The plan was simple: conquer the world with a second album that maintained the guitar energy of the first and mid-tempo songs that would win the ear of the general public. With that idea in mind, Simple Plan launched on October 26, 2004, twenty years ago, Still not gettin any…, which contained the single Welcome to my life, which it reached number one on WECB in November of the following year. They had achieved it.
Formed in Montreal at the end of the nineties, Simple Plan tried, at first, to take advantage of the still hot stream of punk-rock bands of the mid-nineties, such as Green Day and The Offspring. The agitation generated by these and other groups was fading, but even so, the quintet led by Pierre Bouvier managed to make a place for himself on the scene with his presentation album, No pads, no helmets… just balls (2002), which sold a million copies in the United States, and the corresponding tour, which allowed them to act as opening act for some of their idols, such as Green Day, Good Charlotte and Avril Lavigne.
But both they and the people at their record company were clear that it was not enough. They had to give the final punch to the table, the coup de grace, and they concentrated their efforts on making their second album. a work worthy of unanimous admiration. And the first step was to hire a producer of enormous prestige who knew how to give the sound the necessary forcefulness in the fast songs and the necessary emotionality in the slower ones.
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The chosen one was none other than Bob Rock. Canadian like the group, he had worked with top-level names since the late eighties, such as Metallica, Bon Jovi, Mötley Crüe, David Lee Roth (excantant of Van Halen) either The Cult. He was easily linked to heavier rock and, in fact, many considered him just another member of Metallica (in the shadows). In 2004 he was 50 years old and still had a lot to contribute.
Bob Rock told them he wanted to make a black album (Metallica album), but with their songs, taking advantage of their “clean and at the same time intense” sound. The guy knew how to burn records to obtain such a result, and He arranged various tricks in the studio to capture the energy of Simple Plan: For example, in order to record the hardness of the bass drum, he placed up to five different microphones around it at various distances.
The brutal reception of 'Welcome to my life'
The first thing that Simple Plan published from the album was precisely the single Welcome to my life. A kind of punk-pop ballad whose lyrics expressed youthful rage for feeling misunderstood in an adult world (the band's average age was 25 years old at the time). Without being an interplanetary success, Welcome to my life It became the band's emblematic song. He sneaked into the top 40 on the Billboard chart, in Canada it reached second place, seventh in Australia. The video for the song was shot in a traffic jam, with dysfunctional families inside cars that they ultimately abandoned to walk down the street.
Although it had other incendiary themes, such as Shut up!, Crazy either Untitled, was Welcome to my life the one who raised the esteem for the group to heights they did not know. It rose to third position on the United States sales list. Its impact encouraged them to undertake a tour that lasted a year and a half, until February 2006, when they decided it was time to return to the studio and record the third album, which they would title Simple Plan and did not go beyond #14 on Billboard. In Canada his renown lasted a while longer.
Simple Plan continues publishing albums (the latest, Harder that it looks, came out in 2022) and performing live, despite some change in their line-up. In 2023 they starred in a tour with The Offspring and Sum 41, last January they played in Barcelona and this October they announced that Prime Video will broadcast a documentary about its history. A story that, without a doubt, has in this second album and the single Welcome to my life, his spine.
