Nickelback

ickleIn the late 90s, three years before the Alberta based band led by Chad Kroeger hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 with their breakthrough, decade-defining hit “How You Remind Me” and about a decade before Billboard declared them the most successful rock band of the 2000s, Penner produced The State, which laid the groundwork for Nickelback to become a six-time Grammy-nominated, 12 time Juno Award-winning artist – and one of Canada’s most commercially successful bands ever.

Originally released independently in 1998, The State achieved mainstream success once Penner and his management in Los Angeles shopped their agreement with the band to Roadrunner Records, which signed them for a re-release in 2000. Both the lead single “Leader of Men” and the third single “Breathe” hit the top ten on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart.

“I kind of discovered them when they had a record out in Canada called Curb that had sold a few thousand copies,” says Penner, whose home base for years had been between Vancouver and Toronto. “Their manager sent me a demo of three songs, and I immediately saw great potential. Looking back, it’s reassuring to know that I had the insight to see something there. I knew they were going places. It was also very cool to be driving down the street hearing a song I produced and know that people were out there jamming to it. That kind of thing validates everything I’m doing.

“I’m grateful that Nickelback’s success opened the door for me to work with so many other amazing bands and artists, but more importantly I have great personal memories of working with and hanging out with them. So when they’re maligned for being too commercial or supposedly for every song sounding the same, I can look past that partly because I know how hard they worked to get where they are. I helped them raise the $2000 or whatever they needed to do the video for ‘Leader of Men’ which took place in Chad’s house and featured a woman in a nurse’s uniform that we hired because she had done a fire breathing act at Burning Man.”

In addition to Nickelback, Penner’s worked over the years with a several other mainstream pop household names, , including Loverboy (his very first engineering session at Mushroom Studios in Vancouver, for their Top Gun soundtrack song and Top 15 hit “Heaven in Your Eyes”), k.d. lang and Michael McDonald. Back when he was engineering regularly, he also contributed to Jamie Walters/The Heights’ #1 hit “How Do You Talk to An Angel.” Over the years, even as he’s worked with countless artists in the U.S. and Europe, the producer has also racked up an impressive series of Juno Award winning and nominated projects by top Canadian artists Holly McNarland (whose album Stuff also earned him P.M.I.A.’s Producer of the Year), Jonas & The Massive Attraction and Econoline Crush. He also produced the debut album of future Juno Award winners, alt rockers the Matthew Good Band. Some of the U.S. based musicians and bands he has worked with are Boston’s The Winefield (for Priority Records), The Red King (Sony Publishing), Pixies guitarist Joey Santiago and most recently, emerging Nashville artist Darby Shaun and tracks for King Cole ft. Xavier Keyes.