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 Dexter Holland performs live at Espaco das Americas on October 29, 2019 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. (Photo ... [+] by Mauricio Santana/Getty Images) 
 
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On Friday, California rock band The Offspring released its tenth full-length record, Let The Bad Times Roll. The small-time-punk turned platinum veterans were antsy for the world to hear it—and after a nine-year break between albums, so were their fans. 
 
But the band’s guitarist and singer, Bryan “Dexter” Holland, kept himself busy during down time: working on academic pursuits, flying airplanes recreationally and for charitable organizations and even running a hot sauce company. 
“I went back to school and finished my doctorate,” 55-year-old Holland explains. “We tour a lot and all that stuff, but really the time just didn’t feel right. We try to get into the studio whenever we can and I’ve definitely been writing over the last several years, but now it was just like, I’ve got this collection of songs about things I think are important, that feel timely. And all that just didn’t come together until the last year.” 
 
In 2017, Holland earned his doctortorate in molecular biology from the University of Southern California and published his dissertation on HIV and MicroRNA sequences. In the years since, global crisises in politics, culture and public health have given the world grief and anguish—and Holland a bevvy of writing material. 
 
Below, he discusses Let The Bad Times Roll, getting vaccinated, The Offspring’s relationship with politics and a 2016 deal which sold the band’s catalog for a reported $35 million. 
 
 
Let’s start off by acknowledging the amazing new remix to “Come Out and Play (Keep ‘Em Separated),” which replaced the hook with, “You Gotta Go Get Vaccinated!” What a truly modern update to a classic. 
We’ve heard them all over the years. People come up and say, “Oh, you should say this instead!” And it’s always like, “Ugh, oh god,” roll your eyes. I heard this one and I actually thought, for the moment, that kinda makes sense. 
I gotta say, I was surprised to hear, there was definitely some pushback. A lot of people are very divided over that issue. I was kind of surprised to hear it from people that pay attention to us, those people I’m surprised to hear it from. But it just goes to show that it’s a very crazy, divisive time right now. 
Have you been vaccinated yet? 
I did get vaccinated. I do volunteer medical flying and that qualified me to get my shot. 
Does it feel good to sort of re-enter society a bit more now that you’ve gotten it? 
It does. It feels like a big relief, I mean obviously, any given person your chance of dying is extremely low, but at the same time, that’s something you don’t want to get. 
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 The Offspring in the studio. 
 
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How has the past year been for you? Have you been going crazy? Did you record this album during the pandemic? 
It’s a shame not to be able to go out and play shows. We connect with a lot of people that way and it’s very gratifying. We’ve also been sitting on this album for nearly a year because we were almost ready to go when the pandemic started and we thought, “Boy, this doesn’t feel like the right time.” We decided to take a fresh look at the whole record, we spent six months doing that. I’m really glad, because I think we made the record better and it’s as good as we could possibly make it.  
We’ve managed to keep busy, but we’re anxious to get back out there. You’d think after so long without putting out a record, the idea of “Let’s wait years, then wait until we’re right in the middle of a pandemic to put out our album.” It doesn’t sound like a successful move, but like I’ve said, we’ve been waiting a year, it’s done and the time feels right for the record. I didn’t want to wait another year. 
Let The Bad Times Roll seems to be a combination of attitudes, like “doom and gloom” mixed with “you’ve gotta laugh or you’ll cry.” Does that make sense? 
That’s a big part of it. What I always loved about punk rock growing up, it never shied away from tough subjects. I found that to be really meaningful in the bands that I admired, because life isn’t always pretty and that was actually helpful to hear someone tell it how it is. So, we do that, but if you make a whole album like that it can be pretty rough, so you almost have to have a dark sense of humor about it. And that’s kind of what Let The Bad Times Roll is. 
It’s talking about how stuff is pretty terrible right now, in terms of the law-keep of the world in general, then a pandemic on top of that. We have leaders who don’t seem to care about resolving problems, it’s almost like they want to make it worse, they want to throw fuel on the fire.  
“Oh, you don’t like this? I’ll make it worse. I’ll show ya how bad this can be!” [Laughs] Then at the same time, when you get to the chorus, it’s sing-songy. “Let the Bad Times Roll,” like you said, you gotta laugh or you’ll cry. 
 
