Sebastian Bach recalls Jon Bon Jovi telling him to find his own vocal sound when he first joined Skid Row

Photo by Christopher Carroll ROCK Photography

Sebastian Bach recalls Jon Bon Jovi telling him to find his own vocal sound when he first joined Skid Row

Ex-Skid Row frontman Sebastian Bach was recently interviewed by Mitch Lafon on the podcast Rock Talk with Mitch Lafon.

Bach stated as follows about the state of new up and coming singers (as transcribed by Blabbermouth with slight edits): Maybe I haven’t heard any, but where is the new Jeff Buckley? Or where’s the new Steve Tyler? Okay, Greta Van Fleet — there’s the new Robert Plant; that’s for sure right there. But there’s a lack of original-sounding heavy metal vocalists. Unless I’m not hearing any. But I don’t know.”

“To me, when we were all starting out in the ’80s, we all knew that we had to have our own sound… That was the goal of every musician back then — because there was no such thing as Pro Tools or computers. I had to find my own vocal sound, of Sebastian Bach. And I was even working on that… Even when I first got in Skid Row, Jon Bon Jovi said, ‘Sebastian, sometimes you sound like Vince Neil, sometimes you sound like [Ronnie James] Dio, sometimes you sound like [Rob] Halford, sometimes you sound like Neil Diamond.’ [Laughs] He goes, ‘You have to find your own sound.’ And it freaked me out. I was, like, ‘Fuck! I have to do this, like, right now!’ [Laughs] I have to find what is the Sebastian Bach vocal sound.”

“Making the first Skid Row record, my two favorite singers were Rob Halford and Steve Perry, and if you listen to ’18 And Life’, you can hear the influence,” Bach added. ‘You can hear ‘I Remember You’ is influenced by Journey, the vocals. I can hear it — maybe you can’t, but I can hear it.”

You can read the rest of the transcribed interview at Blabbermouth.