Imagine for a second that you have written a song that is home to some of the most raw, honest and emotionally resonant that you have ever conjured. Imagine that it had taken a sticky situation too far to help pry such a revelation out of you and place it within your music, the one thing that keeps you going.
And as you show it to the powers that be, they say, "Can you make this sound a bit more like It's Been A While by Staind?"
That was the reality for Papa Roach when they handed Scars over to their A&R, who then showed it to their new label chairman, who proclaimed it wasn't what they were looking for.
Though it speaks volumes to the limbo the band found themselves in as they plotted their fourth album, How To Get Away With Murder. After the runaway success of sophomore record Infest back in 2000, and within that the genre-defying rise of Last Resort, they were immediately under pressure to keep the streak going. But as nu-metal was taking its last breaths and their follow-up, Lovehatetragedy, severely underperformed, the quartet were forced to stare into the possibility of oblivion with every move they made.
"We were always on edge," vocalist Jacoby Shaddix told the Sarasota Herald Tribune. "We didn't know if we were going to get dropped or anything. So there was like, an underlying sense of doom, you know what I'm saying, to the writing of that record."
We were always on edge. We didn't know if we were going to get dropped.
Jacoby Shaddix
