How did you first get into Bob Dylan?

I was young and heavily into the British Invasion, but the babysitter had a boyfriend who was a folkie; he had Eric Anderson, Dave Van Ronk, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, and of course Dylan. I kinda dug it all. The first album, where he was more of an interpreter, with “Song to Woody” was just a glimmer of what what was to come.

By the second album it was brutally apparent he was going to outshine everybody. Then I kinda got into the whole “folk-rock” thing. It was all over the radio. Simon and Garfunkel, The Byrds, even Sonny and Cher. I still dig that stuff, especially when it got garage band sounding; The Seeds, The Leaves, The Beau Brummels...

How has he influenced your music?

He influenced everybody’s music. Especially those that have non-traditional voices and want to take it in a more “literary” direction.

How many times have you seen him play live? What were those shows like?

Five. Well, I love him live. I stopped going with other people because I didn't want to hear stupid comments about what they expected him to do. I enjoy him better alone. Never saw him with The Band, saw him with G.E. Smith a couple of times -- that was pretty uninspired but his phrasing was always masterful and inventive, very Miles Davis like. And his thing with Tom Petty was cool. But the current band with Charlie Sexton is awesome, particularly around the time of the movie Masked and Anonymous. (I'll go to my grave saying it's a great movie... check the dialog.)

Did it take you awhile to get into Bob Dylan, given his strange singing style?

No. I was too young. It just seemed like that's what artists did. I was lucky I guess nobody made a big deal out of it.

What’s the closest you’ve ever gotten to him?

I've never worked with him, and I feel bad for the guy that questions like this are asked. This is why the “hood is up.”

Is there a period of Dylan’s music you think is underrated or overrated?

He's writing some of his best stuff now.

What do you admire about Bob Dylan?

There are no apologies for genius.

Read more 30 Days of Dylan.

Visit Americansongwriter.com daily during our 30 Days Of Dylan countdown to read exclusive interviews with artists on Dylan, exclusive audio and video, and more.

How did you first get into Bob Dylan?

I first got into The Byrds and his songs via them. When I was around 12, Traveling Wilburys released their record, and since I was such a huge Beatles fan, I got into him properly via the George connection. And pretty soon I was a huge fan of his own records.

How has he influenced your music?

In many ways I think. I love wordy songs and Dylan and Costello where my main influences in getting into trying a similar thing myself. Just the sound of his words, the rhythm of them and how he phrases and make them swing. But also the actual “color” of the words and the mood they put you in.

I love when he's angry, bitter and really mean. I sometimes try to write really angry songs and Dylan's are the best in the field. But he can also be sad and have a pathos and combine emotion and cleverness in an unsurpassed way. As a songwriter these are all things you aim for but seldom reach.

He was a really good political writer so you can understand how the left mourned when he didn't want to be their spokesperson. He mixes up references from past and present, politics, society, personal matters and culture in to a whole mixed bag that is his own objective distorted view of the world. That also something I see myself doing from time to time, often in the songs I like the most. I would love to be in his camera. He really paints and projects with images and wordplay what he sees around him. As a kid I could put on the earphones and see a Dylan-movie or read a Dylan-novel if you'd like. Even the ostensibly least understandable songs makes you go places you wouldn't dream up by yourself.  All good music takes you places but I think with Dylan in his prime the overwhelming amount of words just drew you in and made you wanna stay forever.

I also love his voice and harmonica, the way he made rock adult with his folk and blues influences and essentially created this unique sound with the double keyboard attack and soulful backing. I can honestly say he's one of the artists I listened the most to over the years and I never seem to tire. Obviously he made me start finger picking and pick up a harmonica for starters. I will never forget the first time I heard the "Highway 61"-album in a library as a kid. For me it was a personal revolution when I finally "got it" after the initial rejection earlier. And that album was already over 20 years old then.

How many times have you seen him play live? What were those shows like?

I think four times. They have been good - especially the two shows I saw in the mid-90's - but not mind-blowing. My impression of him as live artist is more influenced by the 1966 footage and music I've heard, but also some of the stuff from the mid-70's like Hard Rain, which is astonishing.

Did it take you a while to get into Bob Dylan, given his strange singing style?

In fact, yes. I heard him when I was really small on the radio and I didn’t like it at all. But I did remember it, so he left an impression.

What’s the closest you’ve ever gotten to him/what was it like working with him?

The closest I ever got to him was the front row at the Roskildefestival in 1995.

