"Oor Magazine" Interview - May, 2003 Translated by Wendy van Stroe of Holland. "Proof-read" by NectarDan. Birds of Pray is the title of the new cd by Live. But lock those prejudices in the closet some longer. Ed Kowalczyk is done. Done looking for the "higher", done with the big gestures, done spreading universal messages, done with wanting to hug the world. Lives frontman became father of his daughter and put his yearning for spirituality numb. Ed is ready to rock. Just as in the "old" days. Ojai, hidden between the mountains and the green hills of CA, at about a good hour drive from the treacherous and shallow metropole LA, looks at first sight as one of those eversleeping villages America has numerous. In Ojai everybody knows everyones first name and the sherrif asks the baker about his wife and his wellbeing, the begonia's look nice in mainstreet. The sun is shining and the smell off nature is withdrawing the scent of pick-up trucks. Ojai, Smallville USA at it's best. But if you scrape off thayt thin layer of shine will find a town where anticulture was always welcomed with open arms. Ed Kowalczyk, 12 year singer of Live and father to Ana Sophia, is sitting at the terrass of sunbathing Local Hero Book Cafe, enjoying his large cup of coffee. Under baseball cap is his old new hairdo: a shaved head with a ratstail at the back of the head. He and his wife Erin moved up here because they didn't want their daughter to grow up in LA. "It may seem boring and common over here, but anti-culture thrived here in this town. Aldous Huxley used to live here, writer of 'Brave New World' and 'Doors of Perception'. And John Lennon used to even hid out here for the FBI, a couple of years before he was murdered". While I was driving up there I got the chance to listen to Birds of Pray. Just like with your hairdo you seem to have returned to the early days, days of Throwing Copper. Ed Kowalczyk: "Absolutely. In the band (which is also Chad Taylor on guitar, Patrick Dahlheimer on bass and Chad Gracey on drums) there was a yearning to get back to basic. The songs had the need to sound organical, vent though with fat guitar riffs, almost symphonical, but really natural. We recorded this record on tape again, as where we got used to work on a more digital level the past few years. Which also made the songs sound more organic." On your previous record "V" you experimented with everything you could possibly think of... rap, indian music, electronics. "Well, at that time I had a good friendship with Tricky, so I had no other choice then experimenting with electronics (laughs). But Birds of Pray is rather different from 'V'. Melodicwise I still think it's something people would expect from Live. But sonicwise, in the sense that we're using more guitars, we're back to the band we were in the Throwing Copper days." The experiments with the music didnít feel like they belonged to Live. Came across as a forced will for renewal. "NO, not my point of view on that one. I had fun doing it: some things turned out good, others didnít apparently (laughs). When we made 'V' it felt good to broaden our horizon. When you play Secret Samadhi, The Distance To Here and V after one another, you will hear we more and more left from the classic guitar sound which got us known in the first place. We got kind of bored with that approach. Buit if you return back to it after a couple of years you go wondering why you left it in the first place, that's how good it feels." Life refound its youth. "It sure feels like it. When we got back as a band and decided to let go of the synthesizers, the loop and all that other shit, we rediscovered the magic of the way of working we had in the early days. Like we know again how cool a guitar can sound, the excitement is back completely. When you're in a band for twelve years, it's inevitable that you return to your roots, your principles of the early days and get all excited about them again. A band has to get thru that process I think to keep it interesting for themselves. We kind of lost our essence. When you do something in the same way for a long time like we do..the same guys and the same instruments....with 'V' we wanted to do things different obviously. The recording process had to be new and fresh and not normal, had to be." The new album hasn't been recorded with your regular producer Jerry Harrison, but with Jim Wirt, know for "Incubus" and "Hoobastank". What did he add to this record? "This time we spent a lot of time along with Jim crafting the sound, more then we have ever done before even. With that I mean taking time to find the right sound. As far as this way of working goes, Jim and us were all at the end of the spectre. We used to do it this way: we tuned our guitars once, recorded the song once or twice and then we tuned our guitars again to record the next song. Jim made us tune our guitars every thirty seconds, sort of speak. He was totally getting on my nerves (laughs) 'Are you completely insane? We're a fucking rockband!' I never ever had to tune my guitar that much. And he went on and on 'Trust me, just trust me'. The current single Heaven for example, has become a warm bed for ten layers of guitar that are all balanced perfectly. And I must say, it sounds like a symphony. His production way really makes the difference. So even though we went back to our roots, this record is more 'produced' then ever." Writing songs you still do pretty much by yourself? "Give or take one or two songs, but the rest I wrote yeah, but arranging and recording was more a group thing then the past couple of years. Especially the past album was, recording-wise, a madhouse. We were never in the studio as a band, everybody recorded their piece. When you listen to Birds of Pray on the other hand, you wouldn't say that writing and recording were two individual processes, so many things all of us brought into it. There's another parallel to Throwing Copper: I wrote again pretty much all, but you can hear we put our heart and soul into that record. 