I recently had the chance to talk with X band member D.J. Bonebrake about X’s 40th Anniversary Tour and their upcoming show at The Kent Stage.
Here is an excerpt of that conversation…
Tell me a little bit about your current tour
DJ: We’re about a week into the tour, this one lasts about a couple of weeks. This year we’re celebrating our 40th Anniversary as X. It’s going well, we’ve done about five or six gigs. We started in Las Vegas and played in Salt Lake City and Denver and Omaha and Minneapolis and now we’re heading east toward Milwaukee and Chicago right across to the east coast and then we end up in Kent and then Columbus. We end this tour in Ohio and then we continue in December. So it’s going really well.
How is an anniversary tour different?
DJ: How is it different? Oh, I don’t know. It’s an even number? (laughs). We’ve been doing basically what we’ve doing the last few years but we kind of morph a little bit into playing, besides our regular set, we’ve been doing some b-cuts and some different songs that we don’t normally do and a couple songs I play vibes… We’re playing more cuts and songs we didn’t always do live like “Come Back to Me” and “I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts” a few of songs like that, “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes”, so that’s how it’s different but besides that it’s pretty much the same. We’re just doing what we do best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGcJNIXc2QM
So how does 40 years feel?
DJ: How does it feel? I don’t know (laughs). It’s kind of an abstraction, it feels good to be still playing and people come out to shows and enjoy it…We’re still doing well, I may look older but I’m still young and we still play great.
What should Kent expect with your upcoming show?
DJ: I think we’ll be rehearsed cause it’ll be the end of the tour (laughs). We’ve got 40 years so it should be good (laughs). I think the sound will be good. It will be pretty intense, it will be loud but I think it will come down a little bit for some of the more ballad-y songs but mostly it’s just gonna be pretty loud rock n’ roll, pretty intense. But there is some variety, also Billy will play sax on a song or two and I’ll be playing vibes so you’ll get a little more variety in sounds so I guess it’ll be some more oddball songs, more b-sides, songs we’d never do before so we mix that up with the classic songs we’ve always done and I think it’ll be a good show.