Three Days Grace less angry these days
By Wayne Bledsoe (Contact)
Thursday, April 8, 2010
When rock band Three Days Grace released “Life Starts Now” in 2009, some fans were upset that it lacked some of the anger fans had come to expect from the group.
“We had to go through a lot of dark stuff just to get this record out and written, but I think the outcome is a little more hopeful,” says Three Days Grace founding bassist Brad Walst in a phone call from his home in Ontario. “People want to hear your emotions. Some of these songs were a little bit of a departure, but it just felt right. It’s a little bit more musical, in general, I think. Definitely a lot deeper.
"We did a couple of records where we were pretty (angry) guys. We’re definitely maturing and we had a harsh dose of reality in the past two years and seeing sickness and death and stuff within our families. We’d never dealt with stuff like that before. We had to be inspired by it, but the outcome is this: It’s a new beginning. It’s life starting over.”
Life for Three Days Grace began when Walst, who had just taken up guitar, met guitarist/vocalist Adam Gontier in Norwood, Ontario, while both were young teens.
“He said, ‘Why don’t you pick up a bass and let’s start a band?’ ” says Walst.
Both listened to a Canadian radio show called “The Alternative Route,” which played alternative rock.
“This is back in the ’90s, so there was a lot of the grunge stuff,” says Walst. “Alice in Chains and Nirvana and Soundgarden and stuff. We’d tape it and learn how to play it. We’d just play covers. Then we started writing our own stuff. So we just naturally went from playing the grunge stuff into our own sound.”
The duo enlisted fellow teens Neil Sanderson on drums and guitarists Phil Crowe and Joe Grant, and called themselves Groundswell.
“We did this all through high school, then in ’97 we decided, ‘If we’re gonna do this, we’re gonna have to move to a big city,’ which was Toronto,” says Walst.
By that time, the group was just Walst, Gontier and Sanderson. The trio changed the group’s name to Three Days Grace and, in 2002, signed a recording contract with Jive Records.
Walst says he knew the band was on to something prior to signing.
“When we first started doing demos in 2000, 2001, we recorded ‘I Hate Everything About You’ and I remember thinking, ‘OK, this could be good. It’s something different.’ Everybody we played it for seemed really excited. Then when I heard it on the radio for the first time I was like, ‘Oh, this could work!’ I was driving on 401, which is a major highway up here, and I had to pull over because I was literally shaking. ‘Oh man, we’re on the radio!’”
While the band’s sound was hard, the group wasn’t afraid of melody. Walst attributes that to the process the band uses to write.
“Adam kind of grew up on the acoustic side of things, so we played a lot of acoustic in the beginning. So, our whole thing was, if it doesn’t sound good on acoustic we won’t bring it to the electric side.”
If fans detect any change in the group’s sound, Walst says it isn’t something contrived.
“For us, it’s real. It’s real emotion. We’re always going to stay somewhat heavy. Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s so light. It’s so different.’ A lot of people don’t realize that we had to go through a lot of (expletive) to get to this point. I’m just glad people are still relating to it.”
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