The grey area

Dressed in trademark hoodie and combats, eyes half closed, reefer dangling from his lips, Staind frontman Aaron Lewis is introducing me to the finer points of the band’s latest album, 14 Shades Of Grey.

It’s the follow-up to their third and breakthrough LP, Break The Cycle, which sold close to seven million copies, plucked the Massachusetts quartet from relative obscurity (on this side of the pond, anyway) and dropped them into rock’s platinum-selling stratosphere.

The aforementioned 14 Shades Of Grey was produced by Josh Abraham, who was also on desk duty for the band’s previous effort. "It probably would’ve been unintelligent on our part to change the scenario," Aaron explains. However, the safe route is not always the most rewarding. Subtle changes – strings, delay, less distortion – may be present, but the overall effect is one of familiarity. Not that you’d suddenly expect them to sound like The Flaming Lips, but a little progression in the sound dept wouldn’t have gone astray.
Musically, Staind are caught between rock and a soft place. Their slower songs sound like singer – songwriter fodder that’s been forcibly roughed up, while the heavier tracks sound jammed out at band level, with the lyrics and vocal melody a bit of an afterthought ("They were! How do you know that?!" says a surprised Aaron).

It’s the full-on distorted, rhythmic drive of songs like ‘Price To Play’, ‘For You’ and ‘Pressure’ that keep Staind down with the kids, while their melancholic one-man-and-his-acoustic efforts conquer the mainstream. This split allegiance has garnered the band a hefty fanbase, but one with which they don’t feel wholly comfortable.

"I do feel misrepresented," admits Aaron, "but at the same time, it’s not necessarily a misrepresentation, because those songs that we are well known for still came out of me, out of us. I’d like to think of us more as multi-faceted. It was a conscious choice to go with ‘Price To Play’ as the first single from the new album just to remind everybody that we’re a rock band, not this ballad making machine. We could’ve easily picked a slower single and taken the ‘It’s Been A While’/‘Outside’ route again and it probably would’ve worked just fine, but at the same time, I don’t think that we really sacrificed anything by picking the song we did."

If it hadn’t been for the monstrous success of those power-ballads, Staind would more than likely be resting in rock’s first division alongside post-grunge die hards Cold – too straight to go the DJ route, too rawk to justify a never-ending slew of love songs.

"If a whole record was in your face the whole time, there’d be no dynamic, no journey," says Aaron. "Think about a major work by Chopin or Mozart or Brahms. They’d take you on a journey that would be so sad and calm and melancholy one minute and then just explode with this rage, turn into this beautiful moment, then get real dark and eerie and then just rage again. There are more places to go with music than to make someone fall asleep for the whole record or just beat them to death with it."

Chopin? Spinal Tap aside, that’s not a particularly common reference point for a guitar band.

"I own a lot of Chopin, Bach, Brahms and Mozart. I hear it a lot more now though because I play it for my daughter all the time," he beams. "It’s a proven fact that at this point in the development of a child’s mind, the complexity and musicality of classical music is very good for their creative development.

"While I was in high school I sang a lot of classical music. I was in a chorus called Lyrics and I was in another hand picked group that did nothing but major classical works, like, we did the Schubert Mass in G – a hundred pages, and it was all in Latin. We’d sing in German, Italian, Latin and French, and we’d have absolutely no idea what we were singing! It was seriously complicated eight-part harmonies, but it gave me a strong sense of harmony and I think you can see that influence in Staind."