Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger is the man essentially responsible for Devin Townsend's latest progressive masterpiece Empath not being a pop album. Kroeger also guested on the record, and he and Townsend have pretty much been good friends over the past few years despite a rocky start.
In a new interview with Consequence Of Sound, Townsend praises Kroeger's songwriting abilities and calls him a "functioning genius." For the record, Kroeger writes basically every single Nickelback song, and the band has sold over 50 million albums worldwide as of 2017. So dump on the guy all you want, but he's clearly got his hooks into something good.
"We met by chance, and ended up forming a friendly acquaintance. One thing that I would say about Chad that I think will eventually be known about him, is that he is a functioning genius, in my estimation. I think that people don’t realize how clever that guy is. And his success in a lot of ways, I believe — although what he’s writing is coming from a place of what he wants to write — I think is his ability to analyze the public and musical structures, and the ways that people react emotionally on a commercial level is such that he is almost more like a scientist than he is a rock musician."
"And I'm fascinated by people who are clever, and specifically, when the cleverness of them is something that I can make mental notes, and refer back to my own work with. It was a godsend for me be fortunate to interact with him for a few days, because just by watching him function and by being able to ask somebody with that sort of pedigree questions that had been plaguing me about my own career, it allowed me to make decisions on Empath that I don’t know if I would have made had I not made his acquaintance."
Now we just need a Townsend / Kroeger pop rock record, which let's face it, would probably be awesome.
