Interview with Eric Taylor of Saving Abel
Posted: August 27th, 2008
Recorded: August 14th, 2008
Contributed By: Jay
TuneLab Music: You’re on tour right now with Puddle of Mudd and Rev Theory?
Eric Taylor: Yes Sir!
How’s it going so far?
It’s actually one of the best tours I’ve ever been a part of. Every band is great, fun to hang around, great on stage. Good chemistry.
Cool. How’ve the crowds been and how has the response been?
Crowds have been really good. We’re main support for Puddle, so we get a later time slot and most of the times the buildings are at their capacity. Most shows are close to sold out. And now the crowds know who we are, and they’re singing along to other songs on the album and “Addicted” blows away the response from the crowd. Singing along, yelling…
You using “Addicted” to close out, early on, or what?
It’s towards the end of the set.
You guys have a new single “18 Days,” and we streamed the rock mix of it on TuneLab Music a few weeks ago. That hits radio officially in 4 days. Have you heard it on the radio yet at all? Are people singing along and getting familiar?
I haven’t heard it on the radio yet, but that’s been—since day one at our hometown and even before we got discovered, has been a crowd favorite. Everybody seems to know that song and everybody seems to like it. We give a shout-out to our troops… we support our American soldiers, and we dedicate that song to them each night and that goes over really well with the crowd.
The “18 Days” rock mix, what exactly does that mean? What’s different with it?
The album version has—we’re country boys from Mississippi, we love old country, bluegrass. We have some mandolin and organ playing low in the mix on the album, and we just went in and took some of that out, beefed some of the guitars up, added guitars where the mandolins were, and you know, just tried to rock it out a little bit for the rock market. A different aspect.
Speaking of markets, you guys have “Addicted” right now playing on pop radio stations. Have you heard any reaction to that specifically? Does anybody tell you it takes the rock edge off the band or what?
Actually, we are a rock band, we love the rock market, but we also love crossing over. We love just letting everybody listen to it. I haven’t seen a negative effect. I think it’s helping as far as the other markets. There’s more listeners getting to hear it. I don’t think it takes away the rock for us to be on the pop market. It’s just more listeners, which is the reason we’re doing this… to have fans and the fans support us and keep us doing it. The more that they can listen to it, the better we are.
In kinda the same vein, I noticed that last week on the Billboard 200 you were #72, and this week you jumped up to #59, and over Linkin Park, Motley Crue, Shinedown, Weezer, and all those guys that had albums come out since yours. How’s that make you guys feel?
It’s a shock because a lot of the bands we all grew up listening to… Shindeown are like brothers to us. It’s an honor to be considered sharing the same ranks with these gentlemen. It’s actually a blessing to say that a band that I’m in is competing and passing Linkin Park and Shinedown. It’s an honor and a blessing.
“Addicted” is up to 223,000+ digital downloads. The label’s gotta be happy with that, right?
They are. They are pretty pleased with it. I believe it’s gonna go all digital and hopefully that’s a good sign as far as we’re selling a lot digitally with the guys. I just see in the near future that this is gonna be the most useful mass to get songs. You can download, buy albums or singles and again, yes, we keep the label pretty happy with that which is also a really good thing.
Recently, there was an article that pointed out that Kid Rock—not the same type of deal and I’m not lumping you in with him—but his single is all over top 40 and country and all that and his album sales are skyrocketing, and what they pointed out was that his album was not available on iTunes, so what was happening was… fans have downloaded your single 223,000+ times. They’re saying he’s charting so high because they can’t get that single they want, and they’re forced to go out and buy the whole album from the stores, which is pushing his sales. One record label was even thinking about going in that direction to do the same. What’s your views on all that?
Um, I see… I’m not really either/or, I’d just love the consumer to get it either way that they can. I know a lot of people are not able to get it off iTunes—they have dial-up or they can’t get on the Internet. I guess there’s pros and cons for both.
Yeah, it’s kind of one of those things that’s a pro for you because more people are hearing your music, but a con for the record label because they don’t have to pay more money if they want just the one song. It’s a double-edged sword in the industry I suppose.
Right.
How long do you have left on this tour?
Probably two weeks, or two and half weeks left.
How long between that and the tour with…
We do some festival dates and a NASCAR event coming up, and possibly a video shoot for the new single. And then around the second week of September we start with Shinedown, Buckcherry, and Avenged Sevenfold.
Avenged Sevenfold… are you guys fans of that style? It just seems like they don’t fit in style-wise with the other three of you. Just seems kinda odd.
It’s definitely, definitely gonna be a rock show. There’s four different spectrums of rock and, I mean, personally I’m a fan of all of the bands. Each of us like each of the bands. We got Avenged Sevenfold, great guitars, great melodies, and Shinedown’s just knocking out rock left and right, Buckcherry is rockin’ all the time, so we all are definitely fans of them. It’s definitely gonna be a fun experience.
You guys big fans of NASCAR? What are you doing with that?
We’re actually going to perform at a Busch race in California on the, I believe, the 29th of August.
Is that gonna be broadcast live?
I really don’t know, probably so. I don’t know if our performance will.
We’ll find out or see something about it. If not I’m sure it’ll be online.
Yeah, it’ll definitely be on YouTube.
We had one question that our reviewer Nick wanted me to ask you. He said he saw a video of Shim from Sick Puppies on your tour in April and he was feeding you guys shot after shot onstage and he wanted to know how that turned out for you.
Well, it was the last night of the tour, so of course we got pranked. It was.. actually throughout that whole tour—it was only our third major tour—we were all worried. You get up and play, and you’re worried about your parts, and worried about your songs to the point where it was becoming a hassle, a big-time job. And our tour managers and everybody was like “you know your parts, get up there and have fun.” So they kept bringing us shots and later in we started having fun. And we realized then that we know our songs, we know how to play, we can have fun. Let’s just get up there and have fun. Since then, that actually opened our eyes, and you know, let’s have fun and the crowd has responded a lot more to it since then. But it was a great night, a great time loading the trailer that night after the show. But nine shots of Jack in 20 minutes…
So you could say that alcohol has completely changed Saving Abel’s live performance?
Hahaha. It opened our eyes to have fun on stage and not worry and run around being worried.
And since then you’ve been climing the charts!
Hahaha.
Sounds like you should do a Jack Daniels commercial. They’d love that.
Probably so.
Since you guys seemed to start pretty quick. Since we did an interview with Jared back in March, you’ve been touring almost nonstop and your life went from the small band from Corinth, Mississippi to #52 on the charts five months after the album came out, and touring nonstop. Is it still kinda crazy or are you getting used to it?
I believe we’re getting used to it. It still has its crazy moments. Every band we’ve toured with this year has been great. From the crew to the bands, we’ve been blessed to have a bunch of good guys to go out with. That’s helped us get us… we’re a new band… it helped us get our feet wet. We’ve learned things from each band. It’s been a long run, we’ve been on the road since January 15th. We’re going out and hopefully giving the fans what they’ve come to see.
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