'V' is to me the only Live-album we actually used to abuse for the wildest experiments in the studio. Felt like splashing paint on canvas. This time we were dedicated as a band, the four of us wanting to make a good album." The lyrics are not as heavy this time, no more shoving your messages into the listener's heads. "I agree. My lyrics are obviously dominated by personal thoughts, ideas and experiences. They're about individual happiness, I don't need to make these huge statements anymore about the worlds existance. 'Bring The People Together' and 'What Are We Fighting For' are the only two politically influenced songs. Ninety percent is personal. Has to do everything with the birth of my daughter. 'Everytime I See Her Face' and 'Heaven' are about her in a direct way. I really felt I had to express my personal feel of what I experienced the past five, six years. Six years ago I moved from the East coast to the West coast, it's like entering a whole new world. The transformation I went through, leaving my birthplace, my house, leaving my family and having to do everything by myself, that story is what I want to tell with this album." What did the move do for you? "It opened up my life to natural beauty. I love it out here, the huge mountains, the clear blue sky. The earth controls us here, where on the East coast it seems like people rule there. Makes one feel smaller here, you're part of nature instead of dominating it or ruling it. You're more aware of the fact that youíre just dust in the athmosphere here. Makes one humble. Worries about making albums aren't that up front when I am here. Which also lead up to the organic character of 'Birds of Pray'. I just sat down and wrote what came to mind, like a journal almost. It's my view on relationships, happiness, losing and gaining it again. My moving out here has made me turn into me, where on 'The Distance To Here' I aimed for the big gestures, the universal messages and means if you wish. That was fun and was how I felt at that time, but the new album aims for intimacy and simplicity." With the new lyrics the new album is more easy to handle then? "When my big gestures find a soil to grow up on, as happened with 'They Stood Up For Love' when we were playing in South Africa, a country that still has to battle with it's apartheids past and that is torn by racial strengths, it still feels good. In general you can say that in a country without struggle and poverty people wouldn't embrace a song like 'They Stood Up For Love' in the same way. I agree with you that by being more simple, smaller in a way a lot of people will appreciate this album easier." Is that a thing that grew on you, that big gestures and universal messages don't work so well in countries which aren't that struggling? "Yes, look at 'Overcome'. We always used to write songs like that. Our music always had... don't want to call it spiritual, cause that sounds dumb, but I always tried to create some depth in my lyrics. 'Overcome' got this really heavy load by the attacks on 9/11, it struck some people by what happened. I was always struggling or fighting some apocalypse, every couple of months there was something happening that was really fundamental and completely disrupted my life. I am not only big gestures, thereís always something in my lyrics that is really small, personal and human. This album is for the first time not: Don't you all.......can't you all see me...can't we all just get along.." Why wasn't there an urge for that now? "I used to write about the world's well-being, partly cause we used to travel so much, especially with 'The Distance To Here' we got this international audience. The platform I got because of that offered me the oppportunity to spread my ideas about the unversilality of man, that were more the same then different. And that was the message I could spread around the globe, for the first time since Live's beginning." Did your daughter overrule the evangelist in you? "Appears to be that way, we haven't toured for quite some time, for once in a decade I had a year off to do absolutely nothing except for watching my daughter crawling around and watching the trees grow. My daughter changed me. 