Todd Kerns: Slash

Todd Kerns is having fun. The 6 foot, 4 inch bass player is running from one end of the stage to the other like there was nothing else in the world but rock & roll. And how could you blame him. He’s on a stage in Jacksonville, Florida, playing in Slash’s band, just tearing it up on the last night of their stint opening for Ozzy Osbourne. Tomorrow, they will leave for Australia, Asia and South America. But tonight, they are rocking out, feeling the high of a show that is kicking ass. And Todd Kerns is loving every minute of it.

I meet up with Todd backstage following their set, happily greeting fans in the hallway and posing for pictures, his joviality contagious. “It’s not like going to that same desk and sitting at your cubicle,” Todd tells me once we have found a quiet room away from the noise of Ozzy onstage and his bandmates running around in the hall. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that per se, it’s just that it’s certainly not for me … I’m very lucky. I’m very fortunate and I know that”.

Right now seems to be a good time to be Todd Kerns. He has several projects going on besides playing with Slash. He is the singer and guitarist for a popular band in Las Vegas called the Sin City Sinners, with a new release, Exile On Fremont Street, as well as a new venture with Ian Grant and Reed “Zowie” Shimozawa called Tee Kay Oh. He likes to dabble in production, write songs, and play drums as well. Not to mention, this rocker likes to actually sit down and read. However, “if it was up to me and if it was up to Slash, honestly, we’d just stay on the road till the end of time and never go home (laughs)”.

So where does this native Canadian find the time for all of this? Here’s what Glide  found out about the bassist lovingly known as Dammit.

So what did you think of the show tonight? Last one in the US.

It was fun. The surreal part of it is, I mean, how long have we been playing with Ozzy and we’ve never met him? And he just walked in earlier tonight.

You haven’t met him?

No, he literally flies in days like this. Flies in the day, plays the show and flies home at night. That’s why he plays every second day. So he walked in tonight and we were all like, wow hello, he walked into our dressing room. Pretty cool.

So how did you think you did out there?

It was good. I had a blast. You know the weirdest thing about playing with Slash is, I think people expect it to be a solo show and then there’s some indiscriminate kind of background guys. But he’s been awesome at sort of letting us be a band and it very quickly became a band. The first shows were thirteen days after I started rehearsing with the guys. So it came together very quickly and now it’s very much like a band in that way. It’s very much Slash’s catalog and Slash’s music but there’s never been a sort of like, “you stand back there and hide”, you know. We just play and its nothing like that at all. I think the more enthusiasm the guys in the band are showing the more infectious it is to the audience. I believe anyway. I know it is when I go and see bands, since I was a kid, when the band is really going for it it’s like you’re into it as opposed to those guys. It’s different for every different kind of music. But I know that for me, I really got off on those people who were really high energy kind of music and performance.

You seem to be a very busy man. Not only are you touring the world with Slash, you have your own band, The Sin City Sinners, as well. When do you have time to do anything else? And I hear you also do production.

(laughs) Before I came to Las Vegas I did a lot of recording of bands. I actually just recently started talking about doing it again but its like my schedule is so crazy it’s literally, I’m out here doing this and I go home to Vegas and I’m back on Sin City Sinners’ time and that’s pretty busy as well. It doesn’t really feel sort of overwhelming or stressful to me because it’s what I want to do. Its fun, its music, its enjoyable, its also therapeutic, you know (laughs). So I think just playing music for a living or even for your free time it becomes like almost seven days a week becomes my life just playing music. That’s more than I could have asked for.

So this is what you have always wanted to do.

Yep (laughs). It’s like I don’t ever remember talking about being an astronaut or a cowboy or whatever children talk about (laughs). I think being a musician just has those kind of elements of being a pirate or a gypsy or a cowboy or all the things that go along with breezing through a town, and wine, women and song, and then off to the next town (laughs). So it’s a bit of that. Oh there’s very little wine and all that in this sort of sober world that we live in these days. This whole band is sober.

Why don’t you tell us about the Sinners album, Exile on Fremont Street. 

The Sin City Sinners completely started as a jam band in Vegas with my friend Brent Muscat from Faster Pussycat. I was coming in and out of Vegas doing some production and working with another band that actually Brent Muscat was working with. And then he wanted to put together this Faster Pussycat reunion and I went out with him to Europe and I played guitar for that. We came back to Vegas and we put together the Sinners really as a jam band on a Tuesday night at this punk rock bar that we hang out at. And then it just kind of snowballed from there and really became the place to be and then the casinos started coming around and then we were suddenly playing in legitimate casinos making good money and playing a lot of my songs from my catalog in my older bands and whatnot.