Do you have a favorite Bob Dylan quote or lyric?

I love "Positively 4th Street": "I wish that for just one time / you could stand inside my shoes / you’d know what a drag it is / to see you."

Not one of his cleverer songs but as I said I love when he's a dick.

Also "Idiot Wind" where the anger is a bit more nuanced but no less biting when it bites. "Dear :andlord" is another one I come to think of I really like. "Hard Rains Gonna Fall" of course. "My Back Pages", "Desolation Row" - really this question is impossible. There are too many sides of his stories and you'd have to pick a different favorite from each of his different type of songs.

But the very first thing that comes to mind for some reason is the end of "Ballad in plain D": "Ah, my friends from the prison / they ask unto me / 'how good, how good does it feel to be free?' / And I answer them most mysteriously / 'are birds free from the chains of the skyway?'"

I love that sad and very personal "end-of-an-affair" song.

What are some of your favorite songs or albums, and why?

I'm a cliché that way - I really, really love his classic albums and songs. The ones I keep returning to are Another Side Of, Bringing It All Back Home and Desire. I also really love Oh Mercy and Time out Of Mind. They have a vulnerability lacking in some earlier work. If I gun to head had to pick just three, I'd say "Blood On The Tracks," "John Wesley Harding" and "Blonde on Blonde."

Especially "Blonde On Blonde." It's something about the sound and arrangements on that record, not just the songs. It's just perfect in every sense; warmer and more melancholic than "Highway 61", richer and more pop than the starker stuff coming after, more grown up and world weary than the early folk stuff and with a surrealist magical shine on top. I kind of get he followed it up with a bike accident. And a suede jacket have never looked better than on the cover. It was a peak.

And my favorite song on it would be "Sad Eyed Lady of The Lowlands". It has one of Dylan’s best melodies, the performance of the musicians is so understated and sensitive but still pretty full. The imagery is pretty weird and tangled and still you feel you totally understand it. I'm sure he wrote it in 5 minutes. I'm glad it's so long. I could listen to a version that would last a day.

Is there a period of Dylan’s music you think is underrated or overrated?

The late 70's and early 80's period is probably a little underrated. Albums like Street Legal, Slow Train Coming and Infidels have some great songs. I also kind of like Nashville Skyline, and it's usually not viewed as great.

Overrated - I couldn't say any period really. His worse albums are usually the ones no one really like anyway. Maybe some of his more recent ones are not as great as some people say but they are not bad either - not including the Christmas album.

What do you admire about Bob Dylan?

I probably answered that already.

Peter Moren of Peter Bjorn and John Covers "Dear Landlord"

On April 3, Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson will release Thick As A Brick 2, the followup to 1972's beloved prog opus Thick As A Brick (an album comprised of two long, interconnected songs). In this extensive interview, rock's most famous flautist talks to American Songwriter about the sequel's genesis, its parallels to the original, his distinctive vocal style, and whether or not he believes he can win another Grammy.

With the recent Aqualung reissue and now Thick As A Brick 2, this a pretty exciting time to be a Jethro Tull fan.

It’s a really exciting time for me too. Aqualung and Thick As A Brick are two of my favorite records for the simple reason that from an artistic and a personal songwriting point of view, they’re very different in terms of their musical and lyrical content. They both represent a period when I got brave enough to take a few risks with different topics, different subjects, and different ways of writing music.

So the two albums are very dear to me in sort of artistic sense. I have studiously avoided, over the years, to recreate Thick As A Brick, either in terms of playing it all on stage, or venturing down that slightly more prog-rock course of musical endeavor.

And I was pretty much maintaining that position until sometime late in 2010, when I met up with an old acquaintance by the name of Derek Shulman. He used to be the singer of the band Gentle Giant, a prog-rock band that had quite a bit of success in the late '70s. He then went on to be a successful record producer in the USA, signing bands like Nickelback and others.

When I met him, he strongly suggested his idea of doing a sequel to Thick As A Brick, which I reacted to with my usual disdain and negative thoughts, but we had another conversation probably later on that year. Somehow the idea just popped up in a conversation about, “I wonder what the eight-year-old Gerald Bostock [Thick As A Brick's fictional protagonist] would be doing today. Would the fabled newspaper [seen in the album art] still exist?

