The Offspring’s Bryan “Dexter” Holland and guitarist Kevin “Noodles” Wasserman discussed their new album title ‘Let The Bad Times Roll’ in a new RockSound.TV interview.
Dexter claimed, “Well, the phrase sums up the world over the last few years. And while it looks like, hopefully, better times are on the horizon, the bad times are rolling still, I think.”
Noodles said, “It’s not just [that] we’ve been handed this shit show that we don’t really have any control over, we might as well make the most of it, on top of that we have world leaders that don’t seem to wanna change anything for the better. They’re rolling the bad times.”
Dexter added, “This is f***ing no joke. The world’s in a bad place right now. And I felt like the leaders are not really trying to make it better — not the way they should; not the way they would have a generation ago. I think this idea of working together with people on the opposite side of the political spectrum has just gone out the window.”
Noodles chimed in, “Democracy has been taking a hit. The idea that we can get all together and through shared ideas and shared concern for each other, we can get through this. People are just, like, ‘Oh, no. F*** you. We won this election, and you go f*** yourself. We’re in power. We don’t wanna hear from you.’ You can’t have a civilized society that way.”
Dexter concluded, “That’s heavy. That’s a serious message that we wanted to get across. At the same time, jeez, you can only hammer so long before you’re just the bummer at the party. So I think the flipside of the same statement, ‘Let the bad times roll,’ is almost kind of, like, ‘We’re here. We’ve gotta roll with the punches a little bit.’ And the chorus of that song kind of sums it up, makes it a little bit lighter. So it kind of felt like this is what the tone of the record should be; this is the underlying message of the whole thing.”
