“Crossing Rubicon is a band where each member writes songs using different influences which leads to the amalgamation of different styles on Seeing Red. This album was inspired by classic records that give the listener something new with each track, that take the listener on a ride…not just front-loaded singles followed by filler like so many modern albums. Seeing Red is not for the “Single-of-the-Week” metal fan, this is a record for fans of heavy metal.” – Scotty Anarchy

It’s tough to talk to Crossing Rubicon frontman Scotty Anarchy about music and not feel the passion that the guy has for it. The guy is like the Tony Robbins of hard rock and heavy metal! The band recently released the above mentioned Seeing Red which is the follow-up to No Less Than Everything. If you’re expecting the new album to be a NLTE 2.0 then you are in for a huge surprise. The new album is more of what he wants the band to be. Is it possible to be genre free in today’s music industry? Genre free in a day and age where music has too many damn labels associated with it? That’s part of his vision and the end results are a group effort that resonate all throughout this new album. Crossing Rubicon is made up of five musicians with each having very diverse influences to draw from contributing collectively to create the album known as Seeing Red. We recently sat down with Scotty to talk about the new direction in music and how it all came to be. 

We’ve been somewhat patiently waiting for new music from the band and we finally have it. It’s always interesting to find out how do you know it’s time to start making a new album? 

Scotty Anarchy/Crossing Rubicon: To me, the first record to me was kind of a ‘hey, hey we’re the Monkees moment. We kind of picked and chose which songs we wanted to release to test the waters. I think I wanted to push the envelope a little more musically on the second release. I also wanted to make a stronger statement on certain things and be a little heavy handed on some things as well. I thought the first record was more of a commercial record and I wanted to get away from that and from genre specific music.  You’re never going to have your big billion dollar music industry ever again. The people that like music are actually liking music now and they don’t feel like they’re part of a scene or a clique or the media’s shoving it down their throats. I’d rather write stuff that’s more along the lines that makes me happy to write and less about wondering what everyone else thinks about it. So, we went through a little bit of a transition phase creatively where certain people didn’t want to go in that direction or couldn’t play a certain way. So, we did a few lineup changes. It’s really rewarding that every single person in this band wrote songs for the record and everybody had input on it. I needed to find the right musicians and the material had to be where I wanted it to go. 

Were you already writing before the lineup came together?

We were already toying with some ideas. Fortunately for me, I have Zach and I have Jeanne. There’s business Scott and then there’s artistic Scott and I can’t be both. When I’m booking shows or working on merch ideas, the last thing in my mind is writing new music. Then, I come back and Zach or Jeanne will say ‘hey Scott, I wrote this.’ We started writing shortly after the last album came out, but it really wasn’t going where I wanted it to go. Then, we changed up some people and it pretty much turned exactly how I wanted it and a lot of that came from other people’s input.

Finding the right band members is like putting together a puzzle. You can force that piece into place, but you eventually find out that it’s not the right fit. How did you find your right pieces?

A lot of them just showed up at my front porch (laughs). It’s about being open minded enough to accept another person’s idea. I needed to find people with different interests because I needed to be inspired. If everything was a four on the floor rock riff, then I would get bored really quickly. I have one guy who is into folk metal and more symphonic stuff. I have another guy into everything Swedish and I’ve got a punk rock drummer. We were able to pull from different ideas and it never got boring. The most controversial song on the record is my probably my favorite and it’s the one that every review hated which was “Active Aggression.”

(Editor’s note: At this point I am going to sound like a real ass-kisser if I tell Scott that I love the track!)

To me, it had a little more of a rap/nu-metal sound to it. If I was a nu-metal band and did a whole album that sounded that way, it would be pretty lame. I liked the fact that we kind of had something a little different at that point on the album. It kept your ears interested and changed the way the album went. I was a big fan of hip hop and I knew I couldn’t do the rap part on the record. I wanted to kick my own ass when I listened to myself on the tracks that came back (laughs). I’m more of a classic rock guy and when you listen to guys like vintage Queen, Bowie or Moody Blues, those guys weren’t thinking ‘I need to make sure this fits this genre because I’m going after this demographic.’ I always liked those albums more because they always challenged me as a listener and made me more open minded. I’m thinking fuck, in this day and age in the music industry nobody’s going to buy the damn thing anyway so let me just record what I want to record.

How was the connection made with Joshua Moore who delivered the rap part on “Active Aggression”?

