Kevin Max

Even if you only stuck to the musical side of Kevin Max’s artistic dice, there would be enough variety to boggle the mind. From old-time gospel to art rock, Kevin’s branches spread the farthest from the dcTalk tree and showcase an ever-exploring artistic side that never fully seems satisfied. But if you refuse to leave the songbook, then you’re missing quite a bit.

There’s also Kevin Max the actor, Kevin Max the poet and Kevin Max the author. The former includes The Imposter, a movie from 2008 that features Kevin in the lead role of a fallen Christian music star. The poet includes an upcoming spoken word project as well as early project, At the Foot of Heaven, with Jimmy Abegg. And the latter involves an upcoming sci-fi project Kevin will be shopping to publicists. It’s all a part of the artistic chaos in Kevin’s head and it’s the gift and the curse (to steal a quote from Jay-Z).

We recently spoke to Kevin about his artistry – whether he’s satisfied with his own work and wondering if all of this is what he pictured when he left dcTalk.

Soul-Audio: I’d love to get into this whole artistic palette that you’ve developed and I wondered how important it is for you to be able to have these other outlets? Does it keep you fresh?

Kevin Max: I’m sure some people look at it like I’m trying to put my hand into every hat and it’s not even really that. At the heart of what I am is that I’m really interested in change. I’m very easily distracted and my biggest problem is just that – I try to do too many things at once. I have too many ideas at once. I think that it takes a really strong type of person to set me down and make me put my time into this or that, to say ‘when this is completely realized, then you can move on to the next thing.’

So I’ve really worked on that. I have several things in the works right now that nobody knows about, but the ones that are obvious were the film that I did a year ago that you referenced and the music I’m doing right now. I also am in the middle of writing a sci-fi novel – not sure if you read about that or not.

SA: Yeah, I did.

Kevin: Yeah, we’re just into the beginning levels of talking with publishers and things like that. But I do love them all. What can I say? I do love to write. But if you ask my purest talents, I would say singing and writing lyrics. I’ve always been interested in poetry and it’s the purest way of writing to me. When I have to write a song lyric, it bugs me that I have to encapsulate big ideas in a small little box, but I’ve learned how to do that. But music relates to a wider audience. Poetry seems to fall on a lot of deaf ears. It has to be a certain personality that wants to dig in, I think.

SA: I think that’s because poetry can be intimidating for some.

Kevin: What makes you say that?

SA: Well, when someone listens to music, they can either dive into the meaning of things and get into the lyrics or they can escape to the music. That allows them to not fully engage. But with poetry, all you have is the words.

Kevin: Okay, I would agree with that. And what you’re really saying is that we’re so programmed – and this is a whole other conversation – but we’re so programmed to look at syntax another way. Just reading over Bono’s lyrics for this album that just came out, there are some great lines, but I’d rather see Bono write a poetry book, to be honest. But we’re so used to seeing words written a certain way that as soon as they take on other properties or a different kind of phrasing, it just mystifies people. It’s an art that is lost. I always call it the lost art, because people have done away with it because it is too much for them to rethink how they look at words.

The interesting idea for me is to be able to put poetry and music together. I did it once with Adrian Belew and I’m getting ready to do it again with a band called 3K Static. We’re doing a spoken word project together and we’ll see what happens. We might sell 500 records. [Laughs] But that will be 500 very impassioned zealot-types. [Laughs]

SA: What do you do with that tension, then, to create art that’s sustainable so that you can keep creating and yet be able to fully do what you want to do?

Kevin: I absolutely don’t wrestle. I’m opposed to it. I don’t believe art is meant to be economical. Art is adventurous, sloppy and hugely imaginative. What I look at is hitting the jackpot. I don’t even think about the intermediate levels of getting paid. What I want to create is something that revolutionizes ideas and it just so happens that I’m not good at it enough yet to become the next William Blake, but I’m trying. I’m not interested in trying – and it might sound weird to hear a guy say this – to become popular for a certain marketplace. I’d rather create something that has its own light and people have to pick it up because they feel it’s going to wake them up or inspire them to move forward.

I read Ayn Rand or Blake or whoever and they totally inspire me. I think about those people wondering if they were competing with their peers or were they just trying to make the best possible thing they could come up with. I think it’s more of the latter that tends to inspire me.

SA: Is that something you knew all along or do you look back at your own catalog of different artistic releases and scoff at things you didn’t know?

