Alt-rock pioneers Bush and LIVE are in the midst of their co-headlining summer tour dates. The ALT-imate Tour which kicked off June 6th at the Grand Theater in Mashantucket, Connecticut is in celebration of each band's 25 year anniversary of releasing their respective albums, Sixteen Stone and Throwing Copper.
We sat down with Bush frontman Gavin Rossdale and Live frontman Ed Kowalczyk to talk about setlist building and melodies. Watch our full Tour Update episode with Bush and Live below:
Setlist Surprises
Gavin: "We’ve got a bit of rehearsal time for the tour so I’m gonna try and surprise myself. Maybe Sonny and Cher are gonna break out, you know?"
Ed: "Now you’re talking."
Setlist Building and Melodies
Ed: "Thank goodness we have a few—so there’s always probably 6 or 7 songs that are kind of like, you’ve gotta play ‘em, people get mad if you don’t—and we like to play ‘em. Then it’s just a matter of having fun with, you know, trying to touch on every album, a little bit, and you know, get a new song in there if we’re working on new music, and give people a taste of the whole career, really, of the band."
Gavin: "Yeah, we move stuff around, I mean I think that the one thing that I can’t—another pet peeve that I have—is when people change the melody of things. I can’t stand that, to me the melody is sacrosanct. You could change the chords, you can change the instrumentation, anything but, as soon as the vocal melody gets messed with, I don’t like that so much. Maybe Dylan’s the only person who’s allowed to do that, you know? But the rest of us mere mortals have to sustain the melody, especially like if I’m doing a cover, even if I approach the music differently, I always have to be mindful of the melody so, I change arrangements to kind of stretch songs out, to allow a sort of, you know, other things in, and the audience, things like that, but never the vocal melody."
