Five Finger Death Punch guitarist Zoltan Bathory is 100% certain that Wrong Side Of Heaven is the band’s most important song.
He tells MusicRadar: “It’s our biggest song, our most watched video. It had a huge impact on our career.”
Released in 2013 as the title track from the band’s fourth album, Wrong Side Of Heaven has achieved more than half a billion streams on Spotify, while the video has the same number of views on YouTube.
For all its significance, this song was also a long, long time in the making.
Bathory recalls: “Wrong Side Of Heaven started out as this little riff that I had for probably two decades. It was this nugget of gold. I knew that I got something special, but I had to wait until the time was right to record it.
“Other artists can associate and understand what I’m saying. When you have something really good, you tend to sit on that, you tend to not release it, because you don’t want to screw up a brilliant idea. You want to make sure that you’ve got the best possible treatment it can get.
“So for almost two decades I was sitting on that song and just playing around with it, and until finally it felt right and it became the title song of the fourth record.”
The songwriting credits for Wrong Side Of Heaven are shared by Bathory with singer Ivan Moody, guitarist Jason Hook, drummer Jeremy Spencer and producer Kevin Churko.
Bathory admits he was still unsure that the track was ready for release until he read Moody’s lyrics and heard his lead vocal.
He explains: “When you have a piece that you know can be brilliant, everything matters – the right melodies, the right vocals, the right mix. If you nail it all, this is a legacy piece. This is something that might change your entire career.
“I had the music, and once we were in the studio we played around with arrangement a little bit. But when it came to the recording, I said to the producer Kevin Churko, ‘This piece is very special to me, so let’s just see where it goes. And if it’s not what I think it should be, then I’m going to pull it, because it’s too important to me to just squander it. It’s a very important piece, and it needs to be what I think it can be.’
“So you have this protective feeling over the track, and I wasn’t really relaxed about it until Ivan came back with the lyrics and those vocal melodies. Once I heard the vocals, I was like, ‘Ah, okay.’ I mean, it was incredible. So Ivan did justice to the song.”
Back in the late ’80s, Guns N’ Roses singer Axl Rose famously said that if his ballad November Rain was not recorded to his satisfaction he would quit the music business.
Zoltan Bathory knows where Axl was coming from.
“I one hundred per cent understand that feeling,” he says. “The pressure is self-inflicted, but it’s my own expectations that I put on myself, so it doesn't necessarily affect me in a bad way. I’m not freaking out. I’m just very protective over the song.
“And I told that to the other guys. I said, ‘If it’s not perfect, we’ll hold it. If it’s not what it can be, we’ll hold it and work on it for another ten years or whatever. But this has to be right.’
“So yeah, I understand Axl Rose one hundred per cent. I understand that feeling. And once Ivan’s vocals were on it and Kevin start mixing it, we all knew, like, ‘Holy shit – this really is something!’”
The video for Wrong Side Of Heaven gave a new level of meaning to the song. It was directed by Nick Peterson and based on Bathory’s original concept.
“Another interesting thing about that song is that it wasn’t planned to be a single,” Bathory says. “But I went to the label and I said, ‘I have an idea. This song is very important to me, and also the lyrics. I think we can use it to support a serious cause.’
“So the video is about veterans, and how many homeless veterans there are. The idea was, ‘Let’s expose the facts, let’s put all the data on the screen of how many homeless people there are – especially veterans.’
He continues: “The words ‘veterans’ and ‘homeless’ should never be in the same sentence. These guys sacrifice too much.
“So in the end this becomes the most watched video we’ve ever done, and it had such an impact that serious politicians had to address this issue, serious newspapers had to address it, because we exposed data about homelessness and PTSD [Post-traumatic stress disorder]. And we also put our money where our mouth is, because we raised a quarter of a million dollars for these causes.”
He says in conclusion: “I’m proud that we gave this kind of support to veterans, and I’m proud that this song had such a huge impact on our career.”
