In the middle of Badflower‘s song “Snuff,” a track off their new album, No Place Like Home, the music suddenly stops and a voice-over informs you that the band wanted to sample a “popular song from the 1990s” at that moment, but were unable to get it cleared.
“Rather than risk litigation, they decided to remove the sample and insert this, instead,” the voice-over continues before the rest of the song kicks back into gear.
Speaking with ABC Audio, frontman Josh Katz shares that he came up with the idea for the voice-over as a way to express his frustration over his inability to use the sample.
“When we got our final, like, ‘No, it’s not gonna happen,’ I was just so mad, and I wouldn’t accept doing something different [or] having that spot be blank,” Katz explains. “I couldn’t sleep at night if I did that. So I had to put my final little, like, f*** you in there.”
The rest of Badflower, however, wasn’t thrilled with Katz’s workaround solution.
“I sent it in, and my band hated it,” Katz says. “And they still do. But I just told them, like, ‘I’m sorry, I have final say on this one. I can’t accept anything less than this.'”
“Like, everybody has to know that I’m mad,” he smiles. “This is how I show my anger.”
If you want to know what song Badflower had intended to sample, they do use it when they perform “Snuff” live.
“We do it the way that it’s meant to be done, that it was always meant to be done,” Katz says.
You can catch Badflower live currently on tour with 311.
No Place Like Home is out now. It also includes the singles “Paws” and “Detroit.”
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