Escape The Fate In 2013

Escape The Fate’s 2010 self-titled release was the band’s most successful album to date.  Was there any pressure from the label to duplicate that success with Ungrateful?

It was quite the contrary.  What happened is, between the last album this one, is the band … just basically disintegrated.  We were pretty much done.  Actually, the label we released the last record on is not the same label we’re on now.  Everything was falling apart at the seams.  We weren’t sure if we were even going to play music anymore.  We were pretty much done.

But the new label got behind us.  They saw that the fire was back and burning brighter than ever before with us.  So the pressure is not to duplicate that success or anything.  We really are focused now.  The last record, it was great [but] in my book it doesn’t hold to what we’re about to unleash on the world.

It’s also the first album with TJ on it.  As the drummer, is it a totally different experience in the studio to have a new bass player in the band?  Did you feel as if you were taking on a new partner in rhythm?

Yes and no.  The way our band works is a little different. We’re a traditional rock sound with more attitude and aggression and everything.  But we don’t play traditionally.  We’re not the kind of band that jams.  We sit with a computer and we rock and everything.  What [TJ] brought into it was a whole new life blood. We were having a lot of issues with our bass player before. 

You asked what the experience in the studio was like going from that bass player to this one well, the bass player [Max Green] from the other [album] was almost nonexistent. I don’t want to go into too much detail with him, it is sort of more personal for him with what he was going through at that particular time.  I can’t say everything he was doing or wasn’t doing.  I can just tell you, as his friend and bandmate, he was in a very hard place, in a bad addiction. 

That sort of thing was the ball and chain that was holding us back.  We’ve shot ourselves in the foot, each bandmember individually, so what TJ brought to the band was a new energy.  He’s coming from the vantage point of a guy who’s really hungry and wants to make it and is extremely excited.  We’re coming from a point where music has been nothing but … heartbreak because of all the problems we’d been having.  We weren’t in love with it anymore.  TJ brought this fire back to us and showed us why we love doing it and how cool it is to be in a band and making music.  It was a renewed strength; we really love having him.  He contributed, he writes lyrics, he writes vocal parts.  He’s not even a bass player, he’s a guitar player, but we made him pick up a bass because we thought he was great for the band.  He’s awesome.  He’s a lively guy.

The band has had its share of personnel changes and has gone through some hard times.  Is playing in Escape The Fate a tough gig for a musician?

Fuck yes.  I’m the only guy who has been there since it’s officially been stamped Escape The Fate.  This is the band.  Let’s say since we got signed.  Let’s take it from therem not counting all the local band stuff, because you’re still planning your life at that point. But I’m the only guy who’s been there the whole time.  Guys wanting to quit and stuff, essentially it’s the same lineup. 

There’s been a gradual change. It didn’t happen all at once, every album we just switched bandmembers.  It’s not like that.  It is a tough job.  There are a lot of problems.  Our guitar player didn’t want to be in the band anymore.  He was over it, having to deal with all those problems.  The pressure of trying to deliver a huge release and make an incredible album and tour the country for months and months on end for years straight, that weighs on you when the guy next to you, you’re not sure if he’s going to make it on the flight because he’s whacked out of his mind.

I love Max.  Max is one of my very best friends.  Every picture I post on Instagram for Throwback Thursday, everytime I look at an old photo, he’s in almost all of them.  He’s my best friend, I absolutely love him.  It was a big issue to deal with. I didn’t want to do it anymore.  It is a hard gig but we’re communicating now better than ever.  We’re stronger than ever and TJ’s the new fix and he’s going to be awesome.

What is touring like for Escape The Fate?  How do you move from city to city?

Depends on the tour.   Sometimes we gotta fly places.  When we’re in Australia we fly, when we’re touring North America we’re on a bus.

Do you have any favorite cities to play?

Every city has a memory, every city has its own vibe and things you like or don’t like about it.  It just depends.  Nothing really ever sticks out for me because I’ve done it for a few years. It’s like a day job.  To me, I’ve been to every city so many times that I’m just kind of day-to-day with it. 

