Nickelback gets a lot of love from the country music community. Which could be explained by the fact that a lot of their songs almost are country tunes. Hell, frontman Chad Kroeger once even admitted that their hit singles “Photograph” and “Rockstar” are basically country jams.
During a December 2022 interview on Q with Tom Power, Kroeger offered some perspective. He straight-up said the band’s 2005 tune “Photograph” is “pretty much a country tune with a heavy chorus.” When asked how that’s possible, Kroger pulled out a guitar and played a bit to show how the melody and chord progression are “so country.”
He then mentioned their song “Rockstar”, joked that it’s such a country tune that he “might as well have sang it with a twang.” He then quipped, “I damn-near am singing the song with a country twang.”
In a 2023 conversation with American Songwriter, Kroeger went into more detail about “Photograph”. He shared some insight into how the song—and its music video shot in the band’s hometown of Hanna, Canada—came together.
“It was cool because we hadn’t been back to Hanna in a long time,” Kroeger told the outlet. “It was also sad at the same time to see. In ‘Photograph’, I’m talking about the movie theater being gone and all that, and sure enough, we got there, and it was gone. I didn’t even know it was gone, but I say it in the song, which is hilarious.”
“Our director, Nigel Dick, had shown up two days earlier and started grabbing all these people from town and shooting shots of them,” Kroeger went on to say. “I didn’t see any of that until I got the first cut of the video. I’m like, ‘I know those humans.’”
Chad Kroeger said he has nearly a dozen counts of breaking and entering on his record
Among the places they revisited in the video, Nickelback stopped by their old high school. “I broke into that exact school,” Kroeger said, referencing the lyric: I broke in twice / I must have done it half a dozen times.
“I think I have eleven counts of breaking and entering on my criminal record. God, I was a bad kid. If [Hanna] was an island, they would have either drowned me or I’d have been voted off real quick.
“My principal, Mr. Britton, came too,” he continued. “All the people that were there, were also there when all of it went down. It was crazy.”
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