He’s a singer in the band Fear the Masses. I remember texting him that night and telling him that I was totally ripping him off. Fear The Masses isn’t genre specific and they do nu-metal, reggae, hip hop or heavy metal. I remember asking my guitar player Zach if it would be ok to bring somebody else in to do the rap part. He said as long as I was ok with it since it was my part. Back in 1991, I was Chuck D all day long, but in 2017 or 2018 when we recorded that song, I was Vanilla Ice at his worst. I called Josh because I needed someone to come in and keep that rhythm. I needed someone to do it the right way going and do it justice. Some bands bring in a special guest guitar player and I bring in a special guest hip-hopper (laughs). I love the guy and we’ve started a lot of trouble together in the Connecticut metal scene together. Whenever a venue is treating bands like shit or someone’s treating a band like shit, we’re usually the ones to rush in and stick it to them a little bit (laughs). It’s kind of nice to be able to write a song that allows us to still have a little trouble together.

Did you know while writing that song that you wanted that verse to be a rap verse?

The guitar riff was written by the interim drummer that we had. I heard it and thought that I would really like to put a rap part to it. I did it and it wasn’t good at all. The rest of the song was but not that, so thank god for Josh!

You mentioned earlier about being open to other people’s ideas when writing songs. Did it take long for you to open up to other people’s ideas?

It took about two months into the initial incarnation of the band. I met this one guy named Pete and I told him we should get together and do some writing. It was just two guys and some tequila writing in my basement. Then our drummer Brandi came in. That poor girl was driving an hour and a half back and forth each week to practice, setting her kit up and tearing it back down each time. Then, I found another guitarist in Zach who is still with me now. He was pretty much Pete’s roadie. After a while, Zach came up to me and told me that he thought I could really run the band and control it and keep everything in line. I was like oh, so you’re ok with me doing everything that I want? So, I made him the new rhythm guitar player. Pete wanted to know why he was in the band and why he was going to be playing my parts. If you’re a lead singer and playing guitar, unless you’re James Hetfield, Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughn, then you’re fucking lame. Nobody can do both parts very well and keep the show entertaining. I’ll write the parts, I’ll record the parts and then he can play them live. I can’t tell you how big of a dick move this sounds in my head as I’m saying it, but that was the intention. After about a month Zach brought in a song that he wrote. I thought oh that’s cute kid; let’s hear your little jingle. I remember before he finished the first verse that I knew where he was going and I had written the chorus for the song. The song was fucking good and I told him that I would give him this song, but he wasn’t allowed to write anymore. After time, I learned that I wrote better when hearing something that someone else has because it puts me in a different state of mind. I found out that it challenges me lyrically and in a different way than if I try to put it all together myself. So, within a few months it went this is my band, we play my music that I write to I want everyone to write. 

On this one, Jeanne wanted to write something. She came in with it and it was almost like a jazz piece. We tweaked around on it and it eventually became “On Wax Wings.” There’s no way that I could have come up with something like that by myself. I did “We Will Rise” which is definitely a Scott song. If you listen to “Army of One” which is probably my favorite song on the record, musically, that one was mostly Patrick. I listened to that piece and thought what am I trying to say with this song and how does this song make me feel? Patrick brought that one to rehearsal the day of the Las Vegas shootings. I was upset about that and fired up. I wanted to make people think and empathize with people who have lost loved ones in school shootings. I felt angry that nothing was ever really done or being done about it. I was like most everyone else at that time. I was scared, I was pissed and I wanted to do something. Patrick brought that piece in and my head immediately went to the news report that I was watching fifteen minutes before where the shooter’s brother said he was like an army of one.

So, we’ve touched on the songwriting, but what was the recording process like? Was it a long process?

We were working with Nick Bellmore at Dexter’s Lab. He’s a phenomenal engineer and has done stuff with Hatebreed. Well, basically anything from Connecticut that’s been amazing, Nick has done it. He filled me out on some stuff on the last record and I really wanted to work with him on this one. I have a stipulation when I record a record and that is I want twelve songs. I know, it’s a weird number and it has to be twelve or more. My thought process for it is that when you sell an album on iTunes, each song is $1 or the whole album for $10 so you’re giving them two free songs.

At the time we had ten songs that were really solid. We also had one song that was a complete clusterfuck and we had another song that my guitarist Patrick (who is the most genius musician that I have ever heard) had. If you give this guy the weirdest instrument that nobody has ever heard of, not only will he play it but he will also be a master at it. I asked everyone for their last songs ideas a month before we were supposed to go in and begin recording and I heard nothing. We were set to go in and do drums on Friday and on Monday of the same week, he sends me this six minute long musical masterpiece that we called ”225.” It has weird time signatures in the beginning, but it has such a hook to it. First off, fuck you for sending me this four days before we go in to do drums and second of all we have to use this song. 

So, now we had two songs not ready to go and the other was ”Coldest of Wars.” That song had parts in it that we just couldn’t use but the riff was worth saving. My personal take on it was that it sounded like “Eminence Front” from The Who. Plus, I loved the fact that it had that funky part to it, so I knew it was worth saving. So, we’re going in to do drums on Friday and we had the trickiest pieces of music that Rubicon has ever done in our laps in its beginning stages on Monday. We had another song that I was refusing to not let it be on the album just because I loved this one riff so much. Nick works that way and if you don’t have the drum tracks down for the album first, he won’t re-set it up and mic it all to do more drum tracks. 

