‘Sticks And Stones’: New Found Glory’s Flagship Third Album
Packed with angst-y yet accessible songs, it remains a career highpoint.
It’s hard to imagine New Found Glory’s third album Sticks & Stones without “My Friends Over You.” But it could’ve happened. “The crazy thing is [the album] was already done, and it was the last day of practicing, it was the night before when I wrote that guitar riff [for “My Friends Over You”]” guitarist/vocalist Chad Gilbert told Grammy.com in 2020. “I went in [the] next day and was like, ‘Come on, guys – one more song. I think this is going to be awesome.’ And everyone was like, ‘No, we’re tired.’ Luckily, our producer liked it. We did it and now it’s our biggest song!”
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“My Friends Over You” helped propel Sticks & Stones into the Top 5 of the Billboard 200 during the summer of 2002. Hindsight, though, suggests New Found Glory’s mainstream breakthrough was liable to happen anyway. The band’s preceding release – 2000’s New Found Glory – sold well and luminaries such as blink-182’s Mark Hoppus regularly enthused about them in the press.
The band relocated from Florida to California prior to the recording, and worked diligently during the album sessions overseen by Neal Avron: a sympathetic producer also renowned for his work with Weezer and Everclear. “He’s a massive producer now, but we were his first punk band,” Chad Gilbert later recalled. “When Fall Out Boy worked with him, they wanted it to sound like the records we did with him. They’re a massive arena band, so it’s pretty crazy.”
“My Friends Over You” arguably represented the record’s apex, but the band crafted a whole host of angst-y, yet highly accessible, pop-punk anthems such as “Head On Collision,” “Something I Call Personality,” and the bittersweet “Sonny.” The result was a bright, accessible rock record with a crossover appeal akin to Green Day’s Dookie. Indeed, it’s no surprise that Sticks & Stones went on to become New Found Glory’s best-selling title – yielding a platinum certification in the United States.
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“It was our second major label recording, we had a little bit of experience going to nicer studios and having that rhythm of how the process works,” vocalist Jordan Pundik said, reflecting on Sticks & Stones in a Grammy.com retrospective. “So I think that at the time, there weren’t many bands doing what we were doing… sound-wise. So that in and of itself is really cool to think back to, because we were doing something really special.”
