This Guy Has Been Rockin' Since the 80's.
Saint Tone has performed internationally, at President Obama's first Inaugural Ball, and more. We talked about his musical evolution over his career and the state of the music industry today.
The Riff: What is the concept of Awake?
Saint Tone: Awake is about a guy that is stuck in a third dimensional way of thinking. He feels like he's the victim. He's feeling all these pressures from all around the world. If it's racism, homelessness, if it's money, power, greed and corruption. He feels like he hates his job and he feels stuck. Again, it's like he's playing the victim card like, “Man, everything sucks and I'm just stuck in this rut.”
It's broken up into three chapters and that's Chapter One. Chapter Two is where he starts to get messages that he can make his own choices and then he can change the way his life is going, by making choices because he has the power to do that. In the third chapter, he [overcame] these obstacles and realizes there could be all this crap going on, but I don't necessarily have to be involved in it. I could observe it and not be part of it. I could observe it from afar. I don't have to be part of it and be a victim of it. So in general, it's an awakening of self-empowerment.
The Riff: What is the inspiration for the story?
Saint Tone: I think there are a lot of people that are going through that. I talk to a lot of different people. I call myself a motivational musician because I like to write positive music and I like to write songs that are empowering for people and it's nondenominational; has nothing to do with religion. It has all to do with your own personal spirit and your own personal growth. It's like a Tony Robbins of music, if you will. It's like a self-help group. But I like that, I love setting goals and encouraging other people to set goals for themselves.
Whenever I'm talking to someone, I'm the guy that's constantly pushing them to go for it. If you came to me and said, “I wanted to be a BMX bike rider”, [I’m like], “Okay, man. Well, what are you doing to do that?” “I don't know. I'm just talking about it.” “Well, do you really want to do it?” “Yes.” Then I'd be the guy that would start setting up things for you to do, to get to that point. So if you really want to do it—because that's how I've lived my life; I've always set goals for myself, and I've been able to achieve them.
Back in about 2000 is when I started doing—I always listened to different motivational speakers in high school; Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, Earl Nightingale I [found] him by taking a course, which was really interesting. I took a course that said “Doing Music and Nothing Else”. In this guy's three day course, he talked about these motivational tapes, to keep you inspired, to keep you driven to go forward, to do what you really want to do and I grabbed on to that like hook, line, and sinker. I was like, “Oh my God, this stuff's incredible.”
Growing up, I was the youngest of three kids. My brother and sister were constantly like, “Shut up, you suck. Why are you playing that guitar? Shut up.” And my parents were just like, “What are you doing? You know, you got to get a real job.” So I took that and it fueled my fire to prove my dad wrong, to prove my brother wrong, my sister wrong. I took [that negativity] and I flipped it on them and I used that to keep me moving forward. So these tapes would help me move forward just as well, to achieve my goals.
Around 2000 I started thinking, how cool would it be to start putting these messages into songs so I started writing songs in a pop sense, breaking all the rules that weren’t meant to be broken. Best case scenario, Magnet for Money, just these different things, different little mantras, if you will, and I put them into a pop song. You don't realize subconsciously, as you listen to music, and those messages are in you. So if you start saying, “I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me?” You know, it's a pop song but you don't realize what you're singing. Pumped Up Kicks is about a kid shooting kids but people sing it because it's a pop song.
So you start going, “Well, what if I had some positive messages that could empower the person who's singing it, from the first position?” So that's how I started going forward with these types of songs, I would say; positive pop rock.
The Riff: Do you have any fans that came up to you and said, “Saint Tone, you changed my life with your music?”
Saint Tone: Yes, I have. I've had songs that have impacted people in various ways and not ways that I expected. I have a song called, Empower Me and I remember I had so many different reactions from that song. It's a piano ballad and it's all about a person empowering themselves. This one lady was going through a divorce and she goes, “Oh my god, I play that song constantly! It helped me get through my situation.” So you find that these songs, regardless of how I intended to write them, they take on a personality of their own and other people perceive them in different ways and they help in different ways, for different people.
The Riff: It sounds like in 2000 you started experimenting with motivational music.
Saint Tone: Yeah.
The Riff: Can you tell us more about the entirety of your music career, from when you were a kid?
Saint Tone: Yeah, I'll give you a quick synopsis because it's like 35 years old. I did my first gig in 1984. It was at a friend of ours. We had a band called The Wave in high school. We did our first gig. I put my first record up in 1989 and then from there, I remember the very first gig we did, we did 10 original songs in one cover.
I've always been writing original material, since the time I picked up the guitar. I've done the hard rock scene, I've done a bunch of different styles and the one thing I've learned is, I don't like to be pigeonholed into a certain style of music. I love all styles. So especially in this album too, I've even branched out even further than normal.
