If three singles can help sell in excess of 4 million records, why not roll out a fourth?
This fall Nickelback will release “Woke Up This Morning” as the next offering from their breakthrough LP, Silver Side Up.
The song, which was written in January 2000, addresses two emotional issues that affected frontman Chad Kroeger during the creation of the track. The first was the loss of his grandmother, who passed away a few days before he started writing the lyrics.
“I was just really unimpressed with the way the whole funeral took place,” he said recently. “I felt it could have been handled a lot better. It was in this really small town where she met my grandfather and they started the family. That’s why the song goes, ‘I paid my last respects this morning on an early grave/ Already said goodbye, nothing left to say/ A tiny church, a tiny town and not a tear was spent/ Not how I wanted it, I’m hating all of this.’ ”
“Woke Up This Morning” also addresses Kroeger’s ex-girlfriend Jodi, who was the subject of the band’s first smash hit, “How You Remind Me.” After dealing with the pain of attending his grandmother’s funeral, the singer had to return back home to his dysfunctional relationship.
“That’s where the next lines [in the song] come from,” Kroeger said, ” ‘I’ve been a loser all my life, I’m not about to change/ If you don’t like it there’s the door, nobody made you stay/ Ain’t a woman on the planet who can deal with this/ Not how I wanted it, I’m hating all of this.’ ” The whole thing’s about a month in my life when I felt like sh- when I woke up in the morning.”
A video for Nickelback’s current single, “Never Again,” will consist mostly of concert footage from the band’s upcoming DVD, Live at Home. The show took place January 25 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the DVD will come out on October 15.
In addition, Nickelback have just re-released their 1996 album, Curb, a grungy disc that features songs Kroeger wrote in 1993 and 1994.
“If you feel like checking out the history of Nickelback, this is an integral part of it,” he said. “It was our first full-length [album] and you can hear lots of Seattle influence for sure.”
The album and title track were named in tribute to Kroeger’s friend Kirby, who suffered through the kind of heartbreak, trauma and tragic violence that exemplified the emotions of grunge. Kroeger’s then-17-year-old friend was dating a 16-year-old girl who lived in the country, and one night he snuck out of his house and hopped in his truck to surprise her.
“He came over a hill in the middle of nowhere on a dirt gravel road and had a head-on collision with a car,” Kroeger recalled. “He stumbled out of the car bleeding and bashed up pretty bad, and he opened up the [door of the other] car, and it’s his girlfriend. She snuck out at the same time, was going to see him and he killed her on the back of a dirt road. I tried to imagine what they could possibly feel like, and that’s where that song comes from.”