And you have songs from your solo album on the new Sinners CD.

Yes, we do. We just started playing them in the Sinners show and they were never available in the States, cause I’m from Canada, so we started playing them and they became popular as Sinners songs. So when we talked about recording a CD, it became like, well, I guess we’ll just readdress these songs. So we just rerecorded a couple of them, renditions that the band would do and the changes that naturally evolved from a band playing a certain song. And then, yeah, we went in and rattled it off and knocked it out.

It really rocks.

Thank you, it’s a pretty high energy rock & roll album, for sure.

Do you have a favorite song on the album?

You know, that’s a tough one. With me they change a lot and some of them I have so much history with. You know, some have been around quite awhile so it’s like some which I feel strongly about has dulled over time because it’s become such a commonplace part of my life. But “Its Not You Its Me” I think is a fairly timeless subject matter. Everybody goes through a breakup, everybody goes through bad things, and I think that song sort of speaks to all of that in a comedic sort of way (laughs).

Do you write all the songs?

Sort of, yeah. Mike the bass player has a song on there, me and Brent wrote a song together and some of the songs are like I said from my older catalog. One was written with my brother and one was written with my partner from this new project called Tee Kay Oh, and we’re putting out a CD later this year also.

So tell us about that new project.

It’s a friend of mine from a band back in Canada. We recorded an album. We actually started this project as, well, we would get together every day in the studio and just sat back there and wrote music and recorded every single day. It was ridiculously productive and then it was like we were so excited about it we just kind of, lets put this damn thing out (laughs). So we’re slowly kind of like, when you’re doing it yourself you don’t really have anyone breathing down your neck to finish it. I mean, it’s recorded and it’s mixed and, we kind of tweak and sit around and fix this and touch that and then make it back to how it already was (laughs). So it’s a lot of wasted time (laughs).

Who is in the band?

Me and two guys from a band called Zuckerbaby from Canada, another Google worthy situation … It was like, we weren’t sure what to call it and then we said we’d call it the Todd Kerns Overdrive, like Bachman-Turner-Overdrive. But then it was like, no, Tee Kay Oh. So it looks kind of Japanese (laughs). And the guitar player is Japanese. But it’s actually really, really cool and I’m really proud of it. I’m happy.

When do we get to hear it?

I’m hoping this year, before the end of the year.

Touring?

Not sure yet. Most of the guys are in different projects and stuff like that so it becomes one of those things where it’s almost impossible to tour on it. It’s a really cool time now, you know. It’s a weird time because record companies are all messed up but its also very cool because the internet really makes it sort of where you can make these and get it right to people immediately as opposed to they don’t have to go down to Best Buy or anywhere to buy a CD anymore. You can just kind of like have it magically appear at the click of a button. That’s what I’ve been kind of trying to do a lot more of. I’m still kind of working on an acoustic CD and stuff like that. They all started off as the idea of, I just want to make music and have it available to people and not really worry about it.

So you’re going to be even more busy.

(laughs) Yeah, ultimately, but I like to be busy so I would really never complain about that (laughs). The Sin City Sinners the last three years I spent in Vegas before this year was the first time I’ve been in one place for that long. So it was kind of surreal.

How do the Sinners guys feel about you running off playing with Slash? I see there’s a really funny web video about them looking for a new front man.

(laughs) Yeah, that is hilarious. It rocked us a bit because you know it was really hard for me to turn this down. It was like, I got to go do this because it’s only going to help raise the profile of everything else I have going on in my life … So the Sinners, we still have gigs around Vegas that we do and we have friends of ours filling in, like guys from Aerosmith, a friend of ours from Beggars & Thieves and he sang on all kinds of Cher records and Kiss records and all these kinds of records. It’s always been a very guest-oriented show where we have people come jam with us all the time.

Have you ever had anyone come up to jam with you guys where you were actually starstruck, so to speak?