What the hell did you end up doing?

First off, Nick’s a genius when it comes to writing. Fortunately, our drummer got through the whole album, all ten songs, through Saturday. We went home and on Sunday, which was Super Bowl Sunday, we were going to write that song on the spot. Plus, get our drummer to play the drum parts for the real complicated song and we have one day to do this.

No pressure, huh?

Right, no pressure! We were working on it and working on it and he got through the other piece a lot easier than I thought. Maybe it was because my genius guitar player was directing him like he was directing an orchestra while he was playing the drum part. That was absolutely crazy, but cool at the same time. So, now we have eleven songs and I told Nick that I had this one riff but I couldn’t get the rest of it to work right. I’ve seen him do this before and he reaches his hand out and says ‘somebody get me a guitar.’ We did and fifteen minutes later he wrote this song. We left the studio that night and my guitar player goes, ’the best Crossing Rubicon song was not written by any of us.’ We now had “Coldest of Wars” which had that “Eminence Front” rhythm to it and I wanted to make it sound like a British new wave song from the 80s. The other song, “225,” is the closest that I will ever come to playing a RUSH song. So, to finally answer your question, we actually started recording it on Super Bowl Sunday weekend in February and finished it up in June.

People are creatures of habit and when bands change their sound the least little bit, their fans (some but not all) tend to lash back. What has the reaction been to the new album?

It’s been mostly all positive. When we released the first music video and single “Seeing Red,” I made a post about how we released a video that even metalcore fans couldn’t shit on. The last time out, we made a commercial rock record and the general public liked it. There were hardcore metal fans, your metal elitists, who shit all over it. This time around, I was like fuck the metal elitists all across the board. I don’t want to cater to people who are like ‘if it doesn’t sound like everything else then we don’t like it,’ so fuck ‘em. For people who are interested, I feel like we did enough on the first album where I wanted to challenge the listener. We did stuff with big harmony parts going for that Queen thing. I did some spoken word parts and certain things that nobody really does anymore or has ever done. I still wanted to have a piece that had parts in Latin. I still wanted to deal with heavy issues of the current time. I wanted to put things out there and have people actually think and not just feed them how they should think. I feel stronger behind this record because I feel like it’s more of where I wanted to go. So, if people want to shit on it, go for it; I did it in the direction that I wanted. If you’re proud of what you do, then nobody can really take anything away from you. Genre specific metal is one thing that I think has hurt the metal community over the last 20 years. I go back to the heavier stuff that I like with Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Queensryche plus newer stuff like Blind Guardian that impresses me when they come out with new stuff. I want to carry the flag for the stuff that people are calling classic rock which to me is heavy metal.

I love the way you handled the negativity! I saw a response of yours to a comment on the “Seeing Red” video on YouTube where someone commented about it being pure trash or something close to that.

Yeah, I remember that! 

You really do have to keep a sense of humor about it all. 

Absolutely! I actually ended up going to a therapist about it last time.

What? I had no idea!

Yeah, I had a guy threaten to shoot me! He said if I ever showed my face in western Massachusetts that he would put a bullet in my head. I remember telling him that I had great news because we were playing in whatever town that was on Saturday and I would put him on the guest list. So, yeah you have to have fun with it. I think one person actually created a YouTube account just so he could shit talk me, so I told him I was honored. He went through effort to talk shit to me, so that was great!

Speaking of “Seeing Red,” the music video features former WWE/ECW wrestler Justin Credible. How did that connection happen?

Well, I used to be a professional wrestler back in the day.

What? I had no idea!

It’s true and my teacher was Jason Knight who was Credible’s manager in ECW. When Credible was first let go by WWE, he went from making that kind of money to making nothing and he was losing everything. He was looking for a job and I offered him a job in my restaurant that I was running at the time. He worked for me for a while and at one time he was terminated because of a drug thing. I wasn’t at the location that he was working at and I was devastated. They pulled me aside and told me that he was having pain killers dropped off to him and I found out about it third hand. That Friday, he was working a wrestling show and he texted a picture to me. It was a picture of him and Ric Flair flipping off the camera. It said ‘hey Scott, fuck you.’ He had to go right to the top! It was Ric Fucking Flair who is in my top two or three favorite wrestlers of all time. Well, I hadn’t talked to him in about ten years and I would always ask friends of mine who were still in the business how he was. He was having issues with drugs and alcohol and then he really started getting in some news for some arrests and stuff recently. I told a friend to let him know that I was praying for him. Then, I had another friend text me and told me that he was with Justin and listening to Rubicon right now and that he loved it. 

