Fox 43: Members of LIVE return to York to rock the economy, featuring an video interview with Chad Taylor Options

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Members of LIVE return to York to rock the economy
Posted 10:45 PM, November 13, 2014, by Forrest Yingling, Updated at 10:53pm, November 13, 2014

The rock band LIVE hit it big in the 1990s after getting started in Central PA. Now, the founding members of the band are returning to their roots. They came back to York to write and record their new album.

FOX43 sat down with LIVE’s guitarist Chad Taylor to talk about how the band members aren’t just rocking arenas, they’re also rocking the local economy.

When you think of rock stars, you might picture them living in mansions in Beverly Hills, laying on exotic beaches, or maybe hanging out on a yacht in the Caribbean. You don’t normally picture them spending their days in a formerly abandoned warehouse in York.

However, Chad Taylor and his bandmates are the exception. The members of LIVE returned to their hometown to write, record, and produce their eighth studio album, “The Turn.”

They did it all at the Think Loud headquarters on York Street. They purchased an abandoned warehouse and renovated it with $17 million worth of work.

Taylor says, “Returning to York was not only about building a building and creating jobs, it was really coming back to where we started as artists and where we became friends and where we were raised and the values, of course, that we were raised around and I found it completely inspiring to begin to write songs from my home-base.”

The members of LIVE met in 6th grade at Edgar Fahs Smith Junior High School. Their orchestra instructor inspired them to start a band. They all graduated from William Penn Senior High School and soon began their rise to fame.

LIVE went on to sell over 20 million albums worldwide, including their eight-times platinum breakthrough album “Throwing Copper.” They had a string of chart-topping singles in the mid 90s like “I Alone,” “Lightning Crashes” and “All Over You.”

Now, after an eight-year hiatus and a new lead singer, they’re back at it. The members of LIVE met Chris Shinn in 1998 during a tour with Counting Crows. Shinn was the singer of the band Unified Theory, the opening act on the tour. It was a difficult decision for them to continue with a different singer but after getting positive reaction from fans, they went with it.

Taylor says, “Of course for us as artists there is a great challenge in honoring the history and heritage of the band and also forging new ground.”

Taylor is a man with a vision. Not just for his music, but for the city he grew up in. Being in a band shaped him into a businessman and entrepreneur. He and his bandmates started a record label called Action Front Records when they were still in high school. They sold corporate bonds to family and friends in order to finance the band. Now, Taylor is using those same skills to start and run companies.

He says, “I had no idea at the time that I was learning the skills to basically be an entrepreneur and many of those skills I employ and use on a daily basis now to create jobs and grow the economy here in our hometown.”

Think Loud Holdings consists of a variety of different businesses. The biggest company is United Fiber and Data. It’s a telecommunications and data storage provider. The company is laying high-speed fiber optic lines from New York City to Ashburn, Virginia, through the heart of Pennsylvania.

These fiber optic lines can bring the highest speed and highest bandwidth connectivity available, capable of transferring the entire Library of Congress in a matter of a few seconds. Taylor says after 9/11, the I-95/Route 1 corridor was labeled a homeland security “blast zone” or potential terrorist threat zone for America. That’s why this alternate telecommunications pathway is important.

Tech companies from around the world want to harness the capacity to have secure high speed connectivity. Taylor sees the vacant and abandoned warehouses in Central Pennsylvania as burgeoning office space.

He says, “We’ll never have the next Google or Facebook or Apple unless we have this infrastructure so it was important for me as a community leader to start to build forward-thinking and forward-leaning businesses.”

United Fiber and Data is building 3 data centers throughout the state. They will be in York, Reading and Allentown. The project will create 700 jobs in Pennsylvania and 175 jobs in York. The Think Loud projects will bring the state an estimated $2 billion in tax revenue over the next 30 years.

Taylor says, “I’m probably one of the few guys in the world that actually want to and are excited to pay their taxes because we can see that our taxes are going to help sustain the city schools where we were actually born and bred and came into our musical career. Certainly my heart is here and every future company that I’d build I’d like to headquarter here in York.”

LIVE’s new album “The Turn” is available now. You can order it from the LIVE website.

http://fox43.com/2014/11/13/members-of-liv...ck-the-economy/