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The Cover Story
Good Charlotte: “We’re hungrier than ever… This story is still unfinished”
Seven years since Good Charlotte were last on the cover of Kerrang!, much has changed for Benji and Joel Madden. Older, wiser and consumed with work on the other side of the music business, it seemed their band had taken a backseat. But cranking the volume once again, imminent eighth album Motel Du Cap is proof they’ll never stray far from the sounds that made them…
- Words:
- Sam Law
- Photography:
- Jen Rosenstein
First opened in 1870 as a private mansion under the name Villa Soleil, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc is one of the most luxurious hostelries on planet Earth. Located on the southern tip of the Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera, its guests have included John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald – who immortalised it as the Hôtel des Etrangers in his final novel Tender Is The Night. The sprawling complex boasts manicured Mediterranean vistas, 117 suites, tennis courts, spas and even its own Michelin-starred restaurant. All of which make it an odd place for Good Charlotte to reconnect with their roots.
“The Hôtel du Cap represents the pinnacle,” grins guitarist/vocalist Benji Madden, flashing back to the wedding of “little sister” Sofia Richie to Elliot Grainge on April 22, 2023. “It’s the pinnacle of luxury; of achievement; of feeling. I was so happy to see Sofia get married in a place like that because when it comes to big days for the people you love, you want them to have the fairytale.”
A fixture in Benji’s life since twin brother and Good Charlotte frontman Joel met his wife (and Sofia’s big sister) Nicole in 2006, she would grow up to be one of their band’s most fanatical followers.
“So when they sat me down and asked if GC would play their wedding,” Joel picks up, “it was like, ‘Of course!’ I’ve been with her since she was seven years old, taking her to concerts, hanging out, watching her grow. For my wife and I she’s almost like [our] kid. We had to organise the band because we’d not played together in, like, four years, but everyone said yes. Zero hesitancy. Zero questions asked. ‘Just tell me what you need and tell me when to be there!’ I wanted it to be a real Good Charlotte show, not some phoned-in [imitation] and it ended up being amazing. It felt like we were back in one of the basements where we started: 200 people jammed into this little room – just at the Hôtel du Cap!”
Inspiration was threefold: the otherworldly beauty of the location; the raw emotion of the occasion; the thrill of playing for a roomful of adoring fans with no strings attached. Already five years on from 2018’s Generation Rx at that point, and 1,392 days since the they’d last stepped onstage around Warped Tour’s 25th anniversary celebrations, reconnecting with the music that made them wasn’t in the plan, but fate demanded that the Maddens write their next chapter.
Shifting Good Charlotte into the background hadn’t been part of any plan, either. Life just got in the way. Business-wise, focus was on management outfit and label MDDN, streaming service VEEPS, and Joel’s Artist Friendly podcast. Between the brothers, bassist Paul Thomas and guitarist Billy Martin, families were expanding and growing up. Benji even reckons that if life comes in seven-year cycles, maybe a full 84 months needed to pass between their last Kerrang! cover and this, allowing time to take stock and replenish before going back to the well.
“The older we get, the more we’re living day-to-day,” he nods, “following our feelings, whatever they may be.”
Starting out as wide-eyed greenhorns, the easygoing cool of Good Charlotte’s early work was counterbalanced by naïveté in the face of the music industry machine. Growing up fast, they didn’t take long climbing the food chain. But common sense and shrewdness came at the cost of sincerity and spontaneity. Time away saw them “close the loop”, reconnecting the wise old heads they’ve become with the openhearted attitude with which they first arrived.
“Our ‘family first’ mentality is [pivotal],” Joel continues. “Music is never more important than what’s going on at home. So it’s interesting that family is ultimately what brought us back together.”
“Music is never more important than what’s going on at home”
Not strictly a concept record, Motel Du Cap’s 13 songs are still rooted in place and feeling. Trading the opulence and unfamiliarity of the south-east of France for the welcoming warmth of the kind of roadside stop-offs that litter their native Maryland, its foundations are far closer to home. Veteran voice actor Marcus Anderson’s spoken Check In At Motel Du Cap promises clean bedding, cable TV, ice machines, fresh coffee and a pool out back. There are irresistible comparisons to be drawn to classic rock staples like The Eagles’ Hotel California, The Doors’ Morrison Hotel and even Enter Shikari’s Dreamer’s Hotel. You can check-out anytime you like, but can you ever leave?
“Musicians have a certain relationship with motels and hotels,” Joel begins, insisting that any similarities are subconscious. “By our nature, we’re people who go out on tour. Things happen in motels. Memories are made there. Mistakes, too. There’s something symbolic about temporary residence that captivates the imagination. I’d heard about the real Hôtel du Cap years before I visited. And when we finally got there it was like, ‘Damn! A lot of rich people have been here for a lot of years. There’s some stories in these walls.’ The Good Charlotte version was always going to be a little off, a little uncultured, a little unsophisticated. We were always going to take some of the Hôtel du Cap back home, set up our own version of it and share it with people in our own way.”
