Chad Kroeger wrote the song that made Nickelback famous as a revenge attack on his girlfriend, bellowing it through a PA in their Vancouver basement so she would hear every barb, and she came downstairs to tell him it was great. That song, "How You Remind Me", became the lead single from Silver Side Up, the third Nickelback album, cut in five weeks by a band who had borrowed their way this far and knew a flop would finish them.
The record reached shops on 11 September 2001, a day when nobody was thinking about rock albums. By Christmas the single was number one on the Billboard Hot 100. By 2010 it had been played more than 1.2 million times on American radio, more than any other song of the decade, and four men from small-town Alberta had become rock's most lucrative punchline. This is how Silver Side Up was written, recorded and sold, and why its biggest moment was the drum tech's idea.
Album Facts
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | Nickelback |
| Album | Silver Side Up |
| Release Date | 11 September 2001 |
| Label | Roadrunner Records; EMI Music Canada in Canada |
| Producer(s) | Rick Parashar and Nickelback |
| Studio(s) | Greenhouse Studios, Burnaby; mixed at Armoury Studios, Vancouver; mastered at Sterling Sound, New York |
| Genre / Subgenre | Post-grunge, hard rock |
| Track Count | 10 (11 in Japan, with Learn the Hard Way) |
| Total Runtime | 39:08 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 2 (178,000 first-week copies) |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 1 (two weeks, March 2002) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | 1 in Canada, Austria and Ireland; 1 UK Rock & Metal; 2 Sweden; 4 Germany; 5 Australia |
| Certifications | 6x Platinum (RIAA); 8x Platinum (Music Canada); 3x Platinum (BPI); 2x Platinum (IFPI Europe, ARIA) |
| Estimated Sales | Over 8 million worldwide by 2002; 5.67 million in the US by 2010 |
| Key Singles | How You Remind Me; Too Bad; Never Again |
The World Silver Side Up Walked Into
American rock radio in 2001 belonged to earnest men with enormous choruses. Lifehouse's "Hanging by a Moment" was the year's most successful US single, and Creed and 3 Doors Down ruled the rock stations. Critics filed Nickelback in the same drawer, which amused Ryan Peake. "Yeah, way back in '96, us and Creed and Three Doors Down got together," he deadpanned to Jam! in August 2001.
Their own label had its eyes elsewhere. Roadrunner, home of Slipknot and Sepultura, released Slipknot's Iowa on 28 August 2001 and expected the masked Iowans to be its commercial story of the year. Two weeks later Silver Side Up landed on one of the most crowded release days of the era:
- Jay-Z, The Blueprint
- Bob Dylan, Love and Theft
- Slayer, God Hates Us All
- Mariah Carey, Glitter
- P.O.D., Satellite
- Ben Folds, Rockin' the Suburbs
"I knew it would be a hit, but the level of hit certainly surprised me. It came out at the end of the real aggro rap-rock thing, so maybe people were ready for a change, back to a good melody."
Randy Staub, mixer, MTV News, 2003
From Hanna to Roadrunner: Nickelback Before Silver Side Up
Nickelback started in Hanna, a remote Alberta farming town, as a covers band called Village Idiot: Chad Kroeger, his half-brother Mike, their cousin Brandon Kroeger and Ryan Peake. The name came from Mike's shifts at a Vancouver Starbucks, where a $1.95 coffee meant a lot of customers hearing "Here's your nickel back."
Chad borrowed CA$4,000 from his stepfather, spent half recording the 1996 EP Hesher and, by his own admission, the other half on magic mushrooms to sell on. For The State they borrowed more than $30,000 from "anybody who would give us a dollar or two", released it themselves in 1998 and ran it like a start-up: Chad made the radio tracking calls, Mike handled the money and Peake worked the internet. Drummer Ryan Vikedal joined that summer.
