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KEVIN MAX
Kevin Max is best known as one-third of the band dc Talk, but his personality and talents extend far beyond that, into places and ideas many would never imagine. One of Christian Music's most creative, provocative, and thoroughly original artists, with a 13+ year history in the business, he has, in recent years, become an outspoken proponent of Christian Music moving outside the walls of this industry. He has one solo album and two books of poetry under his belt (with another of each on the way), and also has several film projects in the works. With a signature message telling listeners to "be yourself," and a one-of-a-kind creative vision, he has both enormous Roaring Lamb past experience and future potential. Visit his website at www.kevinmax.us.
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Robin: You're working on a new album right now, correct?
Kevin: Yes.
Tell me about it.
Well, we're just starting the demoing process right now. The songs that I've been creating for it, in a way, are a departure from Stereotype Be. I think it's a little bit more stripped-down, a little bit more raw, a little softer, a little more straightforward. But still continuing the same ideas of melody and lyrics that I have done in the past. I think poetry is still a huge part of what I do, and it's really hard for me to break out of that, because that's what fuels my passion as a writer. Writing things that are symbolic, writing things that have double or maybe triple meaning. So that's going to be a big part of the record.
But from a musical standpoint, it's really fun, because it's going to be a little bit more "live" oriented than studio oriented.
When will it be out? Do you have any idea?
I really don't. I'm no longer on Forefront Records. That was a decision that we all made together -- or well, Greg Hamm made the decision really, based on the fact that musically, they felt like I didn't really fit with what they have going on.
Were you cool with it?
I was cool with it; I guess I felt a little bit let down. I've been with with this company for about thirteen years, since the beginning, and they have a lot of history with me with dc Talk. But Greg, I think, had a hard time seeing what I do as a solo artist, as something that they could really work effectively. He admitted to me -- and this is the quote that he gave me, which I think is a really, really honest quote that sums up what I am -- he said, "You're a Francis Schaeffer artist in a Billy Graham world."
I count that as a huge compliment. Not that I don't appreciate Billy Graham, of course, but I do feel like I look outside the box and bring in more influences from different cultures.
So are you looking at other labels, other possibilities?
Yeah, absolutely.
Do you have an eye towards mainstream labels, or are you looking at other Christian labels?
Actually, right now, I'm going the route of going to companies that I feel understand me as a Christian artist, but who have the availability and the potential to push me to a larger audience.
You could probably count those on one hand.
(Laughs.) There's not many. But you know, I was talking to Steve Taylor about this yesterday, and I'm a big believer that companies will start to see the light with artists that want to put their spirituality on a record, but not necessarily be evangelistic. Maybe be a bit more subtle and a bit more thought-provoking. As opposed to evangelistic. I'm not against evangelism; I'm all for personal evangelism. That's what I'm in this for -- I'm in it to meet people who have problems, I'm interested in talking to souls who are going through problems and need someone to talk to that they feel accessible to.
Speaking of which, there was a press report that circulated a while back where you said something about not wanting to do any more Christian festivals, that you were more interested in trying to reach out to other kinds of people, such as the gay community.
I made a statement among a lot of different statements, and it's funny that they isolated that one part of it. But what I said was, I felt the need to go outside the Christian Music festival thing, and go outside of what I'd been doing the year before with the dc Talk Solo Tour, and go towards venues and places that weren't necessarily connected to the church. Because I felt the need to bring my music to a larger audience.
In my statement, I said that I feel like people of different religions or different sexual preferences or different backgrounds, a lot of times feel very pushed out of the scenario at Christian festivals, they don't feel very at-home there. And I was actually giving Cornerstone a compliment. I was saying to Cornerstone, "I really appreciate this festival, because I feel like they do open their arms to people of different social backgrounds." And I said that I have a hard time with a lot of the other ones, because it's all about busing the youth groups in and only catering to a church crowd. And those festivals that do go outside the norm and try to bring in a more diverse crowd, I'm all for that. But what I said for that year, was that I felt the need to not do any more. The truth is, I probably wasn't really on their books to begin with, because of the kind of music that I'm making, which isn't bounce-up-and-down, youth group happy music.
We have enough bounce-up-and-down music. We need more of the kind of stuff you're doing.
You know what, thanks for saying that. I really feel like when I got into this thing, back in the late 80s, I was a fan of bands like 77s and the Charlie Peacock Trio, and bands like that that were really outside of the box.
And today everyone is confined to the box.