It was the thought of bringing that idea into the current context. First of all, how do our lives develop? What chance encounters, what interventions shape our lives? It’s what we go through from childhood onwards. That, in itself, began to pose some interesting parallels with my own thinking about my own background, my development in school, my early career, my choice of doing things along the way.

So it suddenly coalesced, in a period of hours rather than days, into a full-blown concept for writing a new album. Once I had that, the whole picture changed. I thought, “I think I can do this.” I just kept it in the back of my mind until the end of January last year and started to try to evolve it as more of a detailed picture – just laying out the bones of it on a piece of paper. Then I started writing some lyrics and I already had one or two pieces of music by then that I thought I could bring into play and so I just kind of got on with it. Within about two weeks, I had the album pretty much done in the sense of the lyrics and the music.

I went off to Munich and spent the day with my guitar player friend. We made some demos of the whole thing in a few hours. Then I came back and spent another day in the studio home of our keyboard player and we started to work on the scores of that. We put it all into the software program called Sibelius, created a huge musical score of the whole album which was given out to the other band members in March last year.

Then we went on the road for six months and didn’t give it too much thought, other than we played two or three of the songs live on stage to try them out. The lyrics were changed a little bit and titles and things to avoid giving the game away to the public. We then went back to it at the end of November. We finished the Scandinavian tour, came back, took a few days off, and then convened for rehearsals. We did about a week or so of rehearsal and ten days in the studio and then a few days of mixing.

We finished my part of it all right about the 3rd or 4th of December. Then we spent a few days working with Stephen Wilson, the man behind the band Porcupine Tree who remixed the Aqualung album last year and he remixed the Thick As A Brick album too, ready for release, or re-release later this year. It was all wrapped up and done well before Christmas. That’s the story.

How does that compare to the amount of time it took you to come up with the music and lyrics for the original album?

It’s all identical. I think the only difference is that with Thick As A Brick 2, I wrote it all and then there was a period of six months before we recorded it. With Thick As A Brick 1, I was kind of writing it and rehearsing it pretty much on the same day. I would write the music in the morning, go to the rehearsal room in the afternoon, work with the guys into the evening, and then we did that every day for about ten days. Then we went and recorded it in Morgan Studios in London in a period of about ten days. We spent a few days mixing it and that was done. It was pretty much the same amount of intense work that’s involved in this one.

So yeah, remarkable similarities really, in terms of the band being in the studio working together playing it together almost like a live experience. It was extensively all-together, not fragmented because it’s a big piece of music with a lot of joins, sections, reiterations, developments, and utilizing themes that crop up a few times in different ways on the album. It was the kind of work that, as musicians, you can get your teeth into. You can sort of tackle it in a bigger way. You’re not just learning a four-minute song. It’s 50 odd minutes of music.

It was quite an intense time for all the musicians just as it was back in 1972. Just like in 1972, I think a lot more time was spent doing the artwork, marketing, and promotional blends. The newspaper is now online. It’s a community Internet magazine really for the imaginary small town communities.

So are all the songs connected? Are there breaks in between on the new record?

Well, there are ID points. I wrote the music very much for the idea that there could be ID points where you were able to listen to it in separate pieces, so in this day in age of iTunes and digital retailers, you can find it. So there are ID points. I don’t really like to call them songs or tracks but I decided I would treat it kind of like songs.

But in reality, things repeat and develop so it’s not really a collection of songs. It is more of a continuous flow piece of music. One thing leads to another. But you can group areas into certain subjects and topics, where two or three pieces kind of hold together on the same idea for a while. I don’t really like to talk about them being songs or tracks, but I recognize the fact that other people do. I kind of constructed it in order to put these ID points on so when you hit the forward button on your player or computer or CD player or iPod, you can at least go forward or backward to the section that you want to hear. Of course, you can buy them on iTunes as separate pieces – you don’t have to buy the whole album.

That would be kind of ridiculous though.

Tell that to Pink Floyd. They somewhat famously recently refused to let Dark Side Of The Moon be unbundled for iTunes and said it could only be sold as a full piece. You have to buy the whole album or nothing at all. It seems to me not realistic. I think if you go and look at the majority of great classical works, you’ll find them unbundled in one form or another on iTunes or another provider. So I don’t see why we shouldn’t be doing that now with contemporary pop music, even if it is a bigger work. I think you’ve got to make it accessible, practically speaking, to people who listen to it in terms of today’s equipment.

