ROBERT ORTIZ of ESCAPE THE FATE: The Majesty Of Song
An interview by Sarah Kidd.
Escape the Fate is one of those bands that have seen their fair share of both the good and the bad times. Having formed in 2005 they appeared to be on the golden path to success after having won a radio show personally judged by My Chemical Romance and then scoring a record deal with Epitaph on the base of their self-titled demo album. But just three years later it all seemed to be falling apart when the band had to fire their lead singer Ronnie Radke [now with Falling in Reverse] following his battery charges involving the fatal shooting of Michael Cook.
Enter lead vocalist Craig Mabbit.
Formally of Blessthefall, Mabbit and last original member drummer Robert Ortiz seemed to bond and while the band has since been through further line-up changes, the relationship between Mabbit and Ortiz has remained constant. Now celebrating the ten year anniversary of their first pivotal album together ‘This War is Ours’ along with the release of their latest album ‘I Am Human’ and Escape the Fate promise to bring a show to their New Zealand fans that is not to be missed.
I caught up with drummer Robert Ortiz for a rather frank and open discussion about the album ‘This War is Ours’ and where he sees the place of Escape the Fate today…
Hey Robert, how’s it going?
“It’s going fantastic, I think I’m on a roll, I think I’m warmed up now for you but not burned out dude…so let’s do this!”
[mutual laughter]
Well first of all it has to be said that your New Zealand fans are all very excited that you guys are heading down this way!
“So I hear [chuckles], actually the response is crazy man, we put up one picture and it was like ‘Oh, that’s the most shared and viewed post we’ve ever posted, so cool!” [chuckles]
Yeah, well you already sold out one venue so you were upgraded to a bigger one…
“Wow, that’s crazy. See that’s insane to me, makes me really nervous and uh yeah thanks for the pressure and we’ll have fun sleepin…”
[mutual laughter]
Now Escape the Fate has been described in your latest promo material as ‘Reincarnated, Reborn and Rejuvenated’; would you agree with that?
“Wow, who said that? That sounds like a Craig thing… [laughs] just kidding, I always bust Craig’s chops and he gets at me later for it. I don’t know. It comes from a lot of learning you know? And that sort of thing, it’s not like you just snapped your fingers and went ‘Right, cool everything is just… we’re fresh and new!’ nah dude those hardships, those scars are what drives you. It just drives me to be better, makes me not make the same mistakes, it’s what makes me not half-ass anything when I’m creating my art – dude the guys will tell you man, I’m stubborn as fuck and they’ll be like ‘You’re an only child right Robert?’ and I’m like ‘Yup’ and they’re like ‘Well that explains it’ [laughs] cause I’m demanding dude.
I’m demanding of my band, I’m demanding of my label – ask my label dude, I’m not allowed to email the label anymore because I cuss too much, they don’t like it [laughs] but it’s because I’m so passionate about everything and I’ve learned over all these years just not to take anything for granted and not to half-ass anything and that no-one knows what you want more than you! And what your fans want is you!
And when you keep it real they will feel. So that’s what I do you know, that’s what I try to do. I try so hard and sometimes that means you butt heads with people, but in the big picture they respect you for it, it doesn’t make me an asshole but it does mean that you know you gotta fight for what you believe in.
When what you believe in is a beautiful song that comes from your heart, when people will try to impress anything else upon you and tell you ‘This is how you’re gonna be successful’ – I don’t care about success, I care about expressing my emotions through the majesty of song. So reborn? I don’t think so; I think learned, matured, more sober than ever [mutual laughter] and… yeah, it’s a combination. But the energy is certainly still there.”
So… I would say rejuvenated then?
“I guess I could say rejuvenated… more than reborn I could say rejuvenated…sure why not?”
Thirteen years down the track where do you see the place of Escape the Fate in the music world today?
“I don’t know man, it’s tough to say. I was once compared – during the last record – to the Velvet Underground. I don’t know much about them, I can’t say that I’m a fan at all, not that I dislike them I just really don’t know, I’ve never really got into them, never really listened to them.
But what I was told by this interviewer was their impact far exceeded their actual fan base in numbers, because they were the band’s band. Everyone listened to them, was influenced by them, and became bigger bands than they were. But as time goes on doing this, it’s crazy that we are celebrating this ten year anniversary of this record [This War Is Ours] and putting out a record now that has a song that is doing better than any one we have put out in the last six-seven years. So it’s like… I don’t know anymore.
And my celebrity status? I mean I could walk the streets, I go on every street and no-one would bat an eye [laughs] but then I hear a fan that knows the name and it’s ‘I love your band!’ everywhere I go you know? I never have to pay for a meal [mutual laughter] so I don’t know man. It’s tough to say, but I know that we’ve had an influence, we’ve made an impact, we’re a real rock band, we’re relevant, people know our name, we mean something to a lot of people but we certainly have a long ways to go to achieve certain dreams that I had in life, and we can always have room to grow and make a new fan every day. We have a base on which to build an empire on I guess…”
Speaking of anniversary this is the tenth anniversary of This War is Ours – so you will obviously be playing the album in full. Is this a concept that quite excites you?