Roadrunner A&R man Ron Burman saw them play a packed Vancouver club "with lighters in the air" and needed three months to talk his bosses into signing them, the metal label's first move into mainstream rock. The State went gold, the band toured America for 14 months with Creed, 3 Doors Down and Stone Temple Pilots, and in March 2001 they won the Juno for Best New Group.
"We had probably sold about half a million records. This one was going to be the make-or-break album for us. Silver Side Up was gonna either come out and tank, or it would be a decent handshake to the world."
Chad Kroeger, Classic Rock, 2025
Peake put it more starkly: "You get one real shot, and I think our label gave us one-and-a-half shots."
Writing Silver Side Up and the Basement Row
Much of Silver Side Up existed before anyone booked a studio. Hangnail and Hollywood were already in the live set, Just For was a re-cut of Just Four from Curb, and Peake said most of the new songs had been road-tested on tour. The big change was Kroeger's decision to stop writing in riddles.
"Before How You Remind Me, I was hiding behind metaphors, I wasn't saying what I wanted to say. And I think when the honesty came out people appreciated it."
Chad Kroeger, Classic Rock, 2025
The song that proved the point began as four lines in a black leather notebook. After a fight with his live-in girlfriend, Jodi, "about something stupid", Kroeger went down to the basement, switched on his PA and sang into a microphone, loud, so every line would carry upstairs. Within an hour he had lyrics, melody and chords. The payoff was pure sitcom: "Instead of her getting the point, she turns to me and goes, 'Whatever song you're working on downstairs, it's great.'"
A week before the sessions he played the skeleton to the band. Ten minutes later it was arranged and pencilled in as the first single. Pre-production added two touches: Peake flipped the outro chords into reverse order, and drum tech Andrew Mawhinney suggested stopping the band dead so Kroeger could scream "for handing you a heart worth breaking" into silence on the third chorus. They paid him $5,000 for that one idea. When Mike played the demo to a friend, the verdict came straight back: "That has got millions written all over it."
Five Weeks at Greenhouse: Making Silver Side Up
In April 2001 Nickelback returned to Greenhouse Studios in Burnaby, the suburban Vancouver room where they had made The State and where Kroeger already moonlighted producing other bands. Greenhouse's A room was built around an SSL console that had started life at Bruce Fairbairn and Bob Rock's Little Mountain Sound, the desk behind Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet, Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood and parts of Metallica's Black Album.
For a producer they went to Seattle. Rick Parashar had co-founded London Bridge Studio with his brother Raj, produced Pearl Jam's Ten, Temple of the Dog and Alice in Chains' Sap, and played keyboards on "Black" and "Jeremy". Behind the desk sat Joey Moi, who had fallen in with the band while studying at Vancouver's CDIS audio school, doing janitorial and security shifts in exchange for studio time. "I could use the school studio between midnight and 8 a.m., so we would make demos until eight in the morning," he told MusicRow in 2013.
The sessions went into Pro Tools, with Alex Aligizakis running the rig, and money was tight enough that Mike Kroeger was "living in a trailer" and "completely flat broke" while they recorded. Peake called Nickelback a meat-and-potatoes band, his own rig "a delay pedal and a wah-wah pedal, and that is it", but the studio loosened them up. Money Bought grew a funk drum groove, a new bass line and a micro-synth under the verses, Kroeger reached for a talk box on Woke Up This Morning, and Big Wreck's Ian Thornley played slide on Good Times Gone.
How You Remind Me barely changed. "We just put a few more things on top of it, but most of tracks were from the demo on that one," Peake told Mix in 2003. Randy Staub mixed at Armoury Studios, modelling the single on "Hanging by a Moment" because "I wanted it to make a statement," and George Marino mastered at Sterling Sound in New York. By June the record was finished, ready or not.
"I couldn't wait to get at the helm and start producing our own records, and never having to say, 'Okay, good enough, we're running out of time.' I absolutely detested that."
Chad Kroeger, Billboard, 2021
Two years later he bought the Greenhouse A room's gear outright, famous desk and all, and installed it in a converted barn at home. It "drastically reduced my commute".
