Most of his new songs deal with some kind of loss, and several fall into the ballad spectrum circa early 2000s, such as “My Kind of Crazy,” “Time of Our Lives” and “Just Tell Me.” In the song, he assumes everyone wants to go to heaven but points out that most of us are going to hell.
He says he was going through a breakup when he wrote it. He wrote it at John Denver’s studio in Malibu. Track 3, “Go to Hell,” seems to capture Scantlin's religious beliefs. “Everyone had their own little story,” he says. They were sitting around the room, sharing tales of misery. Scantlin says he put the song together with a few other songwriters, Christian Stone and Doug Ardito and a mystery woman named Leann. The chorus is basically, “Uh oh, I fucked up again” repeated more times than anyone has said it over the years. It’s also a radio-friendly ballad and seems to be the unofficial anthem to Scantlin’s life. “Uh Oh” brings to mind “She Hates Me” from the band’s first album. Over a three-year period, the same publication claims that Scantlin had “thrown things at audience members, destroyed his band’s instruments and been alleged to have drunkenly lip-synced a concert in Ohio.” He once had a standoff with 30 armed police officers, according to an Aug. He’s been picked up for disorderly conduct and driving under the influence. He was arrested for missing a court date and on a couple of charges for domestic abuse and felony vandalism after he allegedly attacked his ex-wife, dragged her across the floor and swung a sledgehammer at his neighbor’s brick wall. He’d been rocking a courtroom since 2012. “It’s a blessing from God,” Scantlin says. He’s also releasing Puddle of Mudd’s fifth studio album, Welcome To Galvania, next month and will be performing on Thursday night at the House of Blues in Dallas to support it. He’s finishing sets and having a blast onstage with a few new playmates, including Matt Fuller, Dave Moreno and Michael Adams. Now Scantlin says he’s walking a new road and trying to change his rock star life. Scantlin was onstage at Trees, singing “She Hates Me” when he stopped midway through the song, said a few words to the drummer and walked off stage and through a crowd that seemed to say collectively, “Come on, man.” He handled his walk off far better than he did a few years earlier at Trees when he had a meltdown onstage, threw his microphone and a beer at the audience and tried to fight a few crew members.
The group was last in Dallas in April 2017. Billboard reported that the audience was berating Scantlin for his performance. “This guy stole my house,” he said, dropping the mic and taking a few minutes to put on his black leather jacket and walk off stage in a video viewed more than 200,000 times on YouTube.Ī couple of months later, his band abandoned him onstage at a concert in Doncaster, England. In January 2016, about 45 minutes into Puddle of Mudd’s set at the Adelphia Music Hall in Ohio, Scantlin singled out a fan who’d been laughing at him. He didn’t handle his rock stardom well and left a slew of headlines in his wake. As the lead singer for Puddle of Mudd, he followed the well-worn footsteps of many rock stars: booze, drugs, jail. It has been a long road to sobriety for Wes Scantlin.