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Music

Dolled up

Andy Stochansky at the Mod Club Theatre (722 College), Saturday (April 9). $12. 416-588-4663. Rating: NNNNN


Sometimes good things come out of disappointment. Just ask Andy Stochansky.

When the DeLeo brothers, of Stone Temple Pilots fame, tried to push back his recording sked for his new disc, 100 (RCA), he found someone else – Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik.

“I didn’t want to wait,” he recalls over lunch at Tortilla Flats on Queen West, “and at the same time, someone had put my tape into Rzeznik’s hands. After listening to it once, he called me and said, ‘I’m producing your record.’

“It was the most surreal few weeks of my life, having lunch with the Stone Temple Pilots and all of a sudden being flown to Kentucky to meet with Rzeznick and hang out with him. I knew immediately that it was going to work with him.”

It was a good partnership, he says, and “three months in L.A. in the middle of winter didn’t suck either.”

The result is a disc of melodic, hooky, guitar-driven pop rock. So much so that the first single, Shine, is being used in an ad campaign for The O.C. Not bad for a dude who used to be all about the lo-fi hipness.

He says 100 rocks a bit harder than his last release, Five Star Motel, and certainly much harder than his more experimental and ambient earlier efforts, Radio Fusebox and While You Slept.

“I wanted to get out of the white-boy singer/songwriter thing because there were a lot of those people around and it was starting to drive me insane, but I also didn’t want to make a hip album.

“Radio Fusebox was all about studio gadgetry. I know how to make an album that’s all lo-fi and hip. I can add the right Moog filters and make it all sound cool. Great. I didn’t want to do that.

“This is the first time I’ve made a record that I think is done,” he says. “There’s nothing I want to go back and change. With the others, I wanted to rearrange songs or change tempos, or a word was bugging me, but this is finished. I can go on to the next record,” which he says will probably be called 500.

“I love numbers.”

I’m wondering why his current bio makes no mention of his stint in the 90s as drummer for Ani DiFranco.

“It was so long ago and the music is so far removed,” he explains. “I would just rather leave it and move on. It’s cool and I’m very proud of that time, but the 1,000 articles with the headline ‘Ani DiFranco drummer puts out new record’ are extremely misleading. People think my music might be somewhat similar to hers.

“It was the most honest thing to do, not having her name anywhere.”

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