Keane's Chaplin Returns From Rehab Rejuvenated

Posted on Nov 18th 2008 3:00PM by Jolie Lash
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They are known for their big piano-driven ballads like 'Somewhere Only We Know,' but on 'Perfect Symmetry,' British trio Keane's third album, the band wrote themselves a new template.

"There's the sort of poppyness of it and the funky-ness, and I suppose the dancability of the whole thing," frontman Tom Chaplin tells Spinner . "It was just a stream of consciousness. It's just what came out -- what was kind of inside us."

The three piece -- Chaplin, drummer Richard Hughes, and pianist and main-songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley -- took the cuts the latter member wrote to Paris, followed by Berlin, where they self-produced the record earlier this year.

"Everything that we recorded and everything that we added to those songs, really just had this joie de vie about it," Chaplin explained. "We were just excited the whole way through. We were just like little kids looking at each other with starry eyes and just very excited about what we were doing."

In 2006, though, when the band were touring their sophomore effort, 'Under the Iron Sea,' Chaplin had less a positive outlook as he cut a jaunt short to check himself into rehab.

"It was all about trying to break down that defensiveness that I'd built up," Chaplin said of heading into treatment. "I felt a lot of the sort of trappings of success ... bad feelings that I'd had about being in a successful band."

The singer said rehab helped reorganize his priorities and put the things he loved, first. "[Rehab] was really just about putting the breaks on and giving myself time to think, and just remember exactly who I am," he says. "[It was about] returning to the most important things, which are communicating the way I felt with my family and my girlfriend and the band."

And right out of treatment, Chaplin said he found joy again with his childhood friends, who also happened to be his bandmates. "We went back on the road, pretty much as soon as I came out rehab," he says. "The best thing about it was just, we had this sense of camaraderie. We really felt like a gang on a great adventure again and we just wanted to carry that spirit through into what we were doing in the studio."