CHRISTINA FUOCO-KARASINSKI | FOR THE FLINT JOURNAL
Hinder lead singer Austin Winkler has the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle down pat. Calling on a Monday afternoon from Nashville while drinking a beer and smoking, he peppers his conversation with “babe” as a term of endearment. Winkler is doing interviews to advance Hinder’s tour, which comes to The Machine Shop on Wednesday, as well as his act’s forthcoming album “The All-American Nightmare.”
“I’m ecstatic about the album,” Winkler said between drags of a cigarette. “It’s different, babe. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, but I’ve never been more proud of a record than I have with this one.”
Winkler described the album as a dichotomy. Hinder fans will be able to get a healthy sneak peek of the album in Flint as the group is performing six new songs live along with hits like “Lips of an Angel” and “Without You.” “The All-American Nightmare” is slated for release the last quarter of 2010.
• What: Hinder concert with My Darkest Days and Black Sunshine • When: 7 p.m. Wednesday • Where: The Machine Shop, 3539 S. Dort Highway, Flint • Tickets: $25 in advance for the 18-and-older show • Info: Etix.com or (810) 715-2650 |
“The heavy songs are heavier,” Winkler said. “Where it’s lighter, it’s lighter. The songs are unique. We probably couldn’t label them. You’ll have to wait to hear it. It’s definitely different. There’s some tongue-in-cheek songs in there that the crowd’s responding awesome to.”
He explained that the songwriting process was far different than the pre-production for Hinder’s previous efforts, 2005’s triple-platinum “Extreme Behavior” and 2008’s “Take It To The Limit.”
“Me and Cody (Hanson, drummer) have been writing for probably a year and a half,” he said while apologizing for “drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette.” “We wrote, I think, 60 or so songs for this record, which is not what we normally do. We normally do whatever the label wants. But for this record, we had to do something different. We had to mix it up a little bit. We wrote a lot of songs. We’re going to have 10 on the record and 12 on the deluxe version.
“It was hard. It was kind of cool, though, to sit there and write that many songs and then shape the album because it all runs together.”
Winkler listed some of the song titles as “Two Sides of Me” and “Waking Up the Devil.”
“It’s all real (stuff),” he said. “It’s crazy. ‘Waking Up the Devil’ is about you have those two sides of you where it comes out every once in awhile. You’re one way, but when night falls, you’re a totally different person.”
Hinder also marked the occasion by hiring a different producer. “The All-American Nightmare” was produced by Kevin Churko, a Canadian record producer/engineer and songwriter who has worked for some of the world’s biggest names including Ozzy Osbourne. The music was recorded at Hanson’s studio while Winkler did his vocal tracks in Las Vegas.
“We needed to do something different,” Winkler said. “We used the same producer on, I call it three records, but there’s two records because Brian Howse did the demos for ‘Extreme Behavior,’” he said. “We needed to change it up a little bit to see where our talent lies, you know, babe?”