Is it still a punk rock style of writing where you guys get in a room and start hashing out riffs? Are you guys working on the road, on laptops? Has the process changed?
The only real difference with this record is, usually Dexter [Holland, singer/guitarist] kind of woodsheds for a while and comes up with a verse and a chorus and then we hash it out in the studio, this time he was writing in the studio with Bob there and us there. So it was done differently.
I was talking to Perry Farrell a little while ago, and his feelings were that as Jane’s Addiction, he didn’t need to write albums anymore because there wasn’t a need to. He had his catalog and that’s what fans wanted to hear, and ideally, he would just put out a single every once in a while. In the current marketplace, does it make sense to write these big albums?
That’s a good question. At this point, you could argue it both ways. The way music is downloaded over the Internet, whether it’s digital sales or just filesharing, it is mostly songs. It’s not albums so much anymore. Our feeling when we went in to make this record, there are so many bands out there that are doing great things, a lot of bands getting back together too, older bands coming back out—No Doubt, Metallica came out with a really good strong record—all across the board, rock spectrum to pop, all kinds of great stuff happening, and the Internet has changed everything, making it really tough to sell records. So our focus was, we gotta do a record, a whole record, but it’s gotta be good. It’s gotta be good from the beginning all the way through the end, to compete with all this stuff. That was our feeling. It’s interesting to think about that.
There was some discussion about doing an EP, but I think we want to do a record. We’ve always done that, and that’s our feeling about things, that records are still important.
The Offspring perform at Starland Ballroom on July 7 and Roseland Ballroom on July 8. For more info, visit theoffspring.com.
