Nickelback have been pretty much household names since their 2001 album ‘Silver Side Up’ which included How You Remind Me. 15 years later, they are far from slowing down as they continue their perpetual touring schedule and prepare to write new material. Nickelback have just released their cover of Dirty Laundry by Don Henley, their first release since their 2014 album 'No Fixed Address' and are currently on tour in Europe. Having undergone some creative difficulties, they are planning on getting down to some writing and recording whilst on tour.

Before heading out on tour, bassist and founding member Mike Kroeger explains that releasing Dirty Laundry was not what Nickelback planned to do. But when they hit a creative block in the studio, it was a necessary to change pace "We were in Hawaii at the time," Kroeger explains, with the intention being to write more original Nickelback material. But they soon found themselves in a total creative block. “So I felt like we needed to do something to shake it up a little bit and breathe some new life into the session."

Choosing the right song to cover was another story altogether. "We all agreed we didn't want to do something so predictable, an artist that sounds like us. We wanted to do something more unpredictable.” In a display of more varied musical taste than might be expected, Kroeger was considering what Nickelback may be able to do with a Public Enemy or Notorious B.I.G. song. But in the end, they decided that this “wasn't something that we were going to be able to pull off."

Instead, they settled on Dirty Laundry. The extent of Nickelback’s history with the song wasn’t something they completely understood until after the cover was recorded. As Kroeger explains, "I told my mother that we had recorded [it] and she sent me a photo of Chad [Kroeger, Mike’s brother and Nickelback’s frontman] and I at 8 or 9 or 10-11 years old. Chad was holding a broom sideways as though it were a guitar and I was holding a crutch sideways as though it was a guitar and we were pretending to play music.”

The song they were pretending to play? Dirty Laundry.

After recording the cover, Nickelback left that session and did not return to writing original material straight away. Chad Kroeger has been writing independently, and when the band regroup on tour, they will re-assess where they are with new material.

Nickelback have written on tour in the past, although not entirely by choice, as inspiration comes whenever it wants to. "It's one of those things that it kind of comes when it comes and doesn't when it doesn't. It's hard to force. You take your creative bursts when they come and enjoy them and appreciate them when they come."

Having been in the music industry for over 20 years, Nickelback have seen the changes first hand. Speaking of music streaming and how accessible ‘free’ music is, Kroeger says, “it's a little bit of a double edged sword because it is overwhelmingly more possible to be heard with these technologies and these opportunities. However, because so much capital has been removed from the world, as people stop paying – the money comes out of the industry and people stop exploring, because that is the speculative part of the business. [This isn't] the most rock'n'roll analogy but… it's the same thing as oil. When that market goes down and suffers and people drive the price or value down of oil, people stop exploring for new oil. Art and music is identical to that. When people don't pay, there's no money to find the next one. And so as a result it's hard for a new artist. You can put the music out there but to get it heard is becoming increasingly difficult. It sucks that exploration for the next new thing is not gonna happen.”

Kroeger recognises that now simply working hard isn’t always enough. "The "American Dream" was that you get to the United States and you work hard, and then you can get ahead and you can be "successful", that's not the case anymore; and that's not the case with music anymore. Back in the day when we were doing what we did in Canada, we just knew that if we wrote the best songs we could and worked as hard as we could on tour and played every gig we could, and never turned down an opportunity to perform and work that it was probably gonna be okay. Now you can work as hard as you want, be as smart as you want, it doesn't matter – it might not become fruitful. A lot of people have great songs and are working really hard and are killing themselves to get ahead and they're not gonna get the chance just because the world is a different place now.  It's becoming less and less relevant how hard you work, it’s about timing and pace making than anything else lately. 

Moreover, talking about the differences in the kinds of artists that are making it, Kroeger identifies one feature that has become more and more important: personas. “I have been keeping tabs of the most culturally important music right now, the biggest hit music of today and I think these artists, these songs, these careers, these people have become more about personalities and confidence than music performance. It isn't really about music as much as its about personality. It’s something that I'm not really that interested in, people's personalities, I like good songs.”

For now though, Nickelback have set out on their own tour and will hope to write some new material along the way. The band will play Dublin’s 3Arena on 9 October.