I mean anything is better than the awful noisy empty grooves between tracks - lifting the needle and trying to find the track again, only to hear those awful noises and realize you’ve just taken another 20 plays off the life of your vinyl record by dropping the needle in the wrong place, or too clumsily. So we should be grateful for the digital age.

The original Thick As A Brick was meant as a parody of prog-rock, right?

It remains as a parody of the concept prog-rock album of its day. Because at that point, there were several bands producing rather elaborate and sometimes pompous, overblown productions of music, which were sometimes a mixture of great ideas and too much showing off. Those were bands like Yes and King Crimson and the early Genesis. it wasn’t my favorite kind of music, but I enjoyed quite a lot of it. They were great musicians and did some great stuff, but it just seemed a convenient time to create a bit of a spoof of that grandiose concept album.

So I wrote something that was designed to be just that, from the starting premise of an 8-year-old boy writing this piece of rather impenetrable and surreal poetry. I mean if you buy into that, then you buy into the whole thing. I thought the joke was kind of obvious, but I guess for a lot of people it wasn’t so obvious. If it was, they didn’t really care. They just liked the idea of it anyways. So it didn’t really have to be explained unduly and in some countries, I suppose people still think of Thick As A Brick as being literally what it says on the packaging. But that was always going to happen to some little degree.

I would imagine most people understand that it is a spoof. It’s a fabricated and observed notion. But the follow up album is based on an extrapolation of that idea, not just Gerald Bostock but anyone – you know, what happens to you in life. It’s perhaps a rather more somber and serious, sometimes more dark, follow up to the original Thick As A Brick. It is what you expect 40 years down the line. It’s a grown-up piece of work. It has some dark and unhappy moments in there. It’s not all fun and games.

Online at StCleve.com, it's more lighthearted and definitely the spoof every bit as it was back then of parochial country life. In fact, I will be inviting our fans to participate in a couple weeks time of writing their own stories for StCleve.com as correspondents We’re going to let some people appear online and they can write their own stories. We’ll pick a few of those each week and put them on our website to join in the fantasy of parochial country life in England. We’ll have to edit out the bad words and inappropriate photographs. We have to remember our responsibilities and we won’t let it overstep the mark of tastefulness.

