“Unfortunately, though, the song didn’t make the new record (their self-titled effort from last year), but we’ve still kept the track,” explains Mabbitt. “It’s definitely going to be a bonus track on a future album. He’s just this awesome guy who is very much, ‘whatever’. He’s like, ‘nice to meet you’ and not at all official. It makes sense when you think about it objectively – I mean, he’s just a lead guitarist and a human being like everybody else. He was super-keen to work with (Escape The Fate guitarist Bryan) Money, they were really vibing off one another, so I really do hope that track gets used in the future.
“It’s always great to meet someone who’s been in this business for as long as Mick has,” he adds, “you can always take something from that. I personally took away that if you really do have the passion and love, if you live for the music like we have since we were kids, then it can be something you end up doing for the rest of your life. It was one of those humbling moments – here we were, at Mick’s house, he wanted to write with us… It was one of those moments where it hits you that nothing is unobtainable.”
And while Mabbitt admits Escape The Fate have always received comparisons to those same rock legends Motley Crue, the singer claims that their new album dispels such comments from fans and critics. It’s a more pissed off, much darker record… And yet, Mabbitt points out, you just can’t please everyone.
“With this record, I learned more about Money than I ever knew,” says the vocalist of his band’s guitarist. “It turns out that he is very heavily influenced by Rob Zombie, Slipknot, Orgy and Korn – the real dark, industrial heavy mental bands. He never ever told anybody about that! We never knew this!” he laughs. “He plodded along and did his thing and let us get pigeonholed into a Motley Crue band. He thought he couldn’t be himself, so when I told him to just write from the heart, the sound of the album just took a whole different direction. Yet, some people are saying it’s not heavy enough!
“You can never please everybody,” he shrugs, “but I know for a fact those people are not critics. They’re just scene kids who judge a song not by the quality of the music but by the amount of screaming featured on the album. It’s kind of weird because I actually think both this record and our first record are heavier than our last record, so I don’t know what they’re talking about. On the last album we had all the sing-along poppy songs that are still popular!”
Mabbitt is well used to hearing directly from the fans of the band at this point – especially since stepping in the shoes of notorious former Escape The Fate vocalist Ronnie Radke in 2008.
“The way I’ve come to see it, though, is ‘not my fan, not my problem’,” states Mabbitt. “There was a little bit of a backlash at first, which was something any new vocalist would expect, but most of the true fans have given me nothing but positivity and support. If they tell you that you suck, you just don’t listen, it’s as simple as that. When you know that your album is good, you can afford to just sit back and laugh about it.
“I’ve seen so-called fans complain about the most ridiculous shit when it comes to their favourite bands. These people are not fans at all… I know of bands who deal with an incredible amount of crap from their fans having a cry about, ‘why did you cut your hair?!’ I mean, oh my god,” he laughs.
Image-obsessives aside, when it comes to the music, that’s all that Mabbitt cares about. With album number four currently one of the things on the band’s priority list aside from touring, Mabbitt says the plan is to combine the catchiness of 2008’s This War Is Ours and their most recent, third record.
“So we’ve got the heavy album (Dying Is Your Latest Fashion, 2006), we’ve got the poppier album (This War Is Ours) and we’ve got the heaviest (current) album,” lists Mabbitt. “What I want to do is take the best elements from both of the last two albums and go from there. We worked with Don Gillmore on this record but I’m not sure who we’re looking at for the next one yet. There’s a lot of producers who give a ton of great input. Don was a suggestion-giver rather than a control freak, so we listened to him because he gave us constructive criticism. If you don’t have constructive criticism, you’re just not able to make the songs as best as they can be. You end up thinking you’re like The Beatles or something, and just end up writing a bad record. I don’t mean The Beatles made bad music, but I’m talking about the god complex. Then you get people saying, ‘what drugs was this guy taking when he made this record?!’ That’d give the haters something to bitch about, at least,” he chuckles.
