Nickelback frontman Chad Kroeger laughed off the constant trolling he receives after being acknowledged as the most-performed songwriter in the history of SOCAN, the Canadian performing rights society.

He and his band have been the subject of a stream of fake stories over the years, including the suggestion he was replacing the late Kurt Cobain in a Nirvana reunion and that the Australian police wanted them in connection with “crimes against music.”

In a new interview with Billboard, Kroeger was asked for his thoughts. “Oh, the death scares are hilarious for me,” he replied. “Not for my dad. My dad heard one of these – frontman of Nickelback died in a jet skiing accident – and they just report this without finding out. My dad pulled over on the side of the road, bawling, in Edmonton. My poor dad. Fuck. But I think they're hilarious.”

He continued: “Making me raise an eyebrow to anything these days [is hard] because nothing shocks or surprises me. I've literally seen everything. So if I go, ‘Well, that's new,’ it's got to be pretty like, ‘Oh, wow, I haven't seen that before.’”

Kroeger said he was surprised and honored to have achieved greater statistical success than Neil Young, Bryan Adams, Leonard Cohen and other fellow Canadians. He talked up the art of writing “immediate” three-minute songs, explaining: “Every song that I write, I just want that song to be the best version of that song that it can be. That's it. A lot of times, we're sitting there looking at what we're offering so far on the record and we'll be like, 'Alright, so what are we missing here?' …We'll look at whatever we are missing and then we'll just write that one.”

Responding to the suggestion that it was an “A&R approach,” he responded: “I think is a very smart approach. Eleven songs that sound exactly the same is a little stagnant, don't you think? If you have a diverse catalog, you get a diverse fan base. … all I care about is that, at some point in time, when we show up in their town, everybody gets together and sings along to stupid songs that I've written. And that's the best feeling in the world.”