JACKSONVILLE, Fla — The rock band The Calling is back together and coming to Jacksonville. The group will be at Five on September 12. I got the chance to chat with lead singer Alex Band ahead of the Jacksonville show to talk about reuniting with the band, the highs during the height of their single “Wherever You Will Go,” and being abducted in Michigan.
“It was wild,” said a reflecting Band on the popularity of “Wherever You Will Go.” “It took actually about a year of working that song at radio, in America, for it to break. So it was 10 months in, I’d say, we were trying to push a top 10; the label was kind of giving up. I literally put in every penny I had, which was not much at the time, to try to push it another month, and it broke, so that was insane. The highs were, you know, winning ‘Best New Artist’ MTV Music Award, getting to perform with Steven Tyler, and meeting Bon Jovi and becoming friends with him, and touring the world and going to a hundred different countries and everyone knowing who you are when you show up there for the first time you’ve never been. It was just completely wild, insane times.
In 2013, Band says he was abducted following a show at a fair in Michigan. “So I go across the street to get like a Vitaminwater from a gas station, and get pulled into a van by two guys and the first thing they did was smash the right side of my face with, like, a metal bat, which broke my jawbone, my teeth, all this stuff. Then I was kind of all screwed up,” recalled Band. “They took all my money, they took all my stuff. It turned out that they were at the show; they had seen me giving money to local kids who had helped set up the stage and things. They had seen I had cash on me, which I did, and also I had jewelry. They stole all that stuff, drove me out to the middle of nowhere to some train station maybe a mile or two away, and they were just going to kill me and leave me; that was the plan.”
You can hear about how Band was spared from his abduction, as well as hear about the time he says he was taken hostage in Brazil in the full interview.
The Calling’s new single “Dust” is available now. Tickets to see The Calling at Five are on sale now.
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