PROLONGED LABOR FOR THE OFFSPRING
Guitarist Noodles explains why ‘Let the Bad Times Roll’ took nine years to complete
Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman knows what’s coming even before he calls to chat about The Offspring’s new record, “Let the Bad Times Roll,” their first album of new material in nearly nine years.
What took you so long?
“That’s been the first question in almost every interview,” Noodles says and laughs. “Fair enough. I mean, there’s a lot of reasons, you know.
“We finished our deal with Sony, so we didn’t have anyone cracking the whip,” the band’s guitarist says. “We didn’t have any deadlines. Dexter [Holland, the band’s singer] went back to school, got his Ph.D. That took a little bit longer than he thought.”
Add to that the Orange County punkpop band’s annual touring and the acrimonious departure of original bassist Greg Kriesel in 2018, and the band’s 10th album in more than 35 years together just took … a bit more time.
“We had been working in the studio, on and off, the whole nine years,” Noodles says. “Whenever Bob [Rock, the band’s producer] was in town we’d hook up for a week or two in the studio. Sometimes as long as a month. The record didn’t really start coming together until a couple of years ago when we just had a really creative period.”
“Let the Bad Times Roll” displays all the familiar strengths of the Offspring, from Holland’s vocals to Noodles’ crunchy riffing and the strong melodies throughout, across a dozen songs that feel both fresh and familiar.
Given its lengthy gestation, it’s not surprising that some bits and pieces had been in the works for years, according to Noodles. “Coming For You,” for instance, was released as the album’s first single, complete with a music video of a clown fight club, six years before the album finally arrived.
“That’s certainly the oldest one that was finished,” Noodles says. “Some of the songs are older than that. Like ‘We Never Have Sex Anymore’ — it’s probably a 20-year-old song but it’s changed a lot. The skeleton was there but the meat and bones, the meat and potatoes part of it has been fleshed out.
“And then some of the songs we steal from older stuff even before Offspring,” he says. “There’s a guitar break on ‘Hassan Chop’ that predates, I think, us being called the Offspring. That comes back to our Manic Subsidal days.
“Took us about 35 years to get it right, but I think we finally nailed it in this take.”
The album is rewardingly diverse in both sound and lyrics, something Noodles says came about through the long process of picking which songs to include and what order to run them.
The album opens with the one-two punch of “This Is Not Utopia” and the current single “Let the Bad Times Roll,” both of which are about as political as the Offspring gets, offering critiques of sociopolitical dysfunction wrapped — in the case of the title track — in catchy singalong melodies.
“Without having to take sides politically, I don’t think anybody has been enjoying the last four years,” Noodles says of the title track. “I think everyone’s a little wound up by it. And it’s really just an observation of what we’ve seen.
“And then something like ‘This Is Not Utopia’ is far more like, ‘Ah, man, the world, evil people are at odds,’ ” he says. “Ultimately in that song it’s, ‘When will love finally conquer hate?’ Which we kind of think eventually it will. We try to provide some hope it’s not just all doom and gloom.”
“We Never Have Sex Anymore,” a fun take on the waning of passion, is one of the jazziest numbers the Offspring has ever done, complete with a horn section to accentuate the swinging feel. “Hassan Chop” is an old-school blast of high-speed punk. There’s even an Offspringized cover of classical composer Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” here.
The penultimate track, a gentle, piano-based reboot of “Gone Away,” originally on 1997’s “Ixnay on the Hombre,” was done as a sort of musical gift for longtime fans.
“We’ve been doing it live, just a stripped-down piano version, for about four or five years now,” Noodles says. “And, really, the fans were the ones that said, ‘Hey, where can I get a studio version of the piano ‘Gone Away’? I mean, it’s on Twitter, on Instagram. When we do meet-and-greets we get asked about it a lot.
“So we finally decided, let’s see if we could pull something together that still sounds like us but maybe purifies the song a little bit, just kind of strips it down,” he says.
The album might have landed earlier had the COVID-19 pandemic not turned the world upside down a year ago. Instead of putting out a record that couldn’t be supported live, the band waited. A wait, Noodles says, that was difficult because the Offspring plays live so frequently.
“I mean, we miss it,” he says, laughing ruefully. “We’ve been rehearsing. And not just getting together in the room and playing through the songs. We’ve been doing deep dives and getting into the weeds on how we play some of these things. Making sure Todd [Morse, the bassist] and I are locked in our strumming, and making sure that matches with what Pete [Parada] is doing on the drums.”
The layoff has also given him time to break bad habits that slipped in over the years, too.
“I don’t know why, but over like 25 years somehow my strumming has evolved in ways that the song was never intended to go,” Noodles says. “Like ‘Self Esteem,’ I’ve gotten a lazy right hand and I had to really look at that: ‘Oh [bleep], I’m doing upstrokes when everyone else was doing downstrokes, and it doesn’t sound as good.
“I had to really dial it in. Most people probably wouldn’t notice, but it’s something on my radar.”
He and Holland have launched a series of short “how to” videos online — some, like the debut “How to Catch a Wave,” made for a laugh, with others, like a future one on breaking down a guitar solo, more serious.
And, slowly, signs of future life on the road are surfacing. Like many bands, the Offspring had some of its pandemic-postponed dates pushed back a year into late 2021 or 2022.
“But we’re looking at setting up shows that weren’t ever booked before,” Noodles says. “And maybe as early as the end of the year. Hopefully we’ll have some announcements to make sooner rather than later about those dates.”