“This is our Hotel California,” Benji nods. “Good Charlotte have always had that ‘Come one, come all!’ mentality. Musically, we’ve been the genre-benders who’ve woven everything from punk and soul to country music into the fabric of our songwriting. And when it comes to our fans, this has never been some exclusive club. If we could, we would take everybody to Hôtel du Cap. But I don’t think that they would host that party. So we created our own.”
Arguably, Good Charlotte’s Motel Du Cap is a time machine. Its first songs proper (and recent singles) Rejects and Stepper hit with the same unaffected pop-punk spirit that fizzed through 2000’s self-titled debut and 2002 landmark The Young And The Hopeless. If Benji and Joel could flashback Bill & Ted style to sit down with the younger selves who set out on this journey, however, the conversation might not go as you’d expect. Of course there would be an utterance or two of ‘Holy shit!’ at quite how far from down-at-heel East Coast suburbia the pair have come, but more profound would be the pride in having kept their old energy, openness and motivation as creatives, leaders and human beings.
“The most successful thing we’ve done has nothing to do with how many hit songs we’ve written or records we’ve sold,” says Benji. “The greatest achievement has been in becoming the guys we wanted to be. I always dreamed of being someone who would give generously of anything he had, who would teach willingly of anything he knew, and who would share with younger artists coming up… All while still aspiring for more.”
MDDN has been crucial in that vision coming true. Formally founded in 2015, the process of building internally, ironing out problems and establishing a roster coincided with the album cycles for 2016’s Youth Authority and 2018’s Generation Rx. Only in the last half-decade or so have they been able to enjoy the fruits of a ‘by artists for artists’ model that feels long-overdue.
“At its genesis, MDDN was about us becoming the [figures within the music industry] that we wish we had met,” Joel states. “However long we’re in the lives of the players we work with, we want to be a force for good. Whether we got together for one hang, or we had a career-spanning relationship, we want them to walk away saying, ‘I’m glad I met those guys!’ We’ve felt how brutal the music industry can be towards artists. So one of the first things we tell our artists is that they don’t need us. They’ll do it themselves. We want to empower them in that. There’s a sense of freedom in that we don’t have contracts with our [people], too. No-one is being held hostage!”
“In the lives of the players we work with, we want to be a force for good”
From Architects and Bad Omens to Chase Atlantic and Poppy, the stratospheric careers of those clients speak for themselves. Sharing in the successes of artists at the beginning of their careers is reward in and of itself, but it also helped plug back into the electricity powering Motel Du Cap. A reminder, Joel says, “that we could do this, too. That we have done this before!”
And of course, music biz mingling ensured no shortage of collaborators to fill the Motel’s various rooms.
Rap superstar, cannabis enthusiast and old friend Wiz Khalifa was someone the Maddens had wanted to work with forever, and Joel raves about how his verse on uber-baked highlight Life Is Great captured exactly the “radio-up, windows-down, ’90s vibe” they were going for. Pink Guitar sounds like it was written with MDDN’s own “bedroom popstar” and fellow Maryland native Zeph in mind. Rising pop-country contender Luke Borchelt, another of their Free State brethren, layers up the sentimentality on the twangy Deserve You. Then Milwaukee singer-songwriter Patti Hendrix lends his impressive pipes to short-and-sweet nugget Vertigo.
Even more integral was the “dream team” of old friend Zakk Cervini and new partner Jordan Fish on production duties. Someone who “becomes part of the band” in a similar way to the brothers themselves on management duty, Jordan’s ability to simultaneously integrate and modernise was vital.
“It’s about finding the right mix and establishing trust between all the parties,” Joel says. “And it turned out that Jordan and Zakk work so well together. It’s also about combining his modern approach with our older-school techniques, which go back to the first records we made in the ’90s.”
Benji flashes a knowing grin. “Yeah, because we made our first two records on tape!”
Critically, Benji and Joel remain at the beating heart of everything great about Motel Du Cap. And it’s telling that the album’s most poignant moments are reserved for a surprisingly understated, sometimes startlingly intimate run-in. The Dress Rehearsal is a beautiful tribute to their late father, with whom the brothers had a complicated relationship, before reconciling in the 10 years before his passing. ‘I wasn’t lost, I was just broken,’ Joel intones. ‘There were some pieces of me stolen / What was the cost of what we wasted / Too scared to face a life that don’t last forever.’ Castle In The Sand, meanwhile, is a touching rumination on how they’ve grown into parents themselves.
“One thing we’re not trying to do is have Good Charlotte 2025 be the Good Charlotte of 2000 or 2002,” explains Benji. “We love that version of Good Charlotte, but we can only be happy as the people we are now. There has to be an understanding that there are more miles on this car. Listen closely and you’ll hear that even the songs that seem to hark back to our earliest records are sung in the voices of 46-year-old men, with the perspective of being married with kids. Those later songs are different, though. They remind us of an album called Greetings From California that we recorded as The Madden Brothers 11 years ago. Looking back, we realise that should probably have been a Good Charlotte record, but we weren’t mature enough at the time to understand that was something that we could do. We didn’t think that people would accept it, but we really just needed to accept ourselves. That’s what we’re doing here. And when people say Motel Du Cap reminds them of albums from 2000 or 2002, it’s really about getting back to us just being us.”
