A Q&A With REO Speedwagon Vocalist Kevin Cronin
By Mike Saucier
Frontdoors Media heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend that REO Speedwagon is playing a show at Celebrity Theatre on Friday, May 5.
The legendary rockers are marking the band’s 50th anniversary of its inception. Since forming in 1967, REO Speedwagon has been an almost constant presence on the tour circuit. They have sold 40 million albums around the world.
The band has charted 13 Top 40 hits. Their two number one singles are timeless: “Keep on Loving You” and “Can’t Fight This Feeling.” Fan favorites also include “Take It on the Run,” “Time for Me to Fly,” “Roll With the Changes,” and “Ridin’ The Storm Out.”
Frontdoors Media caught up with the band’s vocalist Kevin Cronin ahead of the Phoenix tour stop.
FRONTDOORS: What’s in store for REO fans in Phoenix on Friday?
CRONIN: There’s a cycle a band goes through where you kind of start scrambling things up a little bit. You put a set together, you go out and try stuff out and see how it works, check out the flow, see what you’re doing, and then it kind of gets into a solid flow. And then a year, year and a half goes by and the cycle kind of ends and then you start mixing it up again. We’re kind of in the mixing it up again part of the cycle now so it’s really a lot of fun. I’m really looking forward to the show in Friday because it’s fresh and it’s just a good time for people to come and see it. There’s never a bad time but this is probably the most fun time because everything is fresh so it’s exciting.
FRONTDOORS: After all these years of playing, what moves you onstage, what keeps you going?
CRONIN: Like most things in life, it’s a combination of things. Definitely there are certain songs like ‘Time for Me to Fly,’ for example, all I got to do is walk out and play those opening chords on the acoustic guitar and you can kind of hear the collective hairs going up on people’s arms. You feel the energy in the room just changes. That’s a great feeling because as a songwriter it just tells you that something that was important to you, something that you felt deeply and wrote about and shared resonated with other people and that’s for sure a great feeling.
The other thing is that every time we play – even though we’ve played these songs a number of times over the years – I really never tire of playing the songs. I guess I’m just weird that way. I’m always trying to get it right. I always feel like I can find some little twist, some little note that I haven’t tried before.
A song is a living, breathing organism. It’s not set in stone. Bob Dylan is a perfect example of a guy that takes his songs and turns them inside out on a nightly basis. That’s not what I do. I do that to a certain degree but keep the song extremely recognizable. It keeps me excited.
FRONTDOORS: What do you do when you’re in Phoenix? Where do you go?
CRONIN: Last time I was here I hiked. We stayed at a hotel that was walking distance to Camelback. And there’s a trail that you can walk up to the top and walk back down. I like to get some exercise and Phoenix is a beautiful place for that. I’ve got some really good friends in Phoenix that hopefully I’ll be seeing when I’m in town.
My thing is, I just like to keep in motion whether it’s taking a hike or hitting the gym or even just taking a walk around town – it’s real important for me to just keep active. You know, for my own good but also it’s good for the energy level of our band. We’re all in our 60s chronologically speaking, but energy-wise we all feel a lot younger than that. So part of the message is that you want to age gracefully, you want to be active.
Come to an REO Speedwagon show and you’ll be hopefully pleasantly surprised by the energy level and hopefully that can be inspirational in some way between the music, the energy. We want to have people leave the concert feeling better than when they got there.
FRONTDOORS: What’s the recipe for a great pop song?
CRONIN: For me, a hit song it has to grab people’s attention the first time they hear it and that’s normally the melody, maybe a lyric or two that pops out, the feel, the beat, the rhythm. So it kind of gets your attention the first time you hear it and makes you want to hear it again. And then for a song to really be a hit, to really stick and played on the radio over and over again – that’s the definition of a hit song – it’s gotta have a lyric that gets to people. Most times lyrics take awhile before they sink in because you have to really listen to it, unless you’re an active listener.
That’s my humble opinion.
FRONTDOORS: What’s the one question, in the hundreds, if not thousands of interviews over five decades you’ve done that you wished an interviewer would ask?
CRONIN: I can tell you a question that interviewers ask me all the time that I’m really sick of answering, of course, and that is, ‘What does REO Speedwagon stand for?’ I get it because it’s always interesting to hear how a band got its name but when you’re that band and get asked it all the time it gets a little old.
This question that you’ve just asked me, ‘What question do I wish I had been asked that I’d never been asked before’ – that might be the best question that has never been asked of me before. That question itself.
