As rock-band relaunches go, Good Charlotte’s was conspicuously ritzy.
In April 2023, the pop-punk group known for snotty if smiley Y2K-era hits like “The Anthem” and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” — “I’d like to see them spend a week / Livin’ life out on the street,” goes a lyric in the latter — played its first gig in four years not at a club or a festival but as the musical entertainment at a wedding at Hotel Du Cap-Eden-Roc in the sun-kissed south of France. The bride and groom: Sofia Richie, the model and influencer whose father is Lionel Richie, and Elliot Grainge, the record executive son of Universal Music Group Chairman Lucian Grainge.
“Sofia Richie has raised the bar for celebrity weddings,” People magazine proclaimed of the ceremony, which Vogue described as the year’s “royal wedding” and which led Elle to anoint Richie’s “quiet luxury wedding hair” as the “beauty moment that dominated 2023.”
Reflecting on her nuptials, Richie — whose older sister Nicole has been married to Good Charlotte frontman Joel Madden since 2010 — downplays the glitz and glamour. “Our wedding didn’t look small, but it was really about family,” she tells The Times. With that in mind, Good Charlotte was a “no-brainer,” she says. “I knew they were gonna play all the vibes, and the room just erupted. Every single person was singing every single word. It was electric.”
Reckons Madden, who formed Good Charlotte with his twin brother Benji when the two were high school kids in suburban Maryland: “Easily one of the top 10 greatest nights of my life.”
Two years later, the Maddens, both 46, have parlayed the evening into a new comeback album, “Motel Du Cap,” and again it’s a family affair: Good Charlotte’s first LP since 2018, the album came out last week via Atlantic Records, which 31-year-old Grainge took over as chief executive in October. Richie, 26, says her husband and Joel Madden aren’t just brothers-in-law but “legitimate best friends”; Grainge himself says he and the Maddens play the video game “Fortnite” for an hour every Saturday. (“We go on our headphones, we look so uncool,” the exec told the trade journal Hits.)
“We were at peace with probably not making another record,” Joel says on a recent morning at the Burbank headquarters of the brothers’ company MDDN, which encompasses a talent management business, the livestreaming platform Veeps and digital media brands including Alternative Press and Brooklyn Vegan.
Heavily tattooed and also dressed in black and white, Benji sits in a recording studio next to his brother. “I think we would have made another,” he counters. “But we’d meandered away from the band in so many different ways that maybe it would have been another three, four, five years.”
Whatever the case, Good Charlotte had gone more or less dormant in the wake of the twins’ father’s death just months after the release of 2018’s “Generation Rx.” “Our band was born out of a time when we hated our dad,” Benji says of the parent who deserted his family when the brothers were about 13. “First couple records, you can hear all about it.” Yet they’d reconnected more recently with their father, which left them feeling conflicted about digging into his failings in song after he died.
“It kind of f— us up a little bit,” Joel says. So instead of recording or touring, the Maddens concentrated on their various other endeavors — at least until Richie asked the band to get back together.
For Joel, the answer was an easy yes. “This is my little sister — I’ve been in her life since she was seven years old,” he says of Richie. “Nicole and I took her to Selena Gomez concerts and took her to Disneyland.” (For her part, Sofia Richie says, “I absolutely idolized Joel.”)
Having sold their bandmates on the idea — Good Charlotte is rounded out by guitarist Billy Martin, bassist Paul Thomas and drummer Dean Butterworth — Joel and Benji led the group through a single rehearsal after they’d arrived on the French Riviera, which evidently was all they needed. Video clips of the band’s rowdy performance went viral online, including one in which Benji’s wife, the actor Cameron Diaz, can be seen bouncing in the crowd.
“We’re all sitting around afterward, and Elliot was like, ‘You guys need to make a new record,’ ” Benji recalls. “We’re like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ ” He turns to his brother. “Then later that night, you said, ‘I think I could make a record.’ “
“I felt a little fire,” Joel says with a grin.
