It's almost time to Get Rollin' with Nickelback for their summer tour. In anticipation of that, we had a chat with Chad Kroeger, Mike Kroeger, Ryan Peake and Daniel Adair about their Setlist stats. Watch as they contemplate past covers, the right place in the set to play THE HIT and what the first show back after the pandemic felt like.
Crickets riding tumbleweeds
Ryan: Most performed songs. I'm most interested in the least performed songs. Let's go way down to the bottom here, guys. This is the longest tail. "Yanking Out My Heart".
Chad: We have talked Ryan into singing some songs and convinced him this is gonna go over gangbusters. This is gonna be fantastic. Just look up Flock of Seagulls for me, would you? Flock of Seagulls, the band, is actually from Liverpool. And I come up with this idea, let's cover this tune and make it really heavy.
Ryan: And I love the song. It's a great song.
Chad: ♪ And I ran, I ran so far away ♪ And we actually did a great job of it. It was heavy. I mean, crickets. What's a thousand times worse than crickets? Like crickets riding tumbleweeds.
Ryan: You pick stuff that you're comfortable with. “Day Tripper.” Do you remember “Day Tripper”? We did that in Portland.
Chad: Once, in Portland because we were told we had to learn a Beatles song.
Daniel: Why Beatles? They're not from Portland. - I can't remember why we were supposed to do that. We played it and none of the other bands did a Beatles song that night.
Show flow
Chad: We try and get the show to flow a certain way. We try and do a couple rockers and then we bring it down. 'Cause we don't wanna do six rockers in a row. We move in different directions. You want the the show to ebb and flow.
Ryan: You know, we'll play maybe two this night then two different ones the next night and two the next night. So, come to multiple shows. You'll get to see lots of different songs.
Chad: The one thing I always say is, you'd see some new band come out and they'd have a hit and they'd play it fourth. That's your hit. You finish with the hit. They're gonna sit and wait no matter what until they hear the hit.
First post-pandemic gig
Mike: It was pretty good. Quite a lot of fear.
Chad: I started singing in the wrong spot.
Ryan: Yup. And then I screwed up the next night.
Chad: And then, no, you screwed up the third night.
Ryan: The third night, sorry.
Daniel: That close to a train wreck.
Mike: Yeah, that was, that was a lot of the fear.
Daniel: What did you say? Like, first time in 20 years, you felt we were gonna come right out for us.
Mike: I thought we were gonna have to stop.
Chad: Well, that's all we got today. We're on tour now, so if you wanna check out what we're playing, go to Setlist.fm.
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