(Buzznet) It's going to be a good summer for Simple Plan. The Canadian pop band celebrate the release of Get Your Heart On! today and on Friday they start their stint as a headliner for this summer's Vans Warped Tour. Buzznet got the chance to chat with front-man Pierre Bouvier about music shaping identities, staying together as a band, the song they built using their fans and Twitter.B: On keeping the band together for 10 years: Piere: We have marriage counseling actually. We are the first band to use marriage counseling. (laughs) I think its just communication and understanding how lucky we are to be here. It's a matter of not being too stubborn and leaving your ego at the door when you walk in. Understanding that this is bigger than us individually. Simple Plan is bigger than us, its something that has changed people's lives and changed our lives. I think a lot of bands that have all these line-up changes and are breaking up--I think they're just kinda giving up easily. They don't want it enough. It's not like the last 12 years we've had perfect relationship, or we never fight, or have issues. We have tons of issues and we kinda had our own crises, but it's a matter of understanding we're all in this together. I think because we are all about the same age, come from the same area, have been friends for a while, knew each other before we were a band. It's not like there was a big huge rock star guy that came into the band and then the rest of us. It's a matter of being smart enough and mature enough to know when you're wrong and to just give up and let it go. Just let it go.
On collaborations on the new album incl Natasha Bedingfield, Alex Gaskarth and Rivers Cuomo" Pierre: It was just something that we really wanted to do. We're trying to fall in the footsteps of P. Diddy and Dr. Dre, you know. It's something we always wanted to do but because of conflicting schedules it's always difficult to get those things and to get them right--but this time around we finished the album before Christmas and the label didn't plan on releasing it for a few months so we had some time to call around.
The one guy that was different was Rivers (Cuomo) from Weezer--he actually co-wrote the song that he's singing on. I did a demo of it and sent it to him, and he loved the song, so we asked him if he wanted to sing on it, and he was totally cool about it. For "Summer Paradise", we really wanted K'naan, because I think his voice suits the song perfectly. Alex from All Time Low we met last year, and we played them some of our demos at the time."Freaking Me Out" was one of them and he was like, "I love that song, it's great!" And we asked, "Hey you want to sing on it?" And he did. And then with Natasha (Bedingfield) we gave her a call too, because we were looking for a girl to sing the girl part to "Jet-Lag" and she was down, she said "I can totally relate to it, it sounds like my life". Check out the full feature here