Exactly. One of our first tours in Europe was with like, Charlie Peacock, 77s, Darrell Mansfield, the REZ Band, all of those big bands that certainly weren't "mainline ccm" groups. And I was really moved by that. That's how I became really good friends with Jimmy Abegg. I just really felt myself pulled into his need to push art further and leave the Christian subculture. That's how we got together on the poetry book. I felt like, "How many people are going into painting and into literature, and trying to make pictures of Christ and their ideas of God, in abstract ways?" I look at William Blake, who is my biggest inspiration as an artist. There's a guy who literally would wake up in the morning and go to bed at night, having visions of what God is like and painting things that were a little out there. But really trying to capture what he thought about the universe and who God was. Man, he just pushed the envelope so much for people, I think, and in that, he lived up to giving it the most he could as an artist. That's just one example, there are others. C.S. Lewis as a writer, Tolkien as a writer, both of them were big on giving analogies as to who Christ was in their work.
I'm with you, but I think we've fallen far short of what we should be doing, especially in the arts.
Absolutely.
Let me ask you this. Two years ago, when I interviewed you at GMA, it was right before Stereotype Be came out, and you expressed very high hopes that the album might find success outside of Christian Music. Why didn't it?
It's a mystery. I want to say that I think the timing wasn't right, for me as a person, maybe. And that's a God thing. But I feel like, when it comes to the business end, I don't think that Forefront had a clue on how to market the project. I don't think they even tried to market it. I think they just put it out there expecting the dc Talk crowd to buy it, regardless of anything besides the fact that I'm one-third of dc Talk. They didn't put a lot of prep work into it. I remember, all of the ideas that went into it were coming from me. Nobody ever challenged me on anything. It was just like, "Okay, this is what you're doing, okay these are the photos you want to take, okay this is..." Nobody ever said, "You know, I think the feather boa might be too much for the Christian audience." (Laughs.)
(Laughs.) I remember a lot of talk about that feather boa.
Yeah, it was meant as a concept for me to show how the excesses of rock & roll and fashion can leave you lonely. I wanted to throw that into the imaging, that it's not all about what you look like, it's not how we appear. That's the idea behind Stereotype Be, that you can't stereotype somebody from an appearance. But none of them really got that. They just thought, "Oh, that's just Kevin Max trying to push the envelope." What people don't realize about me, is that I really think things out before I do them. It's not just me on a whim doing whatever. Sometimes I do that, but a lot of times when it comes to a concept, I've really thought about this, I've really tried to come up with some kind of philosophy behind what I'm doing.
Are you doing that kind of thinking for the new album?
Absolutely. The next record I would say, more than anything deals with spiritual warfare. The title, as I'm thinking about it right now, is Dangerous As Angels. It's kind of like the songs that I've been writing are very human, and talking about how we are very deprived and we can be vessels of destruction if we don't allow God to work through us, and how that spiritual warfare constantly plays out in day-to-day life. So I'm really excited about it. And I'd love to see a company like, I don't know, a Rocketown or a Word or somebody like that, that has connections to place this out into a bigger marketplace where they can get behind it.
In answer to your earlier question, the key to me is that they didn't understand it. They didn't want to get behind it and do what it took. Before Stereotype Be, I was on Virgin Records, with Supernatural and Jesus Freak, and I remember sitting around a round table with the whole staff of Virgin, getting behind the project, from the venue to the marketing of the project, to the manufacturing of the project, to radio, to whatever. They talked about this stuff. With Stereotype Be and Forefront, none of these things were ever talked about. It was just kind of like, "Okay, we'll throw it out there." The one person I will say really got it, was Dave Bach, who was A&R at the time. And Ken Coley, who was in Radio, really believed in it, but I think his hands were a bit tied in what he could go out there and do. I'm not trying to slam Forefront, I'm saying it hoping to encourage them to learn from the mistake. If you've got a band like Benjamin Gate, they may not fit all of the parameters of what ccm is, so you might have to put a little more time and energy into them.
Well, I think there were only a handful of people that truly understood Stereotype Be. I still hear from readers who don't understand it.
I think it has a lot to do with my personality, too. I think people have a misconception that I'm just trying to do stuff to push buttons and not trying to say anything with any kind of great merit. That's the opposite of who I am. When I write a song, I'm trying to infuse what I believe about God and what I believe about my Savior, into the music, albeit in a subtle way. Hopefully with this next record, people will see that and they'll see more of a personable portrait of who I am.
When you pour your heart and soul into something like this, how frustrating is it when it doesn't catch fire among listeners?
