Five Finger Death Punch’s Zoltan Bathory talks to Australia’s Subculture about the bands latest single featuring DMX.
In this interview Zoltan Bathory runs through how the bands latest single featuring DMX came to be – a process which was over seven years in the making and lots of red tape when DMX passed to bring to fruition. He also shares how the band reached out to DMX’s team and whether the band felt any pressure on working on the collaboration.
Zoltan also explains what other bands and artists he’d like to collaborate with – explaining the initial reason the band covered ‘Bad Company’ and how fun it was to reimagine the song which led to the band pursuing other covers in the future. Among his bucket list are Wu Tang Clan, Tricky, Eminem and The Prodigy.Finally, he also shares that among the year of touring across the UK, Europe and the USA that the band is hoping to return to Australia/Asia next year all being well.
Check out extracts from the interview transcribed by FFDP UK or keep scrolling to listen to the full interview shared on YouTube.
On how bands collaborate with other bands and artists:
There are various ways. Sometimes you know somebody. Sometimes you know the artist themselves. If you don’t know the artist then you have to have our people talking to your people kind of thing. In this case we asked the management, like hey can you reach out, can you see if we have someone in common, somebody we know, or just reach out to their, lawyers, managers, whoever so we can make the connection. So generally that’s what happens. Sometimes it’s friends of friends. There’s various ways. This particular thing we reached out to our management and theirs and to his people and started a conversation which was basically years in the making.
On whether the band felt pressure on the collaboration with DMX:
Definitely there is more sensitivity. You have to be very conscious of the artists you’re working with. It has to mash. It has to be something you both agree to. I don’t think there is a pressure from the perspective of… it’s not an outside pressure, if there is pressure it’s that you really want to do well. You want to do good and now there’s another artist that’s outside of your writing circle that’s involved. You want to create something that they would approve of, what they like.
With this particular track when it was done, we had to get the approvals from every single person that was involved with X. The feedback was already amazing. We had to have his team and publishers and everybody approve this so we were getting the feedback that is extremely positive. Everybody went like man this is a hit song, this is something that is appropriate, it’s something that upholds his legacy. So people were very happy and impressed by this track so that was really good news.
Once we had the [green light] that this was going to come out, we basically showed it to a bunch of legends of hip-hop from Jurassic 5 to Run DMC, all these guys listened to the track and that was amazing because this is their world. It was amazing to see that they were impressed, that they approved. Getting that feedback is amazing. It makes me feel good. Like okay, we did good.
Obviously from my perspective I love what we did, I love the song, the guitar solo is insane on it, every aspect of the song I absolutely love, but getting that extra thumbs up from the outside, especially from the legends, it feels good, I tell you what.