Part of the Kingdom

Being a part of the Kings Kaleidoscope family requires you to be willing to surrender to a way of being beyond your current comfort zone.

We’re working on a new project (👀) and in the process, interviewing past and present members of Kings Kaleidoscope. Drummer, Daniel Steele had some powerful insights into how being part of the band has caused him to evolve and grow not only as a musician, but as a human being.

Matt

Your name comes up a lot when people are talking about the culture of Kings Kaleidoscope. They’ll say that how it works is, Chad will harness a bunch of people in a room and create an open-ended, chaotic kind of thing, and then whatever happens, Chad will react to, and sample, and direct, and get all that going.

And then they say, “Chad and Daniel will take that and make stuff out of it.”

So, I think that's a role that you play for Chad: helping judge what happens in the chaos and translating it into that next phase.

Daniel

I guess that's what I do. [laughs]

My process is so different from Chad's, because he's super fast-paced and decisions are made on the spot, while it takes me hours to replay everything in my mind that just happened, and I have to kind of shift pieces of music around in my head and live with it, and then come back.

And usually what happens at Kamp is the rest of the guys will go play basketball or something, and I'm just like, “Hey, I'm going to spend some time in the studio by myself.” And I start taking all those ideas that Chad was zipping around. I just start creating on my own and I wait until they come back.