You know, I believed in that project so much. And it's great that you asked me this, because I've been wanting to tell people this for so long. Stereotype Be was a project that I achieved my dreams on. As far as getting into the studio, using the players that I wanted to use, going for the kind of songwriting and production that I wanted to do -- I just pulled out all the stops. I was so excited. And I think Dave Bach at the time was so excited for me, that I think that no one was like, "Will this work?" Instead, it was more like, "We'll just let him do what he wants to do." And I think it's a record company's job to really challenge the artist, to make sure that the art is going to be accessible to everyone. I felt like it was. And I feel like if people would have understood it, it could have gone to another level. That part of it really did frustrate me. Because I had spent so much of my time and energy really seeing this thing all the way through, and at the end of the day, they just kind of threw it out on the shelf and expected it to sell just because of dc Talk. And the point is, that project was so different and so alien from dc Talk, that I think it suffered from that. I think the fans expected dc Talk in my work.
So what's required then, is education. And that goes right back into the Roaring Lambs thing as well. The key is educating people. It's a time-absorbing enterprise, and it's very difficult to convince people who don't want to be convinced.
Yep. I think that this subject that you're onto right now is a really important one, and I wish that more people in your position would really open this up and talk about it. In order to reach the masses today, in order to be vital and relevant, the only way you can do that is to be a part of the culture, and to be tapped into the mainframe. And I think the problem with the ccm industry is that it's so cut-off from everything else. They have the bused-in crowd. They have all the same gatekeepers that they have to go through in every scenario. So when something comes along that doesn't necessarily fit into that blueprint, from the gatekeeper to the festival to the venue to the record company or whatever, they don't know what to do with it, so they throw it to the side.
Absolutely. What I'm hearing over and over again is the issue of safety. The whole "be not unequally yoked" thing. Christians like to feel safe in their beliefs. They like to know exactly what everybody's motives are, they like to know if everybody's doing things for the right reasons. And when you take that away, then the safety mechanism is suddenly gone, and everyone is terrified of losing that.
I was talking to somebody the other day -- I've got a film idea that I've been working on...
Is that Soupernatural?
No no. This is a completely different thing. I've been talking to a different director about a totally different project that I want to work on. It's funny, because I've been working on more film stuff than my music stuff lately.
I think what needs to happen is we need to take the story of Christ, or stories from the Bible, and put a twist on them so people can relate to them. And in order to do that a lot of times, you need to use people that are from the outside. People that aren't from the inside out, but from the outside in, to take a fresh perspective on it. To use the really, really controversial example, I would say the book by Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ. In my mind, that represented a new look at the whole thing. Albeit, I didn't agree with it in the context of the Gospel, and they even prefaced it at the beginning of the film, "This film is not about the Gospel." It wasn't taken from the Gospels. It was a concept piece on what Christ was as a human being. A lot of people had a hard time with that movie, and I understand why they did, but what I did like about it is that it caused me to think about who Christ was. And for me, as a believer in the Gospel, it made me look into the Gospel even deeper to find out. You know, what did Christ do on the most human level? Did he have to deal with his sexuality? Did he have to deal with feelings of rejection? And that was exciting to me. I wish more people within the believers' circle could be pushed to ask those questions and represent those questions in music and film and art.
So I'm excited for that. That's our job, to relate who Christ is to an unbelieving world. And if you can't do that, then what do you get for it?
I'm excited too. I think this is going to be a big year, especially for music. Last question: in the context of this conversation, what are your future plans?
I think God's placed me here. For whatever reason, He put me in contact with Toby and Mike and we started this thing called dc Talk. I think it's important for people to figure out why God has put them where He's put them, and why He's given the things that He's given them to work with, and to use those things in the biggest and broadest sense possible. I don't want to totally alienate what He brought me into. I don't want to walk away from what I've built within dc Talk. But I also feel like I need to stretch, and I need to go outside of the expected. I hope that this new year will allow me as an artist to do both, to continue to speak to the crowd that I've cultivated over the years, but also to take them with me on a journey and go further.
I really believe that this whole idea of Roaring Lambs is where we as believers and artists need to be. It's a tragedy when we're not allowed to stretch our wings as creative beings. When we're held down to a certain rule book or blueprint, then we're not as vital as we could be. So my hope and my prayer -- and I prayed this just last night -- is that the Lord will direct me to the place where I can be used most effectively. And if that means for me to ask these questions from within the realm of ccm, then so be it. But I really believe that God wants me to break outside of the subculture, to draw more people into the truth of His Word. And we can't do that from inside the church. The church is supposed to be about walking outside after the service and telling people outside about the Gospel.