Kevin: That’s a really good question. And that’s very true because the answer is to be very honest. I do look back at a lot of that stuff and wonder, ‘What was I doing?’ Specifically, I mean the dcTalk era of my life. I was in a band with three different individuals coming up with ideas, and I will say that I was very young when I started that and I was talked into it, not knowing where I was going to go.

It was Toby’s vision, so I was following after this other guy’s idea of greatness. As dcTalk progressed, I think saw more of the individual talents come to the surface, but I don’t think I was ever completely happy in that scenario. It just felt very constricting. I always pushed Toby, Mike and management to embrace more of a universal – not as a religion – outlook when it comes to the music and not so overtly Evangelical Christian and there was some tension there.

But again, I look back at those years and think it was a great ride and there were some interesting things that taught me a lot. I think that God was very happy with the success of dcTalk and how many people the music reached and how it affected lives and all that. But I look at Stereotype B as my first real chance at making a statement by myself and I go back to that and definitely look at it thinking that I was a baby with no clue at what I was trying to do. I think the same of my poetry book, At the Foot of Heaven, I did back in ‘93 with Jimmy Abegg. I look at that book and think, ‘Oh man, these poems are not that great, but some of the ideas were awesome.’

I’m happy with what I’ve done, but the answer is that I continue to grow and appreciate the growth. I think if I was stagnant and kept doing stuff that wasn’t progressing or getting better, I think I have it within myself to say, ‘Okay, you need to stop now and try something else.’ It’s all subjective. Some people might look at my stuff and say, ‘Wow, I wish he was still in dcTalk.’ And they’re looking at music as a certain pattern and what they want and that’s the beauty of art – it sometimes destroys all opinions.

SA: To go back to that and then look forward, is this what you pictured?

Kevin: If you could have known me in high school before dcTalk and you could have really known me and we could have talked, you would have seen exactly where I’m at today and you would say, ‘That totally makes sense.’ I can’t say that I was completely happy monetarily and with the number of people who got into what I’ve done as a solo artist, but I think I captured the crowd I always knew would get what I do. I hope that makes sense. Beyond the group of dcTalk, my music is definitely stylized and very different than the type of music dcTalk procured and put out there. So I absolutely knew my trajectory would be different than Toby or Mike’s. I’m happy with that. To this day, I still think the best work of Kevin Max is still out there and I’m just getting ready to really scratch the surface, so that’s what I’m most excited about. I’m a slow grower, but we’re working on it.

SA: What makes you say that your best work is out there?

Kevin: When I say the best work, I think maturity and wisdom brings the best work out of people. Unfortunately the athleticism of music declines with age. Vocally, a lot of great singing masters lose what they do through age. But I think that when it comes to ideas, I think the more wisdom and knowledge and life lived – and it’s just my opinion – allows a person to create bigger ideas. Not to say that when you’re young and passionate that those ideas aren’t great either and there are tons of young artists at the top of their game in the beginning of their careers.

But you see those who were given so much and you see they became disinterested. They have a short attention span. One great vocal example of someone at the top of their game but who is now becoming something else is Robert Plant. You look at him vocally and what he was doing with Zeppelin was unbelievable, but what he’s doing with Allison Krauss is a different layer of this guy. That’s just as interesting to me as him singing an octave higher than everybody else and screaming his head off. It’s a different kind of music just as deep and just as interesting. He’s a great example of somebody continually changing and that’s what I hope to be like, somebody that can constantly change.

↓ 7 comments

#1 Brandon on April 8th, 2009 at 12:48 am

Resonates. Kevin Max is still the most inspiring artist out there for me these days… along with Jimmy Gnecco and Chuck Pauluniuk.

#2 Jeff on April 11th, 2009 at 7:54 pm

Resonates: Kevin is very intriguing as an artist. Very cutting edge. I love the fact that he is not locked into one type or style of music, but that his music evolves, changes … not one to rest on his laurels. He could have chosen the easy path to continued “success” in keeping in the DC Talk tradition.. It would be easy money…very vanilla but easy money..
He sort of reminds me of Blue October or Death Cab … great stuff.

#3 Joe on April 15th, 2009 at 6:32 pm

Resonates as well. Probably one of the best interviews of Max that I’ve ever read. Great questions were asked and Kevin was very honest…especially about his dcTalk years. Many of his fans have always groaned at the steady stream of requests for a reunion…since we so enjoy the places that he has taken us in his solo music. I just can’t believe it’s nearing a decade since Stereotype BE was released! Thanks Kevin for putting out your art…even if it comes back as a loss…. I think in the next few years, you will hear more and more artists claiming your name as an influence….

