"I wanted to get back to our roots and make a rock record again," group leader Jason Wade tells Billboard.com.
"I feel like our (self-titled) last record, leading off with 'You and Me,' the ballad, it kinda softened us up a little bit. I think people forget that we started off as an alternative band, then we kinda got immersed in that Adult Top 40 and Top 40 world. This time it was really refreshing just to plug our guitars back in and crank it up and play some uptempo rock music.
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Wade and his bandmates -- founding drummer Rick Woostenhulme and bassist Bryce Soderberg, who joined in 2005 and is making his recorded debut with "Who We Are" -- started work on the album in September with manager/co-producer Jude Cole at Cole's Ironworks studio in Los Angeles. Wade had a couple of song ideas when the trio convened but the group mostly "laid down an idea and wrote the song on the spot. You can kind of feel that we captured the song right after it was being written.
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Lifehouse wound up with 16 songs, according to Wade, 12 of which are expected to make the final album. Radio has just received the initial single, "First Time," which Wade says "has that summertime, young love feel to it. I'm not really surprised they ended up picking it for the first single, since we're coming out in summer.
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And while some new songs hew towards the dark, emotional lyricism of 2005's "Lifehouse," which has sold 895,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, Wade says the general tone of the album is "a little more lighthearted.
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