Originally Published in HM Magazine
March 2014
“When you walked in that door tonight, we all became family. Instead of tearing down the person next to you, lift them up.”
— Matty Mullins
In a wave, Matty Mullins is hit with something he’s never felt before. The guttural punch and uncontrollable surge flows over him, through him, attacking him rapidly. He can immediately feel every cell in his skin light up. He is eating potato soup, might have been in New Jersey, probably just on the East Coast somewhere. He feels like someone is digging behind his sternum with a pitchfork. His sight wavers.
The panic is paralyzing. It gets worse, building exponentially, and Mullins is particularly freaking out because he can’t pinpoint what’s wrong. He has never felt this way before. I have a great marriage, my band is doing well, today’s a day just like any other…
He thinks he’s having a heart attack. He is the vocalist for a major band, and, within a literal minute, the bus becomes his coffin. The band’s bassist, Cory Elder, and a runner speed him to the hospital. He is stabilized, but, even after the initial earthquake subsides, the aftershocks riddle him for a week, like a live-in hangover. Worse, he still can’t get a handle on why.
It was almost like all of the joy and all of the happiness was completely stripped from me. It felt like such a spiritual thing. I was raised in a Christian household, my dad’s a pastor, but none of that really ever meant anything to me. I knew what I was supposed to do, I knew so much about the Bible and everything from growing up, but none of it was real to me.
There in the hospital, it became very real to him.
The dressing room smells like bowls of baked-in weed and kegs of evaporated beer. It’s fitting, though; after all, it is the dressing room to rock stars. Memphis May Fire, the archetypal melodic metalcore quintet, is performing at Warehouse Live tonight, a mildly famous venue in the developing East side of downtown Houston. (The venue even gets a shout out from Drake on one of his records: “Backstage at Warehouse in ’09 like ‘Is Bun coming?’”) I’m waiting for the band to be ushered in, and though I’m not left waiting long, it’s definitely long enough to pinpoint the ingredients of the smells and to start looking for some type of distraction.
I’ve never met any of the members of Memphis May Fire, so while I’m waiting, I remembered what our photographer said to me about their demeanor when she shot them for this cover about two weeks prior in Nashville. She came back raving. She said she couldn’t take a bad shot. The band was so in sync, no one blinked at the wrong time, moved awkwardly or otherwise bombed the picture. She said it almost never happens. A result of good chemistry, she said.
It seems Memphis May Fire has been excelling at creating good chemistry, especially if their measurables are accurate. They have a rabid fan base, spanning both critical male and female demographics, in large part due to their legitimate talent and songwriting, but also, in part, because they’re so damn cute. A lot of bands have cute, though, but there is an even smaller sect of bands that successfully navigate legitimacy, attraction and songwriting talent. This band is special because they’re not afraid to be cute. They’re not afraid to be who they want to be, from the inside out, a life skill you have to actively work on and one of the hardest to master. Despite millions of followers, they’re not afraid to wear matching Big Face tees to a magazine photo shoot and channel their inner superheroes. There isn’t a ton of proselytizing posturing. There’s a lot less chest-beating. Performing live, frontman and heartthrob Mullins seems to reach up more and look down less. He has taken to smiling consistently on stage in the reflection of the audience, a newfound appreciation for just one more thing he is learning not to take for granted. In an industry where public perception is largely responsible for sales, the panic attack he suffered on his tour bus should have been kept a secret. As a legitimate rock star, he is not supposed to falter. He is not supposed to be anxious.
I tell the band — who have now settled in and are reclining in the bizarre leopard-print house furniture — the name of their new album, Unconditional, is an open invitation for talking faith. I direct my statement to Mullins, a walking tattoo with beautiful ink spanning almost every visible part of his body, knowing he wrote all the lyrics and most likely chose the album name.
He knows these questions will come, but his response still shines, like he hasn’t been asked about it enough. “I was starting to come up with concepts of what I wanted to write about,” he says, channeling his father’s public-speaking charm, “right after we put out Challenger because I know (guitarist and main songwriter) Kellen starts writing right after that,” Mullins says. Challenger debuted at No. 16 on the Billboard Top 200 and sold over 18,000 copies in its first week. “We were on a stretch of touring that was wild. We were doing two American tours, an Australia and Southeast Asia run, all without going home hardly at all. It was like back to back to back to back.”
