John Goodridge chats to Craig Mabbitt, lead singer of Escape the Fate about life on the road, his side project, The Dead Rabbitts and joining the upcoming Soundwave Festival tour.
Hey Craig, how’s it going?
Great thanks, how are you?
Yeah good. So I believe you’re in the middle of a tour in the US at the moment.
Yeah we’re on the Uproar Festival tour right now.
So how’s that been going so far?
It’s been good, playing with some old school radio rock bands, like Godsmack, who I’ve never actually seen live before. You know I like doing festivals where you get an opportunity to see an artist that you’ve never seen before.
I actually wanted to ask you about that, if you get much of an opportunity to check out other artists on tour.
Yeah I love checking out other artists, especially when it’s someone that’s been around as long as Godsmack.
Heading over to Australia next year for the Soundwave tour, how do you feel about that?
I’m very, very excited! We’ve been waiting to come back to Australia for a long time now, so we’re excited to come back and even more excited that it’s Soundwave.
Have you had much chance to look at the line-up yet?
Yeah, I saw a line-up and I’m pretty excited about the days that we’re playing.
It looks pretty good! It’s gonna be massive.
Yeah, it’s gonna be a good time for sure.
Can we talk about your album Ungrateful? The single “Ungrateful”, I was watching it on Youtube and it’s quite confronting, talking about the cycle of violence. How did that come about?
Well I sat down and wrote the video treatment and the director pretty much just took it to the next level for us. It was a change for Escape the Fate because we just usually do like party videos like chick’s boobs hanging out. We were like, we’ve been that band for a while, let’s do something on a more serious topic because a lot of our fans have gone through that, so we wanted to give back to them and explain that we’ve gone through it too and you’re not alone in this. A lot of kids come up to us at our shows, and it’s a popular thing where fans will say, “Oh My God, you saved my life” and when fans would tell us that, we’d step back and say “well how?” Here’s “10 Miles Wide”, it’s on the front page of Playboy, how are we saving your life with that? So when we came out with “Ungrateful”, we said let’s do something more serious, let’s give something back to all those kids that say our band helps them a lot and show them we’ve gone though the same things they go through.
It seems to me that a lot of your music comes form the heart and personal experience. How does it feel having that out in the public eye and exposing your soul, so to speak?
I don’t mind it at all. I don’t think it’s exposing myself, I think it’s just one of those unspoken things that everyone goes through. As soon as you speak up about it, people are more accepting of the fact that hey I do go though this and it’s OK to go through this because we’ve all gone though it in some way shape or form. Everyone’s living on the same planet, we’re all human beings and we all go through the same shit so sometimes it just takes someone to talk about it to really open people up.
I think that’s an important part of music. That ability for fans to have an outlet for their feelings, to express what they feel inside that they can’t do themselves.
Yeah, exactly.
The other song that’s getting a lot of attention is “Picture Perfect.” How did that one come about?
“Picture Perfect” started off as a little demo and our guitarist wrote it for a close friend that died years and years ago and it just turned into that song. Here’s the music, it sounds like it could be a ballad, a ballad about losing people, someone very close to you. It’s the type of thing that a lot of people go through. We tried to think of a video idea and his friend that died a couple of years ago, died in a motorcycle accident in Vegas, while he was racing his motorcycle with somebody.
So when the video started off, it was gonna be this guy, but then we changed it from the guy dies to his girlfriend, because we didn’t release the video until a year after we filmed it and within that timeframe, the singer of Suicide Silence passed away in a motorcycle accident, so now we were like “woah, crap, we definitely can’t have the guy doing that.” We don’t people thinking that we’re doing this video about a guy that none of us are really close with, but we wanted to pay respect to him, but not make it a video about him, so we changed it to the girl. I really like the way the video is filmed, how it goes backwards instead of forwards. It’s not one of those videos where you’re expecting something to happen, it starts off at the funeral and goes back through the memories the guy has with the person that was close to him. I really like the video and a lot of people are liking it.
You guys tour a lot, you’re doing the US tour before heading over to Europe then Australia, how do you do down time? Do you just throw yourself fully into touring or do you have a way to break away?
