Neil Sabatino (Pencey Prep) Interview

Neil Sabatino, former guitarist in Pencey Prep, lead singer of Fairmont, and founder of Mint400 Records, was gracious enough to listen to our Pencey Prep episode and answer any and all questions we had! He was able to tell us some incredible anecdotes from his time in the band, from the recording process to his thoughts on the record today.

My Chemical Fancast: Can you tell us your story of how you ended up in Pencey?

Neil Sabatino: So I was in a punk band that played a lot with Frank's band Sector 12, he knew me for a couple years because I would book his band on shows and I always was the business person for my band band at the time. He heard I left that band and gave me a call to see if I wanted to join Pencey Prep like a month or two after he had started it. I was friends with Frank and his bandmate in Sector 12 Bruno so I was happy to join because at the time I was not in a band.

This episode (of podcast This Was The Scene) covers when I left the band in August 2001 to start the band Fairmont. It's a little long but it's basically the catalyst that lead to the band ending. I was in the band from summer 2000 through summer 2001. By that time we had written all of Heartbreak In Stereo, we had also started work on the second Pencey Prep album, which would have had the songs Home, Heroin Slow, Rebuilding Home, and Lock On The Second Floor Door. The second two I just ended up making different versions of and putting them on Fairmont's first album. Once I left the band had been itching to be a little bit heavier so they wrote Attention Reader, Death of The Lionheart and a few others within the 9 months before they officially broke up. What led to the actual final shows was Tim was having knee problems and could not tour or play drums for extended periods of time. Frank had also been playing in My Chemical Romance for months by that point and Hambone was asked to join Sleep Station so it just made sense to call it quits then. Frank, Hambone and Shaun also did a short lived Pencey reunion as I Am A Graveyard with Ray Toro on guitar and Frank just sang. I believe that was only for a few shows or one show because MCR had started to take off and they were the opener for at least one MCR show in NJ at club Krome. Hambone and Shaun played together a little in a band that later formed called The Hostage a few years later. Then Hambone joined Fairmont for 2 albums (Hell Is Other People and Wait & Hope). After that Hambone joined Frank for some touring with Leathermouth. That's been the extent of collaborations.

MCF: How did you decide on the cover art for the album? NS: We actually had this really great painting of a robot that was supposed to be the cover, it was a piece I made that was hanging in my kitchen but the owner of Eyeball thought it looked too close to The Get Up Kids album that had come out a year earlier and told us to come up with something different. I think I brought like 4 or 5 drawings to Frank and he picked the one he liked best. I definitely did it rather quickly and didn't give much thought to it. We basically only had a few days to figure the situation out.

MCF: There's some confusion among fans regarding who wrote which lyrics. Would you be able to shed light on who crafted the lyrics and/or what that writing process was like? NS: The very first songs that were Pencey Prep songs were 8th Grade and The Secret Goldfish. Those were kind of stripped down and really raw on the original demo which was called "Trying To Escape The Inevitable" (We liked that name, hence using it later on as a song title). The original demo has no lead guitar parts and the whole ending of Secret Goldfish didn't come about until later when I joined. Those two were written by Frank as Sector 12 was ending. That first version of Secret Goldfish had Bruno Rocha from Sector 12 singing on it because originally Frank didn't really want to sing. Next we did 2 songs in the studio after we had been together for about 4 months, which