Returning to their hometown of Waldorf, on Sunday, August 3, Good Charlotte will host an exclusive album listening party before a game at the Regency Furniture Stadium, home of Atlantic League Baseball’s Southern Maryland Blue Crabs. Opening its doors in May 2008, the 6,200-seat venue didn’t even exist when the Maddens first left for Los Angeles. But seeing it grow as a hub for their old hometown has chimed with their love of improvement and advancement. As have tales like that of five-foot-five underdog infielder Payton Eeles, who recently worked up from the Cedar Rapids Kernels and Fort Myers Mighty Mussels via the Blue Crabs to the Major League Minnesota Twins.
“If you’re a guy working two jobs but you can play ball, you can get on that team,” Benji says. “It doesn’t matter who you are and where you come from, if you believe that something is possible, then it is possible. If people get anything from our records, it’s that you can achieve anything.”
Decades down the line, Benji and Joel still rankle at questions about how the underdogs who wrote Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous could grow into the kingpins we meet today. Yes, being in a platinum-selling band, with celebrity wives and multiple businesses at alternative music’s cutting-edge mightn’t make them directly relatable to their average listener. But they’ve never pulled the ladder up behind them. Maybe it’s even better to project success for people to aspire to instead.
“Standing on the sidewalk seeing someone drive by in a sick car, we’ve never been the guys to immediately say, ‘That asshole!’” Benji says. “It’s always more like, ‘That’s awesome!’”
“We’ve always loved aspirational shit,” Joel gestures back to the Hôtel du Cap. “But how you act when you get out of that fancy car is a different thing. Maybe you are an asshole. At the end of the day, I love to see people win and to see them live it up, especially if they’ve come from nothing.”
“A lot of the time there can be guilt,” Benji adds, “around winning or achieving – or even simply trying. But listen to the lyrics to Lifestyles… [‘We'll take the clothes, cash, cars, and homes, just stop complainin'…’] and those on Stepper [‘Now I’m paid to rhyme this way and I’m everything I said I would be!’] back-to-back. That’s the answer. We said, ‘We’ll take it!’ and we fuckin’ did!”
“We want to create experiences that people will remember”
Deep down, too, there are traumas and insecurities that no amount of money or success can wholly undo. ‘Sometimes I still wish I wasn't born at all,’ Joel transposes his childhood mindset onto today on Rejects. ‘'Cause Mommy doesn't love me and my daddy, well he’s dead and gone…’
“In the end, I’m just being honest,” he says. “Sometimes [events early in] your life are so traumatic that you never really escape them. When you’ve been neglected there’s a sense of being truly worthless to people that you never really get away from. It’s not like I walk around every day feeling depressed. But those feelings can come back to haunt you and, if you’re not careful, they can take you to dark places. That’s why people go to therapy. Music is still like therapy to me in those moments where I revert back to being that 14-year-old who no-one acknowledged: my mom is lying depressed in bed; people are calling the pizza shop where I work on Friday night just to make fun of me; so it’s just me and my brother [against the world].”
Beginning with a kaleidoscopic sample of old interviews that came from a “Jordan Fish deep-dive” into the band’s archive, GC FOREVER closes Motel Du Cap with both sepia-toned nostalgia and glowing optimism. Tying the threads between what Benji calls the “turn it up louder, play it faster” attitude of their early years and the emotional maturity of the here and now, what started as a personal indulgence ends up a monument to GC’s storied past and unwritten future.
“Musical legacy is important to us,” Joel concludes. “We aspire to continue to create a catalogue of music we’re proud of and which keeps telling the story of Good Charlotte: a discography where people can listen and feel like they’re being taken on a ride. It’s easier to do that now that we’re not just rushing through a career. More immediately, we want to create experiences that people will remember. We’re not going to do 150 shows a year ever again. But if we do 30 or 40 or 50, we’re going to make every one of them matter. It’s about creating those moments that touch people, to which they feel emotionally connected. Moments that create memories. That’s how you become of the soundtrack to their lives.”
Even with a surfeit of fame and fortune, power and influence, it’s that need to keep climbing the mountain they started out on nearly 30 years ago that drives Good Charlotte to keep on grafting.
“I think we’re hungrier than ever,” Benji signs off. “This story is still unfinished. I see it like a movie that started with kids who left home with 50 bucks to their name. They built a band. Then they built a business. Now it’s time to write a next chapter that someone can look back on 50 or 100 years from now and find intriguing. We still have that hunger to lead inspired, interesting lives and to tell our stories though music. Honestly, I don’t think that hunger will ever go away.”
Motel Du Cap is released on August 8 via Atlantic. Get your exclusive album and poster bundle now.
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