Keeping The Flame Burning With KEVIN MARTIN From CANDLEBOX

Interview by Kris Peters
It is hard to fathom that Seattle rock outfit Candlebox have never
toured Australia over the course of their 30-year existence.
Since emerging from the popular music location during the mid-90s
grunge scene, Candlebox have gone from strength to strength, with a
remarkable number of record sales and music streams starting with
their 1993 self-titled album which sold over 4 million copies and
introduced Candlebox to the world with songs like Far Behind, You
and Cover Me.
It is even harder to comprehend that it takes Candlebox calling
time on their illustrious career for the powers that be to coax
them over to our part of the world, but that is just what has
happened with the band poised to bring The Long Goodbye Tour to our
shores in January next year.
With a global tour planned, and the recent release of Candlebox's
final album of the same name, frontman Kevin Martin sat down with
HEAVY to talk us through what has been a stellar slice of music
history.
We start by jokingly asking how and why Candlebox have neglected
their Australian fans for so long.
"I've been trying to come there for thirty years," he smiled in
return, "so you'll have to talk to the promotors about it. It's
been a dream of mine to come out there. I have an extended
Australian family over there that I love very much. I've been
coming to Australia for the past 23 years and my affinity for that
country goes beyond. I think I was Australian in a past life. It's
just one of those things. I love that country, and I've tried to
come for 30 years. I don't know why it's taken us so long. We've
asked several times about coming for some festivals with Stone
Temple Pilots and the guys in Live, but I guess maybe the
Australian promotors just didn't think we were popular enough, but
I cannot tell you how excited I am to be coming to play there. I'm
looking forward to playing in the country that hopefully, at some
point, I will call home."
We bring up the fact that it will be a bittersweet moment for both
the band and their fans seeing them here for the first and last
time.
"I think so," he sighed. "It's gonna be more interesting for me, I
think than it is for them. I'm gonna give them two hours each night
of my very best, but saying goodbye to this career has been
strange. All Summer long there's been times standing on stage in
front of 10,000 of my closest friends, thinking to myself this is
gonna be the last time I sing this song with these people. It's a
strange emotion, but I think for me being home during COVID and
spending time with my wife and my son and realising just how much I
missed of that life with them… was pretty Earth-shaking for me. And
I sat down with my wife around September of 2020 and said I think
I'm pretty much ready to put all this music thing behind me and be
a husband and a Father, is that okay? And she says I would be
beyond grateful but are you sure you can put that away? And I said
I don't love it as much as I used to. I think it was being home for
such a long extended period of time that I realised that music was
no longer the love of my life, nor my mistress. It's almost as
though she had become a close friend that I would bump into every
now and then and didn't like seeing that much. I don't wanna be an
artist who phones it in. I don't wanna be that guy. So when we went
back out on the road in 2021 I made sure that the shows would be
played where we wanted to play. The events that we were involved in
were events that I felt were a good place for Candlebox to be, and
it was all leading up to this goodbye tour of 2023 for the 30th
anniversary of the debut album. So I was very conscious about what
I was doing."
In the full interview, Kevin talks more about the final tour, what
to expect, how to wrap up 30 years of music in one show, the early
days of Candlebox and where they fit in, if he has achieved
everything he wanted from music, the success of their self-titled
debut and why he thinks people gravitated to it, the changes in
music over 30 years and how Candlebox has survived, the response to
their new album The Long Goodbye and more.