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3 Doors Down Manager Says Band Is Playing Inauguration Because They’re “Good Mississippi and Alabama Boys”

Very few musicians want to perform at Donald Trump’s inauguration festivities, but where KISS and R. Kelly fear to tread, 3 Doors Down rush in. The Southern rock band are playing tonight’s Make America Great Again! Welcome Celebration because—shocker—they’re conservatives. At least that’s what the band’s manager, Angus Vail, told Vice.

“They come from conservative families,” Vail explained. And their families don’t just lean right: “When Obama got elected, the singer [Brad Arnold] said please don’t talk to my father about Obama because he thinks the world has ended,” Vail said. “He was just as horrified and depressed about Obama as many are about Trump. They were like, ‘It’s going to be Armageddon, the whole world is going to communism and he’s going to give everything away to the welfare state.'”

Vail also had a refreshingly candid take on the continuing relevance of 3 Doors Down, whose last big hits date to the early ’00s:

The interesting thing is that they have songs, like “Loser” and “Kryptonite,” and those songs are played at every Walmart and in every elevator in America. But are they huge? Well, the very first album they put out sold 13 million copies and 3 Doors are a Bible-belt sort of band, and they can do very well in all those places. They can play until they’re 80 years old, and people will come and see them. They’re not the latest, hottest thing, but they will always attract a lot of people.

In the Trumpian Bizarro World, everything that should be an obvious loss for a band like 3 Doors Down is in fact a low-risk proposition with a lot of potential upside. As Vail put it: “The more liberals that get all hot under their collar about it, the more we’re appreciated by a whole bunch of conservatives.” The best we can hope for is the cold comfort that they deserve it.