Nickelback make their cash by not really connecting with anyone

Nickelback are about to churn out another album, helmed by famous drunk-driver Chad Kroeger. You might be wondering 'why', or more likely, 'who the hell keeps buying these things?' Chad has an answer:

"In a climate that a lot of people aren't doing that well, we're very, very fortunate," Nickelback's leader, vocalist
Chad Kroeger, said in a recent phone interview.

"We're just lucky that we've been able to make a connection to fans of all ages, instead of just hitting with one group of fans or one age group," he added. "Our fans are really over the map, and that makes it really easy when we pull into town to draw a large variety of people who want to sit and listen to Nickelback songs."

It's perhaps not surprising Chad shares a name with a popular supermarket own brand. Nickelback's appeal seems to lie in being a bit like a King Sooper's soup: it's not perfect, but it's just about appealing enough to the unfussy, and priced to sell.

Don't worry - Chad doesn't mind people criticising his rubbish band. After all, it's all about the money, not the art:

"We don't listen to critics anymore. I don't think we've ever listened to critics, but we don't even pay attention to it anymore," Kroeger, 32, said.

We're not sure how there's a difference between 'not listening to' and 'not paying attention to' - we imagine that Chad's getting confused between 'not paying attention to' and 'not hearing'. Here's a handy way to remember the difference, Chad:

I am not hearing the moaning sound of Chad Kroeger's songs, because I have put my hands over my ears
whereas
I am not paying attention to the songs Chad Kroeger has made, because although I hear them, they're clearly just empty, bombastic yammering

The gruff-voiced, curly haired Kroeger, who is also the group's lyricist, has tuned out the doubters before — especially when it came time to release "All the Right Reasons," as industry insiders told them they'd never repeat the success they had with "Silver Side Up" or even "The Long Road."

"Usually, if (bands) do what Nickelback has done, you watch it decline. You always watch, they come out and they'll have some success early on and it always seems to trickle off, it never seems to gain momentum," he said. "We worked so hard to make sure that that didn't happen with this album."

Are we being unfair, or has Kroeger just said that he's made an album to sell to people rather than, say, one that he can be proud of, or one that fits with an artistic vision? No, we're not surprised that he's done it, just that he's so upfront about it.