Nickelback released The Long Road in North America on September 23, 2003. Their fourth studio album followed Silver Side Up and its breakthrough single “How You Remind Me,” but the recording process changed. Working with Joey Moi, the band took charge of production on an album introduced by “Someday.”
Moi was already a trusted collaborator. He had engineered Silver Side Up, and his working relationship with Chad Kroeger reached back to the years before Nickelback’s breakthrough. In a 2013 Billboard interview reproduced on his website, Moi recalled meeting the band while attending engineering school in Vancouver. He and Kroeger used the school’s studio to record other bands between midnight and eight in the morning, learning how to make records during the hours when the room was available. On The Long Road, Moi’s role expanded to co-producer, keeping that established partnership at the center of the project. In the same interview, he described Vancouver rock sessions that could involve days, sometimes a month, of writing and building a single song.
The band had initially intended to hire outside producers for the singles. According to Mix’s 2003 studio feature, delays and the label’s enthusiasm for the demos encouraged them to continue themselves. The location changed, too. After beginning at Greenhouse Studios, Kroeger bought the equipment from its A room and moved the sessions into a converted barn.
“Someday” received particularly close attention. Mix reported that it contained more than 100 audio tracks, including a mandolin Kroeger said listeners would struggle to distinguish. The point was to add something people could feel within the arrangement, even when they could not identify the instrument. Moi also captured the band playing together with a PA and monitor mixes before they began replacing or adding individual parts.
Kroeger also loosened the connection between the songs and his own biography. Speaking to Billboard in 2003, in comments quoted by Pollstar, he contrasted the personal material on Silver Side Up with a record that could inhabit other people’s experiences. “It could be anybody’s story,” he said. He also told Billboard that he wanted the band to reach as many listeners as possible and did not regard being called a pop group as an insult.
The album earned a Best Rock Album nomination at the 2004 Grammy Awards. Its singles continued to draw recognition beyond that ceremony, with “Feelin’ Way Too Damn Good” nominated for Best Hard Rock Performance in 2005.
The production approach continued into the next record. Interviewed for Yamaha’s All Access magazine in summer 2005, while finishing the follow-up, Kroeger described the practical difficulty of a band producing itself: everybody had an opinion, and decisions required votes. “We’re a democracy,” he said. He also explained that Nickelback had moved away from arriving at sessions with every song finished and tested in front of audiences. Material that excited a concert crowd did not always work as a recording. They were doing more writing and experimentation inside the studio, making the recording sessions part of how the songs developed.
