The Madden Brothers leave Good Charlotte behind with California Dreaming album
PUNK pop twins Joel and Benji Madden are each other’s biggest fans – but a question about their new gig as The Madden Brothers left Benji blushing.
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SOUL. The Beach Boys. The ’60s. Hair, the musical. Electro pop. Americana. The ’80s. ELO. AM radio. Hotel California.
Rarely did such words come to mind when Good Charlotte were making pop-punk kids pogo to Lifestyles Of the Rich and Famous.
But after a three-year rebuilding project, in which Joel and Benji Madden re-emerged as The Madden Brothers, these are the words that fit with the new outfit’s first album, Greetings From California.
JOEL MADDEN: Opens up on that hotel room joint
BIZARRE: Late night selfie from Joel Madden
“We started Good Charlotte when we were 15-16. Then we grew up in front of the world,” says Joel, back in LA after wrapping duties on The Voice Kids in Australia.
“Then one day you wake up in your 30s … I was 31 when me and Benji were like, ‘Hey, have we ever thought about doing anything different? Or is this, like, it?’ We’re adventurous people, we’re creative, we have an appetite. So we had to ask ourselves, is there more? Are we at a place now where we’re allowed to? Like, what are the rules? Are there rules?”
Good Charlotte went into hiatus in late 2011 — “No bad blood”, says Joel. “But we all have families now. We’d been on this Good Charlotte train non-stop.”
So the brothers started talking about The Madden Brothers — they’d played acoustic gigs under that name and thought maybe it could house some new direction.
“Then,” says Joel, “we took the ceiling off and said, let’s just go for it.”
The result is Greetings From California, an old-school listening experience where Side A houses the poptastic, soulful stuff — including jaw-dropping first single We Are Done — while side B has a more ’70s vibe, closing with the downcast Empty Spirits, which name-drops Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine and has harmonies to tear your heart out.
“We’ve always had this real resistance to being put in a box,” says Benji. “Even if you consider the way we look to the way sound … I don’t know if that’s hurt us or helped us, to be honest. But we’ve always felt like, just because I look a certain way and have certain friends, who are you to tell me I can’t play this kind of music?”
Could Greetings From California have been made under the Good Charlotte banner? Or was that band the box the Maddens were locked in?
“That’s a good question,” replies Joel, “because I don’t know if it could or it couldn’t.”
“You know what … you may have just revealed something to me that I didn’t really know,” replies Benji. “Seriously though, when you think about it, we wrote all the songs for Good Charlotte, we sang in Good Charlotte — why didn’t we just call this a Good Charlotte record?”
Why didn’t they?
“Well,” says Benji, “for some reason there was just something different about it.”
Greetings started to take shape in 2012 when the boys hung out in Pharrell Williams’ Miami studio. Yet, far from being a bunch of co-opted beats, its roots can be found much further back — in the record collection of the Maddens’ parents.
“We lived in a religious house. Yet for some reason my mum and dad thought it was OK to play us this old rock and roll,” Joel recalls with a laugh. “Like, that was OK but modern music wasn’t. Our dad would play The Animals, The Zombies, The Beatles, The Doors and The Beach Boys … Those records definitely made it into our musical DNA.”
After the boys’ rebellious phase (i.e.: Good Charlotte), the wheel turned full circle.
“I had a kid, I had another kid, I went back to the old records,” says Joel. “Then I understood why my dad played this for us. I play it for my kids now. I want this music in their DNA.”
Perhaps the biggest surprise on Greetings From California is Benji’s voice — on Dear Jane, a kind of white-boy funk number, he out-souls Maroon 5’s Adam Levine.
Asked where he’s been hiding that voice all these years, Benji laughs and says, “You just made my face get red”.
Benji always sang all the Good Charlotte demos, but was happy to take the back seat to his brother and focus on guitar on the finished recordings because, he says, “Joel has this crazy talent for delivering arena moments.
“It didn’t really fit in Good Charlotte, my voice,” he adds. “Now that we’re doing The Madden Brothers, it kinda works.”
Adds Joel: “Benji, he’s as much the lead singer on this record as I am. There are some songs I couldn’t deliver, there was a little bit more soul in his voice that I didn’t have.”
It sounds like the 35-year-olds have flipped the script because, historically, it was always Benji pushing the more low-key Joel to overcome any lack of belief in the studio.
“You know, the thing about Joel that’s really likable is Joel doesn’t think he’s amazing,” says Benji. “He thinks he’s extremely lucky, that he works hard and that he’s a good guy. You know, ‘People like me because I’m a good guy and there’s a lot douchebags out there’.
“When the truth of the matter is that Joel is actually amazing. I’ve been around a lot of rock stars, so to speak, right? They don’t hold a candle to Joel. When you watch Joel do what he does on stage, the dude is really good at it.
“Sometimes I have to coach him the way we did with those kids (on The Voice), take him aside and be like, ‘Dude, come on, believe it, you’re the s---. There’s a reason you’re here’.”
How does Joel describe his brother?
“He’s a hard worker. Tenacious. Doesn’t give up. Fights every inch. We make a good team, because sometimes I’m afraid, where he never thinks about not going for it. He just gets to work and starts chopping wood. He’s a battler.”
Benji is doing better than battling. He says he’s a “very happy guy at the moment” — not overly surprising given he has just returned from a break in Italy with his new girlfriend, movie star Cameron Diaz.
(He’s not ignorant to the fact much of the trip was papped, but he’s happy to pretend it wasn’t: “I keep my blinders on and try not to let anyone knock me out of my own zone. It’s a good way to live.”)
Joel, meanwhile, is at home, occasionally excusing himself to stop son Sparrow, 4, from getting into something he shouldn’t.
He and his wife, Nicole Richie, have had their own share of gossip-mag speculation. But if a union is only as solid as the song written about it, then all is well: UR, a Joel-penned number on Greetings From California, is a soulful and sunny ode to his family (rounded out by daughter Harlow, 6).
In it, he sings: “You are in every lyric, you are in every chord, you are my inspiration, the one I’m singing for.”
“Those three,” Joel nods. “They’re my team.”
Though reluctant to get specific, Joel seems happy for his brother, too.
“We’re both really blessed and lucky. We couldn’t be happier. We’ve come a long way and we’ve got a long way to go.”
HEAR: GREETINGS FROM CALIFORNIA (EMI) OUT SEPTEMBER 12
Listen to their songs below in our Spotify playlist.
SEE: THE MADDEN BROTHERS, HISENSE ARENA, OCTOBER 31, $99.90 TO $349.90, LIVENATION.COM.AU
NSW QANTAS CREDIT UNION ARENA, NOVEMBER 1
QLD GOLD COAST CONVENTION CENTRE, NOVEMBER 2
Originally published as The Madden Brothers leave Good Charlotte behind with California Dreaming album
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