For an audience of one, Chad Kroeger is playing a couple of Nickelback’s greatest hits, and very much enjoying himself as he does so. Sitting in the lounge area of Mountainview Studios, the recording facility at his home near Vancouver, he’s just been asked about something he said 20 years ago, when he and the band were enjoying their first taste of the big time as their breakthrough song How You Remind Me topped the chart in their native Canada, the US and beyond. “It’s our Stairway To Heaven, our Hotel California,” Kroeger had said back then. “It’s a song that Nickelback’s never going to able to duplicate.”
Now, he smiles as he remembers that comment. “At that time, I was probably terrified I’d never write another song as good as that,” he says. “But…” He picks up an acoustic guitar, leans back in his chair and strums the intro to Photograph, another of his global mega-hits. “I’d say this was pretty close,” he says, arching an eyebrow for comic effect. Then he knocks out a few bars of Rockstar, yet another multi-platinum smash. “That one was pretty good too .”
He places the guitar back on its stand and talks about the thread that unites these three hits songs. In a word: “Relatability.” How You Remind Me was his ‘I hate you’ breakup song. Photograph recalled his teenage rites of passage with bittersweet nostalgia. In Rockstar he sang, with tongue in cheek, of how he, like so many others, had dreamed of getting rich and famous.
“I love universal themes,” Kroeger says. “You want people to identify with what you’re singing about. I want them to say: ‘He’s singing my song. He’s singing to me. I know what that feels like.’ If you can achieve that relatability in a song it can be very powerful.”
