It’s onerous to think about New Discovered Glory’s third album Sticks & Stones with out “My Friends Over You.” Nevertheless it might’ve occurred. “The crazy thing is [the album] was already done, and it was the last day of practicing, it was the night before when I wrote that guitar riff [for “My Friends Over You”]” guitarist/vocalist Chad Gilbert advised Grammy.com in 2020. “I went in [the] next day and was like, ‘Come on, guys – one more song. I think this is going to be awesome.’ And everyone was like, ‘No, we’re tired.’ Luckily, our producer liked it. We did it and now it’s our biggest song!”
“My Friends Over You” helped propel Sticks & Stones into the Prime 5 of the Billboard 200 through the summer season of 2002. Hindsight, although, suggests New Discovered Glory’s mainstream breakthrough was liable to occur anyway. The band’s previous launch – 2000’s New Discovered Glory – offered properly and luminaries resembling blink-182’s Mark Hoppus recurrently enthused about them within the press.
The band relocated from Florida to California previous to the recording, and labored diligently through the album classes overseen by Neal Avron: a sympathetic producer additionally famend for his work with Weezer and Everclear. “He’s a massive producer now, but we were his first punk band,” Chad Gilbert later recalled. “When Fall Out Boy worked with him, they wanted it to sound like the records we did with him. They’re a massive arena band, so it’s pretty crazy.”
“My Friends Over You” arguably represented the file’s apex, however the band crafted a complete host of angst-y, but extremely accessible, pop-punk anthems resembling “Head On Collision,” “Something I Call Personality,” and the bittersweet “Sonny.” The outcome was a shiny, accessible rock file with a crossover enchantment akin to Inexperienced Day’s Dookie. Certainly, it’s no shock that Sticks & Stones went on to turn into New Discovered Glory’s best-selling title – yielding a platinum certification in the US.
“It was our second major label recording, we had a little bit of experience going to nicer studios and having that rhythm of how the process works,” vocalist Jordan Pundik mentioned, reflecting on Sticks & Stones in a Grammy.com retrospective. “So I think that at the time, there weren’t many bands doing what we were doing… sound-wise. So that in and of itself is really cool to think back to, because we were doing something really special.”
Take heed to New Discovered Glory’s Sticks and Stones now.
