Live members Ed Kowalczyk and Chad Taylor discussed the band’s reunion, and now former replacement singer Chris Shinn in a new Rolling Stone interview.
Taylor discussed the band’s time with Shinn, “It was like I was in the Twilight Zone. If anything really stands out for me, I remember playing a show somewhere in the Midwest, and we were in the breakdown portion of ‘Lightning Crashes,’ where the crowd will typically take over the song and sing. And I looked over to the center of the stage and literally thought to myself, ‘Who the fuck is that guy standing there?’ At that moment, I knew that, OK, this is bizarre. It definitely started this spiritual thing in me where I was like, ‘I haven’t done the heavy lifting and the hard work of forgiveness.’ I hadn’t tried to reach out. I hadn’t done all the important things that had to happen – regardless of the music – as men.
As people who grew up together. And I think it was like a dawning. I was standing onstage and thought, ‘I need to start to build this bridge back to Ed.’ Because the truth is if you hang onto that stuff it erodes you. And it takes away from the music. When Ed and I were talking, one thing he learned from playing the songs on his own, when he was solo, was that the they didn’t need a band. They have a life of their own. And I experienced the same thing. But there is a different magic when you put all the pieces together.”
Kowalczyk said he hadn’t listened to Live’s record they did with Shinn, and said that the reunion process took time.
“It took a while – I’m not gonna kid you,” Kowalczyk said. “It was a process that was years in the making. But then once we really connected, it was this incredible full-circle thing. I could look back and say, ‘Yeah, I wish that hadn’t happened.’ But life’s not like that. Life takes turns. There are forks in the road.”
“There’s certainly a lot of things I regret,” Taylor adds. “But dammit if through that adversity you don’t find yourself recharged in terms of coming together and making music. And if we hadn’t aired our grievances, slinged mud, whatever, I don’t know if we would be here, together, now.”