So, we started talking and I found out that a lot of stuff being said about him was true and a lot wasn’t. He had a lot of people writing him off and saying that he was going to be dead in a year. In my wrestling days, he had my back and now I wanted to show people the Peter Pablo outside of Justin Credible. I think the thing with him is he graduated from high school and went to wrestling school and was picked up by the WWE in 1993. He never really got a chance to grow up; real life escaped him and people took advantage of that. He did a lot of stuff and wasn’t thinking about what would happen twenty years later. A lot of the stuff that he was getting arrested for was under weird circumstances. “Seeing Red” was my answer to You Tube critics and about people threatening to shoot me. When I’m talking to him and all of the stuff he’s going through, then I see it as he is kind of going through something similar. I felt that I could use that song for him and use it as a metaphor for people in general wanting to get back on the horse because they still have something good to give. So, I wanted to tell that story through a music video.

A great song and a great music video! As for the other songs on the album, were any more difficult to get to the finished version that we hear than you expected?

One was “Embrace the Pain;” it’s a weird riff and I love the intro to it but it’s really hard to sing along with. The timing threw me off a lot and at one point I stormed out of the studio pissed and left for two hours. I needed to be away from everybody and I tried to re-write it, but it still wasn’t right. It just wasn’t working the way that he wrote it and then Nick came in and helped me out a little with that. Then Jeanne had to sing her part and my mentality was my part was so much harder than hers, so why is she having problems singing hers? Then, she got pissed and wanted to smack me in the face. So, when we finally finished that track, we didn’t even want to talk about it. The other song was “225” which is the one I mentioned earlier. My mindset was that we were going to write and record and I’ll be writing this on the back end. It was our last day and we were still putting it together. If we didn’t get it done, the guy doing the mastering, who was Zeuss, couldn’t get it done for two months because of his schedule. I stayed up until 4:30 am that morning trying to put it together and I was still trying to on the ride to the studio. I literally finished the last lyric five minutes before we got to the studio. 

There was one other song, but this is more of a funny anecdote. Kevin James Frear is from the band Demon’s Past and the guy who did my album art, directed the “Seeing Red” video and probably one of the most talented human beings ever. He wanted to do some vocals on the album and I had the intro to “Culture of Silence.” I walked in and the band was asking if he was sure that he knew the part that he was doing and I told them that we had talked about it a thousand times. I actually wrote the part the night before! I wrote it a while back and recorded it in a demo track. It shouldn’t go sharp or flat, but then it kind of went sharp and kind of went flat. I was like what the fuck is wrong with this song? I was up all night rewriting the song and the melody over and over again. When Kevin showed up at the studio, I told him that I got into a fight with his wife the night before and needed to talk to him about it. We went outside and he asked what was wrong so I had to tell him I brought him out there to teach him his part (laughs). I remember asking him do you know how to speak Latin? (laughs) He sang two parts and I sang two parts and it all worked out. It was Ave Maria, but I just re-wrote it a little bit. He’s not Catholic, so he didn’t know that part either (laughs). The fucker nailed it! He did his part and everyone was like oh my god this is beautiful and he has the most beautiful voice ever. Then they told me to do my part and they needed a second take from me. ‘Scott, follow what Kevin’s doing!’ (laughs)

Have there been any surprises with any songs that the fans have been gravitating towards?

“On Wax Wings was the biggest shocker.” That was a song that I had no intention on releasing as a single or doing a music video for. If I want to challenge the audience, what better way than with a song that I never intended on being a single or music video? When people tell me that’s one of their favorite songs on the album, I’m like ‘really?’ It’s cool though because Jeanne wrote it. Yeah, my wife wrote that one.

That is one of my favorites and the intro totally threw me. I’m not sure if it’s a Pink Floydish type of intro of a Metallica type of intro. I love it!

If your thoughts are going from Pink Floyd to Metallica then we definitely did our job right. I want every song to keep the listener interested and just different enough to make them go ‘damn, what are these guys going to do next?’

Speaking of what are you going to do next, can we expect a 2020 tour?

Crossing Rubicon will be back!

Yeah man you have to get out there on the road these days.

Absolutely and I fucking miss doing it too!

I bet so because how do you get that rush of people cheering for you when you’re not on the road? I bet you don’t get a standing ovation at home if you take out the garbage. Well, I am assuming you take out the garbage. As far as I know, Jeanne might be the one doing it (laughs).

With Jeanne’s sense of humor, sometimes when I take the garbage out she’ll give me a standing ovation (laughs).

By I’m Music Magazine Owner/Editor Johnny Price

Crossing Rubicon is:

Scotty Anarchy – Lead Vocals
Mike Clemente- Drums
Jeanne Wawrzyniak-Bass/Vocals
Zach Lambert – Guitar/Vocals
Patrick Humphrey – Guitar 

Order your copy of Seeing Red:  https://squareup.com/store/crossing-rubicon/