AFI, KT TUNSTALL, AND TAKING BACK SUNDAY LEARN FROM LIVE EARTH

AFI, KT Tunstall, and Taking Back Sunday were proud to be part of Live Earth, but they did say that they were still learning about Green ways.

Live Earth took place this weekend at Giants Stadium in New Jersey as part of a series of concerts held worldwide, spanning from Japan to Brazil. The booking team that Al Gore hired managed to get a good crossection between older rock bands and rock bands on the newer tip. Not only was it an education for the audience, the process was also a learning experience for the artists.

A.F.I. talked about Live Earth and how it has affected them.

[Davey Havok] “Um, as a career I don’t know that it affects our career too much. It’s more about raising the awareness of our fans. I think it’s an opportunity for us, a very apolitical band, to be part of something that we would like to put our stamp of approval on. This is such a good cause that we decided that this would be the event we would play.” [Jade Puget] “We didn’t really look at this as a chance to get some press or some new fans. It’s kind of more about the issue.” [Havok] “Yeah.”

KT Tunstall talked about what she’s learned about going Green, the the term used for being environmentally conscious.

“I mean the average American puts out 15 tons of carbon a year, and as a musician when I sold 500,000 copies of my record I was up to 650 tons of carbon in one year, and I’ve now sold three and a half million records so that’s a considerable amount of carbon emission for one person. So what I’ve done, like I said, I use biodiesel on the busses. I offset… I met this chap called Dan Morell. He runs a company called Global Cool, and Joe Strummer was actually one of the first musicians to offset carbon emissions from CD output by tree planting. It’s a stop-gap measure. It’s not really a solution, but at least it’s a method of carbon storage until there’s a better way of production that’s developed. So that was right from when my album came out in the U.K., so right now I’ve got about 6,000 trees in Scotland munching away at all my carbon output, which is great.”

Taking Back Sunday also talked about delving into environmental issues, which affect both performers and audience members alike.

“As far as trying to not be preachy, I think we’ve done that by internalizing the things we want to do ourselves as a band and letting that speak for itself. Encouraging people to carpool, having recycling stations at our shows, having an organic rider, organic merchandise, and purchasing carbon offsets — all simple things that you can do as a touring artist and letting that speak for itself, and also offering links to stopglobalwarming.org or different websites from our website. Hopefully people will simply find their way there and then simply find their way there and then implement these ideas into their own life. That’s also a huge part of what being here today is about. It’s about people seeing that all these artists that they are possibly fans of and have been inspired by can also take their leave in taking the attention toward this issue.”

The Live Earth shows reportedly had reached the 10 million streamed mark on Saturday, with more internet viewing coming in the days to come. Event organizers also claim that the concert was seen by over 2 billion people. The concert put forth a series of environmentally conscious pledges for artists to impart to the crowd and for the general public to integrate into their lives so they can have a positive impact on the environment.