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Contrary to the image of Canadians as a friendly – even funny – people, the music of modern rockers Three Days Grace, who will be in concert tonight at Memorial Coliseum with Breaking Benjamin and Flyleaf, is dark, lonely and anguished.
“I can’t escape this hell,” lead singer and guitarist Adam Gontier croons on “Animal I’ve Become,” the lead single off the band’s album “One-X.” “So many times I’ve tried/But I’m still caged inside/Somebody get me through this nightmare/I can’t control myself.”
Angst like this has helped Three Days Grace become one of the hottest rock bands in North America. The group has scored five No. 1 hits, and they were pegged as the top rock act of 2007, based on airplay by the radio industry watcher Mediabase.
Now the group has released a third album, “Life Starts Now” and is back on tour.
Still, despite the commercial upside, Three Days Grace comes by its dark material honestly. Gontier and bassist Brad Walst both grew up in Norwood, a tiny one-light town two hours outside of Toronto that the pair have frequently described in terms similar to Twin Peaks. One of the few distinguishing characteristics of the town of 1,500 was an unusually high murder and suicide rate.
“In Norwood, you basically had three options: sports, drugs or music,” Gontier told Rolling Stone in 2004. “We stuck with music and used it as an outlet. Our anger derives from seeing what happens to people in a small town.”
In high school, Gontier and Walst found refuge in Groundswell, a band they helped form that also included future Three Days Grace drummer Neil Sanderson. The group’s early days were marked by quaint gigs playing before movies and on hayrides.
Eventually, Groundswell morphed into the trio Three Days Grace, and the group moved to nearby Toronto. There, they came to the attention of Jive Records, which released the band’s eponymous album in 2003. A platinum hit, Three Days Grace spawned two No. 1 singles, “I Hate (Everything About You)” and “Just Like You.” But true to their preternaturally depressed outlook, the band members soon discovered a dark side to their success.
“A lot of strange things happened on that first tour,” says lead guitarist Barry Stock, who joined the band during the sessions for Three Days Grace.
“So many things were new to us being thrown out there for the first time: starting to get success and partying and all the other stuff that goes along with it.
“Sometimes you get in a little over your head. You have feelings you never had before. Everybody wants to be your friend. Everybody seems to be your friend, but you don’t really know anybody. It’s very alienating.”
The band members dealt with these feeling in different ways at first. Most publicly, Gontier checked into rehab for dependency on the prescription painkiller OxyContin. (Since going through recovery, Gontier and his bandmates have made a periodic habit of performing free shows at rehabilitation centers while on tour.)
After he was well enough, the band reconvened to write a new record and discovered its members had all been going through much the same thing. The quartet convened at Sanderson’s secluded lake house and began writing the songs that would make up “One-X.”
“It was either write or stare at each other,” says Stock of the self-imposed exile. “We hashed everything out together. We’d all sit together with acoustics and just break it down, really narrow down what we were trying to say with a song.”
On “One-X,” all the band’s party-fueled alienation, all its distrust of seedy sycophants, came to a boil in tracks like “Animal” and the record’s other No. 1 hits, “Pain” and “Never Too Late.”
“That’s what ‘One-X’ is all about really,” Stock says. “It’s about feeling like a target, like you’re standing alone in a crowd of people.”
Those days seem behind them now. Stock says the band has learned how to take care of itself on tour, how to spot who they can and cannot trust. But he adds the experience only served to strengthen the band in the long run.
“We’re much closer because of a lot of the things that we went through,” he says. “We managed to get through, and now we communicate much better as a band.”
