There is a common misconception that if you are playing a fast song, you have to play ahead of the beat, or if you are playing a slow song, you have to play behind it. This is not always the case. Off the top of my head (I don't have my iPod here, so these might not be the best examples), "Dance, Dance" by Fallout Boy and "Paralyzer" by Finger Eleven are two examples of songs that are faster, dancable tunes, where the playing is behind the beat. I'm also thinking that "Wonderful Tonight", by Eric Clapton, is an example of a slower song that is played ahead of the beat, though I'm not certain.
When I described it to my band, I did so in a theory sense. Basically, I said, "You can divide a beat into 2 eighth notes, 4 sixteenth notes, 8 thirtysecond notes, 16 sixtyfourth notes, etc. Technically, you can keep going forever, so you can have 32 onehundredandtwentyeighth notes, 64 twohundredandfiftysixth notes, etc, all in one beat. The basic idea is that if you break a beat down like that, you can picture yourself hitting right on the first of those twohundredandfiftysixth notes, or on the fourth, or the tenth, etc. Visualizing that really helped me learn to understand those feels, and now I can switch at will between ahead of, behind, or dead on the beat. I hope this helps, even though it's one of the oddest things I've ever written on here.