a guy from… you know the band Neck Deep? So the guitar player, Fil, I guess left the band and became a producer/writer so we’re writing a song with him right now and another guy that works at the Madden company… And then yeah, so we’re doing that. We kinda like sprinkle out the writing process with a few writing sessions, so we do like – I’ll be at home, at a studio home.. not like a studio but like a guest house where I do my studio stuff and I write, write, write and I get together with some people and I throw some ideas around, go back and work on it again. So, it’s a fun little process.”
– Pierre Bouvier –
Here, Pierre also mentioned that one of the things he’s been struggling with all his career is the awkwardness of writing songs with outside song-writers because of how vulnerable it feels to open up in this way to someone you (often) do not really know.
As far as song-writing for the new record goes, Pierre noted that he thinks him and Chuck will be in the song-writing phase probably until spring of next year. This means that the earliest we could expect Simple Plan to return to the studio to record the new album is summer 2019.
Besides that, in this interview Mike also shared his deep appreciation of Simple Plan mentioning MXPX in their early song Grow Up and their constant devotion to his band, revealing that in a way this also inspired him to return the favor by referencing Simple Plan on MXPX’s own new album in the song ‘The Way We Do’. We also learned in this interview that the tour that MXPX refer to regarding Simple Plan in the lyrics of this song, was not in fact a tour of MXPX with Simple Plan but with Reset. Pierre noted that it was the exact tour that by its end resulted in the big fall-out between him and Chuck and it became the catalyst of the eventual foundation of Simple Plan.
If you have about an hour to spare, definitely give this interview a listen to learn more about Pierre’s view of the music industry, which is wrapped nicely in a very smooth conversation between these two musicians:
