Interview with Neil Sabatino (Fairmont)

Neil Sabatino of the New Jersey Indie rockers Fairmont lives and breathes the DIY philosophy. In over 20 years he has released 13 albums, a handful of EPs and a couple of compilations mostly on his own record label Mint 400 records. His latest and his best so far (at least in my opinion) is called «I Wish I Was Stupid». In the interview Neil talks about David Bowie, religion / god, rejection, why he hates his singing voice, the song «Everyone Hates a Critic», Mint 400 records, his lucky number 13 and creating as a necessity.

Early life:

Robert Pally: What role did music play in your family?

Neil Sabatino: Well my family was not very into music beyond my mother liking the Beatles and my father liking 1950’s doowop. I had to actively discover everything else in my later teen years. I was handed many mix tapes by friends and girlfriends that put me onto the path of consuming more and more music. Eventually I ended up in record stores weekly as a teen trying out anything that I had heard about. Family didn’t really play much of a role in my musical foundations as my parents thought the music I played as a 17-year-old was mostly noise.

Robert Pally: Which was your first favorite band and why?

Neil Sabatino: I think my very first favorite band was Nirvana because it was something I discovered on my own through MTV and I went out and bought their first record «Bleach» and «Nevermind» on the same day. It immediately was the spark that made me think I could learn guitar and start a band.

Robert Pally: Which was your first favorite song and why?

Neil Sabatino: I think early on like between the ages of 5 and 8 the song «Sleepwalk» by Santo & Johnny was a favorite of mine as it was often on oldies radio stations and had this jazzy sadness about it that appealed to me.

Robert Pally: How was your first band called and what music did you play?

Neil Sabatino: My very first was called 3% Error and I wrote all the songs and played guitar. It really was very derivative of everything I liked and was just a mish mosh of styles that didn’t work very well together. We played some very empty bar shows and made a demo tape or two and then I moved on pretty quickly to new projects.

Robert Pally: What was the first song you wrote and what was it about?

Neil Sabatino: I think all my first songs were about heartbreak and the lyrics were very in the vein of The Cure. In my first few songs I wrote I just was looking to preserve the rhyme scheme and put together something cohesive. I eventually used little pieces of songs from my first band in other bands. I think the musical parts always came easy to me, the lyrics not so much. It took a while before I wrote any decent lyrics.

Robert Pally: What was the joy of your youth?

Neil Sabatino: I was pretty much always into art and music since I was probably 4 or 5 years old. With art I used to take the same «learn to draw» books out of the library and draw pictures of famous cartoon characters as best I could and musically I had a little Casio keyboard as well as a piano in the house that I’d figure out TV theme songs on. This later also became my own little original songs. Because I had played a little piano it made it easier later on for me to transpose everything I knew to guitar.

Robert Pally: Which was your first serious band? When was that? What goals did you have with them?

Neil Sabatino: I was in a band in 1996 called Little Green Men that had goals of playing the local famous clubs like Maxwells and CBGB’s, which we achieved pretty quickly. We worked on new music constantly and then quickly started booking our own big shows in New Jersey. That was how I met my next band Stick Figure Suicide which led to some touring and working with a producer for the first time. With Stick Figure Suicide we were able to play alongside national acts like Bouncing Souls, H2O, Saves The Day, and a bunch of others. We were achieving everything I had hoped to achieve which was basically play in front of large crowds and release records.

 

Fairmont:

Robert Pally: How did everything start with Fairmont?

Neil Sabatino: I was in the band Pencey Prep on Eyeball Records and we were on our first tour and I was not getting along with the band. I was in Fairmont, Minnesota at my future wife’s parents house, as we were staying there for part of the tour and I had the idea to start a solo acoustic project. A few weeks later I was kicked out of Pencey Prep and it made the transition to a new project a necessity for me, because there were no other options at the time.

Robert Pally: Is Fairmont a kind of an open band based around you?

Neil Sabatino: Well I wouldn’t categorize it like that. One of our original drummers Andy Applegate was a core member with me from 2003 until 2016-ish and he had to leave because of health issues. During that time we were joined in 2008 by Christian Kisala who is still a member of the band. Christian has been someone who I bounced many ideas off of and has helped shape the music over the years. Fairmont is my songs and lyrics but these two members are just as big a part of the band over the years. Once we stopped touring I did like playing as a 5 piece for live shows so we filled in the band with people who we knew and were interested in playing with us. Most were other artists on my record label. Recently we kind of decided post covid that the band would be more of a recording project only with myself and Christian Kisala with help from his wife Jane Keating on backing vocals. It was just easier to keep the band small with myself playing guitar, bass and doing lead vocals, Christian playing keys and drums and Jane helping with harmonies. We have no plans to play live going forward right now. Christian and I started a new instrumental project that will serve for our band that plays out live and Fairmont will be my outlet for songwriting in more of the indie rock format. For almost 2 decades we practiced every week and played shows regularly. Recently we have been more concerned with just making full albums that are cohesive and well written and we have tossed out the idea of having to be able to play them live. 

Robert Pally: You don’t care about the press. What was the best / worst thing they said about Fairmont?

Neil Sabatino: Well we have had major newspapers and magazines mention us over the years but it seemed even if it was amazing press in a big outlet it didn’t really do much for us. We found radio really picked up on the band and has been more supportive and welcoming over the last 15 years. We also have had our share of sync licenses all over the world with TV and cinema. So, press has been one of those things we haven’t paid much attention to. I do think it’s funny that our most successful albums have had contradictory reviews about them. I think in this new world we live in music is so preference based and so accessible that people don’t need to read opinions on it, they can listen and form their own opinion. Press used to exist so you didn’t have to spend $15 to find out if a record was good or not.

Robert Pally: On your debut «Pretending Greatness Is Awaiting» (2001) are two songs about religion / god (How Summer Tour Made Me An Atheist / Its Not Rain, God Is Spitting On Us). What triggered them?

Neil Sabatino: I suppose at that time I had a lot of traumatic events all occurring within a short period of time and I was pondering the way the universe worked. I had been skewing towards atheism since about the age of 5 and explored ideas of a belligerent hateful God and why would anyone want to worship that. I guess the songs were more my own existential crisis being talked out through song. At the time those songs were me growing up and realizing there isn’t always happy endings and it’s a lot of hard work to heal and mend relationships not thoughts and prayers.

Robert Pally: What keeps the band together?

Neil Sabatino: Well I think too many cooks in the kitchen is the biggest killer of any band. I think a willingness to sometimes lead and sometimes be led is one of the most important things. As I get older I think you find there are some people you play with that are all about just creating a good vibe and doing what’s best for the music and that’s the kind of players you want to play with. When you find a group of people you are on the same wave length with and it’s not a struggle with every new song, that’s the kind of group you want to strive to play with.

Robert Pally: Best-selling album so far?

Neil Sabatino: I think because we pre-date the streaming era and were actually selling CD’s for a while it’s hard to tell but our 2008 album «Transcendence» was probably one that made us the most fans that continued to follow the band but now with each album we reach exponentially more people through radio, streaming services, and sync licenses. Like if you asked which album made you the most money it’d be the ones that less people heard because we were selling CD’s for $10 each instead of having that same album streamed for 3 cents nowadays.

Robert Pally: Biggest crowd at a show?

Neil Sabatino: At some of our very early shows we played sold out rooms in front of 500 or more people with bands like Nada Surf, Ted Leo, among others and others, but we were not very good and I wouldn’t consider those our best shows. I think once we hit our stride of playing at a higher level and drawing our own crowd the shows in front of a sold-out crowd of 250 at spots like Maxwells in Hoboken NJ were better for us because people were there to see us.

Robert Pally: Best gig?

Neil Sabatino: Towards the end of our playing out live days we were playing smaller bars but we ran the shows and ran the sound. Live recordings from those are on some of our best of collections and things like that. Those are the shows where I had the most fun because it was low pressure and we sounded our best. Really to me that’s more important is playing a show, sounding so good you turn someone into a fan.

Robert Pally: What bands should be on a tribute album for Fairmont?

Neil Sabatino: Well over the years I have asked bands on the record label I run to sing on various Fairmont songs and that was always good enough for me. Over the years a random artist or friend has covered us and I always enjoyed it. Anyone who is inspired by us, I’d love to hear their cover.

Robert Pally: Internet: blessing or curse for Fairmont?

Neil Sabatino: It’s been a blessing for a small band like this because we have been heard by way more people than we could ever reach through touring.

Robert Pally: What triggered «Everyone Hates a Critic» from «Transcendence» (2008)?

Neil Sabatino: We had started hiring a publicist to work on our records from around 2004 and moving forward. We had worked extremely hard on our 2007 record «Wait and Hope». Completely revamped our sound, I took vocal lessons, the bass player took bass and vocal lesson, our drummer played every show with a metronome and we put it out there expecting the world. Our previous publicist babied us and made sure any reviews we got were glowing otherwise she didn’t pursue them. Our newest publicist in 2007 just kind of blindly sent it out and got us trashed in some very big publications. I just always felt the writers who reviewed us never understood what we were going for. I always tried to be original and I just created what I created. It was always the best I could do at the time. It felt unfair that some 60-year-old guy was judging the work of a 20 something kid.  

Robert Pally: What elements must a good (indie) rock song have?

Neil Sabatino: There’s so many things. It’s the timbre of the vocal and emotion behind it, the meaning of the lyrics, the feel and groove of the rhythm section, the tone of the guitar, etc. But it’s all preference, there are simple songs that people can listen to a thousand times and then a complex well thought out opus that nobody cares about. Whatever you consider «good» may not be good to anyone else. There is so much out there nowadays that people should just listen to what they think is good and not worry about who else is a fan of it.

Robert Pally: Members come and go in Fairmont. Do you constantly look out for new inspiration?

Neil Sabatino: Well again, Christian Kisala has been my consistent writing partner since 2008’s «Transcendence» and I feel like every year I hand him some demos and we turn them into something we consider to be a pretty good indie rock album. My inspiration is usually just listening to music non-stop of every era and taking the bits I like and making it my own. As an artist, I don’t know why, I just feel this internal need to create and it won’t matter whether the result is glory or catastrophe. But it will go on until I’m dead I suppose.

Robert Pally: I got the impression that you mix your singing voiced a little bit in the background or at least use sometimes filters. Don’t you like your voice or is there another reason for that?

Neil Sabatino: I completely hate my voice, I’d prefer to sound like David Bowie but alas I do not. This has become one of the issues with mixing and producing my own records is that I sometimes feel no matter what my voice is too loud in the mix. I try my best to remain objective but occasionally yes, the result is my vocals being not pushed up to the front of the mix like a traditional singer songwriter. I’m fine with that, but I completely understand the comment, I’m always worried my vocals are annoying.

 

Mint 400 Records:

Robert Pally: Why did you start Mint 400 records in 2007?

Neil Sabatino: I needed a record label for Fairmont’s records when in 2007 we had regained rights to all of our albums and needed them distributed. It just snowballed from there.

Robert Pally: What is the philosophy of the label? I

Neil Sabatino: just wanted to put together a collection of musicians and albums that I enjoyed and get them out to a wider audience.

Robert Pally: Do you have a label music style?

Neil Sabatino: I think majority of the label falls under the umbrella of «indie» so I think I just have this aesthetic in my head that all the music must be. I did start a sub-label for jazz and instrumental which is slightly different than the main label but overall, I think the label represents what I consider to be high standards for songwriting and musical ability and I help promote that.

 

New album:

Robert Pally: «I Wish I Was Stupid»? is your 13^th album. Do you believe in bad luck?

Neil Sabatino: No, I wouldn’t say that and more and more I think people make their own luck with their own choices. I am superstitious though with things that are beyond my own control but luckily 13 is a lucky number of mine, my anniversary date and my first born’s birthday date.

Robert Pally: What triggered the album title «I Wish I Was Stupid»?

Neil Sabatino: There is actually an old graphic novel titled that of these absurd Japanese comics. The title just hit me when I heard it. I loved it. Stupid people are so happy in their stupidity especially in this day and age. If I was stupid I wouldn’t worry every minute of every day about what is the meaning of life and the universe and everything. You know ignorance is bliss and all that…  

Robert Pally: Everybody says that their current album is their best. You say that «Transcendence» (2008) is the best you have in you. How come?

Neil Sabatino: I would say that is not my personal opinion, I just think the Transcendence album is very pop and accessible, very clean production and lots of harmonies. I always think my current album is my best album too because I used the journey of all the previous albums to get to this point. But I realize music listeners are on their own journey, they may not be in the same mindset or enjoy the influences of my current work. However, I don’t really care, this is the album I wanted to make.

Robert Pally: What ideas / wishes have you fulfilled on your new album that you could not on your first album «Pretending Greatness Is Awaiting» (2001)?

Neil Sabatino: I think one thing I used to think about songwriting was that you had to surprise the audience with the chorus, it had to be very different than the verse and you couldn’t just be subtle and create a good groove that doesn’t really venture or stray from that. I think I made an album that I would listen to this time around where as in the past I didn’t have the capacity to do that. I feel it has influences from a wide range of genres.

Robert Pally: Is there a main theme on «I Wish I Was Stupid»?

Neil Sabatino: I think it’s theme is from a place of the older musician saying «I told you so» to younger musicians, maybe even to my younger self. Sometimes I don’t even know how I write these songs, it’s like I just start playing them and singing along and within a few minutes they are written. It’s sort of my subconscious spitting everything out and then deciphering what it means later. Like I could go lyric by lyric and tell you the thought process behind it but I’d hate to bore your readers. I’d rather listeners derive their own meaning from my songs anyway.

Robert Pally: What triggered the song «Oracle»?

Neil Sabatino: It’s kind of weird right? I wanted a big 60’s Arabian sounding musical number that was set to a rhumba beat. Lyrically it’s just saying I don’t want to cause anyone trouble, I want the people I love to love me back and keep this moment frozen in time until it’s time to shuffle off this mortal coil. I think it’s about hoping your kids find some peace of mind as it’s something I’ve struggled to find my whole life. Is that stupid? Like I said, I write this stuff out like jibberish as I write the song and then try to make it make sense after the fact. The oracle part is about wishing you knew ahead of time every bad thing so you could prepare for it so life offers no surprises, which would be boring but tranquil.

Robert Pally: Which is your favorite song on «I Wish I Was Stupid»?

Neil Sabatino: That’s like asking me to choose between my children. I’m not sure, I like the styles I chose to represent but I suppose «Remedy» stuck out to me as an important song in my catalog.

Robert Pally: There is a great cover of David Bowies «Ashes To Ashes» on your new album. What does he mean to you?

Neil Sabatino: The record label had an 80’s comp coming out and the song «Ashes To Ashes» was what I chose to cover for the compilation knowing it also would appear on the album. I’ve loved Bowie since I was in high school. The way he could be a musical chameleon and how his songs almost seem ridiculous if anyone but him is singing them.

 

Personal:

Robert Pally: What means success to you?

Neil Sabatino: I suppose being satisfied would mean success, however I am not yet satisfied. Someone recently said the artist is like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill forever knowing it will never get to the peak and rest. I’m fine with that.

Robert Pally: Is rejection a driving force for you?

Neil Sabatino: It used to be, not so much anymore. The more you get to know people and the stuff they worship in life the more you realize that rejection isn’t so bad, depending on who’s doing the rejecting.

Robert Pally: What was the hardest rejection from a record label?

Neil Sabatino: I just wanted to be part of the club but once I started my own «club» I realized that was much better for me. I wanted to lead and not follow. Every rejection sucks, I think I took them all with a grain of salt and moved on to the next one. For the whole time I did Fairmont we were on a record label, just my ego when I was younger believed I deserved much more than I was being offered.

Robert Pally: What are your personal values?  

Neil Sabatino: If you are an artist just make art and don’t worry about the rest. You push it out into the world and it may be loved, hated or ignored but you did it. The art is the journey, everything after that is gravy.

Robert Pally: Creating as a necessity / way of life?

Neil Sabatino: I’d say for me I’m always drawing or making music and I’d be doing that even if I was on a desert island by myself. I try to look for those kinds of people for my record label and I have come across and amazing bunch of them.

Robert Pally: You (almost?) completely live the DIY attitude. How come?

Neil Sabatino: You ever hear the saying if you want something done right, do it yourself. It’s unfair to have lofty expectations and to put them on someone else to fulfill for you. Now in life we all may come to a point where we cannot break beyond a certain point and we reach out to those who can help achieve larger goals and that’s fine but that should be a situation where you are grateful for the effort and not expectant of guaranteed results especially in any creative field

Robert Pally: How do you make a living?

Neil Sabatino: I have been in special education for over 24 years. I currently am an art & graphic design teacher for a special education school district.

 

Discography:

-Pretending Greatness is Awaiting (2001)

-Anomie (2003)

-Hell is Other People (2005)

-Wait & Hope (2007)

-Transcendence (2008)

-Destruction Creation (2010)

-The Grand and Grandiose (2013)

-8½ (2015)

-A Spring Widow (2017)

-We Will Burn That Bridge When We Get To It (2018)

-Liminal Spaces (2020)

-Recluse Jamboree (2023)

-I Wish I Was Stupid (2024)

 

https://fairmontmusic.com/