 I mean, a lot of them, yes. I’m a huge fan of like seventies punk rock and rockabilly. Slim Jim Phantom was a big deal from the Stray Cats and Sylvain Sylvain from the New York Dolls and Cheetah Chrome from the Dead Boys, George Lynch from Dokken. We had a lot of people who were like I’d seen in a hockey rink like this when I was like fourteen years old and suddenly they’re just jamming with us and its like, it’s surreal.

So what has it been like touring with Slash?

It’s been great. I don’t know if it blows his image or not, but he’s a very kind man and a very soft-spoken, thoughtful, smart guy. I don’t know what it would have been like to tour with him like ten or twenty years ago because of the way things were but now its really about the music and I think that that’s the most important thing about Slash, that he plays his guitar all day long and if anything its sort of taught me that success doesn’t come by accident. It becomes something that you work at and it’s your craft and then you just do it, you know. That doesn’t mean there isn’t luck involved and timing and all the things that go along with it but absolutely, yeah. I’ve toured in bands and slept on floors and all those kinds of things in that whole early part of my career so I’m very accustomed to that. So being on tour buses and sleeping in nice hotels and having my own room and flying to gigs is pretty cushy. It’s hard to complain about it.

How much longer is this going to happen? Its Australia next, correct?

Australia, Asia, then South America. We’re out till mid-April. We might do a quick stint in the summer in the UK or Europe and then there’s talk of perhaps recording something.

That would be great because I have talked to fans at your shows and they all say the same thing: that they would love to see THIS band record a full album.

Wow. Like I said before, it was one of those things where we sort of started as five people who didn’t know each other or whatever and then fell into a chemistry. It really is that kind of thing that is in a similar sense of romantic chemistry has to exist for a couple to work. That chemistry has to work for a band. It’s like I’ve always said it’s so much more than just musical ability and talent. Its like you need musical ability, you need to be able to get along with each other, you need that spark off each other. There are a lot of good players who don’t necessarily work well together for whatever reason but these particular five people, we seem to vibrate at the right frequency with each other.

You know, that’s the one thing I’ve noticed about you – you always seem to be having fun out there.

You know it’s funny because I’ve read a couple of things where people have commented on that. I don’t really think about it cause its kind of like the natural reaction in as far as like when the music starts. Even in the Sinners or any of the things I’ve done in my career it was never sort of like you don’t really think about I’m going to do this or I’m going over there and I’m going to do that. It’s kind of like how when children, when you take a small child and play music and they just kind of react to it, know what I mean? They’ll always dance and they’ll always kind of rock out and you think to yourself, that’s so pure, the music and the kid. And the kid doesn’t have a preconceived idea he’s even supposed to dance to music. Its sort of the music moves them. Cause you’ll literally be sitting there like before you go on stage sometimes and be like, oh my stomach or I slept funny and my neck, you know, and you get on stage and you just like, you can literally be like that until they introduce the band and the lights come on and its just like, you just kind of like go.

Have you always been like that?

Yeah, I mean, people always say, don’t you get nervous? And no, it just feels like, I mean, its literally like I can be laying in bed watching a soap opera or something like that and somebody says its time to get on stage and its like “ok let’s go”. Its kind of like to me its just what I do and I think that the energy, when I look out at the audience, I see people going crazy and it makes sense to me that they should be going crazier than the band on stage. It’s like these people paid money to be here and they don’t deserve to see some jackass running around like me (laughs). I’m just saying I should be putting as much energy into whatever I do.

And they feed off of that energy.

I think that they do. Because I know for myself, it’s like when I watch old videos. I was recently watching this documentary of the MC5 and its like, man, these guys are just going for it. And I found myself sitting in my bunk on the bus just like getting hyped up just by watching these guys rock out. I really do believe that it sort of feeds the momentum of the show.

You seem to be like that offstage – a fun guy, a happy guy, cracking jokes.

I think so. I really do like the music, I really do love playing music. If we’re not playing music on stage we’re back here talking about like, “well, wasn’t that a great record?” or “wasn’t that a great band?” We’re just kind of like music nerds that way (laughs). But I think that’s kind of part of the deal. It’s kind of like to me, it’s not a job. A friend of mine once said, we don’t get paid to do that, we get paid for the waiting to do that. The rest of the other twenty-three or twenty-two hours of the day on airplanes and busses and everything like that, that’s where it’s a bit taxing.

I wanted to ask you about that moment when that first note hits and all that anticipation for the show to begin comes together for the crowd and its probably one of the most exciting parts of the evening. Is that the way ya’ll feel too?

