Chris Babbitt of Taking Dawn
March 2, 2010 by TWRY Staff
Drawing influences from the Rock Gods of the 80s and early 90s ,Taking Dawn has created their own collection of infectious, in your face, rebellious rockers with their debut album “Time To Burn” on Roadrunner Records. From the fist-pumping title track to their assaulting cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” Taking Dawn mixes shredding guitars (played by frontman Chris Babbitt and childhood compadre Mikey Cross) with heavy melodic choruses beckoning back to the days of old. Rounding out the band is Andrew Cushing on bass and Alan Doucette on drums.
There’s an interesting cover on the album, not one people might expect that edged out a possible cover of W.A.S.P.’s **** Like a Beast…what lead you down the path of Fleetwood Mac?
We’re still going to do **** Like a Beast, it just wasn’t the right timing. We wanted to do the W.A.S.P song because it had to be shelved in the 80s and I think it’s the best song on that album which I think is W.A.S.P’s best album. I think that W.A.S.P stands for a lot of in the 80s what music was misconstrued to be because it’s such a hard awesome catchy record that someone might disregard as glam because they don’t know any better but it’s nothing like that. At the same time it had balls that was enough to scare people of power so to speak so I thought it would be cool for our first release to feature that. We brought it up to our producer and he wasn’t too big on it which was weird because he loves all that kind of music. I wanted him to be into it and so we looked for different options and we considered Mirror, Mirror by Def Leppard (back when they were more Maiden sounding) which is kind of our sound – early Def leppard/ Skid Row/Motley Crue meets Guns n Roses/Metallica/Megadeth so it felt like that was the common ground. The record itself had so many elements of the big harmonies and the catchy, succinct songs that were still edgy and kind of metal but rock so we thought it would fit and complement the record but we thought, what’s the point of covering something that you sound like, unless you’re going to own it. So Mike suggested The Chain by Fleetwood Mac and we thought it would be fun because it was different and brought new elements to the table while still bringing the balls to it. We get to do to that song what Metallica did for Seger which was really cool. There’s no point covering a song unless you make it your own or make it better than the original.
http://theywillrockyou.com/2010/03/chris-babbitt-dawn/