I live in Las Vegas.  Most people, you tell them you’re in Vegas, they’re like, “Let’s go partying, let’s go gambling.”  I don’t really do that. I don’t go to the casinos all the time because I live here.  I go to the store and go home, you know what I mean? Like a real person.  I’ve been to enough cities enough times that the monuments and landmarks don’t do anything for me, but they used to. 

I’m really looking forward to going home, going to my hometown of El Paso, Texas.  [That’s] my original hometown, that’s where my heart is from.  This is where I have my mail – in Vegas – and El Paso is where my heart is.  All my family is coming out, the biggest show we’ve ever played there. Radio is all over it and I’m really, really excited.  I’ve got, like, 800-some cousins that I’ve never even heard of, another 500 that I have heard of.  It’s going to be great. I’m really looking forward to it.

Playing drums in such a high-energy band as Escape The Fate, do you have to work out or follow a routine to stay in shape?

You know, the thing about it is, no, you don’t actually have to be in shape to play drums.  I’ve seen some obese, like just gigantic black-metal drummers play the fastest stuff in the world and are better drummers than I’ll ever be.  But they’re 300 pounds, 400 pounds and not that tall.

I stay in shape, though.  I’m coming right now from this fight week in Vegas.  There’s this fight over at the Mandalay and I watch a lot of those guys. I admire what they do, all the boxers and what they do to stay in shape. They basically have to torture themselves to be able to deliver, and I’m all about that.  So I stay in shape a lot.  Escape The Fate has this thing going on right now that we’re calling “Escape The Fat Challenge 2013” and we’re trying to see who can get a six-pack before summer. …  I’d rather go to the gym than go to the bars like I used to.

When did you start playing drums?

I was 10 years old. I was obsessed with Metallica and Guns ’N Roses.  I grew up with them.  My parents were metalheads.  They were always into rock, my mom listened to Ozzie and my dad was more like classic, classic rock, so he was into a lot of stuff.  That was always on in the house and, naturally, I was always going to want to play rock music.  When I was 10, my dad got me a drum set for Christmas and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Touring and being a way from home so much, is it hard to have a personal life?

I’ve teeter-tottered with it.  That was a very hard part about the last record.  We were starting to experience success that we’d never seen.  I’m a private guy.  I don’t like guys, like fans, to really know me as a person too much.  The feeling they get about me and the perception they get about me, the only one I want them to have is what they see on stage or in videos. That’s the only perception I want them to have of me but, at the same time, you have to give them something.  They have to know you’re real.

It’s impossible to hide everything about your life because they coincide so much.  Especially because everything’s out in the open.  If I’m walking around at the store and a fan runs into me, they know I shop at Smith’s now.  They take a picture, it’s on the Internet and it’s passed around. … I do my best, but I don’t let it tear me down.  I used to hate that.  I have a girlfriend, I’ve been with her for several years.  I don’t want her picture on the Internet next to me because I don’t want my fans to judge her because she didn’t ask to be in the spotlight.  I did and you can judge me all you want because that’s what it’s there for.  I’m hoping you’ll like it but you’re also entitled to not like it.  But she never asked for that. She didn’t want to do that but sometimes a picture finds its way … and I think it’s weird.

Some musicians are on 24/7 but it sounds as if you’ve managed to separate your private life from your professional life.

That’s really the hard part about it. I think that’s more of what I meant.  My private … it’s hard to be me when me is the band.  I remember Billie Joe Armstrong from Green Day … someone came up to him or something and said, “They only like you because of your band,” and he said, “I am my band. This is me.  This is who I am.”

So I am Robert from Escape The Fate.  At the same time, I do other stuff that I don’t want people to know about. So it’s not like 24/7. It’s more like 20/7.

Your management sent me some stats regarding audience demographics and which age-groups Escape The Fate is particularly strong in.  Do you get into the business of the band, that is, studying breakdowns of what your audience is made up and all the research that goes into marketing?

I do more than I want to because I kind of don’t care.  I want to just put out my music and be real and make sure it reaches as many people as possible.  Am I aware who more of our fans are? Yes.  I notice a lot of them tend to be of the Warped Tour kind of thing.  A lot of them are younger.  We’ve been doing it enough that some of them are actually starting to get a little older.  It’s kind of weird, fans have their kids.