'Heaven' personifies the meaning of the album. It's very explicit in a way, I have always been searching for something spiritual, I always battled the big questions about life, God and religion. The lyrics of 'Heaven' are about my daughter ending my search for spirituality. A birth is so non-abstract, so real and touchable. It's really easy to abstracise concepts about spirituality, God and love. These are concepts, not reality. At their best they are potential reality, but they are still thoughts. The birth of my daughter kind of teminated my adolescent search for God or the higher, that lasted about ten years." You call your own search adolescent? "Because I realize now that my search was kind of childish and ridiculous. There is enough God in everything that is among us, what's the use in constantly searching for him? I used to torture myself with it. Everytime I forced myself to go into a bookstore and find some religious writings that would possibly have the answer. This week I was a Zen-buddhist, the next week I jumped on Tibetan Buddhism. Like a bouncing ball I went from here to there. I don't want to say I found God now, but since I became a father I became much more real as a person and I live more from one moment to another. I grew up. Jerry Harrison told me once when I was nineteen years old: 'Be careful, cause living in a Rock & Roll band is like a prolonged adolescence. You grow up, but at the same time not really. You move from your parents house to the road managers tour bus. It takes longer to learn lifes lessons because of the fabricated environment." Both feet on the ground firmly? "Absolutely. Thatís why this new record feels so earthly to me. I am happy now. Happy instead of hippy. I am a happy hippy with a oh so cool guitar sound (laughs). I don't meditate anymore, gave up on yoga. I sit still every now and then, but that's it. Stretching and bending is only short before a show. Even when I was supposedly meditating I only thought of the shopping I had left to do. If you can't find God when you're walking on the streets, then how could you find him sitting still with your feet all bent up?" You call your search ridiciulous just now, but it was the "face" of Live for the past decade. "I know, a decade! Okay, I admit it is really easy to call it 'ridiculous', but that's not really fair. A search for the higher is okay, as long as it doesn't take too long. And that's the way it felt. For me it's a closed book. Again, I am not saying I found the higher now, cause the 'higher' is the big unknown and unthinkalbe entity, so what is there to find? This morning I found a cup of coffee in my kitchen. You will never find 'it'. For years my mistake wasn't the search at itself, cause way too many people buy that 'bullshit', it's positive to not be satisfied with that and search for something bigger and higher. My mistake was to distillate an abstract concept from my search and try and host all my life in it. Now I find happiness in each day, moment to moment. The yearning to want to discover something more between earth and sky was good, but it shouldn't get the upper hand, in which you do nothing more then searching." Did you have the feeling you just kept searching and didn't find anything? "Yes, was wearing me out, I used to talk about it a lot, but in reality I was running away from life. The past year I got more in contact with the present, the moment I'm in now. That's why the new record isn't ruled by the almost agressive hunger for the higher, but it radiates satisfaction, being happy with what you got. I am no longer the fanatic Kowalczyk that has to save the world. This record is about a very personal, intimate transformation. I am happy, relaxed." How honest were you to yourself in your lyrics? "I was honest, but I realized now that my lyrics had more then one function, being filling up by the void that was created by what Live had become. We were so popular and succesfull... What I did as a person, human and artist was a direct re-reaction to the fame we gathered. I had to fill up that void." For you are you back to square one or is this the second life for Live? "When you look at our careers it's full circle again. 'V' in the USA sold about as much as of our first record, about 350,000 copies. So in that way we were back to square one. In a way I regretted that, because I would have liked it if more people would have came into contact with that record that has, in my opinion, some genius things on it. But my manager told me: 'You can also see it as a clean start. No one knows what the next of Live will be.' And I could agree with that. 'Birds of Pray' is to me a new fresh start, without people expecting anything from us. We didnít have to wrote a follow-up for a record we sold dozens of millions of copies of. It felt like a regathered feeling of freedom." Was Live caught in it's own success then? "The breakthrough of 'Throwing Copper' has been buzzing amongst the band for quite some time. Not in songwriting, but in the sense of performing. We had the idea people had some expectations and that we had to live up to them. Like we had to fill shoes that others before us with success made. For me it lasted up to this record to say: Fuck that. I am me. I couldn't handle all those expectations. For an artist that's so cruel, the feeling you have to live up to things instead of just being you. People will hear I am myself on this record. I don't care anymore if a lot or a few people buy it, I just think it's awesome that Live is capable of making such an album after twelve years. I see it as honoring the chemistry in the band and the trust we always had in each other. Cause God knows how you can go crazy. U2 had such an experience after 'The Joshua Tree' and 'Rattle and Hum', they had no idea what to do after that. I can understand that. For me there was nothing left to do then let that feeling bleed to death and then think of what my next step would be. It becomes harder and harder to get back to your roots after staying in the machinations of the music industy. I don't want to say we lost 'it', but we lost touch with it for a couple of years. This album feels like home. Back in Shit Town." © COPYRIGHT - OOR MAGAZINE - MAY, 2003