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Lead vocals, guitar, talk box | Chad Kroeger | Wrote every lyric |
| Guitar, backing vocals | Ryan Peake | Reversed the How You Remind Me outro |
| Bass | Mike Kroeger | Wanted Never Again as lead single |
| Drums, percussion | Ryan Vikedal | Credited as Ryan "Vik" Vikedal |
| Guest musician | ||
| Slide guitar | Ian Thornley | Big Wreck frontman, on Good Times Gone |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producers | Rick Parashar and Nickelback | Parashar co-founded London Bridge Studio |
| Engineer, digital editing | Joey Moi | Later the band's co-producer |
| Assistant engineer | Pat "Sajak" Sharman | |
| Assistant mix, Pro Tools | Alex Aligizakis | |
| Second assistants | Kevin Fairbairn, Kristina Ardron | |
| Digital editing | Geoff Ott | |
| Mixing | Randy Staub | Armoury Studios; won a Juno for it |
| Mastering | George Marino | Sterling Sound, New York |
| Production co-ordinator | Kevin Zaruk | Also tour manager |
| A&R | Ron Burman | Signed the band to Roadrunner |
| Crew credited on the sleeve | ||
| Drum tech | Andrew Mawhinney | The $5,000 stop |
| Guitar tech | Kris Dawson | |
| Artwork | ||
| Design, illustration | Amoebacorp | Front cover and logo |
| Band photography | Daniel Moss | |
It is a lean list: no strings, no session ringers, no celebrity cameos, and a team split between a Seattle veteran and a Vancouver engineer who used to mop the floors of his audio school. The detail worth savouring is the crew section, because one of those credited techs had just written the album's most famous pause.
The Songs on Silver Side Up
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Never Again | Kroeger / Nickelback | 4:20 | Yes | Domestic violence through a child's eyes |
| 2 | How You Remind Me | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:43 | Yes | Written mid-argument, arranged in ten minutes |
| 3 | Woke Up This Morning | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:50 | Kroeger on talk box | |
| 4 | Too Bad | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:52 | Yes | About the father who left when Chad was two |
| 5 | Just For | Kroeger / Nickelback | 4:03 | Re-recording of Just Four from Curb | |
| 6 | Hollywood | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:04 | Fans knew it from gigs before release | |
| 7 | Money Bought | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:24 | Funk groove and micro-synth | |
| 8 | Where Do I Hide | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:38 | A Hanna friend who kept breaking out of prison | |
| 9 | Hangnail | Kroeger / Nickelback | 3:54 | Another pre-release live staple | |
| 10 | Good Times Gone | Kroeger / Nickelback | 5:18 | Bluesy closer with Ian Thornley on slide |
The record opens with its heaviest punch. Never Again sets a story of domestic violence, told by a terrified child, over a hammering riff, and Mike Kroeger wanted it out first. Chad's verdict two decades later: "That's why we don't let Mike pick singles." His brother, he explained, loves Meshuggah.
"'Never Again' was not drawn from personal experience, thank God. It is something that happens every day, unfortunately, and stories like that have to be told."
Ryan Peake, Jam! Showbiz, 2001
How You Remind Me is quieter, meaner and cleverer than its ubiquity suggests. The opening lines, from "never made it as a wise man" onwards, are Kroeger repeating back the insults a partner throws at you, which is why the chorus lands as a mirror rather than a love song. He is openly proud of the alliteration in "sick of sight without a sense of feeling". And the stop still works: after two choruses of full-band thump, the silence in the third is the moment crowds wait all night for.
Too Bad is the most personal thing here. "'Too Bad' is a story that kind of stemmed from the fact that my father left when I was about 2 and a half," Kroeger told CNN in 2002, and from "not getting to develop a relationship with your father until you're in your teens." Mike remembered the man as "sort of persona non grata when we were growing up". The riff is all swagger, the lyric all bruise.