For example, there is this one graph, labeled “Fan Demographic.” On the upper end, under “65 Plus,” you have 0.5 fans.  That is, 0.5 percent of your fans are age 65 or older.  And I thought that must be the bandmembers’ parents.

No, our parents aren’t even that old.  My mom just turned 50.  There are some grandmas out there who like to rock.  They’re there.  They’re in the back.  They might not be in the pit but they’re still headbanging…. There’s 0.5 percent out there, out of 3 million Facebook likes, how many is that?

How does Escape The Fate create its music?

It takes a lot of different forms.  Our guitar player, Monte [Money], he’s usually the driving force behind everything.  I just think most bands are that way. Whoever is playing guitar in the band, he probably starts the song. If it’s the singer who can also play guitar, he’s probably starting songs, too.  That’s just the way we do it. It starts with a riff, a chord progression, it starts with anything, a sound, an inspiration.

You hear a song that sounds a certain way and you say, “Man, I want to make a song that’s kind of like that.” You try to copy it and it ends up something completely different so you end up with this whole new sound.

Usually our guitar player comes up with some riffs and starts putting it together and brings it to us.  We find, usually at the beginnings of albums, there’s like 50 songs and 20 of them actually make it through the cut. Then we start breaking them down and 15 end up getting recorded. A song that can be your favorite on the instruments, our singer doesn’t connect to it and it just sounds bad when he puts his vocals on it and all of a sudden that song sucks.

And a song that you thought was boring and super-lame, now the singer has an amazing sounding chorus for it and now it’s your favorite song. There’s just so many things that happen … it’s art. It just sort of happens and you have your ideas.  There’s no starting point or ending point. It just sort of happens.

Are there any tracks on Ungrateful that are your personal favorites?

This is an album I genuinely love a lot.  I think the way, the direction we went is more of what I wanted it to be our whole career.  There are a few songs that are more oriented towards that Warped Tour style and I love that.

My favorite is a ballad, actually.  The ballads we’ve made have always been my favorites.  Guns ’N Roses “November Rain” video where he’s out there in the desert, walks out of a church and starts playing a guitar solo – I thought that was the coolest thing ever.  Something about a metal guy playing a blistering guitar solo over this epic slow song with a lot of feeling, that resonates with me. We have one called “Picture Perfect” and it’s my most favorite song we’ve ever written.  It deals with loss.  Monte, his friend had passed away and at that particular time, during the writing of that song, it was a month or so removed from when my girlfriend’s grandmother had passed away and it was sort of a vibe that was going on. We never had made a song that was that personal before.  It just connected and it sounded incredible and I love everything about it.

You sound very optimistic about the future of the band.

Well, you got to do what you believe in.  If I didn’t believe in it, I wouldn’t do it. If there’s anything that sucks about being in a band is that your bandmembers are in the business.  But I love the music and it’s what keeps me going and believing in what we want to do.  I can tell you this, the reason why is it can’t get much worse. We were at the end.  So anything better than that is going to be better, right?  That’s as bad as it gets, not being a band anymore.

You started playing drums when you were 10. What could you tell a young, pre-teenage drummer who wants to be in a band, make records and tour?

The thing about music is you have to understand you can try your hardest to make it perfect but it’s never going to be and at some point you got to get it out there.  My whole thing is I’m an entertainer first and a drummer second.  To me, it’s more about putting on a spectacle and getting people excited and wanting to enjoy your music. The music, when it’s there, it’s there.  There’s no formula and it’s sort of magical when it happens, it’s awesome. Just push, don’t take “No” for an answer and never settle. … And be who you are and do your best.  Haters are going to hate and there’s people that are going to love you.  Just do it.

Upcoming shows for Escape The Fate include Saint Petersburg, Fla., at State Theatre April 12; Ocala, Fla., at the  Ocala Entertainment Complex April 13 and the one-day Fort Rock festival in Fort Myers, Fla., at JetBlue Park April 14.