Wherever You Will Go

Welcome back to The Hang, brought to you by Almost Famous Magazine.

Alex Band is the founder and unmistakable voice of the L.A. rock band The Calling, whose global breakthrough, wherever you will go, spent 23 straight weeks, number one on Billboard's Adult Pop Airplay chart, has crossed a billion Spotify streams, and helped propel the band to more than 10 million albums sold worldwide.

After some label battles stalled by the band's momentum and a Parkinson's diagnosis forced Alex into a years-long fight to regain his motor skills, he eventually found his way back to the stage.

And now The Calling are returning with their first full-length album in 22 years, Before the World Turns to Dust.

Now, this is not a nostalgia tour.

This is a second chapter for one of the defining voices of 2000s alternative pop rock.

So today on The Hang, we're going to talk about survival, songwriting, the endurance of a song that never went away, that you can still hear played wherever you will go, and what Alex wants to call into being now.

So Alex, thanks so much for giving me some time today.

This one's called Hold On Me.

And there's obviously no way we could do this interview without talking about Wherever You Will Go, which has now passed a billion streams on Spotify.

Pretty damn extraordinary for a song that came out 25 years ago.

We also talked about the band's new fan contest, which includes some seriously cool prizes.

called Fool That You Are, which is a song I wrote a long time ago.

because my younger brother died and it's a song I wrote for him and I felt like it should be on the record.

And I would be remiss if I didn't bring up Wherever You Will Go.

That's now passed a billion streams on Spotify.

This is a group out of Los Angeles.

They're best known for the song Wherever You Will Go.

This was a chart-topping single.

It spent 23 weeks at number one on the adult top four.

i get a kick out of that bubbling under hot i'm number one if you

don't count the first 115 right other than those other hundred

So it was released as a single in April 2002, about nine months after the album, and about a year after Wherever You Will Go came out as a single.

So that's a pretty long gap.