The deep cuts reward a second look. Money Bought is the oddball, its funk groove and burbling micro-synth a genuine left turn. Where Do I Hide, Kroeger told a Las Vegas crowd in 2018, is about a friend who kept breaking out of prison and heading straight back to Hanna. Good Times Gone closes on a five-minute bluesy slow burn with Thornley's slide guitar, the least like a single of anything here.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Five weeks at Greenhouse left little room for extras, and the surplus went on to the singles, scattered across territories with real abandon:
- Learn the Hard Way: the Japanese bonus track, also on the UK How You Remind Me single and later an international bonus on The Long Road.
- Yanking Out My...: a European Too Bad B-side, its title trailing off on the sleeve.
- An acoustic How You Remind Me and a European "Gold mix" of the single.
- An acoustic Leader of Men on the US single, and Little Friend from Curb on the Australian one.
- The "Diggla mix" of Too Bad, the lead version on the UK and European singles.
The Never Again singles went further, raiding the Edmonton concert filmed for Live at Home for live versions of One Last Run, Worthy to Say, Breathe and Old Enough.
The Silver Side Up Cover
The sleeve, designed and illustrated by Amoebacorp with band photography inside by Daniel Moss, does its job in a single image. An enormous eye fills the top of the frame, iris a cold sea-green, the lower lid raw and pink, tiny red flecks spattered on the skin beside it. Everything around it is scuffed and stained in olive and khaki, as if the face had been printed on strips of weathered tape.
From the corner of the eye runs a tear of liquid silver, reflective as mercury. It pools along the lid, then falls in a thin stream straight through the gap between the words SILVER and SIDE, swelling into a fat, mirror-bright drop with a smaller bead below. It is the only thing on the sleeve that shines. The band name crosses the middle in heavy, distressed black capitals, the B printed backwards. For an album about domestic violence, absent fathers and a relationship curdling in real time, a crying eye was the least subtle and most effective choice available.
Release and Reception
Nickelback spent release day like everyone else, staring at a television.
"We were on the tour bus, driving through Pennsylvania an hour and a half south of where one of the planes crashed... It became a complete afterthought. It wasn't at the forefront of anyone's mind. Everyone just thought the world was ending."
Chad Kroeger, Billboard, 2021
The record sold anyway. It debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 with 178,000 copies, behind Jay-Z's The Blueprint, went to number one in Canada, and was double platinum in the US by the end of 2001, selling upward of 150,000 copies a week. In Britain it reached number one in March 2002, in its 11th week on the chart, and spent 16 weeks atop the Rock & Metal chart.
Critics were less smitten, and not always accurate. Rolling Stone's Matt Diehl gave it two stars and signed off: "if you're looking for originality, you might want a full refund instead of a Nickelback." Entertainment Weekly gave it a C for being "stunningly derivative". Neither could count to three: Rolling Stone called it the band's second album, EW a debut. In 2022 Stereogum's Tom Breihan gave the single eight out of ten: "'How You Remind Me' still goes hard."
The industry voted with trophies: four Junos in 2002 (Best Rock Album, Best Group, Best Single and an engineering award for Staub); Billboard Music Awards for Single of the Year and Top 40 Track; and a Record of the Year Grammy nomination, lost to Norah Jones's "Don't Know Why".
Singles and Music Videos
| Single | Released | US Hot 100 | US Mainstream Rock | UK | Video |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| How You Remind Me | 17 July 2001 | 1 (four weeks) | 1 | 4 | Greg and Colin Strause |
| Too Bad | 27 November 2001 | 42 | 1 | 9 | Nigel Dick |
| Never Again | 8 July 2002 | Did not chart | 1 | 30 | Live at Home concert footage |
How You Remind Me topped the Mainstream and Modern Rock charts before the album was out, then hit number one on the Hot 100 on 22 December 2001, trading places with Usher's "U Got It Bad" on the way up and on the way down. Burman heard it on rock, alternative, adult contemporary and pop stations: "I think even some urban and country stations played it."