Oh yeah, it never gets routine to me. Cause people say to me, we’re doing these giant festivals in Europe and England with just a vast amount of people and they’ll be like, “are those the best shows you ever played?” and I’m like, they’re SOME of the best shows I ever played but I’ve played shows in tiny little clubs that were like just off the chain. So to me it’s kind of like every day is a new challenge; not challenge, but a new experience. How could it be boring doing that?

Was it very hard getting into music?

That’s so funny cause somebody asked me, there’s this thing called “Ask Dammit” [on his website www.toddkerns.com] so I get like a million questions a day now and I’m like, boy oh boy. But it’s something like, “how do you get started in the music industry?” And I’m like, jeez, I don’t know (laughs). To me, it’s like when I was like a little kid I loved music and my father finally said, “here”. He showed me a couple of chords, he could barely play a few chords on the guitar, but he finally showed me that when I was like eleven. To me there was nothing else after that. It was like to some kids going to play baseball or whatever they liked to do. For me it was like music was everything and that was it, you know.

So what band first got you off?

KISS. Yeah, still. There’s a funny guy named Brian Posehn, a comedian who said that if you were the right age and they got you, KISS had you for life (laughs) and it’s true, embarrassingly true. In my house I got the KISS pinball machine and Axe bass and all the junk everywhere.

Do you remember the first song that you ever wrote?

Not really, no (laughs). That’s the funny thing, when you first start playing guitar you don’t really know how to play guitar so you just kind of learn a couple of chords and start to diddly-diddly and make things up and then immediately you’re like, I’m writing songs (laughs). It’s funny cause we have this conversation all the time where Slash doesn’t really know a lot of other people’s songs, like cover songs per se, because when you start playing guitar the whole thing is to get together and make up your own songs is the purpose of it. And for guys like me it was like, and for Brent the drummer and Myles the singer, in different ways we all kind of had bands that played like high school dances and then eventually played clubs where you had to play other people’s songs, which I’ve never regretted or thought was weird because the Rolling Stones started that way and the Beatles started that way and they kind of cut their teeth learning other people’s songs. You learn a lot about songwriting, you learn a lot about performing live on a regular basis and you just learn your skill really.

Which do you prefer? Bass, guitar or singing?

Well, it’s weird because in this situation I totally come from playing bass. But in the Sinners and all that and everything I’ve done prior to this I’ve usually been the singer because ultimately when it comes to my own music, I usually like singing my own music. But that’s never going to stop. If this were to carry on and this became the band and we carried on with this then I would still do my own things in-between and sing and play guitar. You know I’ve been working on a project for the last year to play drums for a friend of mine’s band, so that’s something I never actually done on stage.

So you play drums too?

Yeah, punk rock kind of drummer. So to me again it comes down to, well, I suppose some people go bowling on Wednesday nights and for me its like sometimes I play guitar, sometimes I sing and sometimes I play drums and sometimes I play bass. I’ve always dreamed someday to make a record where I play everything (laughs) and kind of be like this obnoxious like Lenny Kravitz record where I like just play everything (laughs). This is what I made up so enjoy it (laughs).

What kind of bass and guitar do you play?

Music Man basses, Ernie Ball strings, Gallien-Krueger amplifiers, MXR pedals, SansAmp by Tech21, Red Monkey guitar straps (laughs), my wireless is a Line 6, it goes on and on I know. But they have all been amazing to me because when I first got the Slash gig it was kind of like, I showed up with a couple of basses. Then I was like, I’m going to need one for this tuning and one for that tuning and I need that for this so suddenly I needed like an array of guitars, basses, so they sent over a bunch of stuff.

So you have a whole truckload of shit (laughs).

My house is like a guitar shop. It’s like when you walk in its just like insane. But again it’s what I love and what I’m interested in so it becomes a collection of stuff that I love.

You grew up in Canada. What was that like? I’d like to go to Calgary.

