Interview with 3 Doors Down

You’ve sold more than fifteen million albums, your latest album went to the top of the charts and it’s not the first time, and you currently have the number one rock song in iTunes. So how is it that we never see 3 Doors Down in the tabloids, we never hear anything about you guys unless it’s somehow related to your music?

You know what, man? I’m not really sure exactly why that is but I can definitely tell you that I am glad it’s like that. I guess it’s mainly because, you know, radio has always been our lifeblood, and a lot of times we’re the guys that, it’s like, I was sitting there talking to somebody he asked me what I do for a living or something, and I tell him I sing for a band, and they’ll ask me what band and I’ll tell them and they’re like “Really? I didn’t know what you guys looked like.”



It’s kind of strange but you know I’m so glad that, I’m really thankful that we get to do this and we go out and we’re successful at it and you know it’s all because of our fans. At the same time we get to go out and we get to do this for a living and be successful at it, but I can still go to Wal-Mart and nobody… I mean it don’t bother me, I love talking to fans anyhow.

You just released your fourth album. How did this one end up being self-titled?

I think we just really felt like this record summed up the band more so than the other ones did and I guess the best way I can explain it is the other albums kind of seemed like chapters and this one just kind of seems more like a whole story. And I think it just really shows kind of a cross-section of what we do as a band and a lot of the different styles that we do things in, just kind of all in one record. To me it just kind of felt more like it should be maybe a self-titled one. And I don’t know, maybe the fact that we just couldn’t think of a good name for it or something.

The band took an entire year off before returning to the studio to work on this album. Was that intentional?

It was, man, it was. We toured so hard and and heavy for those first six years, man, and I think you know including making three records, toured thirty-three or thirty-four countries and played probably on average, shoot, probably 200, 250 shows a year. And at the end of that sixth year, you know, it’s like farmers say, every seventh year you have to let a field rest, and this field needed to rest. And we just took a whole year off and just kind of stepped away from music. And I mean we didn’t quit or anything, we just kind of needed a break and we wanted to go away and get hungry for it again.

And so we all did that, and came back hungry. You know it was a little strange, honestly, to jump right back into it after being away from it for a year, cause I didn’t write a song for a year, and I’ll never go that long again without writing one cause actually it’s kind of like riding a bike, they say you never forget how. No you never forget how, but you ain’t near as good at it, you know, when you first step back on it. So it took a little bit of getting back in the right headspace, but I’m so thankful for that year off, and I’m thankful also for the year that we had to write and record this record. You know, it was not like a date that they set and “Man, we’ve got to have this record by this date.” The record company, they said “Guys, y’all go write a record, when you get it done, we’ll be sitting here waiting on it.” And they were.

And it worked out really cool and it was, you know we didn’t go in a studio also this record, we recorded this record in a house down in Orlando. It was a big nice house and stuff, and we just sound-doctored up a couple of rooms and used them as a live room, and brought in some old pre-amps and then done the rest of it through ProTools. And you know you don’t really need a studio now, and that afforded us the time, because you’re not sitting there in the studio saying man, we gotta get this done dude, this is a $2000 a day studio.

And we were able to go down there and chill, like I said it was a big old cool house and it was really relaxed, go outside and go swimming a little while and then go in and record and really made it organic. And at the same time cost a lot, lot less to record like that. It was all around just a really way cooler way of doing it like that, to me.

How did you end up down in Orlando of all places?

We were up in Nashville, wrote the first half of it up in Nashville out in this little farmhouse a little bit outside of town, it’s kind of isolated but not too isolated, you know? And that was predominately during the wintertime, and Nashville gets pretty dang cold in the winter.

By the time summertime rolled around, we were ready to go somewhere a little warmer and a little sunnier, you know, and we picked Orlando just cause we knew there were a lot of, we didn’t want to go to a studio but at the same time we needed to be near an area where there was equipment availability and things like that. And Orlando just seemed like a good spot cause of all the touristy stuff. You know, if you get bored of the studio, you can go down to Universal Studios, Disney, something, you know, and chill down there. And we wound up doing that a lot of times, and just kind of going and amusing ourselves when somebody else was working on their parts for a few days. We came up with a new slogan: “Welcome to sunny Florida where it rains every day.”

The album starts off with a song called Train, which is kind of a ballbuster. How early did you know that it was going to be your leadoff song?

I remember one day were in there, and I think Johnny K said “What are we gonna start the record with, something like Train?” I was like “I don’t know,” and Chris was like “What the hell do you mean you don’t know, of course we’re gonna start the record with Train.”

It comes out of the box and just like wow, there’s something a little bit different. I really like that song and you know, we’re from the South obviously and we’re a rock band but I’ve never really classified us as a southern rock band. But that is a southern rock song if there’s ever been one. And I really like the fact that maybe a band from another region of the country might not could pull that song off so well. It would be kind of like us trying to cover a Ramones song, it just kind of wouldn’t sound right, you know?

I was just about to ask how strongly you guys associated yourselves with southern rock.

To be especially from south Mississippi, and that being the birthplace of the blues and rock and roll and southern rock, it’s kind of hard to separate yourself from just being totally tagged as a southern band. But we’re proud to be from down there, man. In my personal opinion, there ain’t many places you can be from that lends itself to, and I don’t even, honest to God, for what reason I don’t know, but there’s not many more places that lends itself to inspiring good, soulful music rather than the South. I don’t know if it’s the fact that there’s so many churches, that there’s a lot more soul, a lot more blues, just a lot more music in general. Cause you know I mean the South, if it’s full of one thing, it’s full of music. And so it’s a great place to be from as a musician, but I don’t really know what that is, that you are pretty much automatically tagged as a southern band until you kind of maybe do something to deliberately break yourself away from that. And you know, when we first started, I kind of wanted to be separated from it. I didn’t want anybody to call me no southern band, you know, all that. And you try not to talk so much like a redneck, which I found out was just inevitably impossible for me. After awhile it’s kind of like you know what, if we’re a southern band, well damn, we’re a southern band. We are from about as far south as you can go without falling in the Gulf of Mexico.

