After the release of his first solo album, ex-Live frontman Ed Kowalcyzk opens up about his creative renaissance.
In 2008, Live went on "hiatus", which quickly turned acrimonious, which turned into a split, with the three remaining members forming The Gracious Few and leaving the face of the alterna-rock hitmakers alone. In July 2010, Ed Kowalcyzk released his debut solo album Alive."I had pretty much decided a couple of years ago to make it a solo career," he tells Undercover. Kowalczyk did an acoustic solo tour at the time, which he says "fed the creative process that I was in while writing this record."
His producer CJ Erickson had moved to Austin and implored Ed to bring the songs to his Wire Recording studio. "When you pull up to it, it looked like somebody's storage bin," Kowalcyzk laughs, "But when you get inside they're roasting their own coffee beans in a popcorn machine, it's got this incredible vibe, great instruments, great gear."
Erickson had arranged a group of musician friends who became Kowalcyzk's band on the album, and formed a core band for his tours. "Everybody really brought their top notch creativity to the way they interpreted the music and energised it to a level beyond where it was. I was very happy right away," Kowalcyzk beams.
"The most gratifying thing about the changes I was making in my creative life was really when I started to hear the way the new musicians interpreted it," he says, "That got me re-amped about music in a way. I went to Austin with new songs, I felt good about them, I put some music to them. I got that, but I got this new sound that I wasn't really expecting, so my hat's off to all the guys who played on the record."
It was a particularly fractious split with Live but Kowalcyzk doesn't quite address the issue on the album. While Alive's first single 'Grace' could be seen as a comment on the split, he says it's more about seeing a silver-lining in tragedy, mainly inspired by the Haitian earthquake.
"I started to form the idea of someone who could see the silver-lining in those images [from Haiti] and someone who wouldn't see that," he muses, "And how the dialogue would go between these two world views. And of course, the chorus being 'You were wrong, there was grace'."
There's no surprise that there's a strong spiritual element in Alive, as there had been in Live. But Kowalcyzk has moved away from Zen Buddhism and "come full circle" to embrace Christianity.
"A gratifying aspect of making this record was finding out how to express that lyrically." In that respect, he is a huge fan of U2 and Bono's lyrical ability to tackle faith "but also keep the doors open for everyone to get something from it."
This sincerity of the album means that there is very little irony in choosing Alive as a title, either as a reference to his old band or a reminder that, hey, Ed Kowalcyzk ain't dead. "I have a total regeneration of energy, the creative process was flowing so hard that I was thinking 'Whoa, I really feel alive.' Using that title would inevitably relate to the old band, but honestly, it just encapsulated how I feel."
With his first solo tour he played the Live catalogue, but now he has a new solo set to draw upon. Never fear, Live fans, Kowalcyzk says he'll just play longer. "We're playing a lot of new music and a huge chunk of what I guess you'd call the 'classics' from Live – interpreted freshly but not reinvented by my new musicians. It's just something you have to see, but the fans who have seen it during the 15 shows we've done already have been blown away by how the new songs and the old songs fit together."
"For me, getting to hear these songs in a new way how these guys are doing them, it's lifted me to another level of joy on stage and a refreshed attitude," Kowalcyzk enthuses. Solo, but still live, Kowalcyzk certainly has a new lease on life.
