Interview with Fight The Lion Lead Singer Jake Mimikos

Fight The Lion is a band from the Virginia area who are currently gearing up to play Jiffy Lube Live for the Rockstar Energy Uproar Festival. Other bands on the bill are Avenged Sevenfold, Disturbed, Seven Sour and many more. In promotion for them playing the festival on August 31st I was able to ask lead vocalist Jake Mimikos a few questions. The bands most recent album When The Mighty Fall is available on iTunes and other digital retailers.

http://www.myspace.com/fightthelionmusic

While we were recording our album we were going crazy trying to figure out a name that no one had, that sounded good and represented an overall feel of the band.  We wanted something that connected with the lyrics, our sound and our energy.  So honestly we were just throwing names out randomly and our drummer (Shawn) threw out "Fight the Lion".  At first we kind of laughed it off and went on to the next ridiculous name.  When we were leaving the studio the next day, Ron (Lead Guitar) said, FIGHT THE LION and we all looked at each other and agreed, that was it.  It represents conquering whatever it is in life that is bigger than you, your struggle and overcoming the odds.

It really depends, sometimes a riff spurs a thought and sometimes a concept inspires the music.  So really there is no set way that we write the songs; we just go with a feeling.  Often the final lyrics come last.  We will have a basic concept but it usually takes a while to make everything fit, so changes are often made.

Everyone contributes to the writing.  I usually write all of the lyrics but the others contribute some parts of the songs on occasion.  The lyrical content usually comes from true life experiences.  Musically, we all contribute.  For example, Time Taker started with a beat and we really designed the song over the drums.  Other times, Ron, Jason and I will come with a guitar riff and we build from there.

We all have a wide variety of musical influences that contribute to our sound.  Def Leppard is one of them for probably all of us.  Ron really digs Van Halen and more of the 70s rock era, Jason is all about Led Zepplin, Shawn's Idol growing up was Tommy Lee from Motley Crue and I grew up inspired by the 90s grunge like Pearl Jam and more modern progressive rock like Coheed and Cambria.  I think you can also hear influences like Stone Temple Pilots, Tool and Sound Garden.

We want our listeners to be able to hear this music doing anything. Before new technologies were introduced, music was mostly played in your car stereo. These days, the great thing is you can listen to music anywhere with your iPod. So now we hope people are able to hear our music doing just about anything. We still hope people are cruising down the highway with the windows down cranking our album and singing out loud to the music!

Well since we just released our album 'When The Mighty Fall' we will only be performing those select songs. Since this is a hard rock show we're choosing our heaviest and most rocking material we have. Two of them being 'Long Shot Kid' and 'Bleed Me Dry'. We are definitely planning on keeping the energy up! Also, we are already talking about working on new material and are excited to have some new stuff ready soon.

Shawn would be a big game fisherman in the keys.
Ron would be a flight mechanic. (his old job)
Jason would be institutionalized.
And I would be fighting lions for Sparta.

We have some big things in the works and we are definitely working on keeping this momentum going. A tour is in the works and we're planning to play as much as possible to support our album. We wanna thank all our fans for the constant support!!!