I was talking with Jared Weeks of Saving Abel, they’re an up and coming band from the South, and he specifically made of point of crediting 3 Doors Down for paving the way for his band. How does that make you feel?

It makes me proud, man. You know, if you can actually be around long enough to be an influence to somebody, I guess one, you’ve done it for awhile, and two, you’ve done it well enough I suppose to have influenced somebody. And it just makes me proud, it makes me proud of us for sticking around that long and it makes me proud for those guys for doing it themselves, and for being an influence. It’s a pretty cool feeling.

With the song Citizen/Soldier you’ve got a tie-in with the National Guard.

I reckon it was around October of last year, maybe a little earlier than that. They wanted to run a spot in the theaters for the end of the year, the holiday season, and they approached us to write a song for a treatment that they had. And the original treatment for the video was kind of showing where the National Guard was going, into like the future, it was gonna be a futuristic video, almost like Minority Report where they kind of reach their hand inside of the screen and things like that, move cubes around. And I had a couple of conversations with the Colonel and he told me a couple of points that they wanted to hit on in the song. And we’re proud to do anything for our military. I love to do anything for them that I can, and say thank you to them in any way that I possibly can, and so we jumped at the chance to do it. But having those couple of conversations with the Colonel helped me out a lot.

I tried to think about what our National Guard does. They were our first military. And they go and they fight, but they do a lot for us here at home. You know, I just got a MySpace message from a girl up in Iowa the other day that was talking about how close her town was to flooding, and National Guard fixing their levees, I’m talking about like hours before it was gonna flood their entire town. So that’s the kind of things I wanted to focus on in the song, not only how they do things abroad, but how they do things here at home.

After turning the song in, they were like “We love the song, but it really doesn’t go with the treatment, so we’re just gonna switch the treatment.” And they went back and re-wrote the treatment and kind of showed the reflection and the history of the National Guard and what they do, and all the different dynamics of it. And Antoine Fuqua stepped in and directed that video, he’s done Shooter and Training Day, and he’s done a great job on that video. I was just proud to be a part of that whole project.

Nothing will make you more proud than when a soldier will come up to you and say “Thank you for supporting us” and “It helps me out when I was deployed” or “It makes me proud to know that somebody supports us” and you know, that’s the least we can do is support our soldiers, you know? Cause regardless of political belief, that’s here nor there. A soldier is a soldier, and they deserve our support one hundred percent and I’m so glad to give it to them.

You’re a few months away from turning thirty. Has that affected your songwriting on tracks like “It’s Not My Time” which are addressing mortality?

I don’t know if it’s a little bit subliminally or not. Not on purpose I don’t suppose. About right now in your life, in my opinion, is about the age that you start realizing the permanency of things. Even when you’re in your early twenties and stuff, and especially when you’re a teenager, you don’t really realize it but I’ve started to realize in the last couple of years that there ain’t no reset button and this is not a dress rehearsal. You get to write it one time and, you know, you only get to live once. And yeah I guess just as you get about our age, you’re starting to see your youth not go away, but you start to see a different chapter of youth, and your youth starts to change. And it makes you realize that hey, I don’t ever get to be twenty-one again, I’m not gonna go back to that age. I don’t get to push rewind. And so I guess maybe it leads to writing from a little bit more of a sense of permanence.

You started off as the drummer for 3 Doors Down before you moved up front to be the singer. Have you ever been tempted to pull a Dave Grohl and sneak off during your downtime and play the drums in the studio for some other band?

You know what, I’d like to do that but I don’t know if I’m a good enough drummer to actually do that. I sit around and we’re doing pre-production right now and just doing a couple of practice days cause we’ve been off tour four a couple of weeks, just to get the cobwebs shook back loose, and I sat down on drums for a little bit yesterday. I don’t know if I’m good enough to go play with anybody or anything, but I do still enjoy playing. I’ve been gonna set my drums up at my house for the last month and hadn’t done it, but I do still enjoy playing, and love to sit down and write behind the drums. It helps me out a lot, strange as it sounds. I do still like to play, but I like listening to Greg play too. I always tell him he plays like Animal off Muppet Babies, or John Bonham, one or the other, I ain’t sure. But he’s a great drummer.

Drums is kind of strange. It’s one of those instruments that I swear, you can actually… you’re not gonna get better on guitar from sitting there watching somebody playing guitar. But drums, I swear to you, is one of those instruments that you can actually improve by just simply sitting there watching somebody play.

So are we ever going to see a 3 Doors Down tour where there’s two drumsets set up back there so you can do the dueling drums?



Hopefully this summer. I’m trying to work that out right now. Cause actually, right there in the middle of Citizen/Soldier it’s got that big percussion part and I’d like to just, what we’re planning on doing if we can it worked out, is right there in that percussion part just stopping the music and just doing that. Because it doesn’t really have to be two big elaborate parts. You get to mic’d drumsets going on stage it sounds, we done it during the Better Life tour a long time ago, and it sounds killer, man. And I mean you don’t have to be a great drummer when you got another one playing along with you, you know? So hopefully we get to do that this summer.