At 43, singer Pierre Bouvier still gives concerts and releases songs with the same punk pop sound of 20 years ago.

“Harder Than It Looks”, Simple Plan’s sixth album, was released after seven years without records. The group had never gone so long without a release. “We try to channel the best of Simple Plan and embrace who we are, where we come from and what people expect of us,” Pierre tells g1 (see interview in the video above).

In the weekly series “When I hitei”, pop artists reminisce about their heyday and talk about how they are doing now. These are names you may not remember, but when you hear the song you think “aaaah, that played a lot”.

Pierre stays in direct contact with the band’s fans: he has always heard stories of young people who have used Simple Plan’s songs to overcome difficult times.

“I never thought that the music I was going to write could really really help people. These stories had a lot of impact for us and are the highest praise I could receive for the band. my life’, we started to realize the impact we had with our music and it was amazing, a lot of people came up to us to talk about ‘Perfect’.”

“There’s a story, I can’t remember the name of the girl, but I was a fan and she said her and her dad had a really bad relationship and he was really, really sick and he was going to die soon. And she went to the hospital and played the song ‘Perfect’ and they had an incredible bonding moment and for the short rest of her life they fixed it, they fixed their relationship and thanks to this song, they were able to get back together.”

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“Perfect” wasn’t the only Simple Plan song whose lyrics seem to be taken from a teenager’s diary. Before, Pierre sang these songs thinking about his adolescence, but now he is a father. He is married to model Lachella Farrar and has two daughters, now ages 8 and 10. The youngest is called Soren and the oldest is Lennon.

Now he sings the hits of an emotional youth while thinking of his daughters. “Thinking my daughters are going through this gives all those lyrics new life.”

“When you’re younger and you sing these lyrics, you think about yourself, you think about what you’re going through, how you’re affected by people, whether it’s parents, old people or friends who have let it go, but when I sing these lyrics now and when my girls come to see the show, I wonder how they feel and what these words will mean to them.”

“It also makes me realize when I sing ‘Perfect’…it’s like I’m trying my best to never make my girls feel like they’re not good enough. It doesn’t matter what you do as a father, your daughters will have had a hard time and sometimes you’ll feel like you’re not good enough so it’s very weird to sing ‘I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare’ , ‘Perfect’, ‘Welcome to my life’ or ‘Anxiety’.”

“Anxiety,” the song from the latest album, describes how someone with anxiety feels, with voices in their head, a desire to be someone else, fatigue, shortness of breath, and other symptoms. “People are realizing that having mental health issues is like having real health issues. I think talking about it helps people who are going through a tough time.”

“I dealt with anxiety, you know? People sometimes think it’s wonderful to be a successful person. You have to be happy all the time and I’m a very happy person…but I have to deal with attacks.” of panic, of anxiety. So we can explore that lyrically and kind of let people know. What helped me a lot when I was anxious was knowing that other people had mental health issues. ”

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Another recently released song that he can sing while thinking of his daughters is “Wake me up (When this nightmare’s over)”. They love Simple Plan’s old and new repertoire, but their favorite artist is something else.

“My girls really love Olivia Rodrigo. And ‘Driver’s License’ is one of their favorite songs and it’s cool to see them coming to an age where they’re not babies anymore. Now you know they have personalities, they have style, so it’s really cool.”

How does it feel to have a TikTok hit?

Simple Plan still manages to connect with this young generation, fans of Olivia Rodrigo. It’s one of the most streamed songs in TikTok history, “I’m just a kid”. Pierre, however, took time to understand what was happening.

“Bowling For Soup frontman Jaret texted and said, ‘Hey guys, maybe it’s cool to check out TikTok. ‘I’m just a kid’ is going viral…” and I was like, “Oh, TikTok is such a little thing. Nobody cares”.

“What I find really cool is that it happened without us doing anything. We didn’t plan for it. I wasn’t the first to take on the challenge, I didn’t didn’t think of it, I didn’t make it up.” He says the song has become much more popular today. “Now when we play this song live, I can tell the response at concerts is much higher than it was 10, 15 years ago.”

Twenty years after the release of their debut album, Simple Plan continues to sing songs with similar arrangements. How does it feel to have an emo band today? Pierre says it was “a kind of life lesson”.

“We realize that we are getting older, but I don’t feel much older, you know?”, explains the singer. “Being in a pop punk band then and now is the same for me. We always try to do our best to make the best music ever.”

“We’ve had a lot of success, but we’ve never had massive success. We’re never as big as Blink-182, Green Day, Linkin Park or Foo Fighters. Or Coldplay. We’ve never had that kind of success. It kept us ‘hungry.'”

“We keep doing our thing. We keep recording. We keep touring. We keep hoping that we’re gonna connect more and while we’re having fun we’re gonna go on tour to see new places and, yeah, life has been eerily similar. But I look older, I have wrinkles and gray hair.”

Simple Plan played several shows in Brazil, but one of them was the most talked about, even though there were only 12 people in the audience. They played in the 2007 edition of the BBB, won by Diego Alemão. “I just remember jumping in the pool and remembering it was a fun time.”

“And I remember the show was a really big surprise for the cast there and it was interesting. It’s a TV show so you never really know what’s going to happen, especially since I don’t live in Brazil of course… so I didn’t really know how important the show was so we went there to do our job, but I remember thinking ‘we should jump in the pool, do something crazy.”

He says he would like to come back to Brazil and play for “passionate fans”. If he could, he guarantees that he will play Big Brother Brasil again. But would you jump in the pool one more time? “Yes, of course! Is the show still there? Yes, I would love to, that would be great. It was a great opportunity for the band and I would love to do it again, that’s for sure.”