Men With A Message

10/15/1999 4:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Gail Worley

Live's charismatic singer-songwriter, Edward Kowalczyk, is reluctant to take on the guise of New Age Pop Guru. Nevertheless, the allegiance to a spiritual path that permeates his lyrics is so deeply enmeshed with his being that it is, in fact, written on his body. When I first met Ed, at New York City's Irving Plaza, I noticed a written passage tattooed on the back of his neck. I asked him what the writing was, and what it meant. "It's Sanskrit for 'the incarnation of the heart,'" he said. "Actually, it's the mantra for a teacher that I follow." Other than that, Kowalczyk, 28, "a self-proclaimed spiritualist," politely declines to reveal the specifics of his personal practices.

"I really am a firm believer that all paths lead to the truth, in its various forms. I've really tried in my lyrics over the years to keep that universal quality on the forefront of what we're doing. It's so important, at this moment in history, that people begin to see the similarities between things rather than the differences." Maintaining a universal message of love and the quest for truth that would not be filtered through his own belief system "was a big goal" in Kowalczyk's approach to writing the songs that constitute The Distance To Here, Live's fourth full-length album.

In this interview, Kowalczyk spoke from his home in Los Angeles about the new ground Live cover on The Distance To Here, while reflecting on the band's great success with its sophomore release, the multi-platinum Throwing Copper, and the less-than-stellar reception given to its follow-up, 1997's intensely personal Secret Samadhi.

LAUNCH:
How were you first attracted to a spiritual path, and how did you start to integrate that spirituality into the music of Live?

ED:
It probably happened some point around the age of 18. I started getting into all kinds of Eastern thought and spiritual teachings. I'm one of these guys who's been going on this journey for a long, long time. I have worked really hard, on this record in particular, to make [the lyrics] universal and to have the whole world be able to hear these songs and find something in there for themselves. It's a lesson that I learned, actually, from the last record. What I'm most interested in as a lyricist is communicating fundamental emotion and humanity. On The Distance To Here I was really focused on wanting my lyrics to communicate as much of my message--which I feel is ultimately universal and uplifting--but I want to do it in a way that people from Sri Lanka, Australia, Chicago, or Germany can all get something from it.

LAUNCH:
Live enjoyed phenomenal success with Throwing Copper, yet Secret Samadhi was, relatively speaking, a disappointment. What are your thoughts on why that record failed to go all the way for Live, and also, what did the band gain from doing that record?

ED:
The use of the word "samadhi" [a state of meditation] was something that was so personal to me, but it did in some sense distance us from a large portion of the population that doesn't necessarily know what that word means. The record was never designed, conceptually or in any facet, to be a Throwing Copper Part Two, which is what people wanted. It was really a record that we needed to make as a band at the time, that we felt we needed to do to grow as musicians and songwriters. I, personally, as a lyricist, was kind of hiding for awhile from the "man with the message" persona that I had come into with Mental Jewelry and Throwing Copper. I think it was a growth record. It was a band searching to find a level of comfort in itself.

LAUNCH:
How do you see The Distance To Here as compared to your previous work?

ED:
The Distance To Here is such an accomplishment for Live. It seems that we've been able to find a place in ourselves that is comfortable being Live. There's a tremendous energy; at the same time, [there is] a tremendous peace and strength in the band right now. The urgency of our earlier records is back, but with better songs. I think the better songs part comes from the fact that we did allow ourselves to experiment and grow on Secret Samadhi and to really push ourselves with songs like "Lakini's Juice." You have songs on The Distance To Here like "Where Fishes Go" and "Voodoo Lady" and "The Distance," which are really new for Live, totally different approaches to arrangement and style.

LAUNCH:
Many of the songs involve images of water. What does that signify to you?

ED:
[With] all of the elemental metaphors on the record, hindsight being 20/20, I was going to what I felt was such an elemental place emotionally, that those metaphors--sun, water, desert, meltdown--just seemed to fit what I was feeling. Water, in particular, is such an amazing metaphor. What it can symbolize, and what it does symbolize, is a limitlessness. In "Where Fishes Go," [it represents] the darkness of the un-evolution of the sea, and the fact that mankind has come out of the sea and evolved. In "Feel The Quiet River Rage," which is much more about water as a metaphor for spirit--the spirit of creativity--it just seemed to be the multi-use symbol for all kinds of feelings that I was having.

LAUNCH:
"Voodoo Lady" has a nice vibe to it. What inspired that song?

ED:
"Voodoo Lady" was inspired by a dream. Now that the record is on the analyst's chair [laughs], I can say that song, the lyric in particular, reminds me of some of the things Freud is famous for saying, like "We are everybody in our dreams," that we are actually all the characters, no matter who or what they are. It's just our super-conscious mind playing a trick and trying to teach us a valuable lesson. When that song was written, I was being totally over-self-conscious about the record, concentrating on every single note in the song to such a degree that I was strangling myself. Chad [Taylor, lead guitar] sent me that slinky guitar riff that starts it out and I just immediately, you know, [came up with the lyric], "Light up a cigarette and calm the f--k down" [laughs]. I have the feeling that it had a lot to do with the fact that at that time in the record-making process, I needed to come down to Earth again.

LAUNCH:
What's the story behind the composition of "Dance With You"?

ED:
It was inspired by a trip that I took [with my wife] to Fiji after Secret Samadhi. It's just about an evening on the beach there. A lot of the romance on this record, which I think pokes its head in on that song, would most obviously have to do with the fact that I've been married almost two years. I think that [this type of song] is totally new territory for Live. People think "I, Alone" is a love song but it really wasn't. The lyrics were more abstract, encompassing a much larger message. "Dance With You" would be our first official love song. I wanted it to end the record, because it ends with the essence of what my message is--and the message for Live--which is the line "I see a world where people live and die with grace/ I see a sky full of the stars that change our minds." I'm a person that would choose hope in the face of all the calamity in the world and all the darkness or the pre-millennium tension. It really is, in a lot of ways, the closest I've come, at least in my own songwriting, to a song like "Imagine." If that is what people remember me for, or remember the record for, I'll be very happy.