Five Finger Death Punch drummer, Charlie Engen, features on the latest episode of Doc Coyle’s “The Ex Man” podcast talking about how he landed the gig as the permanent replacement for former drummer Jeremy Spencer.
In the interview Charlie talks about the last 18 months with Five Finger Death Punch during which time he has been part of four tours as well as his early childhood memories of attending Def Leppard, KISS, AC/DC shows. He also discusses his time in the bands Scale The Summit and Ideology and how he has made the transition to joining an arean-sized band.
On joining Five Finger Death Punch, he recalls how he ended up meeting the members of the band, “Me and Jeremy had known each other for probably a year and a half or something, just through social media,”
“He liked my playing a lot. We would talk randomly about drum stuff or life stuff a little bit, about music industry stuff. And he was saying stuff even early on, like, ‘I wanna get you a good gig, man. You’ve gotta be on the big stage.'”
“I have a feeling at this point, everybody already knew it was in the works, but I didn’t know. So I was just thinking, ‘Yeah, that’d be awesome. If something comes up, definitely let me know.’ Anyway, then Jason Hook got in touch with me, and this was May of 2018. And we just talked about music and whatnot. He kind of gave me a little insight of, like, ‘Hey, you never know what’ll happen down the road here.”
“Because Jeremy’s back had been bugging him for a while at that point already. And the summer kind of went through. A short time later, I saw my phone blowing up next to me, and it was from Zoltan. And by this time I had talked to Zoltan too.”
“It was Jason, Zoltan and Jeremy all, like, ‘Hey, call me.’ And I was gonna go hang with those boys the next week in Chicago, ’cause I’m only six hours from there. So I was just gonna go to the show. “
And they were, like, ‘How about you learn some tunes and come down and jam on stage with us, and let’s see.’ This was Jeremy talking. ‘Because I need to back out of the fall tour, and I want you to be the guy.’ So I’m, like, ‘Oh, shit.’ You know, like, ‘Okay.’ … So I went down there, played, like, three tunes with them. And it was I feel like what you would call an assumed audition, where it was an audition, but it was mainly to make sure I wasn’t a weirdo, ’cause I spent, like, three or four days with them. And then to make sure I could play, obviously. So it was really seamless. And then I went home, started working on the tunes and then we did that fall tour then, two months later or whatever it was.”
On his personal life, he reveals he came from a musical family who supported his decision to persue music. After doing various jobs, at the age of 25, he decided to go back to study music and ended up spending five years at college with the aim to teach music. This led to him gaining a Masters in Music from McNally Smith Music College. He joined the band Scale The Summit right after finishing college.
Reflecting on College now, he sees it as a big mistake, mostly due to the financial expense, but also acknowledges he gained numerous skills from going this route that he would not have gained without going. For instance, his college experiences allowed him to be exposed to various different styles of music other than Metal, such as Swing, which took him out of his comfort zone as a drummer.
Speaking about his social media presence, he talks about how he started Instagramming in 2016/2017 to initially document creative ideas within Instagram’s then 15 second video limits. Part of his reason for capturing his ideas was so that if anything happened to him, his ideas would live on digitally.
He states that this profile on the platform really took off and helped him gain opportunities within the Prog community especially. Scale The Summit discovered him on Instagram following the release of Ideology’s album. He also confirms he has not left Scale The Summit and that they have a new album due out this summer.