Oh Calgary is beautiful. I lived there for three years. I grew up in a small little town of fifteen hundred people [Lanigan, Saskatchewan]. Well, that’s not true, two different towns, but I refer to it as Smallville; it’s a Superman complex (laughs) Children have that, they usually grow out of it (laughs) but we did that and then like the big city was like moderately sized cities that you would consider a joke. But like a shopping mall or a 7-Eleven was a trip. We very rarely saw that sort of stuff and then we moved to like a city. Me, I left when I was like seventeen when I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth. I was like playing in bands already and I was ready to get the hell out of there. But my parents were very sort of like, “you need to finish high school, just finish high school and then just go”. At the time I was like I didn’t get it cause I was like playing with older people who had tours set up and we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that and I’m like “let’s go, I’m out of here”. And my parents were like, “slow down, you have all the time in the world for this”. Which I understand now as an adult.

Do you have children?

Yes, two. They’re teenagers. Girls. Most musicians I know have girls. Because it’s some sort of vicious payback (laughs)

Your band Age Of Electric. They were very popular in Canada. What happened?

Yeah, we were big as far as our little world goes. It was my brother John and I and two other sets of brothers and that was the band that came up. We were small town nobodies who came up and had like gold selling records and we did pretty well. It’s the funniest thing and I’ve seen it happen a thousand times and I’ve had this conversation with different musicians where when you’re struggling to make it you’re like a united force of just kind of fighting all these things in your way and people telling you you’ll never do this and you can’t do that. You just fight through it. And as soon as you start to succeed the band starts to kind of fall apart. It’s the weirdest thing and suddenly its like, you know what, I can’t stand this guy (laughs). I’ve put up with him because we were struggling to do something and once you start attaining these things its like now I can’t stand this guy. And vice versa. It just becomes like you’ve been living in each other’s pockets for years and it just gets old. So we imploded. We started to have other projects and it just kind of pulled itself apart.

But then you jumped back in with your brother again for Static In Stereo.

My brother and I carried on with our youngest brother Ryan. We got along fine. It was, I think we all got along in Age Of Electric in our own way. Just as a group it became harder and harder to make it work and I think we never really intended to break up. I think we always intended at some point to kind of find itself back together and it just has not. And even though I have entertained the idea once in awhile to do something together it just sort of always falls by the wayside. And they’re family, ultimately we’re all family cause we’ve been together so long.

How do you keep from being bored on the road? What goes on back here when you’re not talking to people like me?

You know what, its surprisingly boring (laughs). I always say, people want to come backstage and are shocked to see how lame it is back here. It’s like a lot of guys sitting around talking. You know there’s been times when we’ve been in the middle of a conversation about some “Star Trek” episode or something like that and I’ll be thinking to myself, now if somebody came back here right now they’d be like, this is the worst backstage experience I could imagine (laughs). Ultimately I read a lot and I watch a lot of movies.

What interests you?

Music (laughs). I also like a lot of film, I’m kind of a film nerd that way, Sci-fi. I’ve always said that the weirdest thing is I feel like sometimes they stopped making music for me or for anybody who is not fifteen years old. Its kind of like, I know who Lady Gaga is but I don’t really feel like I’m going to go out and buy her records or any number of bands’ records. I feel like the best stuff has already happened and that’s just the way I feel. I feel like every once in awhile something great like Jack White or something like that will come along and I’ll go, that guy’s talented. But I feel like even though they don’t make music anymore for me they still make movies for me. Quentin Tarantino and these kinds of people are putting movies out and I go, see, this is still for me … I don’t think Lady Gaga is really made for me, its just not part of my world. It’s kind of like, I know who that is and its great but its like I’m not going to go out and buy her records or whatever cause I like KISS and Guns N Roses and the Ramones and Iggy Pop and the MC5. It just doesn’t really work in my world. This is what I like and that’s this other thing. I obviously have seen the videos and go, she’s talented and she’s great but … And there’s a lot of new bands that come along but I really haven’t seen anyone that has really knocked my socks off.

You had something happen to your eye this past year and you couldn’t tour with the band. What happened?

I think it was summertime. Yeah, it was summertime because my operation was in July. It was a detached retina. We don’t really know how it happened. Whenever I talked to a doctor about it they were always, its like bad luck. Sometimes it happens. My [right] eye had like clouded over and it was like very interesting. I was in Belgium at a festival and as we were riding to the airport, I was like my eye is freaking out and I wear contact lenses so I was like this contact is screwed up. So we got to the airport and took the contact lens out and I still couldn’t see anything and I was like, oh shit. We flew to England to Bristol and then from Bristol I went to the emergency room. We were on the road so I had to kind of like stop at doctors along the way. By the time I got to Moscow it was like, they kept saying, you’ve got a tear in your retina and vitreous fluid is leaking into the eye. We’ll wait till it drains out and then we’ll laser the tear; but I still need to have some work done on it but it’s a pain in the ass. So I flew back home from Moscow, had the operation and was down for about a month. So they went over to Asia and Australia with our friend Tony [Montana] on bass. Thank God he was there. But it was a drag. What doesn’t kill us (laughs)

Have you ever forgotten what city you were in?

