Scott Stapp: Feeling the Music

Risen Magazine, July/August 2006

The skeletons in Scott Stapp’s closet started rattling in 2002 when his drinking and drug use contributed to the breakup of his platinum selling band, Creed. By Thanksgiving 2005, they’d broken down the door and sauntered out in a succession of events that mocked his then futile attempts to stay sober: the fight with members of punk rock outfit 311; the drunken appearance on Spike TV’s Casino Cinema days later; getting arrested at Los Angeles International Airport the day after his wedding to Miss New York 2004, Jaclyn Nesheiwat; and a 1999 sex tape that distributors threatened to release.

They are things Stapp could easily have said he wouldn’t discuss, but tour publicist Chuck Randall says Stapp is anything but tight-lipped. “You shouldn’t have any problem once he gets going,” he says. “He can talk.” Stapp and his new backing band, former Creed opener, Gone Blind, were supporting J.D. Fortune and INXS on a leg of their North American tour. Assistant in tow, Stapp arrives wearing jeans, a beanie pulled low, and a splint on his right hand. Later, on stage, he’ll remove the splint to shake hands with the receptive crowd gathered in front of the stage during his 45-minute set.

“It was broken and it didn’t heal right, so I had to have surgery and get a pin put in,” he says. “It’s been a long healing process.”

The same could be said for Stapp’s life over the past four years. If he’s nervous about discussing the lowlights of the years past, he doesn’t show it, save for a band of sweat that forms about his upper lip. It’s one of the few times during our conversation that he avoided eye contact. Conversely, when discussing his wife and son, Jagger, age 8, his eyes light up as any proud papa’s would.

During our hour long interview, Stapp candidly discusses the spiritual struggle he’s had since childhood, the pressure to define his spirituality, why he entered re-hab, and why he believes his life is finally coming together.

Risen Magazine: So the lyrics of The Great Divide read like a diary of the past few years. It’s like you’re chronicling your spiritual journey.

Scott Stapp: It’s the emotional journey, the roller coaster, so to speak. I can’t run from the spirituality, I can’t hide from it. It’s in me.

RM: Your spirituality has been a major issue throughout your career. People of faith have wanted to claim you as their own, while others reject that. Do you feel pressure to have to define your spirituality?

SS: Well, it’s not about that. I never had an agenda to try to make anybody believe what I believe, and I’ve never tried to push any specific religion on anyone. Starting with My Own Prison, I dealt with a lot of things I was raised to feel. I tried to figure out if I believe in it or if I don’t, and then I tried to figure out if I was going to have spirituality or faith in my life. It’s something that I’m just starting to find peace with. I’m just starting to figure out what my beliefs are. I think the misunderstanding was that I had it all figured out and I was trying to tell people about it. That’s not what I was doing at all. I was questioning. But even amidst all that doubt and struggle, I knew I believed in God. My problem was turning to Him when I was on my back. I’m just really honest in my songs. I talk about what goes on in my life, what really goes on in my head. I don’t know anybody that hasn’t cried out for something, or asked for something because they were in a place where they had no place to look but up. That’s typically when I make references to God in my music. It’s usually out of desperation, out of having nowhere else to turn.

RM: Bono often says music that gets him going is music that is either running to God or running away from God.

SS: Bono is one of the biggest, most influential artists in my life, and I think Joshua Tree was a huge influence on how I write music today. When that album came out, I thought “Oh my God, there’s someone else out there that thinks like I do, that’s having doubts, these fears, these concerns.” I hope that someday, someone will say the same thing about me. I think I went from the hospital to the church nursery. I’ve spent a good 95 percent of my life either in church or trying to figure out if I believe what they teach me in church.

RM: I read that you started having a spiritual struggle at age 9. What happened?

SS: I went to a church where they believe in a lot of spiritual gifts – speaking in tongues, prophecy, and healings – stuff like that. For some reason, no matter how much I prayed and talked to God, it would never happen to me, so I thought there was something wrong with me.