But you'll hear some rap, you'll hear some country, some hard rocks and progressive rocks, some jazz; you'll hear different influences throughout all my music, which has really helped out. I do various shows because as a motivational musician, I like to go out into places that you wouldn't normally go and play. I have a nonprofit called Spirit of Music Foundation.
When I was in LA, we were playing shows at the L.A. County Jail. Now you can just imagine what kind of crowd that is. It's a really diverse, tough crowd. But the beauty of it was, I've done easily over six thousand shows and I've done some really incredible things traveling around the world, entertaining the U.S. troops, and opening up for national acts and a whole bunch of stuff.
The shows in L.A. were probably one of my favorite shows ever; doing those L.A. County Jail shows because we were doing all original material and I would say a little message before the song. These people were so ready to hear something positive in their life. We did it for the women's jail, and then we did it for men’s jail and I think we did like six shows for the amount of time that we were there.
I remember this one show we did at the L.A. County Jail with the women, it's 200 women and we hadn't even played a note and they were screaming like we were the Beetles at Shea Stadium. It was insane. The energy was so intense that we went to start playing and I went to go sing and I couldn't sing, because I just felt this push on my chest and everyone looked at each other like, “What is going on? What is this?” Because we've never felt that kind of a rush and throughout that show, they were crying, they were laughing because every little story that I told about something.
I have a song called Mama Said, We Could Work It Out and these girls were saying, “My mom told me not to get in trouble, she told me not to do this and I ended up here.” That was a girl that was feeling that song, really depressed about it. Then other people were going, “Hey, I can get through this. My mom says we can work it out, so I can work this situation out.” So it's just very empowering. Being able to do this type of music, for me, has been great. I love doing it.
The Riff: Let's talk about your fans. I mean, you've performed all around the world, you've performed at jails. How many people get to say, “I performed at jails”?
Saint Tone: Not very many.
The Riff: So do you keep in touch? Do you have some sort of way to keep a community of your fans? Also, are some of the people who were incarcerated, for example, if they're not incarcerated anymore, have they ever reached out to you?
Saint Tone: Yes. So, let me just give you a quick synopsis on how we got in there. Our keyboard player at the time was a L.A. sheriff. So he said, “There might be an opportunity for us to play at the jail, would you want to do that? And I said, “absolutely.” From there, I got introduced to a guy named Clyde Terry. He had a nonprofit called Emerging Leaders, which he would take people that just came out of jail, that were on parole, and put them through an eight week course. This eight week course would help them to not think the way they're thinking and change their way of life, so they don't go back to jail and he has a 75% success rate. He's had like over 1500 people go through his classes. So I would make a presentation at one of his classes and we would play every single graduation. So every three or four months we do a graduation.
But I've met people that would come up to me and go, “Hey, man. I remember you. You played while I was in jail.” I'm like, “really” and they’re like, “Yeah and you have no idea what that did to us. You coming in there and presenting that music man, was just unbelievable.” Because they don't get that; the L.A. County Jail, they did bring in music. They were bringing a classical quartet or a jazz singer, so nothing was a rock deep, nothing with a full band, it was just very mellow. So when we came in, all the guards were like, Oh my god, we've never seen a reaction like this.” I'm like, “Of course not, this is this is different. We're bringing some energy here.” But it was positive energy and to have those people come back to us was awesome, because you knew that you touched them.
I'm going to tell you another quick story. We were in a place in Kuwait called Tent City and that meant there were 600 tents in the middle of a desert. They put us on a flatbed and you would have thought that Van Halen had just showed up because [it was just] insane. I mean, they started stage diving, they just started going crazy. There was a girl that came up to us at the end of the show and she goes, “I want to thank you so much for playing tonight.” So I said, “Oh cool, that's great.” She goes, “No you don't get it. Tonight’s my one year anniversary with my husband, and I was in my tent and I was going to come out to see you. My friend just kept saying, “You have to come out. Come on, there's a band here tonight, come out” and she goes, “You guys just really changed my life.” I said, “Oh, that's awesome” and we had posters, so I said, “Here, let me sign your poster”, and I drew a little picture of someone stage diving [and wrote] “Keep on flying.” And that was around 1996, roughly 1997.
So, two years ago I'm in Sarasota, Florida and this girl sees me on Facebook, and she comes to the show, and it's the same girl. She goes, “You're Saint Tone!” I go, “Yes”, she goes, “I'm the girl. I saw you in Kuwait”, and later on, she posted a picture of my signature of that poster. So, she held on to that poster for 20 something years. That’s the power of this. You have no idea what kind of impact you're having on people.