]]> http://www.americansongwriter.com/2012/02/jethro-tulls-ian-anderson-on-thick-as-a-brick-2-the-grammys-and-more/feed/ 2 http://www.americansongwriter.com/2012/02/judy-collins-on-bob-dylan/ http://www.americansongwriter.com/2012/02/judy-collins-on-bob-dylan/#comments Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:00:12 +0000 Evan Schlansky http://www.americansongwriter.com/?p=75351
Have you ever sung with Bob Dylan? Oh yeah! I met him originally in 1959 when he was Robert Zimmerman and met him again at Gerde's Folk City when I was starting out. He was still singing old Woody Guthrie blues songs. We sang together at the big Woody Guthrie fundraiser in 1969 at Carnegie [...]]]>
Have you ever sung with Bob Dylan? Oh yeah! I met him originally in 1959 when he was Robert Zimmerman and met him again at Gerde's Folk City when I was starting out. He was still singing old Woody Guthrie blues songs. We sang together at the big Woody Guthrie fundraiser in 1969 at Carnegie Hall. That was more formal and the other shows were more informal. Over the years he’s sang me songs, we’ve recorded songs, and I’ve learned songs of his. One of the things that he always catches flack for is that he has borrowed from other songwriters. What is your stance on that? Of course when he first began to sing it was old Woody Guthrie blues. I didn’t get it and I wasn’t smitten with his versions of old Woody Guthrie blues. After he started writing his own songs I was a total, complete fan. I mean I thought he was brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. I recorded a number of his songs early on with one being “Bob Dylan’s Dream," which I then sang on the old Pete Seeger show, Rainbow Quest. “Bob Dylan’s Dream” was a direct copy of a song called “Lady Franklin’s Lament” and I didn’t know that Bob had not written it when I recorded it. However, that was the folk tradition to take the melody and rework it with new lyrics. The only thing, I would say, that anybody has to complain about was that there was no acknowledgement of that. In some sense he was following the tradition of the anonymous folk singer over the years, but maybe learned a little later that he could acknowledge his sources. That’s what people are mainly concerned about. Do you remember much of the controversy of when he was transitioning from a folk singer to an electric artist? When he put out Another Side of Bob Dylan people were concerned that he was writing songs that were too personal, and not applicable to the civil rights movement. There was always a lot of controversy about Bob Dylan. I think that anybody that is a genius creates controversy. I didn’t ever think much about his transition to electric guitar because I thought that everybody should be excited about it and think of it as a really important shift. Take “Blowin’ In The Wind” for instance; that was phenomenal. People explore, they do different things, and they look for other ways to reflect upon music. I was also breaking rules at that time. In 1966, when he had gone electric, I was recording with orchestras and each change from the folk music police created excitement. Although, I don’t know that it’s terribly important in the long run. In the moment it creates drama, a lot of interest, and a lot of curiosity. You have to realize that Dylan was always going to draw fire because he turned up in the midst of a whole slew of songwriters that were scrambling for the limelight such as Eric Andersen, Tom Paxton and David Blue. They were all writing incredible compositions, but Dylan created songs that were so different and so extraordinary that people were bound to get nervous, excited, and critical all at the same time. It was very profound what happened with him and the energy around all of it was very controversial in itself. When did you find out “I’ll Keep It With Mine” was written for you? It must have been sometime in the late '60s. He presented it to me as a song that he had written for me and then there was the controversy with Joni [Mitchell] because she thought he had written it for her. She never recorded it, he recorded 12 times, and I recorded it once. What do you think is going on with his singing voice in the past couple of years? The same things that’s always been going on with his singing voice. The difference is that he’s a little less understandable. If you listen to those early records people may not have thought that he was Pavarotti, but you could always hear the words and I had always said that he was a fine singer in those days. Albert Grossman brought me a tape in ’61 and asked me, “What do you think? People say he can’t sing” and I said, “Oh, he can sing.” They were spectacular songs, every word was understandable, and it was like that for a long time. Maybe he doesn’t care anymore, I don’t know. People go through changes in their singing. Sometimes it has to do with whether they have vocal problems and sometimes it has to do with their general style. I think his general style has a lot do with that and he doesn’t really care, does he? It’s hard to argue with a genius with that body of work at this point. You put out a record of Dylan songs in the past. What are some of the songs that you still perform today? I do “Mr. Tambourine Man” a lot. People know it and I like to tell the story about how I heard it. I woke at three in the morning in the basement of Albert Grossman’s basement in Woodstock, NY. It was 1964 and we had a party the night before with Dylan, Suze Rotolo, Albert Grossman, Sally Grossman, and I. When I awoke, I heard this voice coming from up the stairs and he was writing “Mr. Tambourine Man.” He sang it over and over again because he was working on it. It’s a stunning piece of writing that I sing a lot and is the one that I’m most attracted to. I like “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and sing that a bit. Also, a song that I recorded and Patti Smith also recorded called “Dark Eyes.” I think it’s a great, overlooked song and I often sing that as well. What’s your favorite Dylan lyric or quote? The words from “Blowin’ In The Wind” are powerful. “How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?” That’s pretty great. What do you admire most about Bob Dylan? He’s an amazing, amazing artist and I’m grateful that I’ve known him for 50 years, since the old days before he turned into Bob Dylan. Read more 30 Days of Dylan. Visit Americansongwriter.com daily during our 30 Days Of Dylan countdown to read exclusive interviews with artists on Dylan, exclusive audio and video, and more.]]> http://www.americansongwriter.com/2012/02/judy-collins-on-bob-dylan/feed/ 1 http://www.americansongwriter.com/2012/02/david-crosby-on-bob-dylan/ http://www.americansongwriter.com/2012/02/david-crosby-on-bob-dylan/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:00:20 +0000 Evan Schlansky http://www.americansongwriter.com/?p=77084
  Have you ever sung with Bob Dylan? Yeah, I have. He asked me to sing on Under The Red Sky, which was produced by Don Was. I had done some work with Don and I think he suggested to Bob that I would be good to sing harmonies. He has known me peripherally since [...]]]>

How did you first get into Bob Dylan?

I can't remember not knowing who Bob Dylan was but it wasn't until Eric Clapton's release of Time Pieces in 1982 that I really connected with Dylan as a songwriter. I fell in love with Clapton's version of “Knocking on Heaven's Door” and only then learned that Dylan had written it. So I listened to some Dylan songs and hated them. I couldn't get passed his delivery and voice. Everything I had listened to up to that point in my life sounded “pretty” and he was just too rough for my ears.

How has he influenced your music?