“I would lay in my bunk and I would shake and I would call my wife and I’d have all these thoughts about her getting in accidents and just the worst things you could possibly imagine.”
Matty Mullins
Vocalist, Memphis May Fire
He picks up the pace of his speech, getting visibly animated, mainly because he knows the rest of the story. “The pieces of the puzzle started to fit together two days before I had that first panic attack. We played in Raleigh, N.C., and a girl who has a terminal heart condition gave me a letter and said, ‘I’m going to die, but all I wanted before I die was to come and see you guys play, and I just want you to know that your music was one of the only things I lived for.’”
That’s an unbelievable thing for a human to hear, I say to him.
“In the back of my mind — always knowing God is in control — when you start to think you have a grasp on these things and that you really are in control and you really are saving these kids’ lives… Think about what it’s like going into the writing process,” Mullins says. “‘Dude, if I don’t write the right song, these kids are going to kill themselves. They’re going to keep cutting their wrists.’”
That’s the weight you were carrying?
“Yeah. I had all this weight, and I had no idea I was holding it because it hadn’t registered mentally. But when all this started to happen, I felt such a disconnection from everybody. From fans because it’s not something you want to talk about. Not only do you not want to admit it to everybody else around you, but you don’t want to admit it to yourself. At every moment — every waking moment — you’re feeling like panic could happen at that time. ‘I’m crazy. I’m losing my mind.’ I see these people walking around in Seattle, these homeless people, who are hitting themselves in the back for no reason. You’re like, ‘Holy crap. That’s what I’m on my way to.’
“The first time we went to Europe, while I was experiencing all this panic, was one of the worst experiences of my life. I would lay in my bunk and I would shake and I would call my wife and I’d have all these thoughts about her getting in accidents and just the worst things you could possibly imagine. I felt myself truly starting to give everything away to God, ultimately realizing it’s not only my duty to write the best music I can for these kids, but to be totally honest with them about how much of a human I am. To let them know, ‘Man, not only do I make the same mistakes as you guys, but I’m only here by the grace of God, in this position. It could be any of you. At the same time, I experience the exact same things that you guys are going through, the anxiety, the depression.’
“I think God allowed these things to happen to me so that I could sympathize. … I’ve said in some interviews that I don’t think I’m man enough to ever say, ‘Anxiety and depression was totally worth it, and if I could go do it all over again, I would definitely do it,’ because I couldn’t. But I do know that in my darkest hours, when I was crying out for God and wondering why He wasn’t there, He was right there, holding my hand through all of it.”
Mullins is on a roll now, sitting up straighter, eyes a little brighter. “There was so much ego, so much ‘me, me, me’ I had to really let go of to realize my actual purpose in this band and my actual purpose on earth.”
I ask him if he means to imply that purpose is what he’s doing on stage every night, the very reason 1,500 fans are waiting for them on the other side of a these walls. “That’s when the amount of influence you have starts to be less scary and starts to be more fun,” he says. “You really just realized, ‘Dude, I’m going to get up there and I’m going to do my best tonight. I don’t know how this is going to honor God, but God, steal my show. This is yours.’ That’s what I pray every night before I go on stage, and I’ve been having so much fun ever since. Anxiety and depression has completely left my life.”
It’s a wholly transformative process, much like pressure turning carbon into diamonds. It’s a fun way to phrase things, but as Mullins said, it’s a process that has ended as many lives as it has transformed. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, the disease affects 18 percent of the population, and more than two-thirds don’t receive treatment. It killed more than 40,000 people in 2012, an astounding number given its consideration as a “highly treatable” affliction.
“I feel like a lot of people spend their entire lives reaching for (some level of) success, never getting there,” Mullins says about his search for purpose, “and then finally, they’re laying on their deathbed and they’re like, ‘What was that all for? I’m about to die. What did I leave here?’ I feel like for the first four years in this band, I was reaching for that same thing. We had essentially gotten to the level that I always wanted to be at — touring in a bus, playing big shows, making decent money — but it all felt so empty (even though) a lot of people don’t ever get to experience that. So I feel so blessed to have reached this level of success, but, ultimately, not feeling anything substantial come from it. At that point, I started to question everything in my life. Am I really making an impact? Is this all about me? Nothing good is coming from this.