The Riff: You've seen it all, in the sense that we went from discovering music on MTV and radio, to discovering music on iTunes, or if you were a shithead for a kid like me, LimeWire. Then it ended up becoming paying per track streaming with Spotify, right?
Saint Tone: Yeah.
The Riff: Do you think that this technological evolution of distribution of music has anything to do with [how music is today]?
Saint Tone: Yeah, because there was a cartoon that came out not too long ago that I saw and I thought it was classic. It's a guy doing a little show-and-tell tour for kids and he shows the kids a payphone and goes, “Hey, kids! That's a payphone. That’s what we used to do to make a phone call.” Then he shows them something else and then he shows this guy and he goes, “See that kid? That’s a rock star. We used to pay him for his music”, and the kid goes, “Stupid rock star, music’s free”, and I went, “Oh my god, that's exactly what kids think. Kids think music is free.”
Spotify, if you have 100,000 streams, your artist will get about $40. That's insane, as opposed to him selling 100,000 records, 100,000 singles for $1, or some kind of royalty. So the mentality now is that music’s free.
Here I am, I spent about a year recording and writing this album and people just go, “Oh, that's cool, *click*”.
There's no respect for it. It's almost like, “Yeah, you just do it because it's free, right?” No, it's time and energy. I guess people don't see the effort that you put in, so there's a bit of a discourse amongst that. So, the whole streaming thing, I get it. It's evolved. It just is what it is.
Now you have to go out and play shows, sell merch, do something a little different. For my audience, I think they're going to look at this where it is a musical journey, it is a concept record. So when you listen to it from beginning to end, it tells you a story. It's not just a single; it’s not just a bunch of songs. [Someone] also told me, “You should think about making this into a play.” So there are different things. You have to look at it and go, “How can I evolve from this? How can I make this different?”
The Riff: You're saying that it's just really up to the musician to think about how they could innovate, so that they don’t get caught with everything that’s going on?
Saint Tone: Yeah. Because the musicians are already digging themselves out of a hole. It's like, “Hey, I got an album out, and where can I put it out?” Well, no one buys anymore, so their best option is to get it on Spotify, and to get it streaming. So even at 100,000 streams, the guy made $40. You can't live on $40. Well, if that was back in the day and he had sold that many records or that many singles, he'd be doing okay. He'd be like, “Wow, I can make another record. It's worth it to make another record.” You see what I mean? It's almost like the incentive there now--and I've told this to people all the time, you make music because you love music.
If you're making music to be a huge rock star, be a lawyer. You'll make more money being a lawyer, representing people as opposed to; you have to do music because you love it. If you're trying to do that one-hit wonder and kind of bang it out, I think you'll be more disappointed than not.
The Riff: It used to be a lot cheaper to go to a concert, for example.
Saint Tone: Absolutely. Now it's ridiculous because these guys are trying to make their money back. It used to be $10 to go see a band, and then it was $30, which was a lot. Now it's $130 for the worst seats possible. You want to be [in the] 300 [section] it's still $130. If you want to be down in front row, it's like four grand, right?
The Riff: I don't know the data on the past at least, but the most recent data that I've seen on this, which I believe was a report on the industry in 2017, and honestly, things haven't really changed so much since then.
It was basically saying that the majority of capital flown in the music industry has to do with touring and things related to live performances. Like Bono and U2, for example, I believe they made either $42 or $52 million and approximately 95% of that number came from things that had to do with live performing. Literally less than 5% of it came from miscellaneous things like streaming.
Do you think this is why concert tickets have risen so much? Or just not making money from anything else?
Saint Tone: Absolutely. Well, think about it. If you're a band like Aerosmith or a classic rock band or even U2 is a perfect example. There are not even avenues for people to buy the music and people just go, “Oh, well we're not buying music.”
Look at a band like U2, they put out one of their albums onto iTunes, do you remember that? Where they put an album out and they put out 500 million copies, so everyone who had an iTunes account got the record?
What they did is, they ended up putting out—and it was one of their best records, because I'm a big U2 fan. And I went, “Wow, these guys aren't even trying to sell it. They're literally just giving it away.”
When you see a band at that level that they could have sold XML and they decided to cut a deal instead. It’s like, we're going to just cut a deal and give it away free, and you’re like, “What?”
What does that say for the guy that's up and coming? I'm trying to charge for mine and U2 is giving it away for free. It sort of gives you this weird—again, going back to our original conversation, the music industry has evolved and it just continually evolves. So, you do it because you love to do it. I put out 18 records because I love writing and recording. That's what I love to do. So, you do it because you love to do it.
This interview was edited for concision and clarity.
Photos provided by Saint Tone. Last photo taken by Ron Lyon.
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