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MC: Having your Twisted Brown Trucker Band do most if it had to make a difference, too.
Kid Rock: Definitely. The real difference between studio players and live players, I think, is a mind space. The studio cats can play everything because they’re that good. And your band, you play good together and do certain things, and this sound comes out, which is good. It’s not necessarily about being the greatest players in the world, but it’s what we do that no one can, I guess, duplicate.
MC: Earlier you referred to Born Free as poignant. Is Rebel Soul a return to fun?
Kid Rock: Yeah, it’s a fun record. There’s definitely some poignant songs on there, too, some stuff that would be more in line with Born Free, like “Rebel Soul” and “Midnight Ferry.” That’s there. But there’s the other stuff, the Kid Rock songs––even “Cocaine and Gin”––that’s a total country song, but no one in Nashville would record that song. “Chickens in the Pen” is totally Kid Rock shit; even though I’m not rapping in it, it’s still got the big beats and I’m doing my scream thing. I can just tell that a lot of this stuff is going to go over really well live.
MC: Speaking of old-school Kid Rock, “Cucci Galore” sounds like it could have been on Devil Without A Cause or something from the ‘90s.
Kid Rock: Yeah, early Kid Rock. That was around before Born Free, from, I think, right after (2007’s) Rock N Roll Jesus. I showed it to Rick for Born Free but he wasn’t interested, so I held onto it. It was real easy to do, and a lot of fun. We did the video for it and it reminded me of some of the old, crazy videos we used to do for “Cowboy” and “Bawitdaba” and stuff like that. I was looking around this crazy mansion in Bel Air and there’s all the ingredients for fun there––girls dancing, people on stilts, breathing fire, there’s midgets everywhere, a pony walking around. I was like, “Yeah, this is fun!”
MC: Rebel Soul is available on iTunes...
Kid Rock: Yeah. Welcome to 2003, right? (laughs)
MC: You were a long and notable iTunes holdout. What changed your mind?
Kid Rock: I still feel the way I’ve always felt. If you make a good product, people will obtain it no matter what it is. But I don’t agree with iTunes when they say all music’s the same price. They’ve kind of switched away from that a little bit; there’s different prices on different albums now, but still the singles are all a buck, a buck-29 or whatever it is. And it seemed like this was a new way to present how to have some transparency in the music business with your record company and all that...but that didn’t happen. So I held out. Now I’ve got the deal I want with my record company, so hopefully this is the beginning of some transparency.
MC: Was part of the reservation also the fact that you’re an album artist and iTunes and other digital outlets, the whole concept really, champions the song over the album?
Kid Rock: Nah. If I make a good album, people are gonna buy the album. That’s the end of the story with anybody. I remember when singles became big in the hip-hop era and then it went back to albums with CDs and now it’s back to singles with iTunes and it’s probably gonna go all streaming in a minute, so who knows. I’m not gonna fight the technology. I embrace it like everybody else, but at the same time I stood up for what I believed in and I proved my point. I said I wouldn’t hold out forever, and now it’s just the right time. Eventually the older stuff will be out there, too.
