"She doesn't know the animal I am when I'm drinking and using": Why Josh Todd wrote Buckcherry's Sorry to apologise to his wife

Buckcherry group portrait
(Image credit: Annamaria Disanto/Getty)

At the turn of the millennium, a betting man wouldn’t have touched Buckcherry. The Californians had enjoyed gold sales with 1999’s self-titled debut album, home to crossover hit Lit Up. But 2001 follow-up Time Bomb was a relative stiff, and the following year’s hiatus suggested a band realising the zeitgeist was against them.

“That period was when what I call ‘nerd-rock’ – y’know, the shoegazer dudes with the Buddy Holly glasses – and fuckin’ rap-rock was going on,” recalls frontman Josh Todd. “We didn’t fit into any of that.”

With their sleazeball riffs and Todd’s serpentine stage presence, Buckcherry seemed more like a glorious relic of the mid-80s Sunset Strip. Even when he and lead guitarist Keith Nelson rebuilt the line-up in 2005 with Stevie D (guitar), Jimmy Ashhurst (bass) and Xavier Muriel (drums), the industry hardly welcomed them back.

“Nobody would sign the band in the United States,” Todd remembers. “We got a small advance from a Japanese record label, and that’s how we made the 15 record [2005 in Japan]. In the States, our manager Allen Kovac said: ‘Fuck it, I’ll start my own label and we’ll put it out on that.’”

Thankfully, as an adaptable and prolific songwriter, Todd was holding a couple of aces. The first was Crazy Bitch, a leery, lascivious old-school strut seemingly designed for the stripper pole. The second was its polar opposite, Sorry, a wistful, instantly catchy country-rock ballad that Todd had initiated as a fun song to sing with his youngest daughter, then realised it was the perfect way to apologise to his wife.

Buckcherry - Sorry (Official Music Video) - YouTube Buckcherry - Sorry (Official Music Video) - YouTube
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“I met her through a photographer called Christopher Cuffaro when I was thirty,” Todd recalls. “I really like eyes, and I was just looking through his pictures and there was this girl’s face with these beautiful green eyes. I said: ‘Hey, are this girl’s eyes for real?’ And Christopher says: ‘Yeah. That’s Mitzi Martin. She’s the biggest LA-based model. I’ve known her for a long time and she’s really sweet. Do you want to meet her?’ And that started the whole thing.”

The sentiment of Sorry, Todd says, will be instantly familiar to anyone who makes their living on the road, the singer holding up his hands for not being there for his family. “You can’t really understand it unless you’re a touring musician but you’re always playing catch-up when you get home. You’re fucking exhausted and trying to squeeze all your love into your family, and you’re saying ‘sorry’ a lot for all the things you couldn’t do.”

There were also deeper reasons why Todd wanted to thank Martin for her commitment. “I’ve been sober the whole time I’ve been with my wife, but when we got together she didn’t really know the depth of dysfunction of my foundation and where I came from,” explains the singer, who remembers being a “horrible drug addict and alcoholic” in his teens and early twenties. “She doesn’t know the animal I am when I’m drinking and using. I learnt so many bad habits from childhood, and stuffed down so much shit instead of articulating it. There’s been a lot of stuff I’ve had to work through. I’m not the easiest person to deal with. I’m still a work in progress.”

Having sketched out the lyric and song structure, Todd presented Sorry to the band. “It had started out with three chords on a guitar, just a pretty song with a good melody,” he reflects. “But it wasn’t great yet. We knew it needed something. So Keith tweaked a few chords to make it sound more like a song. Marti Frederiksen [co-writer] had just come into the fold, so he changed the chorus melody a little and wrote some bridge music for me to write the words and melodies over. And boom, it happened.”

With the band’s meagre budget stretching to just 15 days for the entire album sessions (hence the title), Todd recalls spending less than two hours tracking the Sorry vocal. Yet the finished track joined Crazy Bitch to lead the 15 album campaign. It’s ironic, he concedes today, that the success of a song he wrote to apologise for being away from home so much left him facing even more road miles. “We toured almost three years on that record, put in over two hundred shows a year and we had to be everywhere at all times. There was no going home. But we were playing crazy-huge radio festivals and the crowds were insane.”

It could be argued that Sorry is an unlikely signature tune, hardly representative of Buckcherry’s feral sound. But this hard-rocking band had no problem with a ballad becoming their highest chart performer (hitting No.9 in the US).

“I have wildly different emotions,” Todd says with a shrug. “I’m a human being. And songs are emotions. They’re short stories. All of my favourite rock records had peaks and valleys. You had rockers, mid-tempo songs and ballads. It’s nice to rock people out then bring them down with that human emotion that a ballad brings out. I’ve seen some big, giant, hard, tattooed motherfuckers singing Sorry. So I know it’s touching people. I’ve also had some real out-of-body moments when we’ve played Sorry at huge venues and you just look out and see a sea of cellphone lights.”

Ultimately, he concludes, Sorry flew because everybody can relate to its themes of regret and hope for redemption.

“We all have a moment when we need to apologise for something we’ve done. We all need to humble ourselves and say we’re sorry. And especially when you’ve been in a long-term relationship, it’s really important. We’ve all fucked up in relationships. We’re not perfect. We’re human beings. I think that’s why people love Sorry.”

Buckcherry’s album Roar Like Thunder out now via Earache.


Henry Yates

Henry Yates has been a freelance journalist since 2002 and written about music for titles including The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Classic Rock, Guitarist, Total Guitar and Metal Hammer. He is the author of Walter Trout's official biography, Rescued From Reality, a music pundit on Times Radio and BBC TV, and an interviewer who has spoken to Brian May, Jimmy Page, Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie Wood, Dave Grohl, Marilyn Manson, Kiefer Sutherland and many more. 

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