The first song, “This is Not Utopia,” talks about the roots of American “hysteria,” is this a song that perhaps hints that the ego of American Exceptionalism has been a bit unwarranted? 
For sure. Look around, it’s obvious this is not utopia, to put it a nicer way, we could do better. We could do better, right? It’s important for us to not come across as political, I never want to be preachy, I never want to tell you that you should think like this, that you should do something or act a certain way, but I do want to throw the observations out there and you can draw your own point—whether you are a liberal or a conservative—to think about the things that we can all do to make things better. 
One perception of “Behind Your Walls” points towards how people can’t really have a civil discourse anymore. You might try to talk to someone on the other side of the political spectrum but they’re just so filled with rage that you’re just getting blank staring eyes back at you. Is that where you were going with this song? 
[Laughs] I love it. It’s a really great interpretation, it wasn’t where I was going with it at all, but I like that. I think sometimes in lyrics, you don’t want to spell things out too clearly, right? Because the idea is that you want someone to take a song in a way that is meaningful for them, or a combination of what you intended and how they perceive it.  
To me, that song was actually trying to talk to someone who you think is just about to go over the edge. Trying to talk to them and say, “What does it feel like to be in that bad of shape, where you feel so desperate that you might harm yourself?” or who knows what. We might’ve called that depression ten years ago and now I think people are talking about it in terms of mental health, which I think is important and a really good thing that it’s not as stigmatized to talk about in the way it used to be. 
 
Those two interpretations do kind of overlap. You could be talking to someone who is pushed so close to the brink that they’re suicidal, or you could be looking at someone else who feels so disillusioned with the world that they become a gun-toting QAnon conspiracy theorist who exists outside of any realm of understanding—either way, it may be hard to put yourself in those shoes. 
Yeah, I might be talking to someone who’s about ready to storm the capitol! [Laughs] 
You mentioned earlier that you don’t want to be preachy and political, but in “Let the Bad Times Roll,” you’ve got references to Machiavelli—a hat-tip to the king of deceit and self-interest, “erasing truth” and a tongue-in-cheek chant of “Lock Her Up.” It’s impossible not to realize who that song was inspired by, right? 
You know, that one had some more specific references, and I even went back to it like, “Eh, maybe I might want to make it a little more obtuse.” I definitely don’t want to make a song called “The Trump Song” or whatever, it’s not that. But some of those specifics are, I mean, look, it’s the elephant in the room. How could we write an album and not talk about some of the things that have happened over the last couple of years? And that’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole thing.  
But, yeah, you picked up on the part that it’s definitely part of what’s going on. Machiavelli, it just fits in a lot of ways, I guess right now. When you talk about self-interest being one facet of that, but I don’t think that’s specific to United States leadership. I think there’s a lot of crazy s*** going on. Look at Hong Kong, the violation of Human Rights going on over there. Look, I’m about to get political! [Laughs] I’m saying, it’s not just about one specific thing. 
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 The Offspring 
 
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It seems like it’s just been a dumpster fire everywhere, doesn’t it? 
It’s an extraordinary time, it really is. And it’s interesting to see how we’re gonna come out of it. Even putting out an album called Let The Bad Times Roll, it’s like, well, even if people are getting vaccines, are things looking up now? I don’t think we’re there yet. We’re still facing a lot of challenges. 
And divisiveness. It’s probably going to be a weird time to be an American for many more years to come. 
Boy, I hope we can see past it, that we can look at each other and say, “Oh, well, I’m your buddy, but I don’t agree with you.” Now people are losing friends and family members on Facebook because of their beliefs... 
Speaking of social media, The Offspring’s guitarist, Noodles, has a totally openly political Twitter account, where he has no problem speaking out against Trumpism. Is there a conscious effort to separate your personal social media from the band’s songwriting because you don’t want to alienate your audience or make it too on the nose? 
I mean, no one has ever asked us that before. But I mean, we’ve talked about it. And we both feel pretty strongly that it’s not the job of our band to be that person. In your personal life, sure, say whatever, but the band, it’s not a matter of being “afraid” of alienating people, it just doesn’t feel right. I don’t know. You’ve heard our songs, there’s a message there for sure, but there’s also a lot of fun stuff. I think we’re here, at the end of the day, to entertain people. Maybe educate them a little bit, but mostly entertain and not be “that guy.” 
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 Noodles, guitarist of The Offspring, performs live at Espaco das Americas on October 29, 2019 in Sao ... [+] Paulo, Brazil. (Photo by Mauricio Santana/Getty Images) 
 