“I finally realized that, whether it feels right in the moment or not, giving glory to God for everything and redirecting the focus to Him and redirecting the weight to Him, is the only thing that brings pure, real, natural joy to my heart and to my soul and to my life and to my being. Everything else falls into place, and it starts to make sense. Now when I get a letter and I read about anxiety and depression, it breaks my heart in a whole new way. But I feel like, ‘OK, now I can write a song about something real, not some broken heart or something gone wrong in a relationship.’ Dude, I have a great marriage, I don’t know what that’s like, but (I do know I’ve) experienced these other things, and now I can offer hope. If it wasn’t for redirecting all of my focus and all of my being to Jesus and what He did, and fully understanding the love of Christ for humanity, I think I would still be in that deep, dark place I was in a year ago. I’m so thankful for that experience and for God giving me the boldness to put all of that reality into one record so all these kids could really get the truth.”
For you as a singer, when you’re front and center every night, a lot of people are going to tell you you’re the best, you’re awesome, you’re attractive, you can do no wrong — it starts to build up. God always finds a way to humble that, and it can be scary how He does it.
“Oh my gosh, dude, you don’t know. You’re totally right. You’re totally right and you don’t even know the extent of it. It got to a point with anxiety and depression where I didn’t even feel like getting on Twitter and saying anything inspirational. I didn’t even care about influencing other people’s days because I was just like, ‘Man, if these kids are feeling what I’m feeling, I understand suicide. I understand why people want to give up.’ When I can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, feel so horrible from the inside out, can’t even enjoy my perfect marriage, can’t enjoy my band that’s doing well, can’t enjoy whatever’s on this TV right now… And when it comes down to it, I don’t know if I would be alive. I don’t know how people that don’t find Jesus in their darkest places get past it. I don’t even know. I can’t speak for anybody but myself, but I need Jesus in my life, every single day. I need the one-on-one conversation with him. I need to rely on him for answers, for substance, for reality. That is all I can count on, and that’s where the name Unconditional came from.”
Guitarist Anthony Sepe is also plagued with anxiety. When he brings it up, I hope to myself he’s talked to Mullins about it. Anxious people want to talk to people, but the spiral starts because you don’t want to burden others. Instead, you start talking to yourself. The negative self-talk heats up, and what began as an honest attempt at transparent conversation devolves into mental paralysis. “When I first joined the band,” Sepe says, “I went through anxiety really bad. When we were doing Challenger, these were the guys that stayed at my house.” That care actually solidified the new band lineup, one with a slight history of roster changes. In those moments, everyone knew they could count on each other.
“Did you guys know that about each other?” I ask Sepe, nodding in Mullins’ direction. “Did you know he was suffering through anxiety as well?”
“That’s actually a part of what really helped me get through it, being around these guys,” Sepe says, motioning to the other four members in the room. “We were so new (as a band), and I remember going through (the panic) super bad.” A bit later, after Mullins finishes up a statement about the negative effects of addiction on anxiety, he swiftly changes subjects. As he’s speaking, I watch his face change shape because his brain knows what he’s about to say. He’s about to espouse his new outlook — the band’s new outlook, really — a wonderful summation of what he now does to power through this life.
“That’s the beauty of it, though,” Mullins says, “waking up and asking, ‘What’s the mystery of the day?’ I’m not just here to be an optimist, but I do believe that God has a plan for today. He’s got awesome things in store, and when I feel like just relaxing on the bus at the end of the night, instead I’m going to go outside. I’m going to take pictures with these kids. I’m going to listen to what they have to say. I’m going to realize that it’s not about me. So much anxiety about being around large crowds and people pushing me up against buses and everybody reaching and everything… Man, when you realize these kids are just looking for anything to take that weight off — that same weight you and I hold — I want to tell them, ‘Come to me. I’m going to give you whatever answer I have, and if you don’t want an answer, I’m going to give you a hug.’ Sometimes that’s all they need.”
Photos by Julie Worsham for HM Magazine. Reproduced with permission from HM Magazine.