I would pray and I would cry about it like, “God, what’s wrong with me? Do you not love me? Do you not care about me? Can you make my lamp turn off?” I guess I was just searching to find out if He was real. I started talking to God and said, I guess I’m not going to get this – whatever. But can you make me smart like King Solomon? I was pleading with God to give me something. I wanted proof, I guess.

My father was making me read the Bible at the time. I would have to write commentaries on each chapter and what they meant to me and then he would grade it on spelling and grammar. If there were any mistakes, there wasn’t a computer, so I had to go back and write it all over again. He used red ink and the whole nine yards, like he was a teacher. And then I found out when I was about 14 that he was using my notes to teach Bible classes.

RM: How did you feel about that?

SS: At the time, I was flattered by it. I was like, my Dad’s teaching my stuff, and I’m only 10! But I think my father saw as a young child, I was questioning. I could never take everything and just believe in it without questioning. Having been on this Earth for 30 years, it’s finally starting to make some sense to me. I think maybe it’s starting to move 12 inches from my head to my heart. It’s been in my head my whole life but there’s been this doubt. I’m finally starting to figure out what I’m going to take from it, what I’m choosing, and how I’m going to live my life. I had to make a lot of mistakes and learn things the hard way in order to come to a place where I’m finally starting to feel at peace in my personal life, my emotional life, my family life, and my spiritual life. They’re all starting to sync up.

I didn’t want to lay all the heavy stuff on my son that I had laid on me: worry about hell, the devil, fire, and all this stuff that I was so in fear of when I was younger. It forced me as a kid to say of course I’m going to believe in God, I don’t want to die and go to hell and burn. That’s a lot of heavy stuff to have as a kid. I talk about that on ‘Broken’. When I wrote the chorus to that song, I was sitting at the pool with my son and his friends. They were singing, I was playing guitar and watching them, and for some reason I got this heaviness in my heart and the lyrics just came out of me. I was like, OK kids, Daddy’s going to pray. I always pray before I write songs. And after it came out, one of my son’s friends was like, “Do you always pray? Do you always thank God?” And I said, “Yeah, I do.” As someone who thinks creatively, you write things down and you don’t know where they come from. Some people liken it to the subconscious. For me, and maybe it was part of how I was raised, I want to liken it to something bigger than myself. The purity in my son’s little journey right now is that no one’s pushing it on him. He’s made a choice in his little mind as a 7-year old to believe in God. He comes to me and asks me questions, but I’ve never made him go to church.

RM: Do people question you about whether you go to church or not?

SS: It’s kind of hard for me to go to church so I really haven’t gone. People ask me for my autograph in the middle of the sermon. I can hardly go to funerals. It’s really hard. In the Bible it says where two or more are gathered in God’s name, He’s there and that’s church. So we let my son come to it whenever he wanted to and we’re always there to talk about any questions he has and he’s just been drawn to it.

RM: There’s been a lot of criticism about your putting your beliefs in your lyrics. Didn’t that cause friction within Creed?

SS: I really don’t worry about it. It is what it is. In the Christian community, with things that have happened to me over the past year, they’ve been really judgmental and that’s exactly why I didn’t want my son in the church. That’s exactly why I didn’t go to church. I didn’t want to be around the judgment. I saw that when I was growing up, with people in the church. My father was not a very judgmental guy. He was like, hey, we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and that’s part of the journey. And you know, that is the one thing I did take from my Dad. He wasn’t a judgmental man. He was like, hey things happen in your life and it’s all part of the growing process as a Christian. Some of us are further along on our journey in faith than other people, so you don’t want to cause someone else to quit or to fail.

RM: Was your father different with you?

