John Elefante filled some giant shoes in 1981 when he replaced Steve Walsh as the lead vocalist in the band Kansas. The first album Elefante appeared on, Vinyl Confessions, spawned a Top 20 single with “Play the Game Tonight.” By 1983, despite an Elefante penned hit single, “Fight Fire With Fire,” the parent album, Drastic Measures, flopped and the band split up.

Elefante, like fellow Kansas band members Kerry Livgren and Dave Hope has a strong Christian faith. Elefante's career in both Christian, and secular, music is impressive. He has produced over 100 albums while enjoying a successful solo career.  He has won three Grammy awards and co-owns a major studio in Nashville with his brother, Dino. 

John's latest release, Revolution of Mind,  sees him return with a rock oriented album featuring many guest musicians including Kansas alum, and founding member, Kerry Livgren and longtime friend Dave Amato of REO Speedwagon.

John: I produced a few records for them in the past. I have known Bill Edwards for a while. Lou Mann and I know each other but it was many, many moons ago. These guys are a real record company. They are really into the music; Bill and Lou are major music people. There are not any real records companies out there anymore, so it has been great working with these guys. They even hired a real publicist in Chip Ruggieri.

John: I like to dig myself, once in a while. It’s good for all of us to get into that mode and dig ourselves. But if you have kids, like I do, they can put you in your place. They go, “Kansas? Who?” They will cut you down to size without even meaning too. They really put things in perspective.

John: That is what I set out to do. A lot of this record is about my life experiences, as that is what I know best. I struggle, and I have good times and bad times, and that is what I write about, lyrically. It is a little bit of where I am spiritually, and where I am generally in my life.

John: You have to live with me for a couple of weeks to understand how I do it. When I do lyrics, I like to dig down deep. There is nothing wrong with a lyric that is easy on the ears and benign. I am not opposed to doing that, but it is just something that I haven’t done a lot of it. I wrote a song called “Where Does Our Love Go” that was a full on love song. I wrote the song because I wanted to pitch it to Whitney Houston. My friends told me that I had to sing that song. I said, “But she sells a lot more records. I need the money.” I ended up keeping it on my album.

I called it a Mastedon record because I brought in so many outside people on it. A John Elefante solo record is not this edgy and Mastedon is. It just announces that the music will be edgier and have a heavy rock side of things. I think people should give this album a listen. You have to taste it in order to know if you are going to like it or not.

John: A very major imprint, not just before I was in Kansas, but when I was in Kansas. On the lighter side of things, Kerry is what I would tag as a genius, but a lot of times he can’t find his car in the parking lot. Kerry is really a trip. He can multi-task in his brain and he can think so angular, musically. I would watch him play the middle of “Song For America” on the piano and he would play his lead part with his right hand, while his left hand was playing some sort of bass part, which is in a different time signature. I would just think, “This guy is some sort of Mozart or something.” His brain is split up into many compartments and he can bring them all together musically; it’s incredible. I have learned a lot from him, not just a musician, but as a person too.

John: I started writing that song just goofing around. I wanted to have a theme to it with a lot of changes. While it doesn’t plagiarize a particular Kansas song, it does borrow heavily from the Kansas sound. I think I have a little bit of a license to do that as I spent some time in the band.

The song was never intended to be on this record. I was going to shelve this song and then if Phil Ehart ever called me and said, “Hey, do you have a song for Kansas?” then I could say, “Yes, I do.” It was going to just stay on my hard drive. One day I decided to call and ask Kerry if he would be a part of it, and play on the song, and he said he would. With him on the song, then it made total sense to have him, and this song, on the record.

John: I have known Dave Amato way before he was famous. I met Dave Amato when I was with Kansas. “Fight Fire with Fire” was a big hit at the time. I walked into a club, as I was waiting for everyone to show up so we could go across the hall to dinner, and there was this band playing “Fight Fire with Fire.” They were nailing it pretty well but there was nobody in the club. I decided that I had to go up and talk to them. There is nothing like being in a club and seeing a cover band play one of your songs. To be honest, I wanted to go up there and sing it with them. Dave and I instantly hit it off as he is Eastern Italian, just like I am. Dave goes, “Come on up.” I said, “You just played it.” He said, “There’s nobody here; nobody heard it. Get up here and play it with us.”

John: He played with Richie Sambora and he did a couple of tours with Cher. Dave plays lead guitar on eighty percent of this album. I play rhythm on the album because lead guitar is not my thing. I can play guitar but I can’t play lead like Dave or Kerry. It is very easy working with Dave. We screw around for three hours and work for fifteen minutes. All Dave wants to do is to make sure you’re happy. He will do an incredible solo and you will be like, “Great job, man. Let’s move on to the next song.” He will be, “I can do better. Do you want me to do another one?” All he cares about is that you are happy.

