20 Questions with Gunnar Nelson, Part 2

Chad Bowar: Is your foray into country music just a widening of your musical horizons or do you plan on focusing exclusively on that genre in the future and move away from pop/rock/AOR?

Gunnar Nelson I think that our foray into country really served to be a beginning of our broadening our musical horizons but, I definitely think that here in the United States that access to radio, access to video, access to fans has become so limited. Matthew and I don’t rap, were not R&B, we are not any of those things and we really don’t want to change that way. We are not an industrial rock band, we never wanted to be that. We are melodic pop/rock. That is what we have always been. And if you listen to the country charts now, man, all they are making is 80’s music. That's all it is. It’s getting more pop oriented. By the time we actually come out with a “country debut,” you know what, it’s just gonna be American music and its going to be exactly the same stuff we have always made anyway. Which is what we are interested in doing. We don’t want to change ourselves to fit the format. We want the format to get to the point where its going to embrace what we do naturally and it looks like it headed that way. So that's our plan with that.

Describe your songwriting and recording process and how it has evolved over the years.

I think in the beginning, Matthew and I used to really collaborate on all the material. It used to be kinda a force thing. Matthew was much more into playing live and doing interviews and actually being out in front of the public and I’ve always really been more into the behind the scenes, getting my hands dirty and doing the work kind of stuff. And so what we’ve got right now for the most part, I begin writing all of the material, writing all of the songs and bringing them to Matthew to help me polish. An exception to that rule is if we were to sit down with a really hot songwriter in Nashville for a “writing session” and doing it as a strict collaboration. We haven't been back to Nashville in about 6 months or so but I have been talking to Matthew and we are looking forward to doing that. He is a very, very talented writer and for me, I have always considered songwriting like playing a game of tennis...if you are really in a group of people who are your equal. I think the only thing that has changed we are emphasizing the lyrical content of our music even more than we ever have before. We’ve always had a very strong melodic base but with our time spent in Nashville, where the story is really king, as opposed to Los Angeles where the melody is really king, what we’ve got now is a lot of experience pulling from both resources.

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