SS: He was a little tougher with me but as he’s gotten older, when I’ve had tough times, he’s extended a hand and opened up to me. I never knew that my Dad had certain issues in his life cause he kept them away from us. As I’ve gotten older, he’s said, “You know I’ve been through this, you just don’t know cause I’ve kept it away from you.” And that’s what I’m doing in my life. I’ve been dealing with things over the last couple years my son never saw. It was something I did away from home. But, it started getting a little close to home, in terms of some things that were made public. One of the things happened almost ten years ago, but it was as if things started coming up out of the blue. And I was inebriated on Casino Cinema, because that’s what I’d do when I played poker, I’d drink.

That was actually a good thing that it happened to me because I got to see myself that way and I didn’t like it. Also, that was too close to home for me. My son could see this. My wife sat me down and was like, “Honey, I love you and I want to be by your side and stand by you. We gotta make some changes.”

I’m glad I have someone in my life that is straight up with me, who tells me like it is. She’s my biggest cheerleader, support, rock, but she’s also the one who will sit me down and say we’re not having this.

I’m so hard on myself, especially if I make a mistake. I’ll lie in bed sick and depressed for three days like, what am I going to do? I’ll call people and say “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry". I’m really hard on myself and my wife knows that. But the fact that it was getting to a point where it could affect them and their lives, I didn’t want that to happen. And it got close enough and so I had to put a stop to it.

RM: How did you meet your wife?

SS: We were introduced briefly in Miami through a friend. It was a hi-bye thing. Then I went to a charity event in New York, and I didn’t know this, but she was the reigning Miss New York at the time in 2004. She was there. I said, “Oh I ran into you before.” I used that as an in to talk to her. We ended up sitting at the same table during the event and then she got up and spoke and I said “That’s the woman I’m going to marry right there and she just doesn’t know it yet. She’s Jordanian and there is a cultural difference in terms of how they date and get to know people. I had to talk to her family and get permission to date her and it had to be structured.

RM: What was that like?

SS: Well, I knew she was the one so I don’t think it was tough. It was what I was supposed to do to be with the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. After about six months of us being together, she started feeling the same way. We fell in love. The thought of losing her because of stupid mistakes…

Her putting it into perspective…that was enough of a scare for me to know that my son might see that TV show or even hear something from someone at school. I wish that nothing was made public, but it seems I’m the type of person who has to learn things the hard way in order for it to really sink in.

About the tape thing, what hurt me the most about that was someone I trusted from my past stole that from my safe. I trusted them with the code to my safe because of the position they had working for me. They had to have that code to access certain things that were in the safe. That someone would decide to profit off that and then align their profits with trying to take advantage of one of the happiest days in my life, marrying my wife…someone trying to capitalize on our wedding with an indiscretion in my past, it really hurt.

My wife and I have nothing to hide from each other. I was very honest about things I had done in my past. I didn’t want her to hear it from somebody else or to run into somebody who was going to tell her a story. I'd rather just say hey, this is what you’re marrying and I want you to know everything. In her closet were like, two things: I think she kissed a guy in like 12th grade or something without her brother finding out. [Laughs]

Her mother is an amazing woman. They have an amazing family. I really found a diamond in the rough, and hopefully, after everything that’s happened, her mother sees a diamond in the rough with me. All my skeletons are out, so they’re not skeletons any more.

RM: How would you describe your career now and where do you see it going?

SS: You know how I feel? I feel like I did in 1997 and 1998, like the ball’s starting to roll again. I feel like I’m out paying my dues again, and I’m starting to feel the excitement coming back. Almost everyone I’ve talked to thinks The Great Divide is my best work to date and they actually like it better than anything I’ve done previously. It captures a time in my life. Every time I listen to it, for the rest of my life, I’ll remember that time because of how the album sounds. It makes it personal. Even the mixing and producing becomes a personal reflection of the artist. I look at it as a really raw album that, hopefully, we got as true to a live sound as we could. Hopefully people can feel it because that’s what it’s all about for me – feeling the music.

Writer – Fayola Shakes
Photographer – Chapman Baehler
Interviewed exclusively for RISEN magazine at the Palace Theater in Cleveland.