Papa Roach launched “Scars” as the second single from Getting Away With Murder for the U.S. rock-radio adds week beginning November 1, 2004. The album had arrived that August, but this song put a different side of the band in front of radio listeners: a mid-tempo ballad built around Jacoby Shaddix’s singing.
Shaddix had been working toward that performance throughout the album’s recording. Producer Howard Benson put him through what the singer called “boot camp.” In a December 2004 interview with Campus Circle, Shaddix recalled singing in a dark, windowless room with candles and his lyric book, pushing until he couldn’t sing anymore. He wanted to get emotionally inside the songs, while making a record that gave Papa Roach room to explore. There was still metal on the album, he explained, but the band hadn’t set out to make every track fit that description. “Scars” was the closest they’d come to a ballad.
That approach didn’t win everyone over in the studio. According to Steve Appleford’s reporting for Metal Hammer, neither Benson nor the label was initially convinced by “Scars.” Papa Roach were pushed to record another version closer to Staind’s “It’s Been Awhile.” They tried it, but that recording never came out. The version that became a single kept the melodic direction they had been exploring.
Beneath that accessible melody, Shaddix was writing about the limits of caring for someone. When Papa Roach performed “Scars” acoustically on The Howard Stern Show in August 2005, he explained that it concerned a friend who was using drugs and the pain of watching that friend hurt himself. His explanation put a real relationship behind the song’s frustration: caring deeply while being unable to stop someone’s destructive behavior.
That emotional connection also drove a rethink of the video. Director Steven Murashige’s first clip leaned into green-screen imagery and computer animation, including metallic dragonflies. By December 2004, Shaddix was telling MTV News that the band felt the result had missed something essential. He had wanted an ambitious visual treatment, but the finished clip wasn’t communicating the feeling behind the song. “It just loses its heart,” he said of the reliance on computer effects. Papa Roach decided to make a replacement that put more emphasis on their performance. The second video followed in 2005.
A commercial single edition followed in May 2005, after the song’s rock-radio launch. “Scars” reached No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year, carrying the band’s more melodic approach into the pop chart’s top 20.
The song also became a reference point inside the band. While writing “Help” for 2017’s Crooked Teeth, Shaddix was struggling to connect his low mood with the upbeat, major-key music his bandmates had written. He told Psychology Today that bassist Tobin Esperance and guitarist Jerry Horton brought up “Scars”: they’d already made a song where bright-sounding music carried painful lyrics. They wanted his actual feelings, even if those feelings ran against the music. Shaddix went into the session and told the producer he needed help and felt overwhelmed. That conversation supplied the chorus for “Help.”
