Papa Roach frontman Jacoby Shaddix reflects on his creative life, his relationship with Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington and his breakthrough moment with “Last Resort” in his interview with The Void’s Christina Rowatt, which you can watch on YouTube or listen to via The Void with Christina podcast.
“I’m deeply saddened to know that it came to that for him in his life,” Shaddix said of his friend Chester Bennington of Linkin Park’s tragic suicide. “It’s, like, God, it’s just fucking terrible. But the reality is we can try to find these things that we feel fill the whole in our soul and a lot of us struggle in trying to find that and sometimes it just gets too dark. And that’s how it got for him and, unfortunately, it came to that. It’s incredibly sad. He left a lot of loving people behind. But through the story, it opened up a bigger dialogue.”
Papa Roach’s biggest hit “Last Resort” has been streamed more than 25 million times and has an unexpected story behind it. “I sing it in the first person, but the song is about my best friend who I was living with at the time,” Shaddix said. “I moved out of my house and I was seventeen years old and I moved in with my friend Mark and he went through this really dark time. We took a bunch of drugs and he snapped and tried to kill himself [on] mushrooms and acid. It was the worst trip of my life. It was not O.K., one of my best friends tried to take his own life, and it hit me really heavy. So we wrote that song. It’s trippy, years later we named the band after my grandfather Papa Roach. Years later, my grandfather has taken his own life. Years later, I go through my own space of wanting to end it … I don’t know, it is what is is. It happens to people. Fortunately right now I’m in a really good place. I’m not isolating myself, I’m sober. All of these things help me to not be as insane as I can be,” Shaddix explains.
