There is... a greater sense of divine purpose when we're playing at all-Christian rock shows. In clubs or bars, we know that the audience primarily came to see a show, so we try not to get preachy and instead let the music do most of the talking.
So I came home and I had a resume and everything, but the only job experience I had was just playing in bars and clubs on my summers off. So, I was temping and stuff during the day and playing music at night.
As much as we love playing the small clubs, we'd really like to get ourselves in front of a larger audience. I'm not talking about arenas or anything, but nice theaters and larger clubs.
Jay Z in many ways is a rock artist. In the sense that they've used hard rock, punk rock, psychedelic rock aesthetics and influences in their music. When you see Kanye West, he has a full band playing. Jay Z has a full band playing with Marshalls.
I was a standup comic, which doesn't necessarily mean you interact with people all that much. In fact when I did shows, I wouldn't talk to the audience very much. Then my friend offered me a radio show, and I thought, you know, I'll try talking to people and see what kind of interviewer I was.
It came from my mother. She was a singer, and literally every day of the week she sang at a different club in a different genre of music: country, R&B clubs, jazz clubs, church on Sunday morning where she was the music director, pop hits, soft rock. I grew up listening to all this music, so it was never one thing for me.
Most of the network television audience now is primarily women, but I think that's because the shows are developed to appeal to women. I don't know that there are too many shows that appeal to guys anymore. I'm not sure why that is, but I think that it may have something to do with the fact that most development staffs are women.
You know, fame is a funny thing, man, especially, you know, actors, musicians, rappers, rock singers, it's kind of a lifestyle and it's easy to get caught up in it - you go to bars, you go to clubs, everyone's doing a certain thing... It's tough.
Almost all the bars in Southeast Asia are lady bars. The listener and participants who interact and frequent the clubs are exclusively male who become actively involved with the ladies, not the music. Coming to them to listen only to the music is not what people do.
What I miss from the States, I guess, is going to museums and to see small rock shows in small bars. We don't have that in Hong Kong. Unfortunately because the property market is so high, all rent is so expensive, they can't afford to have a rock music bar because those things don't make a lot of money, and they're paying a lot of rent.
What I try to get beyond is playing music at people and, instead, to play music with people because audience members are constantly part of the experience. What they say in their body language, what they say in their eyes, what they sing with me... it's an 'us,' and there's a communication that's like... it's like church, man.
My faith plays a big part in who I am: a Christian guy playing pop-rock music. I'm in a pop-rock band, not a Christian band.
When I'm representing my music live I think of it very much in a rock band sense. When I first started doing festivals in the 90s there really weren't other DJs playing the stages I was playing. So I felt I was being afforded an opportunity to kind of make a statement about what DJ music can be live. In the 90s, if you were a DJ you were in the dance tent, and you were playing house music and techno music. There was no such thing as a DJ - a solo DJ - on a stage, after a rock band and before another rock band: that just didn't happen.
Positively, he [Heidegger] shows that the prospect of death doesn't of itself destroy all possibilities of meaning but calls instead for these to be relocated from fantasies about a future post-mortem life. However, I don't think he does enough in this work to show that this relocation has - I believe - a primarily ethical character (in Levinas's sense of 'ethical').
Even though you're in charge, you're not completely in ownership. You know, the audience takes a huge ownership of your show. Look at comments about shows and tell me if I'm wrong. Look at shows like 'The Walking Dead' and the ownership that the audience has of that show.
If you're playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you're playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience's expectations. What I'm battling all the time is complacency in the audience. I try to bring a little mystery to what might happen because that engages people more.
You can really bring so much more to rock'n'roll. Rock'n'roll is the most accepting, is the most fertile ground for creating hybrid forms of music and hybrid forms of show, if you draw from many, many different wells. It's just unfortunate so many rock'n'roll stars only bother to learn how to play like Led Zeppelin and/or the Rolling Stones and that's what you get, disc after disc and show after show.