Q&A: Finger Eleven singer Scott Anderson on band's 1st album in 10 years

Singer Scott Anderson of Finger Eleven, the Canadian rock band known for songs like “Paralyzer” and “One Thing,” knows there are big expectations for their new album.

Their first album in a decade, “Last Night on Earth,” comes out Nov. 7.

“You can’t wait 10 years and then put out a garbage album. You can’t do that,” Anderson said. “But I’m not sure we’ll hit expectations. It’s a lofty goal, and we tried as hard as we could. At the end of the day, all you can do is look around the room and go, do you guys like this? ‘Yeah, I do too.’ OK, awesome.

“It’s a very democratic situation, which also makes putting out a record a longer process. Everybody truly has to be happy. What’s nice is whatever reaction we get, we can still stand behind it. It’s a wonderful thing to say coming out of the recording process. The old-school model was you would rent an expensive studio for two months, two and a half months, and when you ran out of time, that’s when the album was done. That’s not the case anymore. A whole bunch of stuff gets in the way, but we certainly took our time with this one, but we got it exactly where we wanted it to be.”

The new album features a guest appearance from Filter’s Richard Patrick on “Blue Sky Mystery” in addition to their latest single, “Last Night On Earth,” which just dropped Friday.

Finger Eleven kicks off a tour with Alien Ant Farm and Brkn Love on Thursday, with a stop at Jergel’s in Warrendale on Sept. 30.

“I’m excited to come down and play. There’s nothing like seeing a band that actually wants to be on stage and be excited about its new material,” Anderson said. “I love it when I see it, and I cringe when it looks like there’s a bunch of hostages on stage. So I’m looking forward to finally seeing everybody again.”

In a Zoom call earlier this month, Anderson spoke with TribLive about the new album, the band’s original name, working with Patrick and more. Find a transcript of the conversation, edited for clarity and length, below.

Are you looking forward to hitting the road?

Absolutely. I want it both ways. It’s great, because I’ve spent most of my life making records and music with my middle school friends. So I love it. But everybody’s in a new phase. Everybody’s married with kids. We now understand the value of that. But you get to do your thing on stage and feel like teenagers again.

Have you ever toured with Alien Ant Farm before?

We ran into them once, never toured, but we ran into them once a million years ago. They invited us onto their bus, and it was a pretty crazy party. I remember they kept things a little livelier on the bus than we had at the time. And we thought we could party. I’m excited to tour with them this time. Again, we’re at different stages, but music is still a vital part of their fiber. It’s going to be fun.

You have the new album coming out in November, so what should people know about the new album?

I think old-school Finger Eleven fans are going to be happy. There’s no shortage of very loud guitars and very memorable solos. We really thought everything there is to think about every single song, so we’re quite proud of it. That said, there’s a heavy tone that old-school fans will recognize, but then there’s also the other side of the band. We called the album “Last Night on Earth,” and the title track is a slightly mellower one that we’re all very proud of. So it’s a big album for us, and we’re excited to share it. My hope is that fans are going to be extremely happy with it.

Was there an intent to make it more of a big rock record this time around?

What happens is we have a giant bag of songs, and we break them out and we all say, OK, that’s a cool idea. Let’s expand on it. Let’s see what we can do with it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. At the end of this process, the only time that ever comes up is, now we’re making a record: Does it have too many of this kind of song or too many of that kind of song? Personally, I don’t care about that. I’m more like, oh, well, I just like this, this is a great song. We gotta figure out how to put it on the record.

But there was a little bit of discussion about, oh, OK, primarily we’re a rock band and we should have more, up-tempo songs which are harder to write (laughs). But we never intentionally sit down and go, we need to write this type of song. But it’s like, if it’s that song over there, maybe we can work on that more. And so there was a little toward the home stretch that was like, things are taking shape. Maybe we should start thinking about how it all fits together. So maybe we kicked one slower song out and put a higher tempo song in there, but that’s kind of as far as it goes.

The single “Blue Sky Mystery” features Filter’s Richard Patrick. So how did that collaboration come together?