It's hard to trace all the ways he's influenced me because of all the other artists he has influenced who have influenced me. Directly, every time I think I've written something pretty special I hearken back to a Dylan song and realize he's already tackled the subject and done it much better. He's the spot in the clouds all artists aim to reach.

Did it take you awhile to get into Bob Dylan, given his strange singing style?

I was late to get into Dylan. It took many conversations from many people I trusted and respected and then one day it just clicked for me. I got it. I finally got what they heard. Now I can't get enough of him.

What’s the closest you’ve ever gotten to him?

I was making an album with T Bone Burnett in 1999 and he took us to the set of Dharma and Greg because a "friend" of his was making a guest appearance on the show and wanted him to sit in and play a band member. When we showed up and I saw it was Dylan my mouth fell agape. I thought to myself, what the hell is Dylan doing a sitcom for?!? During the car ride back to the studio I asked T Bone why Dylan would do a sitcom and he replied, "To keep the people guessing."

Do you have a favorite Bob Dylan quote or lyric?

From his 2009 interview with Rolling Stone: "It's peculiar and unnerving in a way to see so many young people walking around with cell phones and iPods in their ears and so wrapped up in media and video games. It robs them of their self-identity. It's a shame to see them so tuned out to real life. Of course they are free to do that, as if that's got anything to do with freedom. The cost of liberty is high, and young people should understand that before they start spending their life with all those gadgets."

What's one of your favorite Dylan songs?

"Positively 4th Street," because this is what it sounds like when you piss off a poet (even though he doesn't like to be called a poet).

What do you admire about Bob Dylan?

His period of greatness has never ended. He has endured. He is timeless. He speaks for everybody.

Read more 30 Days of Dylan.

Visit Americansongwriter.com daily during our 30 Days Of Dylan countdown to read exclusive interviews with artists on Dylan, exclusive audio and video, and more.

Madison Rising's self-titled debut album was released in October 2011. The band – with Dave Bray on vocals, Alex Bodnar and Christopher Schreiner on lead guitar, Steve Padelski on bass and Sam Fishman on drums – makes guitar-heavy rock music with a distinctively pro-American message and sound. The overarching theme of the band’s music is that of liberty, independence, smaller government and personal responsibility. Madison Rising believes that they can not only create a musical revolution but help revive patriotism.

With songs ranging from the lyrically powerful and guitar-centric opening track “Right To Bear,” to the beautiful violins and cello of “Hallowed Ground,” it's clear that this band is on a mission to not only make great music, but to also send a message that American culture is alive and well.

The band was in Washington DC to attend a few private events but decided to take advantage of the open mic provided by the Occupy Movement to play a five song acoustic set from their debut album (which recently reached as high as number 29 on the Amazon rock charts) on the front lawn of the U.S. Capitol.

When asked about their motivation for joining in on the protest, lead singer Dave Bray said simply, “We went over to see the Occupy Protesters in person to see if we could connect with them through music because music is the one of the only things in this world that can bring people together instantly.”

“We did a quick sound check of our song “Hallowed Ground,” then began the real performance with “Honk if you Want Peace,” a track about the problems that maliciously orchestrated protests can create. The second song we did was “American Dream,” a song that celebrates the ideals our nation lives by –- freedom, opportunity, hard work and the need to fight to defend that dream. It was during this song that we really began to connect with the Occupy crowd and come together around our shared ideals.

But it was the band’s final song, "Before the Hyphens Came," a song about the strength and unity of the American people - and a warning against those who try to divide to further their own agenda or profit – that the crowd really went wild. “We were touched and blown away with how this song resonated with the Occupy movement,” said Bray. “One protester even pulled out a saxophone and came over and jammed with us. American flags were being waived and the crowed truly came together as one. All of a sudden there was no 99% -- no 1%. At that moment, we were the 100%. 100% American. It truly was chilling!”

Asked if he had anything to say to the people at the Occupy Congress event, Bray responded, “We thank you for the opportunity to play for you and share our love and appreciation for this great nation and were chilled by the way you embraced our message.”

“Madison Rising gives people a new way to think about things – whether it be the right to bear arms, the sacrifices made by soldiers of America or just motivating yourself to create a better future,” explains Bray. “That way is through intelligently written music. Great music. Cool music. Fun music. Music with meaning.”

With an election year upon us, perhaps there’s no better time for Madison Rising to spread its message. As Bray says, “If we really want to get younger people involved in politics, we really do need to make better use of popular culture. The positive things that the right kind of music can do truly are endless.“