#4 MMAKansas on April 28th, 2009 at 2:48 am

At the end of Kevin’s life, he will stand before God as a man, not an artist or a creative thinker. God will weigh him, as God will do with me, and everyone else. I believe Kevin’s work with the band that has been belittled as “my early years” and as another would say “vanilla”, has yielded him more heavenly rewards due to souls like mine, that were reached through it.

At the end of it all, it’s about winning souls for Christ, that is the only legacy we leave after 3 decades, nobody will remember Kevin Max, but the revolution of DC Talk – that will be remembered, especially by a 30 year old Pastor, who got saved at a youth meeting listening to Jesus Freak when he was 17.

God bless the early works, they are the only ones worth listening to in my opinion…

#5 John Wofford on April 28th, 2009 at 3:13 pm

I didn’t realize that man was created in God’s image for anything other than to create. And what you’re saying, MMAKansas, doesn’t make a lot of sense in other regards too. I mean, with all due respect, Kevin’s matured as an artistic thinker, and I think all he meant by referring to DC Talk as “my early years” was simply to point listeners who’ve only connected him to his work with the aforementioned band in the direction of all his new material.

“At the end of it all, it’s all about winning souls for Christ…”

I was going to stay away from this comment, but since I’m already here… we’re here to engage our world, to prepare for a better way of living, to revolutionize how we think about love and loss and politics and human sexuality and economics and everything else under the sun. We’re here to perpetuate a different shade of thinking in society, to make Jesus’ idea of how the world is supposed to spin come about. And he, in turn, is getting things ready to create a new society here for us as well.

My point? If this whole Jesus thing is about making a new world, then it seems a given that shades of this new world should come about in our artistic expression, and when an artist attempts to break out of his mold, do new things that he hasn’t tried before, made a creative palette that is consistently unique, he has every right to contrast his current image with his former one.

#6 kevin max: stereotype be « doot doot doot on August 14th, 2009 at 6:16 am

[...] I’ve always been interested in poetry and it’s the purest way of writing to me. When I have to write a song lyric, it bugs me that I have to encapsulate big ideas in a small little box, but I’ve learned how to do that. But music relates to a wider audience. Poetry seems to fall on a lot of deaf ears. It has to be a certain personality that wants to dig in, I think. – from an interview [...]

#7 Kevin on November 20th, 2009 at 2:34 pm

With regards to only his early work being what is worth listening to…

Keep in mind that I have no idea what KMax’s spiritual status is right now, but.. if only his early work is worth listening to, then is only Bach’s church music worth listening to? His Coffee Cantata is a great work and greatly shows the sense of humor of a very devout Christian man.

There was “Christian” music long before there was ever a concept of what we today call Evangelical Christianity. Much of it was never conceived in an evangelical notion as though its only purpose was going to be to reach the lost. And, Bach’s overtly religious music and his secular work will always be “Christian” music because of who he was, and I promise you it will outlive DC Talk in the annals of musicology and human culture. I already run into young Christian people who don’t know that there ever was a DC Talk, but they know the name Johann Sebastian Bach.

I think it’s great DC Talk has touched people, and I will always love a lot of their music, but people need to get out of the realm of modern society to make their judgments on things because I can count on one hand the number of shows on TBN that have anything to do with the reality of what God really is in context with Jesus, the Apostles, and early Christians. If we think Constantine’s popularization and proliferation of Christianity is at the heart of what we are, then we have a long way to go. Does that make the modern church irrelevant? No. But the modern church sure is doing about all it can to make itself irrelevant by focusing on modern culture and modern ideas of what Jesus is.

I am not talking about universalizing theology. I’m not talking about any idea goes, or breaking molds to reach new realms of Christian spirituality. I’m talking about the fact that Christianity has been both the creater of culture and supressed by it in history and limiting Christian expression to what DC Talk was is being ignorant of history, and handicapping what any given Christian human being is capable of doing in regards to affecting those around him or her.

I don’t understand where K Max is… from what I’ve read, I don’t see how it makes a bit of sense… but, I’ve not talked with him, and I don’t know how he fits in right now. But, if his music is valid and quality, it is worth listening to. AND, if he was still overtly evangelical (which wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to me either since I think the results of D.L. Moody make little sense anyway), he would likely still be referring to his “early work” in terms of something he’s progressed and grown from.

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