Turning Up The Heat With NEEDTOBREATHE
08-21-2007
by Kevan Breitinger

Bear Rinehart’s musician’s heart was pumping full force in our recent conversation, as he had a LOT to share about the new album, The Heat, releasing on August 28^th

 

CMCentral.com (Kevan Breitinger): I’ve been listening to the new album The Heat, and hear a lot of classic rock references in your music. Who has influenced your sound the most?

Bear Rinehart, Needtobreathe’s lead vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist: Yeah, I’ve definitely been listening to a lot of classic rock. I like everything soulful, and a lot of those classic rock guys did that really well. We listen to a lot of Otis Redding, Joe Cocker, stuff like that. In our van, we listen to more of that than the modern stuff. The modern stuff doesn’t always seem as powerful to us. We grew up in church listening to that old gospel, sort of emotive style, and that has always seemed the ultimate to me.

Well, you’re taking it in and spitting it back out with a modern twist yourself. Your sound isn’t derivative at all, I like the way you turn it around.

I appreciate that. The thing we’re most proud of on this record…. We’ve always been a southern band, but our first record didn’t have as much of that on it, even as far as the texture of the instruments. This record has more harmonicas, some slide guitar, a gospel choir, more organ stuff like that.  I think we sounded a bit too much like the bands we were listening to on our first record. We’d write a song that sounded like the Black Crowes or something (laughing), and say ‘well, we can’t use that.’ But we’re proud to have achieved a record that contains some of our own live flair.

Yeah, I agree, I think you did a great job with that. I know the first album was recorded in England, but I don’t know much about the production of this new one.

"That's the one comment that we hear all of the time, that it's so obvious that we enjoy what we are doing."

It was kind of all over actually, but mainly in Atlanta. We used a couple of different producers; we actually produced and recorded four of the tracks ourselves. We did all of the pre-production on the first album ourselves, but never gave ourselves credit for Daylight.  But we co-produced this new record with Ed Roland of Collective Soul and Rick Beato who actually did the majority of the record. He’s from a band called Jump, Little Children, an indie band from South Carolina that we used to love. His material was very organic, not at all pop-rock. It was the organic texture that we were looking for, and hoping to record that to make this one very different from the first. We went with him and we loved it, and both of those guys work out of Atlanta.

But we also recorded some in Chicago while touring with Jars of Clay. We stopped and spent a few days on the horn section for “Moving On,” one of the new songs. So the album was put together all over the place really. We recorded the choir spots ourselves at a local church. We got a choir together and directed them. It took us a lot longer (laughing). We did the first record in about 6 weeks, and this time we spent more like 6 months.

But all of your band members have so many talents between you. What do you see as the band’s greatest strength?

I think it’s our song writing, I really do. I think with where music is heading, and the fact that bands are selling less records these days, though not to get into a discussion about MP3s (laughing)… I think with where music is heading, people now want access to their bands, they want deeper connections. So a band that can write more songs, and put out more records, has a leg up.

We put 14 songs on this record, and we could have put on 20. We’ve written 15 for the next record already, we’re constantly working on that. We’re talking now about possibly putting out some EPs after this record comes out, to kind of correspond with tours. So we’d basically put 3 or 4 songs out online or on shows so our fans can get involved with music that comes out every few months. We want to have a relationship with our fans that is ongoing, not just about the one big release that happens every two years. We’re fans of Wilco, and they’re a great example. They put out these records and you don’t hear them on the radio, but when they play Atlanta there are five thousand people there.  I’m a fan of theirs, so I don’t necessarily care if they put out an electronic record or an acoustic record, I just like Wilco so I’m probably gonna like the record when they put it out. That’s the kind of relationship we’d like to have with our fans. You know, they don’t care if it’s a little more southern or a little more modern, or heavy or soft, or whatever. They just like what we do and know they’re gonna get a lot of it. We’d like to cultivate that with our fans.

Well, it seems like you have a lot of ground support with the “Breathers.” (Fans of Needtobreathe).

Yeah, in a live show obviously. And that is very important to us because before you have records, that’s all you have. We toured for four and a half years before we signed a record deal, so that’s still our favorite part about this whole thing. We’re really looking forward to touring with this new record and we’ve got a bunch of great ideas about how we’re gonna play these new songs. About three quarters of the new record’s songs we will be playing differently than they appear on the record. We really want to make this experience something fresh and new for our fans. They’re gonna see that we put a lot of time and thought into what we do, and also that we love what we do. That’s the one comment that we hear all of the time, that it’s so obvious that we enjoy what we’re doing.

Sure, everybody digs that. But I think you guys are predisposed to be where you are anyway, with your names (laughing), it’s like you were born rock stars. (Bear and Bo Rinehart, Joe Stillwell, and Seth Bolt.)  It’s like your destiny or something.

(Laughing) Yeah, it is very odd, the names.

Well, anything else, Bear, that you wanted to make sure got out there?

Well, we have a new video for our single, “Signature of the Divine (Yahweh),” coming out in a couple of days. We did a lot of it ourselves again, spent two weeks on it. It’s stop-motion photography, which is like claymation, sort of.  We put basically 6,000 photos into order for the video, kind of crazy. But it allows you to do things you can’t do, like fly through the air, after you Photoshop every single picture. We edited all 6,000 photos to make a three minute video, but it’s really, really cool and we can’t wait for people to see it. It comes out in a few days on our myspace.

OK, Bear, we’ll look for it. Thanks for your time.

No problem, thank you.