Just the other day I did that. I was like, where the hell are we right now? It was like Moline, Illinois, cause it was not something I’d ever heard of before. I was like, Chicago, Jacksonville, all these places, and then I was, where the hell are we? And what is this town? And why are we here? (laughs). It’s Moline and it’s the home of John Deere Tractors. Oh cool. So it is easy to kind of get lost.

Do you like living in Vegas?

I do, actually. Fitz, the drummer, lives there too. I’ve made some of the best friends of my life in Vegas. It’s been really good to me. But I’m a fucking gypsy, you know. Its like I said the other day, we went through Nashville and I was like, I love this town. I could totally see living in this town. And I thought to myself, Vancouver was my home for fifteen years and I loved it, I still love Vancouver. It’s a very beautiful city and has many, many attributes about it. I didn’t plan on relocating to Vegas, it just kind of happened, going down and doing stuff and going back and forth and back and forth and eventually was getting so busy there I didn’t leave. Then I bought a house and it makes sense now. Its home, you know, in the weirdest way.

Brent Fitz keeps making faces at us through the window in the door so I ask Todd to tell me more about him.

I’ve known Brent for probably twenty years. He played in bands back in the day when I was doing my thing in Canada. He went down to LA very early on. I had a family and a career going in Canada, going very strong. He left for LA and we stayed in touch and when I finally ended up in Vegas it was like we sort of really got tight and then he got the gig with Slash and they had another guy playing bass and then they called me the next day, out of nowhere they called me.

Did that surprise you?

Yeah, I think I had played with so many people in like different things. Like in Sin City Sinners we always had people on. And when they said, you want to come jam with Slash, it was like, yeah, sure, sounds like a blast. I threw my stuff in the car and drove there the next day and then they wouldn’t let me leave (laughs). And it’s been like this since, well, it’ll be a year in April or March.

And you jelled in.

Yeah, we were jelled pretty fast actually. It came together pretty fast. For anybody like yourself who has seen us in that year-long period knows that.

Would you like to shamelessly promote your band or your CD or something before we finish?

Yeah, I have a limited amount of my solo album still kicking around so we put those up on my website and trying to unload those just cause, you know, its kind of like some of the people are interested cause I’m playing in this thing and suddenly now people are coming out of the woodwork going, who is this? Who is this guy? (laughs) And they see I have this and I have that and I have the Sinners and we actually put out two CDs last year, in February and December. And then I’m going to go home and just sort of plug myself back into that and see what other mischief I can get up to. The Tee Kay Oh CD we hope to drop that this year, and an acoustic CD I’m working on, a solo CD, and to me its just always keeping busy and going forward.

You have that long flight to Australia tomorrow and you’re not getting any rest sitting here talking to me (laughs).

I’ll sleep when I’m dead (laughs). That’s the way I feel about it. You only live once and that’s really what it’s kind of been like on this particular run. Its been like, well, you know what, I said it to myself standing onstage tonight: I look out into the audience and I see this whole arena full of people and I always tell myself, take this in and just sort of like really remember it because there may come a day or there WILL come a day when I’m not going to be doing this anymore or whatever … I look out at those pockets of people who like our band and sort of take this in and remember it.  

Todd and the rest of Slash’s band were en route to Singapore from Bangkok when they learned about the tragic events unfolding in Japan. After debating over what they should do, they decided to proceed to Osaka, Japan, where they were greeted by fans appreciating their presence in the face of tragedy. As Todd wrote on his blog: “There was a guy right in the front row in Osaka that held up a sign that said something like You Saved Our Souls Tonight. I’m paraphrasing. We kept the sign. I wish I could remember it exactly. It was deeply touching as we are aware that we hadn’t really saved anyone but we had taken their minds off of this disaster if only for a couple of hours. That’s what he meant. Music is a powerful thing that way. It was not lost on me.” They ended up cancelling the rest of their Japanese dates but promised to return at a later time when the country and its people were ready for them.