“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 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. The layoff has also given him time to break bad habits that slipped in over the years, too. Making sure Todd (Morse, the Offspring’s bassist) and I are locked in our strumming, and making sure that matches with what Pete (Parada) is doing on the drums.” We’ve been doing deep dives and getting into the weeds on how we play some of these things.
And not just getting together in the room and playing through the songs. “I mean, we miss it,” he says, laughing ruefully. A wait, Noodles says, that was difficult for a band like the Offspring that plays live so frequently. Instead of putting out a record that couldn’t be supported live the band waited. The album might have landed earlier had the COVID-19 pandemic not turned the world upside down a year ago. “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. When we do meet-and-greets we get asked about it a lot. “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. “We’ve been doing it live, just a stripped-down piano version, for about four or five years now,” Noodles says. The penultimate track on the album, a gentle piano-based reboot of “Gone Away,” which originally was on 1997’s “Ixnay on the Hombre,” was done as a sort of musical gift for longtime fans. There’s even an Offspring-ized cover of classical composer Edvard Grieg’s “In The Hall of the Mountain King” here. “Hassan Chop” is an old-school blast of high-speed punk. “We Never Have Sex Anymore,” a fun take on the waning of passion, is one of the jazziest numbers the Offspring have ever done, complete with a horn section to accentuate the swinging feel. We try to provide some hope it’s not just all doom and gloom.” “Ultimately in that song it’s, ‘When will love finally conquer hate?’ Which we kind of think eventually it will. “And then something like ‘This Is Not Utopia’ is far more like, ‘Ah, man, the world, evil people are at odds,’” he says. And it’s really just an observation of what we’ve seen. “I think everyone’s a little wound up by it. “Without having to take sides politically, I don’t think anybody has been enjoying the last four years,” Noodles says of the title track. The album opens with 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 get, offering critiques of socio-political dysfunction wrapped - in the case of the title track - in catchy singalong melodies. 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. “Took us about 35 years to get it right, but I think we finally nailed it in this take.” That comes back to our Manic Subsidal days. “There’s a guitar break on ‘Hassan Chop’ that predates, I think, us being called the Offspring. “And then then some of the songs we steal from older stuff even before Offspring,” he says. The skeleton was there but the meat and bones, the meat and potatoes part of it has been fleshed out. Like, ‘We Never Have Sex Anymore,’ it’s probably a 20-year-old song but it’s changed a lot. “That’s certainly the oldest one that was finished,” Noodles says. “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. Given its lengthy gestation, it’s not surprising that some bits and pieces had been in the works for years, according to Noodles. “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. The record didn’t really start coming together until a couple of years ago when we just had a really creative period.” “Whenever Bob (Rock, the band’s producer) was in town we’d hook up for a week or two in the studio. “We had been working in the studio, on and off, the whole nine years,” Noodles says. Offspring guitarist Noodles explains why the band’s new album took 9 years to finish – Orange County Register
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