Over 50 million albums sold worldwide. Nine Grammy Award nominations. Twelve JUNO Awards. Two American Music Awards. Six Billboard Music Awards. World Music Award Recipient for World's Best-Selling Rock Artist. Twelve consecutive sold-out international tours, playing to well over eight million diehard and adoring fans. Not to mention the distinguished achievement of being the best-selling foreign act of the 2000s - second only to the Beatles. Just some of such staggering statistics can only belong to Rock's reigning giant's of this century's musical landscape: Nickelback.
Crowned Rock Group of the Decade by Billboard, Nickelback has been a force to be reckoned with since bursting onto the worldwide charts with their 2001 debut smash "How You Remind Me" - certified by Billboard as "Top Rock Song of the Decade" and "Most Played Song of the Decade" by Neilsen SoundScan - from their eight-times platinum album Silver Side Up. Thirteen years, and 23 chart-topping singles later -- including such indelible classics like "Photograph", "Savin' Me", "Far Away", "Someday" and "Rockstar" -- only Nickelback has remained rock-steady during the most turbulent periods in the recording industry. And true to form, the Vancouver-based quartet has beaten the odds with their hotly-anticipated and distinctive eighth studio album No Fixed Address, a title which offers a clue to the band's enduring longevity, relevance and allure for millions of fans around the world.
On the surface, the aptly-named No Fixed Address is a sly reference to the band's globe-trotting expeditions to nearly a dozen different cities in writing and recording their triumphant follow-up to 2011's platinum-selling Here and Now. From such locales as Zurich, Göteborg, London, Surrey, Copenhagen, Vancouver, Berlin, Kapalua, Toronto, Los Angeles and Budapest, the over year-long endeavor proved a long realized dream for the band. "Rather than being locked in a studio for months and months on end, I really wanted us to get out and fully experience a bunch of different places," reveals Mike Kroeger. "Whether a tropical island, a hotel room in Italy or Sweden, or rented houses around the world, it really does change the way you work. We went everywhere to compose and record these songs. From the culture, the food, the surroundings or even the weather - the vastly different vibes have a huge impact on your frame of mind and greatly enriches the music."
Consequently, No Fixed Address traverses a sonic spectrum with pulsating vigor and innovation reflected throughout the diversity of the album's 11 tracks, each embodying the much-loved Nickelback sound propelled to tantalizing and unique new levels. While continuing to lure a broad spectrum of listeners into the trademark Nickelback party-brew of fast-lane indulgences and soaring power ballads, No Fixed Address ultimately proves an equally befitting title for its inspired and boundary-pushing musical map.
"I think we're very lucky because from the beginning, we never painted ourselves into a corner of saying we're only going to make one kind of music," reflects Chad Kroeger, who along with brother Mike began scouting future recording destinations during the band's massively successful two-year Here and Now world tour -- which took them everywhere from North America, Russia, South Africa, Australia, Brazil and all points in between -- to help weave a myriad of new textures throughout the soundscape of No Fixed Address.
"As a result," continues Kroeger, "we're able to produce a variety of different songs that get accepted by our fans. And that's fantastic, because that means there's always going to be a ton of diversity on all our records. So even while we've gone to different places on our albums, and especially now on No Fixed Address, we've always had to make sure it's still somehow in the language of Nickelback."
United in that core conviction is also the Kroeger's faithful friend and bandmate since junior high school Ryan Peake, who recalls their band's early days of defying musical trends to carve out their own niche in that once-predominant era of grunge rock that quickly faded into disposable synthetic pop by the early 2000s. "When you fashion yourself after musical fads, you'll find out you're yesterday's news in a couple years," notes Peake, whose early influences as a guitar prodigy was largely informed from his father's eclectic vinyl collection. "Suddenly, you wake up one day and find out you've completely pigeon-holed yourself. But when you're honest in what you do and concentrate on the songwriting, people will follow you. Fortunately, we have such a well-rounded fan base. And in these days of extreme ups and downs and cyclical musical movements, our fans have always stuck by us.
"Because at the end of the day," adds Peake, "people just really like hearing good songs, plain and simple. They like to feel good, whether they're singing along or just listening to it. It's something innate in all