Trivia / Faith No More

• Approval of God: Lionel Ritchie was flattered by the band's cover of "Easy".
• Black Sheep Hit: "Epic" is one of the band's biggest hits (alongside "We Care a Lot", and perhaps to a lesser extent "From Out of Nowhere" and their cover of "Easy"),^note and in fact, from a technical standpoint, "Epic" is their only hit, but it leans much more towards Rap Rock/Rap Metal than the band's usual genres (and deliberately so, as in fact it was made as a parody of Red Hot Chili Peppers).
• Creator Backlash:
  • If AllMusic is to be believed, the band got such a large fandom of metalheads due to their cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" that they eventually dropped it from their live sets entirely - see Trolling Creator for how they replaced it...
  • Patton didn't care for Nu Metal very much at all and disavowed FNM's connection to the genre.
• Chart Displacement: Those who deem them a one-hit wonder due to "Epic" might be surprised that their chart-topper in the US Alternative Rock was "Midlife Crisis". Or that their highest-charting song on Mainstream Rock is the even lesser-known "Last Cup of Sorrow".
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • An early incarnation of the band was called Faith No Man, and they released a single "Quiet In Heaven/Song Of Liberty" under this name. Although a popular Faith No More related item it's never been released on CD, mainly because of the band's dislike of original singer Mike Morris.
  • Although not massively rare, their first album We Care a Lot is out of print due to rights issues and is only available on iTunes, to the point where many fans haven't heard of it. It was finally reissued in 2016.
• One-Hit Wonder: Technically speaking, "Epic" is their only huge hit. Certainly their only song a non-fan would be likely to have ever heard. That said, they had several other smaller hits, such as "We Care a Lot", "Midlife Crisis" and "Easy".
• Trolling Creator:
  • After their cover of Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" became popular, they decided to spite their new metalhead fans by covering the Commodore's "Easy" instead, followed by The Bee Gees' "I Started a Joke". Both covers are performed without a hint of irony. They released both as singles, too.
  • The band also knows a good joke on their audience when they see it. At one famous 1995 show, their opening act, noise rock band Steel Pole Bath Tub, played a set consisting of nothing but alternating covers of "Paranoid" and "Surrender" over and over again and made the audience incredibly angry as a result. Faith No More liked their opener's joke so much that they decided to continue it: When they came on stage, they opened their set...with their own version of "Paranoid" and teased the audience with its opening riff multiple times throughout the show. For their encore, they brought Steel Pole Bath Tub back on stage to play "Paranoid" for the seventh time in the show.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Geordie Walker of Killing Joke and Justin Broadrick of Godflesh were both asked to replace Jim Martin on guitar, but declined. Either one had the potential to take King For A Day... in a different direction.
  • After the band parted ways with Chuck Mosley, they asked Chris Cornell, then with Soundgarden, to try out.
  • One out of the million different singers they had for a week or two early on was Courtney Love. Who knows how that would have turned out if they got along better.
• Working Title:
  • "Ricochet" was originally "Nirvana", because they happened to write the song on the date of Kurt Cobain's death.
  • A very early, instrumental version of "Zombie Eaters" was informally titled "Surprise! You're Dead". Once Mike Patton joined the band and added lyrics, the title changed. However, Mike still liked "Surprise! You're Dead" as a title, so it ended up being used for a totally different song.
  • "Midlife Crisis" was "Madonna" after Mike's inspiration for the lyrics.
  • The working title of "The Morning After" was "New Improved Song", and it was originally played live in 1986 and recorded for Introduce Yourself, but wasn't used, ending up on a freebie record with the UK magazine Sounds in 1988. The lyrics and some music were changed after Mike Patton joined. When asked about it they have mentioned that they very often called new songs 'new song' until they thought of the lyrics, and "New Improved Song" was a way of distinguishing it from another song that was titled "New Song" at the time.
  • "The Perfect Crime" (from the Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey soundtrack) was originally recorded two years earlier as "Sweet Emotion", and this had somewhat different lyrics and tune as well as a different chorus. The original title was taken from a famous song by Aerosmith, and the original recording appeared on a Kerrang flexidisc, and the newer title "The Perfect Crime" represented the new lyrics, whereas the phrase "Sweet Emotion" never appeared in the original.
  • "Faster Disco" kept its working title, which doesn't feature in the song. The song was titled what it was because it reminded the band of "Arabian Disco" from We Care A Lot but it at a faster tempo. Similarly "R'N'R" was its own working title.
  • The compilation Cares A Lot? features such imaginatively titled tracks as "Instrumental" and "Hippie Jam Song", which were obviously never finished.
  • "Mark Bowen" is another song that ended up keeping its working title, but unlike their other examples, there was a title drop. The band wrote the song as an instrumental before Chuck Mosley joined, and as they were in the habit of giving songs Line Of Sight Names, they named it after Mark Bowen, a friend of the band who played guitar at some early shows of theirs and who they'd happened to see that day. They sent an instrumental recording to Chuck, who decided to work Bowen's name into the lyrics.