Tobin Esperance was born on November 14, 1979. As Papa Roach’s bassist and a songwriter, he helped build songs from ideas that could begin on a keyboard as readily as a guitar. “Last Resort,” from the band’s 2000 album Infest, started with a piano figure he brought to the group.
His connection with Papa Roach began before he became a full member. Recalling those early days in a 2015 interview with The AU Review, Esperance said he had met and played with the musicians as a teenager. He was eager to find people who shared his appetite for making music and throwing themselves into a performance. The group’s previous bassist had inspired him, too. Esperance joined in 1996, entering a band that was still working out how to turn its mix of hardcore, hip-hop and other influences into memorable songs.
That willingness to move between musical ideas helped produce “Last Resort.” Guitarist Jerry Horton told Ultimate Guitar in 2022 that the band transposed Esperance’s piano part onto guitar after hearing him play it. They worked through demos, including one recorded at NRG Studios in Los Angeles. Horton remembered the recording coming together quickly once they had established the guitar sound. It was an early example of Esperance’s writing reaching beyond his bass parts: he supplied a melody, and the band found the instrument and arrangement that made it work.
By the making of The Connection, released in 2012, his portable writing setup was helping shape the recordings themselves. Esperance carried a laptop and small keyboard while traveling, building sketches that the band could develop later. “I am usually the one who kickstarts the initial writing process,” he told PopCultureMadness in an interview excerpted by Blabbermouth. Some electronic elements survived from those early sketches into the finished album. Others became starting points for arrangements the musicians pulled apart and rebuilt.
The sessions gave those ideas room to develop. Working in their own studio with producer James Michael, a friend before the project began, Papa Roach had time to experiment. Esperance described conversations about the album before recording started, followed by sessions that accommodated both prepared material and spontaneous playing. That combination meant the record could preserve something from a laptop demo while also leaving space for a song to emerge in the room.
His working relationship with vocalist Jacoby Shaddix involved revisions in both directions. In a March 2015 interview with Myglobalmind, Esperance described supplying instrumental demos that Shaddix would revisit while developing lyrics. The musicians then offered feedback on the words, just as the singer responded to the music. Esperance sometimes changed his arrangements to make them fit the lyrics more closely.
That flexibility carried into F.E.A.R., released in 2015. For those sessions, Papa Roach went to Las Vegas without completed songs and wrote as they recorded. In an interview published by Metalorgie that January, Esperance described a departure from their previous habit of playing together for hours to discover material. The process separated writing and arranging from the final performance: they used programmed drums to build demos, settled the song structures and added lyrics, then recorded live drums.
