Daughtry tweaks the 'Spell' some on album three


The first two Daughtry CDs earned the group (fronted by former "American Idol" finalist Chris Daughtry) plenty of comparisons to bands like 3 Doors Down, Nickelback and Shinedown for their melodic, mainstream-rock sound.

But the songs that fans hear on albums don't represent the full range of music that Daughtry (as the group's main songwriter) and his bandmates (bassist Josh Paul, guitarists Josh Steely and Brian Craddock and drummer Robin Diaz) will come up with over the course of making a CD.

That was particularly true of the group's recently released third CD, "Break the Spell," in which Daughtry and the band tried to create without any thought about trying to sound like any of their previous songs or any other act on today's music scene.

"There are certainly songs that people don't hear that were written that were so far out there that people would be very confused," Daughtry said in a recent phone interview. "They'd go, 'That's Daughtry? I don't know about that.' So there's all kinds of experimentation going on when we're writing, and then there are songs that we know, 'OK, that's us. That's like the quintessential Daughtry song. That's obviously going to work.' "

The songs that made "Break the Spell," obviously, were the ones that stayed in the ballpark of the stylistic blueprint established with the first two Daughtry CDs ---- a 2006 self-titled album and 2008's "Leave This Town."

Like those albums, 2011's "Break the Spell" is defined by its mix of hearty rockers ("Crawling Back to You" and "Louder Than Ever") and full-bodied ballads ("Gone Too Soon" and "Rescue Me") that fit squarely within the mainstream rock format.

But as Daughtry explained, that doesn't mean the band didn't add some new wrinkles on "Break the Spell." Two songs in particular strike him as something new for his band.

"‘Renegade' and 'Outta My Head' are, in my opinion, the two songs that stand out to me as where this band is headed," he said. "'Outta My Head' was very much the song I wanted, or the kind of record I wanted to make. I was listening to a lot of old Aerosmith, and I just wanted something with that four-on-the-floor kind of riff-rock (feel) that we didn't have, and it kind of reminded me a little bit of 'Rag Doll' or something like that when we wrote it.

"To me, we've never had any songs like that where it kind of has a dance feel to it without being a dance song. That was something I felt like we needed on this record. And 'Renegade' is just something that I think, once again, is something like we've never done before and kind of has a Foo Fighters-meets-Tom-Petty vibe."

Beyond that, there are some more subtle steps in new directions on other songs, as Daughtry, for the first time, tried to incorporate some loops and other synthetic sonics into a few tunes.

"I wanted to mess around with some loops on this album. I thought it would take it somewhere different than the other records ... And part of that stems from working with ... Timbaland a while back on his 'Shock Value II' album (on the song "Long Way Down"). I really dug how having a loop kind of instigated a song, as opposed to the other way around.


