In a brand new interview for Alternative Press, We The Kings’ lead singer and also a talented song-writer Travis Clark talked about his recent writing collaborations with other artists – such as Avril Lavigne, Machine Gun Kelly or Simple Plan. For Simple Plan, Travis has been writing with Pierre and Chuck in California on and off for almost year and half during countless songwriting sessions. All that mostly for Simple Plan’s upcoming album.
During the interview, Travis was asked about his collaboration with both Simple Plan and State Champs on their collaborative song ‘Where I Belong’ and how the songwriting process worked “with so many minds in one room trying to put together a song”. This was Travis’ answer:
With “Where I Belong” specifically, I think Pierre [Bouvier, Simple Plan vocalist] and Chuck [Comeau, Simple Plan drummer] had an overall skeleton idea of the song. And they brought Derek [DiScanio, State Champs vocalist] in to write some of the production and some of his lyrics that he sang in the second verse. And then they basically had that song finished and completed other than the recording of it. They were like, “Trav, would you want to do the bridge?” And all of our voices sound relatively similar to each other, so you want to piece it together part by part. And so we all decided that it’d probably be best if I sang the bridge and did that together so that every person had their part in it. But as far as the rest, We The Kings didn’t record any drums or guitars. We didn’t do anything other than sing vocals. And I think it was probably similar for State Champs.”
Working with Simple Plan was mentioned one other time during the interview and that was when Travis was asked about what his take on collaborating with someone is and how he approaches the way the ideas come about. Travis explained that sometimes is just comes organically after listening to the artist’s story and background (such as Avril Lavigne and her battle with Lyme disease) and the lyrics just roll out. However, according to Travis, with Simple Plan, sometimes ideas came from collective brainstormings and finding just the right word or phrase that the song could be written around. See how Travis explained this interesting process below:
