Derek Webb Interview – 26 February 2005

G: You’re not gonna hear that, sorry…love you .net, but not that much! It’s all Bryan’s idea. Well actually they’re Bryan’s plans, I’m just helping him out. But anyway. We talked about Nashville and you and I were talking earlier about how it’s hard to have Nashville be home because you don’t have a home fan base.

D: Yeah…

G: Everyone loves to have the home team, you know…Eric tonight, Eric’s got Birmingham as his home crowd, and Caedmon’s has got Houston, and …

D: The Chaffers have got Kansas City…

G: Yeah, and we were talking about Over the Rhine in Cincinnati and Dayton, and all that. Do you ever foresee yourself…I mean obviously Nashville has been good to you, it’s been good to you there, it’s been good to Sandra, but do you and Sandra see a time where you’re not going to be in Nashville anymore?

D: We talked about it. We talked about…you know, you spend a certain amount of time living in the Bible Belt, and you just really start to crave getting away from all that pretense. You know, you really do, and it’d be great to move up to the Northeast, it’d be great, and there’s a lot of towns that I love, I love Boston. I love Northeast towns like that, I just love it. I love California…you know, there’s just a lot of towns that I love. We love it over in the UK, I mean, we dream about living in Scotland or Ireland, you know.

But I think we’re gonna be in Nashville for awhile, I do. I think we’re kind of putting roots down there. We’re getting involved in a new church and we’re working on moving over to the more urban, downtown, east side of Nashville, and the community there that we want to be a part of, that we kinda see our future with. And I think that’s a big part of our story, I think we’re gonna be here for awhile; but on a purely musical side, like we were talking about before, I definitely feel like I need to find a hometown crowd somewhere, and it can’t be in Nashville. The folks up at Belmont, I’ve done a few concerts up at Belmont, and they’re really supportive, we get really good groups that’ll come out for shows, and it tends to be different than the typical industry crowd, you know, instead of how it is for the students.

And I love that, but I’m gonna have to eventually declare some other city my hometown and try to really go there a lot and build the community there and really, you know, there are a few towns, there are towns in North Carolina, there’s a town in Georgia, there are towns in different spots, still in Texas, you know, that come close to feeling like a hometown situation. But I’m gonna have to really—cause it really…it takes a homebase, it takes a regional homebase to really get you through the thin, kinda the famine years…but, I’ve got a cyber hometown, you know? I mean, the .net, you know…you know they’re everywhere. I mean, this is the 21st century and so maybe that’s why I haven’t felt the geographic void as much, cause I do feel like I’ve got a supportive community, it’s just hard to get them all in one place.

G: Seriously, it’s like herding cats…

D: Yeah, well, it’s cause they live all over…get a few here and there … I’m satisfied, but it’d be great to get a place where you could go and you know everytime you play you’re gonna have that sold-out crowd. And there’s nowhere I can do that.