Its video, by brothers Greg and Colin Strause, later the directors of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, casts model Annie Henley as the ex who keeps vanishing. Kroeger wanted an arena and got a small club, and of his long curly hair, which people called his "Jesus Christ look", his verdict is: "It was definitely... something."
Too Bad got Nigel Dick, director of "Sweet Child o' Mine" and "Wonderwall", and a mini-film in which a father walks out after a foreclosure notice and his grown son, years later, crashes his car and comes home to find him waiting. A narrative video for Never Again was shelved as too violent, so Dick's Edmonton concert footage went out instead.
The Silver Side Up Tour
The album turned a support act into a headliner inside a year. Once the tickets were selling themselves, Kroeger's production brief was simple: "I want pyro. I want huge lights. I want everything."
- September 2001: US dates with 3 Doors Down
- Late 2001: headlining, with Default in support
- January 2002: Canadian arenas, selling out Edmonton's 12,000-seat Skyreach Centre
- April 2002: MTV Campus Invasion, with Default and Injected
- May and June 2002: Jim Beam Road to the Rackhouse, with Jerry Cantrell
- August 2002: European festivals
- November and December 2002: first UK arena tour, reaching Wembley Arena on 2 December
Nigel Dick filmed the Edmonton show on 25 January 2002 for the Live at Home DVD, and Jerry Cantrell walked on to play his old band Alice in Chains' "It Ain't Like That". Not every night was a coronation: at Portugal's Ilha do Ermal festival on 19 August 2002 the crowd pelted the band with bottles and stones until they walked off. Kroeger does have a rule for the day he tires of How You Remind Me.
"Mick Jagger should walk up to me and slap me in the face and say: 'Hey! When you've played Start Me Up as many times as I have, then you can bitch.'"
Chad Kroeger, Classic Rock, 2025
Silver Side Up in TV, Film and Media
- Hero (2002): Kroeger's Spider-Man theme with Saliva's Josey Scott, written in the Silver Side Up whirlwind, reached number three on the Hot 100.
- Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock (2010) handed How You Remind Me to the plastic-guitar generation.
- Saturday Night Live (March 2018): a sketch in the episode hosted by Sterling K. Brown made the song a dying woman's last singalong. In 2021 Kroeger admitted he still had not watched it.
- Pickle's Back (March 2026): Cheetos hired Nickelback and Megan Thee Stallion to rewrite the song for the return of Flamin' Hot Dill Pickle Cheetos.
That last one, directed by Dave Meyers, contains the most self-aware couplet of Kroeger's career: "It's only 'cause it rhymes with 'nickel' / That's why they paid us for a huge commercial."
The Backlash, the Mashup and the Pickle
The sniping started almost immediately. In November 2001 Matthew Good told Chart magazine that "if you line up Creed, 3 Doors Down, Staind, Nickelback, and Default, you've got the same band." Kroeger fired back: "That's what happens when you try and release in America and it stiffs."
In 2005 NPR told the story of Mikey Smith, a 21-year-old Alberta student who put How You Remind Me in one speaker and 2003's "Someday" in the other and found it "actually ridiculous how similar they were". His mashup, "How You Remind Me of Someday", escaped across the internet, and his girlfriend, formerly a big fan, "pretty much despises Nickelback now". In 2010 a pickle out-polled the band on Facebook, and in 2011 some 55,000 people petitioned to stop them playing the Detroit Lions' Thanksgiving halftime show. They played anyway.
"If Nickelback is the thing you get most upset about, you're living a charmed life. Nobody's trying to kill you, and you're not starving to death."
Mike Kroeger, NME, 2024
Covers, Samples and Tributes
Sum 41 took to covering How You Remind Me with the lyrics tweaked, including on MTV's New Year's Eve countdown into 2002. In 2004 the Greek singer Alkistis Protopsalti recorded a Greek-language version called "All My Fears". The most famous cover came from the family: Avril Lavigne recorded it in 2012 for the anime film One Piece Film: Z while making her album with Kroeger, whom she married the following year. "Avril jokingly suggested to cover a Nickelback song," he said, and after a straight version fell flat she rearranged it herself.