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The record has a song that addresses the opioid crisis in America. Have you personally been affected or lost someone to opioid abuse? 
For sure, I know people. It’s kind of a spectrum: some people are just down and out, some people have messed up all their relationships, some people are dead. There are a lot of songs written about addiction, but I felt like with the opioid crisis, there’s something unique about it and that’s that these people seem to be more like “accidental addicts.” It wasn’t like they were partying, these are people who went to the doctor to get prescriptions thinking this was okay and trusting the pharmaceutical industry that they’re taking something that was gonna help as pain medication.  
This is like your high school quarterback or your blue collar factory worker who hurt his back and is just trying to get through and all of a sudden they inadvertently become addicted to opioids. Then, eventually something happens and the insurance money runs out and they have no choice and end up being on heroin. What a weird different kind of situation than the ways of drug use that we’ve seen in the past. And what a shame. And you really gotta call out the pharmaceutical industry for introducing something like that. 
 
It recently came out that Paul Simon sold his entire catalog to Sony. A couple of years ago, The Offspring sold its catalog for a reported $35 million to Round Hill Music. What sort of conversations go into making a decision like that? Were you approached or is it something the band sought out to do? 
I don’t want to get into it too specifically, but basically, we were very fortunate that our deal with Sony was a licensing deal, so the records, we still owned the records and they were all supposed to come back after the deal was up. But we actually finished our deal with Sony, believe it or not, we didn’t get dropped. We had a seven record deal and we freaking finished it, we gave them seven records. After the term, it’s a certain amount of time after your last record, blah blah blah, then you get the records back.  
So, we have these records, we’re not equipped to be a record label, so we need to make some kind of deal. So we went through a bunch of options, we could relicense it to Sony or someone else, or blah blah blah, or we could sell it. That’s just the one that made the most sense to us at the time. 
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 Bryan Keith &#34;Dexter&#34; Holland (left) and Noodles (Kevin Wasserman) performing, London 1995, shortly ... [+] after the release of 'Smash.' (Photo by Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images) 
 
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It’s interesting, especially considering there has been this whole movement of artists pushing the importance of owning your own masters. But now you’re seeing larger artists sell them off, Bob Dylan just sold his catalog to Universal for an estimated $300 million. Why do you think some artists are going the opposite way? For you, is it part of removing the hassle of maintaining your legacy so one day when you’re gone your family members won’t have to deal with managing and collecting royalty checks? Is that part of it, thinking about your future? 
For sure that’s part of it. I think the uncertainty of the change in the music industry, you’ve gone from CDs to digital downloads to streaming, and that’s hard to know. I think that there’s definitely some legislative things going on that have made it beneficial for some people, the bigger guys, to sell their catalogs versus keeping it. But, you know, it’s everyone’s personal decision I guess. 
When the news that you sold your catalog went public, did everyone on the internet have an opinion about your financial decisions? 
No, I mean, beyond the surprise that it sold for a lot of money. 
 
In the recent Bad Religion book, Do What You Want, the band discusses how The Offspring was a benchmark as to what a successful punk band could be to a mainstream commercial audience. How does it feel in retrospect, knowing that you made such an impact? 
It was quite a moment. And we were as surprised as anyone else. We were trying to make the best records we could. But, we thought Bad Religion was the benchmark! In 1994, I think they’d sold 200,000 of their most recent record, so we thought the ceiling was 200,000. 
We thought, “Maybe we could sell 100,000, [of Smash] because I think Pennywise had sold 75,000-100,000. The fact that it just went the way that it did is a complete surprise. But, it’s something that we’re really proud of. At the end of the day, we’ve sold the most records on an independent label of anybody. Because we don’t sell records anymore, it’s a record that’s probably gonna stand. 
Follow me on Twitter at @DerekUTG. 
 
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The Offspring frontman discusses the band's new album, 'Let The Bad Times Roll.

The Offspring Singer Dexter Holland: Basking In The Bad Times