Good Charlotte’s return is propitiously timed given the broader emo and pop-punk revival that’s ushered other turn-of-the-millennium acts like Blink-182 and My Chemical Romance into stadiums over the past few years. Six months after the Richie-Grainge wedding, Good Charlotte played the annual When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas alongside Green Day, the Offspring and Sum 41; this past April, the Maddens even turned up at Stagecoach to perform with country star Luke Combs, who called himself a “huge, huge, huge fan” as he brought them to the stage.
Yet the brothers describe their ambitions these days with a modesty distinct from the early 2000s. “If there was a podium, we’re like in third place — maybe an honorable mention,” Benji says. “We’re good with that.” The way he and Joel see it, Good Charlotte no longer sits at the center of their lives, nor should it.
“Some people will sacrifice everything for art,” says Joel, who, like his brother, has a son and a daughter. “I’m not sacrificing my relationship with my kids for art. I’m gonna make the best record I can make right now, and I’m still gonna make bedtime.”
“Motel Du Cap” reflects that mindset in songs about family and devotion such as “Deserve You” and “Castle in the Sand,” in which Joel imagines the sound of his children playing down the hall. “I wouldn’t say it’s dad rock or married-guy rock, but it kind of is,” the frontman admits with a laugh.
It’s also rich-guy rock, of course. “In the evening, we just order Matsuhisa,” Joel sings in “Stepper,” referring to the sushi joint on La Cienega, “And you know we always get the champagne.” He laughs again. “I understand what it looks like,” he says of a song that uses blistering guitars to paint a picture of moneyed comfort. “It’s ironic.”
Adds Benji: “Hasn’t our band always been a little ironic, though?”
Indeed, the Maddens found a certain frisson from the get-go in writing about their rough-and-tumble upbringing with a squeaky-clean pop flair. Punk purists scoffed while “TRL” viewers made a gold seller of Good Charlotte’s self-titled 2000 debut; 2002’s “The Young and the Hopeless” went triple-platinum and landed the band on the cover of Rolling Stone. (A framed copy hangs on a wall at MDDN in Burbank.) The brothers moved to L.A. from Maryland around 2003 and bought houses near each other in Glendale.
“We were really close friends with the Game,” Joel says of the Compton-born rapper, “and he told me, ‘The second a house comes up for sale on your street, I want to get it.’ ” One day Joel saw a sign go up and promptly called his pal. “He literally came in the front door, walked around for one second and said, ‘I’ll take it.’ We all lived on that same street for three or four years.”
For “Motel Du Cap,” Good Charlotte recorded in the room we’re sitting in today with producers Jordan Fish and Zakk Cervini, both of whom are signed to MDDN. (Among the company’s other clients are Bad Omens, Poppy and, uh, Nicole Richie’s hip-hop alter ego, Nikki Fresh.) The music still puts catchy vocal hooks over chunky guitar fuzz, though the LP also includes a laid-back rap-rock collab with Wiz Khalifa and a pretty credible country tune in the wistful “Deserve You.”
“There was a lot of country music where we grew up,” says Benji, who mentions that “there’s a little bit of lore” around the idea that Combs and the brothers might be related. “Our dad’s last name was Combs,” he says. “We took our mom’s name when we were 18 — went down to the courthouse because we were angry. But his family was from North Carolina, and so is Luke. We’ve sort of loosely connected our grandfathers.”
As teenagers, Benji continues, “I think we were like, ‘F— country music — we’re gonna do pop-punk.’ But as we’ve gotten older, you hear a song and you go, ‘Hmm, that’s nice.’ ” In fact, Luke Combs has been Benji’s most-listened-to artist on Spotify the last three years in a row.
“Look,” he says, holding out his phone to prove it. “Every year I send this to him.” Behind Combs on the tally are Idina Menzel and Hugh Jackman — “I’ve got a 5-year-old,” he explains of the singers from “Wicked” and “The Greatest Showman” — followed by Chet Baker(!) and Good Charlotte.
Twenty-five years after their first album, both brothers are comfortable — psyched, even — to find their band in such an unlikely mix. “Where Good Charlotte’s at now, we can definitely play any rock festival, but also your whole family can come to our show,” Joel says.
“That’s one of the things I’m happiest about,” Benji adds, “is that we’re not trying to relive something that we were at 22.”
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