Staying True To Themselves

It's been a couple of years since Get Your Heart On!, the fourth album from French-Canadian pop punks Simple Plan, took over the airways. Behind lead single Jet Lag, which featured formerly forgotten pop star Natasha Bedingfield, the record charted in more territories than Simple Plan had ever reached. It wasn't their most successful record - their debut achieved platinum status over here while their self-titled third release reached number six - but it was the album that allowed the quintet to rediscover the joy of what they do.

“Not that our band ever took themselves too seriously, but with our third album we were trying to make a little bit of a statement and trying to say, 'We're not that band', that kinda juvenile band and all that,” says Los Angeles-based Chuck Comeau. “And in some ways it backfired on us; I think we learned a lot from it. There's no need to run away from who you are - just enjoy it. Sure, our band is not like the critic's darling and there's some people that don't like us, but there's a heck of a bunch of people who really love it. So let's just have fun with that and just enjoy it and not think about the people who don't like it so much and just do our thing. I think that's the biggest lesson that we've learned and we're taking that with us as we start our next album.”

Songwriting sessions for an anticipated fifth record have started in earnest under the Californian sunshine. However, before they get down to serious business, Simple Plan are going to give us a musical wedge in the way of an EP. Comeau hopes the bridging release - a first for the band - will be out before their Warped visit, admitting there are plenty of sketches to single out for record. “We wrote 75 songs the last album, and there's, I think, some pretty good ones that we didn't put on the album,” he reveals. “The EP will be mostly that, B-sides and everything, so it'll be interesting to see the reaction. Now with Twitter and obviously when we tour we go and talk to our fans, [and] it's always cool to get that instant reaction, like, 'Oh man, this one's good' or, 'I hope you go more like this one for the album'. It gives you a nice bearing but at the same time you've got to follow your heart and trust your instinct, too. It's a good balance.”

From the gut is where the best Simple Plan decisions have been made, and it's helped give the Montreal group longevity in a genre that has seen more than a few fly-by successes come and go. “The moment you get really comfortable and you get cocky in a way and you're like, 'We got this; it's going to be easy', that's when you know that the record is going to suck,” jokes Comeau. “I love that feeling of, 'Man, can we pull it off again?', and 'What should we do?'. It needs to be better again, and that to me is what creates special songs because you're willing to take some chances and push yourself and you're not taking it for granted.”

Simple Plan don't want to let their fans down, or themselves - that's what it comes down to. “We love what we do and we love our career. I'll be straight with you - I don't want it to stop. If we make a shitty record it might, so I don't want to do that,” levels the drummer.

The band will play their first Australian dates in roughly 18 months as part of Warped Tour, a festival that has given the group so much. The pop punks performed on the North American run in each of their first seven years together from 1999 to 2005 - it became the annual Simple Plan summer vacation in a way. Comeau recognises that the event was “a huge help” in grounding the high school pals and went lengths to shape the band as we now know it.

“There's a reason why it's been around for so long,” he explains. “There's something really cool about how every band on Warped treats each other. There's no big rock stars with attitude, and if there is people get told really fast to knock that out. That made us better people in some ways. It's not because you have success that you have to act like you're bigger than all the other bands. And because the first bands we were playing with were really punk rock - Pennywise, NOFX, Lagwagon - even though we're a lot more pop than they are, we grew up with these ethics: don't act like you're better than any other band. That festival just reinforces that.”