There are songs on Three Days Grace’s new album, Life Starts Now, that aren’t the usual full-throttle rockers that have helped generate sales of more than six million units worldwide for the Toronto quartet. “Last To Know” is a moving piano ballad, “No More” gets into jangly, soaring musical territory and the verses on “Goin’ Down” are kind of creepy.

“We would rather err on the side of fresh than stale,” says the band’s drummer, Neil Sanderson, who also plays piano and guitar off stage. “It was really important to us to push ourselves beyond what people would normally expect from us. We never want to get caught up in that angst-y genre of ‘This is what we do.’ It happens to a lot of other bands, but this record and even One-Xactually have helped us get out of that.”

The band — Sanderson, singer-guitarist Adam Gontier, bassist Brad Walst and guitarist Barry Stock (who joined after the first album) — is known for such hits as “I Hate Everything About You,” “Home” and “Just Like You” from its 2003 self-titled debut, and “Animal I Have Become,” “Pain” and “Riot” from the 2006 follow-up, One-X, but 3DG’s aggressive songs have always been dynamic. Life Starts Now simply branches into different-sounding songs, not just using the mercurial loud-’n’-soft approach to create interest.

Sanderson cites “Lost in You” as one of his favourites. “It switches around time signatures a little bit. The verses are in 6/4,” he says. “I think that’s one of the best songs we’ve ever written. It’s fun to play and we’re getting a great response to it.” He reveals that in “The Good Life,” which has a kind of elastic heaviness and clip-clop beat in parts, “sonically, we wanted it to sound like a witch was coming.” He laughs. “I know that sounds weird. We wanted to keep that song kind of dry and as far as guitar tones, we used a lot of fuzziness and octave pedals and stuff like that — Zeppelin used to use that stuff. We just didn’t want a friggin’ normal, heavy sound, you know what I’m saying? Like with most rock records you put it in, I can tell who produced it.”

For Life Starts Now, Three Days Grace re-enlisted Howard Benson (P.O.D., Motorhead, Sepultura), who produced One-X, but the band members knew how they wanted each song to sound before they even started recording the 12-track album with him at Bryan Adams’ studio, The Warehouse, in Vancouver. “The songs were mostly done, music and lyrics, when we got to the studio,” says Gontier, who collaborates with the entire band. “We basically finished the songs and got them to the point where we were happy with them, then we headed down to L.A. to spend a bit of time with Howard to get his ideas and opinions. We’ve got a good idea of what we want going into the studio, so the pre-production time isn’t a lot for us.”

Sanderson says there are numerous versions of all the songs “because we rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. We don’t write 30 songs and see which ones stick to the wall.” He believes those artists who write a song and refuse to make any changes to it because that’s the way it flowed are “shooting themselves in the foot. Like with a lot of great art, you have to do whatever you need to do to be able to create something, and then walk away to freshen your ears or eyes and then come back and reapproach it. It’s like sleeping on something. If you come back to it, it’s clear if it’s right or it’s wrong, but sometimes, if you’re just sitting there working away at it, you put the blinders on a bit.

“So we trust each other as a songwriting group. If one person is like, ‘Oh man, I’m not feeling that part. My cheese metre is going off,’ we’re at the point where we’ve spent so much time together that we can respect that there’s probably a good reason for that person to be feeling that. So until everyone is like, ‘Wow, that’s awesome,’ then we put it away for a little bit and then come back and readdress it. Everything is a work in progress until it’s done.”

Three Days Grace has always been as intense lyrically as it is musically, and on the last album, in particular, Gontier released his inner demons. Unlike the first album, which addressed the quirks of their small-town upbringing in Norwood, Ont., the lyrics on One-Xdelved into the perils of the rock world, namely an addiction to painkillers — when this small-town boy became an international success. He successfully tackled and beat those demons, but not without turning the struggle into great songs.

Over the 10 or so months Gontier, Sanderson, Walst and Stock spent writing Life Starts Now, they were dealing with some difficult times. Their manager, Stuart Sobol, passed away and family members also fell seriously ill. “All of us have been through that sort of thing, where there’s a lot of sickness in our family and people passing on,” says Gontier. “So lyrically, that’s where the inspiration for this record came from. It’s not just about that stuff, but that was the basis of what we wanted to write about for this record.

“It’s tough because for each one of us, in our personal lives we’re pretty strong people. We try to keep things together on a personal level with our loved ones, our family, and I think when we get together as a band and write the stuff, for every one of us it’s a way to get a lot of feelings out that we wouldn’t normally be able to.”

“It’s been a really scary time,” agrees Sanderson, “and I think that all those emotions have shown up on the record.”

While there are songs that don’t have anything to do with death or disease — “Bitter Taste,” Gontier says, is about being backstabbed by someone you trusted and “Break” is about getting away from everyday routine — “World So Cold” is directly about what they’ve been going through. “That’s probably one of the most personal ones for me,” Gontier says. “I wanted to write a song that was about how your world changes so quickly when somebody you love or somebody who’s been in your life for so long disappears, and you don’t really see it coming. It’s about dealing with that.”

And because they are all on the same page with respect to these particular circumstances, it hasn’t only been Gontier supplying lyrics to this album. It’s truly a jumble of ideas and contributions from everyone in Three Days Grace. Another interesting point is that all four write on acoustic guitar, hammering out the true heart of the song.

“Regardless of how heavy the songs are going to end up, we still write with the bare essentials because you can always add things,” says Sanderson. “We just haven’t been into sitting there writing with everybody plugged in, super loud. It just doesn’t seem like you’re focused enough on the song itself, so we use acoustic guitars.

“I think that’s one thing that sets us apart from other bands — we all just sit with guitars and bring ideas to the table and have kind of a roundtable of parts. We bank a lot of parts and sit down and put them together as a band.”

FYI
Publisher: EMI Music Publishing Canada
Discography: Life Starts Now (2009), Live at the Palace (DVD; 2008), One-X(2006), Three Days Grace (2003)
Members since: Adam Gontier (2002), Neil Sanderson (2002), Brad Walst (2002), Barry Stock (2006)
Visit www.threedaysgrace.com

Karen Bliss is a music journalist and a frequent contributor to Words + Music