Hoobastank struggled to make it to 'Fornever'

• By JOHN WIRT
• music critic
• Published: Mar 6, 2009 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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The second CD from Southern California alternative-rock band Hoobastank, 2004’s The Reason, received three Grammy nominations and sold more than two million copies. After the band’s 2006 follow-up, Every Man For Himself, made less impact than the Howard Benson-produced The Reason, Hoobastank realigned itself with Benson for its new disc, Fornever.

Much time and hard work went into Fornever.

“Yeah, this record definitely was a record that had a lot more tension and creative conflict than the previous record,” singer Doug Robb said from the Hoobastank tour in Bloomington, Ind.

Robb won’t go as far as saying Benson and the band fought during recording sessions, but he admits many differences had to be reconciled. After all, artists, songwriters, singers and so on can be extremely protective of their work.

“Right,” Robb said. “But that’s where you have to put your ego aside and place some trust in the person you hired to give his opinion. And that’s not easy. When you have a vision for something and somebody says, ‘I don’t like it,’ or, ‘It needs a change,’ there’s gonna be a conflict. So a lot of these songs went through massive changes from the writing stage to the finished stage.”

Knowing their producer beyond the recording studio helped keep disputes from getting out of hand. 

“We have a really good personal relationship with Howard outside of music,” Robb said. “That relationship allowed us to battle with him over things we wanted or didn’t want, but later we could joke about it.”

Production of the new album, Robb said, including writing songs, six weeks in the studio, re-recording and more writing, felt as if it lasted the entire two years between Every Man For Himself and Fornever.

“But any musicians or painters or whatever can literally paint or write forever,” he added. “They could work on a record that never comes out, because they keep making little adjustments to it. At some point you have to take a step back and say, ‘We’re done.’ ”

That said, Fornever is nearly everything Hoobstank wanted it to be.

“Our goal was to be able to say we barely have any of those disappointments on this record,” he said. “We really accomplished that.”
 And the new songs work especially well on stage, Robb added.

“It sounds very close to the record. That’s good for us, because we’ve been told since the late ’90s, before we had a major-label record deal, that we sound so much heavier live than on CD. But with this record, I definitely got more aggressive with the singing, which is more like how I sing on stage, so it sounds truer to our live sound.”