Links...
Official Audio Adrenaline site
“It’s all about getting out there and doing something incredible for God. You don’t have to go overseas to be a missionary. Just get out there in the world-even if it’s just to your next door neighbor’s or in your high school-and take God there.” - Mark Stuart
Audio Adrenaline:
(l to r) Will McGinniss, Ben Cissell, Mark Stuart and Tyler Burkum
We recently were part of a Press Conference with Mark Stuart of Audio Adrenaline. He shared about their upcoming album 'Until My Heart Caves In', the Hands and Feet project and more...
Is there any particular theme to this album - and what's it going to be like sonically and lyrically?
Mark: The record is called 'Until My Heart Caves In' and it's about having passion and living with passion, until you die...basically. It's kind of like the old song, 'It's better to burn out than fade away' - that kind of mentality. I think a lot of people in their walks become ...after a while, you struggle with being lazy, lackadaisical, even lukewarm. We as a band struggle with that too - even on a career level. You know, "How are we going to keep going?" 
I think this record is speaking from that kind of experience. We want to be as a band, and as Christians, passionate - even on fire - until our heart caves in. That's what the theme of the album is about. I think sonically, it's probably the most agressive record that we've ever made. We're working with a producer named Jay Joyce who did Nichole Nordeman's record which is exactly the opposite, probably, of what our record sounds like. (laugh) This guy is a guitar god.
I don't know how familiar you are with producers, but T-Bone Burnett who did the WallFlowers 'Bringing Down the Horse', our producer Jay Joyce did all of the guitars on that. He's a stellar guitar player. He's kind of an 80s dude, but he's very organic and very much about 'aggressive rock guitar.' And for me, that's what Audio Adrenaline is, I think 'sonically', born to do - is to play arena, guitar, anthemic rock. And that's what this record kind of sounds like. It's more modern sounding than 'WorldWide'. WorldWide was kind of a throwback to 70s rock. This one is a little bit more aggressive and modern. I think there are nods of the hat back to classic rock on this one, but it's more of in a, I guess, 'sonically aggressive' way like 'Jet' would do it, more of a 60s metal than a 70s classic rock way if we were going to throw it back to some retro sounding stuff. There are some big ballads on it. There's a worship song called 'You are My King' on it. The title track is very aggressive. It starts off by saying, "I'm a Warrior, I would die for You." So the theme runs through the whole record, but there are also some songs that would divert from the theme a little bit. We're doing a cover song - an Otis Redding song. I don't think he wrote it, but he was the one that made it popular. It's called 'Your love is lifting me higher'. That's a pretty good song, it sounds really cool.
How do you see technology influencing how you create, produce music. Also, how do you see it changing how you interact with your fans? It seems nowdays at a concert, you'll likely to see more camera phones than film cameras.
Mark: It has changed the way we make records. Used to, you'd have to go in and demo something at a little studio. We can demo our songs on the tour bus, going down the highway on a Mac, you know, in 'Garage Band.' It's made our lives a lot simpler, and more efficient as far as songwriting goes. I think making records, it's obviously made that different too. Some people really use ProTools as a crutch and they can't pull it off live. We tend to use ProTools - not really as a crutch - we want our records to sound like we do live still, but we use it as editing. We might take out a bridge, or shorten something. So, I think making the record - technology hasn't changed what we do greatly, but as songwriters it's probably effected us more in a positive way than actually in the studio.
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