John: I always write music first and I lay down a dummy melody. I, then, dig down deep to find something that fits that cadence. Lyrically, this song is about a new way of thinking. Sometimes we need to revolutionize our thinking. A lot of times, I like to let the listener get out of a song what they want to get out of it. Sometimes, if the writer explains exactly where he is coming from, then something can be lost for an individual. I like to let people conjure up their own meaning to the song.

John: I like that.

John: That song is pretty deep. My daughter had a basketball tournament in Memphis. It is about a three and a half hour trip each way. I had my headphones on the whole time and I really put myself into that zone.

When we get into that time in life, the forties and fifties, you like to reminisce and you wonder where the time has gone. You still feel like you’re in your twenties, until you bend over to pick something up. I just feel like it is better in life to stay content where you’re at because you can’t change the past.

The song is about this guy, who is down by the lake, and he is reminiscing about the past but he realizes that he is in a good place now. He realizes that he can remember the past, and be happy about it, but he is okay with where he is at now as well. We have all seen those guys that we knew back in high school, and they’re still living in the past, and they just don’t seem very happy. I think it is healthy to dig where you are at right now.

John: I think everybody is trying to figure that out. It is an internet world. You have to support a record by doing live shows. I have seen groups get stuff up on YouTube and fans love it. Word of mouth is good, but it is not like the old days where a record company will spend a million dollars to market you and get ten million in return. I leave those questions up to the record company. Radio is still big. If you can get radio exposure then it is still huge. It is probably still the best way if you can get it to happen.

John: I am both. My problem is that when I go out and play live I am such a perfectionist… I can’t just go out with a scrappy four-piece band and bang it out. My songs are way more sophisticated than that, so I just can’t do that. We have a date in Toronto on April 23^rd and it is taking a lot for the band to learn all of this stuff. My perfectionist side of me really kicks in during a live performance.

John: I could do that but I don’t. There are way better drummers and bass players than me. You don’t have the same objectivity when you are playing your own drum track. I want to sit in the studio and listen to what is going on and make suggestions. I have found that is the best way to do it, for me.

John: You have to have passion, and you have to put a lot of passion into the song and convey that to the listener. Steve Walsh has an excellent lower range. The sweet spot of my voice starts in the middle and then goes up; I don’t have a very good low range. Lou Gramm, who is a friend, also has a great low range…and a great high range. I have worked on my low range and it has improved. I like to start a song and then build it. I like to build the vocal just like a person would build a song.

John: It was pretty miraculous. A friend of mine told me that he heard on the radio that Steve Walsh had left Kansas. He told me that I had to try out because he thought I would get it. I knew an attorney that was in the same office as Kansas’ attorney. The tape got passed over to him, and the next thing I know, the manager of the band is calling me and telling me to come over to his house and have a chat. He liked me, and I started getting calls from Phil and Dave Hope. I think he liked my voice but he also liked what I brought from a songwriting angle. Steve was a big part of the band. When he left, he not only took his vocals skills, he took his songwriting as well. Nobody was going to fill those shoes but they were looking for someone who could do the job in both areas.

John: Heck yes. I was doing Kansas songs in clubs. It was extremely surreal. One day I was playing a Kansas song in a club with twenty people in it, and then next day I was playing it with Kansas in front of twenty thousand people. I remember there was a song on Vinyl Confessions called “Face It” and the band learned the song before I came to Atlanta for rehearsals. I remember hearing the band kick in, and then Robby Steinhardt came in with his violin, and Rich Williams was doing his part, and Kerry and Phil were kicking it, and I was just amazed, as I was hearing one of my songs morphing into a Kansas song.

John: No, it was written by a couple of guys in Nashville. It was originally called “Stay with Me Tonight” which didn’t fit the band, lyrically, at all. We reworked the lyrics and it became “Play the Game Tonight.”

John: Every band lives their existence in turmoil; I have learned that since I left Kansas. I think their turmoil was pretty mild compared to what I have seen since in other bands. I have produced well over a hundred records, and every band I have worked with is in full turmoil. It really kicks into gear when the band starts making money. All kinds of stuff goes down. It is very common in bands.

John: It was and it wasn’t. Kerry’s lyrical influence came from a spiritual influence. It wasn’t like Motley Crue went from “Girls, Girls, Girls” to “The Wall.” From that point of view, it was fairly seamless to me. I think the press made it a bigger deal than it was. They made it really stand out that there was a rock band with Christians in it. I think they really blew it up big.

John: It was hard. I knew there were going to be a lot of people going, “We hate you!” It was what it was, and it is what it is. It was fairly short lived but it was a big part of my life. I don’t want to call it a stepping stone because that will make it sound like I used it somehow, but it has really shaped a lot of things that I have done.

John: I am flattered but I sing it better -- I just threw that in as a joke. Steve and I really do have different styles. When you step into Kansas, you want to give the fans what they are used to hearing. They don’t want to hear something very different on “Carry On Wayward Son,” they want what they are used to hearing. They don’t want to hear Tiny Tim replace Steve Walsh. Since then, I have developed my own style. I will never have the success that Kansas has had, but I have done okay.