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Nickelback will be receiving a homegrown honour when the Alberta-born rock band will be inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
The group’s induction will take place at the 2023 Juno Awards in Edmonton on Monday, March 13, 2023, for which tickets go on sale Friday, Nov. 18.
The group spoke with ET Canada’s Carlos Bustamante about the induction, and shared their thoughts on being honoured at the Junos.
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“It’s hard to believe that that’s actually a real thing, to be honest,” said Nickelback guitarist/keyboardist Ryan Peake.
“I’m kind of speechless,” Peake said, jokingly adding, “It’s amazing for somebody to recognize that we won’t go away… We didn’t start playing to end up with something like that. I mean, that’s just it’s an amazing thing to do to have bestowed on you. So yes, we’re incredibly flattered.”
Having made their mark on the music scene, both here in Canada as well as internationally, has led the group to redefine what success means to them.
“I think it just means happiness,” mused Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger. “You know, now we are afforded the luxury of just being able to say, ‘Let’s do what makes us happy.’ And that’s a wonderful thing because I don’t know that everybody has that. I mean, we made a record that we knew wasn’t going to be commercially viable, but we just did it anyway because we wanted to. You got to be pretty brave to just do that.”
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Nickelback’s induction ceremony will feature a live performance by the band and look back at their 20-plus year career and influence on rock music at home and around the globe. To date, the quarter boasts 23 chart-topping singles and over 10 billion collective streams internationally. Their 10th studio album, Get Rollin’, drops Nov. 18.
As Peake explained, the band is always striving to make music that will prove engaging to Nickelback fans and the band itself.
“I think that’s kind of the thing, is that we’re just moving forward and making more music and just trying to still entertain ourselves and entertain the fans in the same sense,” he said. “And these things are just, I mean, it’s a pretty great happenstance to kind of have happen to you. But I guess those are the things that happen when you’re busy working, right? That’s the success, it’s that we can still work and we can still do what we want to do, and record stuff how we want to do it. And I mean, how great is that?”
According to Kroeger, that can be a bit of a balancing act.
“It’s weird because I have a little bit of a mindset where we’ve made fans with so many different kinds of music. But I want to keep them all happy, I do,” he said. “I think a lot of people would sit here with a camera pointed at them and say, ‘I just make music for myself’… But I also want to keep the people who have loved the stuff that we’ve done in the past happy.”
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In fact, Kroeger insists that Nickelback’s fans are top of mind whenever they head into the recording studio.
“I’m not so selfish, like, ‘No, every record is just for me. And if you like it, you like it. If you don’t, I don’t care.’ Like, that’s such a selfish thing for me,” he said.
“I’m more like, you know, these people who have driven, flown, whatever it might be, to come see us play after falling in love with certain songs everywhere in the world, to just write them off and be like, ‘I don’t care which song you like, I’m just going to make the stuff I like,’ you know, I just find that to be a little bit selfish. We have a wonderful platform where we can just make anything we want, and so it’s lovely to be able to do that and to keep everybody happy.”
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Added Kroeger: “That keeps me happy as well, because if we just made the same kind of music straight across, just straight, you know, it would be mundane and a little boring. And it’s really, really lovely to be able to make something really aggressive and rock-heavy and to also be able to do something melodic that everybody wants to sing along to.”
The 2023 Juno Awards ceremony will appear on the JUNO Awards Broadcast and will also stream live across Canada, at 6 p.m. MT/8 p.m. ET on CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Radio One, CBC Music, CBC Listen, and globally at CBCMusic.ca/junos and CBC Music’s Facebook, YouTube and Twitter pages.