That was fun. The idea was, if we were going to collaborate with somebody, what would make sense? Because Finger Eleven, we’ve been around for quite a while and we’re just kind of our own thing, we don’t even jam properly. If we were in a bar, we’re the worst jam band, it takes us a long time to set, we’re just not one of those bands. And so collaborating with anyone was a little scary. But we thought, OK, well, what would Richard Patrick’s voice sound like on this? This might be really interesting.

The label set up a call, and I was able to talk to him for almost an hour. I got to sell him on the song, and he really responded to the song when I sent it to him and thought it was really cool. He came back with a pass when he sang the second verse. It was just such a trip to hear the guy from Filter on a Finger Eleven song. I just couldn’t stop smiling. That led to him liking the song enough and committing to doing the video with us. We just sat around, and he couldn’t have been a nicer guy. He was telling us about how his brother is the guy from “Terminator (2).” And we were like, dude, yes, we know that. (laughs) But he was just so proud. It’s like, that’s my brother. And we’re like, yeah, man. Video shoots are interesting because they’re a very, very small window of time. My hope is that we can tour in the future because he was very nice. It’s a legendary band. It was very gracious of him to lend himself to one of our songs. So it was a very nice collaboration, and I’m glad it came about.

I read that song is about deep obsession. Whenever I listened to it, for some reason, conspiracy theories popped into my head, the way people get about them. Is that a possible take on it?

I like that better than what it really is about. (laughs) I mean, I don’t know what my favorite songs are about most of the time. But I think in a more general way, I think there’s maybe a more romantic bent there. That state of mind maybe leads to even more confusion from the protagonist’s point of view. (laughs) But yeah, I like the oxymoron. You can see it’s all in front of you, but you still can’t figure it out. I thought that was a cool vibe.

“Last Night on Earth” is more of an acoustic song, and it was described as one of your most personal songs, so what’s the the story behind that one?

That idea was just born of the age-old, late-night argument that I don’t even remember what the argument was about, but just that feeling of wondering what the next night or the next day was going to look like. Is everything going to change? What’s that feeling in the pit of my stomach? Is that going to go away? Did I say anything I can’t take back? Those kinds of arguments, those moments that maybe it just happens in my relationship. I’m not sure, (laughs) but sometimes there’s no other way out emotionally than to sit down and write about it. I’m very lucky that way. So that’s where that idea came from. Just a really shitty night. (laughs) Ah, this is going to be a tough one to get out of, but I don’t even remember what the argument was about. I like songs that evoke that feeling. I just don’t like actually feeling that way.

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The band was originally called Rainbow Butt Monkeys. Was it the smart decision to change the name all those years ago?

I don’t think so.

No?

Well, yeah, I do because, when we were the Butt Monkeys, that was our high school band. There’s a whole different energy going out there. Despite ourselves, we ended up getting signed to a label and touring the country. And then we left high school and went, oh, OK, there was a tonal shift in the stuff we were writing. Coming from our point of view, we were like, well, we need to acknowledge how different this is. So we need to change, and the label looked at us like we were crazy. They were like, uh, are you sure?

We were like, yeah, we’ve never been more sure of anything. Listen to what’s going on. It was a massive undertaking. We changed our name and a week later, we got dropped by the label and we floundered for a long time. Then we had a label out in New York called Wind-up fall in love with the record eventually. There’s a bit of time compression here, but they signed Creed, and then we were their second signing. They thought we were going to take over as much of the planet as Creed would. Didn’t turn out to be the case.

But yeah, the Butt Monkeys were a lot of fun. There’s a lot of energy, we put out one record. And it’s good. It’s a lot of fun. From our perspective, we’re like, no, the stuff we were doing is just so different, you can’t believe that this is the same band. But I’m going to my grave with people telling me that the label forced us to change our name. Everybody knows my history better than I do, evidently. So that’s fine. But that’s kind of the boring truth of it. But it was tough.

We stuck to our musical convictions, and it bit us in the (butt) until we got some of our credibility back by remaining Finger Eleven and then putting out album after album. It was only on our third album that we had a bona fide hit, which helped us stay with the label. (laughs) The old-school system, we had three albums that didn’t “perform.” That kind of support, it’s unheard of nowadays. So bless Wind-up for believing in us for all those years. It’s been a long time with the same four core members: my brother and my two best friends, my one best friend, James, from middle school, and then Rick from high school. So it’s the same band, but quite different.