Bob Walkenhorst is vocalist/guitarist and main songwriter for The Rainmakers. The band is based in Kansas City, Missouri and was inducted in the Kansas Music Hall of Fame in 2011 and accumulated numerous fans since the early 1980s, including author Stephen King. The band’s most recent recording is Cover Band.
Here, in a 2014 interview with KMUW, Walkenhorst discusses his longtime fascination with religion in his lyrics.
“I don’t think it’s good to be disrespectful to anyone’s faith. Faith can take a lot of different forms and it certainly gets all of us through this moment or that moment. What label you put on that faith, what name works for you, I don’t ever want to be ridiculing that. On the other hand, I grew up in conservative, Christian middle of America. I know the language. I know what that book was about. I have to have a little fun with my own past. ‘OK, all this stuff that you guys impressed upon me that was so serious? I just can’t take it that seriously.’ Again, I don’t want to be disrespectful but I think there’s a lot of people that grew up with that same experience in religion, that it became this cloud that followed you around. ‘Are you worried about sinning? Is this good? Is that bad?’ It can color your whole life. I try to break up those clouds a little bit. I think rock ‘n’ roll can do that. It can break up those clouds. Let the sun shine in!”