Well we enjoy what we do, so that’s a start. I honestly don’t know how we’ve been doing it lately with double duty. We have our other project, The Dead Rabbitts so right before the Uproar Festival we did a full tour with them and right after the Uproar Festival we go over to the UK and Europe, right after that we fly home, do another tour with Dead Rabbitts, celebrate Christmas, go in the studio and start doing the new Escape album then fly over to Australia. So you guys will possibly be one of the first people to hear our brand new song that I don’t even know what it’s gonna sound like yet. We’ll be doing songs before we come over so there’s probably gonna be a new song that we haven’t even written yet that we’ll be playing at Soundwave.
Wicked. It seems that you love recording. What do you do with the tracks that don’t make it onto the album?
We have a bunch of B-sides that we haven’t released, some we want to redo for the next album, and they’re starting to pile up where we could almost release an EP or even an album and I think when it comes to B-side tracks that never made the album, maybe we just bundle them up and maybe we just randomly end up giving songs away for free of a certain quality. “Here’s a song that never made it. Hope you guys enjoy it. Go ahead and download it.” If you don’t ever do something like that it just becomes a song that you don’t know how many fans might really like that song. The fans always appreciate new music no matter what it is. Instead of burying them and losing them in an outdated i-tunes on a macbook why not let some fans hear it.
Between the recording process and the touring, do you have a favorite that you’d prefer?
I can’t say that I’d have a favorite, I think my favorite is that we can do both. There’s good things about both of them, so I do the best of both worlds. I can tour and when touring gets to be frustrating and gets to be too much, around that time you usually get some time off and sit in the studio and work on a new album. So it’s the best of both worlds.
I’m always interested, when you go out on stage and you have that crowd in front of you, what’s that feeling like? What goes through your mind? Do you just go into a type of autopilot?
Lately it does go into autopilot, I’ve been doing it for so long now, it could be five minutes before going on stage and I’m like “I can’t believe I’m doing a show tonight. I wanna go lay down, I wanna play some video games, I just wanna eat a whole pizza to myself and drink a whole case of beer“ … but then you hit the stage and it’s BOOM, you hit autopilot and you get the show done and before you know it you get backstage and you’re all sweaty. The show’s done and everybody’s doing hi-fives. It’s definitely autopilot, but what goes through my brain is a whole crap load of thoughts man. I’m thankful to be there, I still can’t believe that I have the opportunity to do what I do, because I started off in the crowd, I consider myself one of the lucky ones that I get to travel the world and share my music with people that want to hear it.
It always seems to me that power that you have on stage to, you know, form a pit or put your hands in the air, it seems that’s what drives musicians.
I think so, maybe. I think that sometimes people look up to the fact that you’re able to do it. I get on stage every night with this band, Escape the Fate; it’s been my band now for almost eight years, and there’s that added sense of accomplishment. It’s not just proud of yourself because your band made it, it’s not just proud of yourself because not only did you make it, not only did your band make it, but you came into this band and still made it work. So that’s just a whole other sense of accomplishment I feel every night when I take this band on tour for the past eight years because usually you can’t replace the singer. It just doesn’t work.
So what were the challenges of being the new singer?
All the challenges I’ve gone through have been pretty public, the whole ordeal of joining the band was pretty much right there in the spotlight. I think I get a lot more hate than a lot of other band members out there. I think I definitely get the most hate out of all of them, because the whole ordeal just lasted so long. It’s still happening, even though it happened almost ten years ago. I mean I joined this band and the band’s old singer’s in jail. Oh drama! It was a fun story, it was fun for all the publications and magazines and everybody that wanted to write about it, it was entertaining. So I did it, but I still feel very lucky and accomplished through all of those years that it was happening that we’re still here and still able to tour is fucking amazing.
Looking forward to seeing you guys on tour with Soundwave, good luck with the album and thanks for the chat today.
Bye man, hope to see you in person when we get over there.
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Escape The Fate play Soundwave Festival in February and March 2015. Get all the dates, details and tickets here: http://soundwavefestival.com/. Tickets go on sale Friday, August 29th.