“Yeah, that’s certainly a popular question when doing these things because there’s obviously songs we’ve played plenty of times or songs that…”
[beeping noise in the background]
“…sorry, that’s like my daughter’s toy, I don’t know how the hell to shut it off…”
[laughs] it’s all good!
[laughs] “ummm… [laughs] I’m multi-tasking here dude, I’m on Dad duty as well…
…like there’s the last song on the record; we tried it once and it was such an epic failure that we never did it again, so this is an opportunity to really close it out in style. There are songs that went under appreciated by me. I know at the time when we were writing this there’s a lot that I didn’t appreciate, I guess maybe I felt that some of the songs were just really weird and I don’t know there was just a lot of auto-tuning going on or I don’t know it felt weird and to me it was like a band-aid record you know that was going on while we were figuring out what we really wanted to do as a band with Craig as the singer cause that’s the reality of what was happening at the time.
But, as the years have gone by… you know I love Craig, he’s my brother, and I’ve like experienced more than half my life with him now. I understand those songs so much more now. And if there’s one thing that Escape the Fate does, we allow eachother to be artists. We allow each band member to have their moment, where they can use the songs and you know express themselves, whether it’s emotionally, creatively, you know whatever it is and we take our own individual thing and our creations and give it to the next guy to make it better.
Maybe I didn’t appreciate back then what Craig was doing and I’m so glad I allowed him to express himself because now those lyrics – having gone through my life experiences – I know every fuckin’ thing he was singing about and jesus man that’s [chuckles] some gnarly stuff going on.”
You are creating from a mutual place…
“I’m glad I stuck it out with him, I’m glad I spent all these years helping him get those songs out and hearing him sing those every night. I’m blessed to be able to do that and as a musician it’s obviously very nerve wracking to do so much stuff that we haven’t done in a long time along with still burning so many brand new songs that you’ve played in the studio… you don’t know what the hell you played, you played it once! Yeah it’s an undertaking and I mean there are songs that were lost in the shuffle and… name me that last one because it was… it’s such a weird fuckin’ song man and I never thought we would play it again and here we are…”
The last song on the This War Is Ours is called ‘It’s Just Me’…
“Oh ‘It’s Just Me’ is the song…” [chuckles]
Taking into account all of what you have just said about under appreciation and so forth, I have to ask what song for you personally sums up how you feel about the album This War is Ours now in these present times?
“Oh man that’s… see like this is tough [chuckles] because while we’re getting all nostalgic and putting ourselves back in places we tend to overlook the big ones that have been a feature in our sets you know for ten years now, which is ‘This War is Ours’. Now that song is why we named it [the album], why it was the title track because we were obviously very fearful of what was going to happen then. We were fearful fans wouldn’t take to it, that it would be a failure, that this was it; this was the end of the line!
It was like this battle was internal and external and we said ‘No fuck that dude, we’re gonna win this battle, this war is ours’ and that’s what we said and it still resonates to this day. That’s why it’s on our set every single day, every night we play that song. It is a big part of our lives and it will continue to be so til we just decide not to do it anymore or we die. So I can’t let that song go without feeling that that is still the resonating song, even though I’m feeling nostalgic and wanna say one of the other ones, I can’t overlook it you know?”
No, I can completely understand that…
“We did a Metallica bracket to determine the best Metallica song of all time, you would have not thought that ‘Enter Sandman’ would be it but ‘Enter Sandman’ beat out every other song except for ‘One’, it came in at number two” [laughs]
[laughs] wow big call…
“And everyone’s like ‘play it out you guys, I don’t really like this song anymore’; Nah dude, listen to that shit, that’s a bad ass fuckin’ riff and those drums are huge [laughs] but that’s what a song is man, you can’t forget about the big ones either!”
No you can’t that’s fair enough! Obviously you guys have released a new album this year entitled ‘I Am Human’; will New Zealand fans get to hear any tracks off this latest release?
“Absolutely, that goes without question. Craig might think otherwise… here I go again throwing jabs at him again [chuckles]…but I absolutely feel that it’s imperative to play those songs because although this obviously is the celebration of the ten year anniversary it’s also… you know we have fans that have come along after that, and we have fans that have taken to this new record more so.
I have gotten far more of ‘Escape the Fate is back’ comments on this shit than I ever have and I would be remise to tell you that playing some of this new stuff for my family was a really, really emotional endeavour and there was a visual reaction from them from some of the stuff we’ve played.
And just crowd’s singing so fucking loud dude [chuckles] for this new stuff on this tour we did with Papa Roach just recently, with Papa Roach headlining. We’re playing for their fans, a lot of which maybe heard of us, but don’t really…aren’t really that bigger fans, don’t really listen to us…dude, they were singing ‘Broken Heart’ our new song! They were singing it so loud!
So why would we not play that, you know what I mean? We have to…we have to!”
Escape The Fate perform TONIGHT (4th June 2018) at Wellington’s San Fran. Last minute tickets are still on sale from Under The Radar, but get in quick as you don’t want to miss this show! Tickets have now sold out – if you’re heading along, have a great show!
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