Country got its turn in April 2024, when Nickelback and HARDY played it together on CMT Crossroads, a neat loop given that Joey Moi, the Silver Side Up engineer, went on to work with HARDY.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
Silver Side Up's reissue history is a story of formats rather than vault-raiding:
- 2001: CD and cassette worldwide; the Japanese CD adds Learn the Hard Way.
- 2002: a UK vinyl LP from the specialist label Simply Vinyl.
- 2003 to 2006: Silver Side Up / Live at Home, pairing the album with the Edmonton DVD, the videos and a making-of for Too Bad; Japan's 2006 edition was badged for Roadrunner's 25th anniversary.
- 7 July 2017: vinyl reissue on Roadrunner in the US and Europe.
- September 2021: a 20th anniversary digital edition, as How You Remind Me passed 1.2 billion streams.
The Legacy of Silver Side Up
The numbers are absurd. How You Remind Me was Billboard's number one single of 2002, the fourth-biggest Hot 100 song of the 2000s and the decade's most-played song on US radio, just ahead of Train's "Drops of Jupiter". In 2021 Billboard ranked it the fourth-biggest hit in the history of the Mainstream Rock chart, and in 2026 the RIAA certified it nine times platinum. Silver Side Up placed 47th on Billboard's albums of the decade.
It changed everyone who made it. Nickelback self-produced The Long Road with Moi in 2003, and Moi went on to become a Nashville hitmaker with Florida Georgia Line and Morgan Wallen. Parashar produced 3 Doors Down's Away from the Sun in 2002 and died in 2014, aged 50. Kroeger, who had already helped make Default's platinum debut The Fallout, co-founded 604 Records in 2002.
The backlash has since softened into something like affection. Hate to Love: Nickelback premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on 8 September 2023, the year Kroeger said it was "really nice to not be Public Enemy Number One." Their 11th album, Everything Under the Sun, is due on 30 October 2026, a quarter-century after the record that made them. As for its big song, Kroeger stopped thinking of it as his long ago: "It belongs to the world."
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Yet, not yeah | After "Are we having fun yet?", Kroeger sings "yet, yet, yet, no, no", not "yeah, yeah, yeah". He calls the line full sarcasm. |
| No need to move out | He had just bought the house with his first publishing cheque, so despite "living with me must have damn near killed you", he stayed put. |
| Nugent turned away | In late 2001, security at Detroit's State Theatre refused to believe Ted Nugent was Ted Nugent and asked him to leave. "I was devastated," said Kroeger. |
| Mustache night | To beat tour boredom in late 2001 the crew held theme nights, including big-wig night and a night of fake mustaches. |
| Born Chad Turton | Kroeger was born Chad Robert Turton and took his mother's maiden name after the father at the heart of Too Bad left. |
| Same distributor as the rival | The US CD was distributed by Island Def Jam, which also released The Blueprint, the album that kept Silver Side Up off number one. |
| UK chart company | It reached the UK summit between Barbra Streisand's The Essential and Celine Dion's A New Day Has Come. |
| Stapp's injury, Default's gain | Default joined the 2002 Road to the Rackhouse tour at the last minute after a Scott Stapp injury cancelled their slot supporting Creed. |
| The 40 impressions rule | In 2000 Kroeger explained the industry formula that 40 radio spins, interviews and video plays make a listener most likely to buy. |
| A Big Wreck tribute | At the Edmonton Live at Home show the band played an acoustic cover of Mistake by Big Wreck, Ian Thornley's band. |
Hear More on the Riffology Podcast
Silver Side Up is a record plenty of people claim never to have owned and somehow know every word of. For more stories like this one, from the sessions to the singles to the rows, the Riffology podcast is available on all the major podcast platforms.
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