This latest album has one of the most direct album titles I’ve heard in a long time from a Christian artist. What was your thinking when you decided to call it Church Music?
I like language a lot. I think language is fluid. You couldn’t have put a record out like this 10 years ago and have people get the slightly ironic satire or at least understanding that we were aware of the strangeness of these words attached to what we’re doing. At the same time, it is what you’re saying. It’s very direct and stating the obvious. We’re writing congregational music even though it doesn’t fit universally in congregations. Nonetheless for us these are songs that we’re singing on Sunday morning together. If you’re coming from a more progressive setting you might think, “Ah this isn’t church music. Church music is more stodgy: choir robes, organs, that kind of thing.” If you’re coming from a more traditional setting you would hear what we’re doing and go, “Absolutely not. This is not church music.” I think what is beautiful about that is that there is critique available to all of us. We tend to think of everybody else like ourselves. And yet when you think of the global church, there are a lot of people coming from a lot of different cultures and the art and the expression coming from these cultures looks a lot different than our own. We like that two little words could play with expectation and hopefully in a positive sense could help people think about music in the church in a bigger way, including ourselves. That the Crowder Band could fall under that little moniker is fantastic. It’s cool that a couple of words could say that much.
Because you play these songs on Sunday mornings at your church in Waco, is that where you are trying things out and honing new material?
Most of the time, these things take shape there. We have the great fortune of having people that we live life with there that are kind to us. We get to see where things want to go. There’s a few on [the new album] that have their life just with the record. You stumble into things and things take you places that you wouldn’t have suspected so some of those pieces are new entities for our people as well.
This record is interesting in that all the songs flow into one another so it is this cohesive piece of work. How did you hit on that idea?
We did this world tour with Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman – folks we’ve been connected to for a long time. Knowing we’re going to do this Church Music record, we thought, “Oh, this is gonna be great. Maybe we can travel the globe and collect these songs and expressions from a lot of other cultures and have this album be a global church expression kind of thing.” Well, obviously it didn’t go there at all because what we found was apparently we as Americans have exported more than McDonald’s, we’ve exported our worship music. Because that’s all they were singing were these American worship songs! So then we started looking at the music coming out of these cultures. So we thought, “What if the Crowder Band was transplanted to Tokyo. What would our expressions look like trying to find an common authentic voice for the age group of people that we are giving expression for here in the States?”
So, we collected a lot of j-pop in Tokyo and in Korea collected k-pop thinking, “What would the local church sound like if they were to follow our model which is to throw your arms around whatever is happening in pop culture to find the common voice of the people that you’re in front of?” And when we get to Europe, the club thing is way way bigger than it is over here. What we started hearing were a lot of influences that were happening for the producers of pop music around here in the States, pinpointing the things in Europe that were influential on the charts in America. And one of the things we decided initially is that when you hear a DJs work, when they hit play, it a takes you on a journey from start to finish. The logistics of pulling off what they’re pulling off isn’t that difficult ’cause you’re talking about 5 to 10 BPMs one way or the other and keys are sort of irrelevant I don’t think they’re aware of music theory as much as we are. For us, we’re talking massive jumps in BPM and massive jumps in keys, so the actual pulling it off incredibly tedious. But we’re kind into that thing; the harder it is the more joy we have.
Do you think that you have been successful in attracting people to the faith through embracing popular music and culture?
That’s a little disingenuous. We don’t view at all what we’re doing as proselytizing. What we feel like we’re doing is providing people the ability to express or articulate a response to God in the sense of a corporate worship experience. We’re using music to say things back to God with. I turn to hymn writers and people who have written about the struggle how you do that. It seems like to [Isaac] Watts or to [John] Newton, any time they’re talking about what your role is and what you’re trying to accomplish, it is so much easier when you find the common language of the people that you’re in front of. And for us pop music is a no brainer. How do I on behalf of the people that I’m in front of articulate faith through music and it’s mostly through collecting sounds and finding out where we are as people. It’s pretty natural for us because it’s the environment you exist in you’re around all this music that shapes your sensibilities. Being on a college campus like we are, most of it is college radio and straight up pop music so it’s really natural for our expression to be what’s common among us. [W]hat we’re trying to do is to provoke response or allow response to happen in a way that’s authentic and not forced. That’s what’s been successful or at least the successful moments of music in the church have seemed to be, in my opinion, when the writers were throwing their arms around what was happening in popular culture and were in conversation with what was going on in popular culture rather than being cloistered and oblivious. So, it’s not an attempt to proselytize but what we have seen is that people from outside of the church, mostly in the mainstream media or even in the club environment, go “Wow, this is not what I would expect coming from a group of musicians playing music in the church.” I think that’s what we’ve seen interesting and surprising.
Would you ever conceive of making an album strictly for yourself and not for a corporate setting and what that would sound like?
I can’t even think of what that would look like. I don’t have a drive to do that in me. I just think about what we’re doing in such utilitarian terms. What we’re doing is useful and it just fell in my lap to be the guy that says something on our behalf in our community in Waco and so yeah I don’t even know. The stuff we’re making and the sound that we’ve got makes me grin and pulls at me in an emotional way, so I don’t think it would sound too terribly different. Granted the stuff that we are doing is so varied that I think if I were doing something, it would have as many twists and turns as this stuff because I get bored and need to find different ways to express things. I would suspect it would be similar journey.
Most people that I talked to when I told them I was interviewing you wanted to know about you changing the lyric of John Mark McMillan song “How He Loves.” Were you shocked at all about the response that happened to you changing part of the song?
No not at all. Getting the feedback immediately was unexpected. There was this division of people that felt like these are the greatest words that they’ve ever heard in a song in their entire life and there are people who are equally emotive in saying that these are the worst words I’ve ever heard in a song. I found myself all these bizarre conversation about two little words. Then I started to do some checking and some research on the Web and sure enough there’s all kinds of stuff about these two words preventing it from being in a lot of corporate settings and it causing as much of a ruckus as it had with us. There were two arguments that I felt were absolutely legitimate and worth visiting with John Mark about. One is that the imagery just doesn’t work. Again, to point back to hymn writers, one of the things they struggled with was imagery. To read Newton and Watts talk about the songs that they’ve written which have a lot of imagery in them they struggled with it because what you’re trying to do is find something that’s common. You’re trying to give expression to a group of people that brings them together rather than divides. Something that is common in our experience that would let us understand God in a way that’s fuller and that has more depth to it. And these two words seem to fail in that light.
Granted, John Mark didn’t write this thing for that purpose. It’s just his personal expression. And as a writer he’s successful because he stumbled on to two words that are probably one of the more provocative lines that have been in a song in a long long time and as a songwriter that’s a great success. But as a person whose trying to say something on behalf on a corporate entity it fails because it is not uniting, it’s dividing.
The second thing was a guy came and said, “I did some research and found this guy doing this deal on YouTube where he tells the story of the song. It’s pretty emotional, but knowing where the song comes from, I think the anthropomorphic language that exists in that line is unhealthy for our theology.” He said that if this is coming out of an experience of tragedy where this guy is trying to figure out what’s God’s role in this thing, our anthropomorphic language ends up with something sloppy and I think that this is a danger in a corporate expression. So, in talking with John Mark, I offered up both of these things, both of which he’s probably already dealt with. After some time, he came back and said, “Let’s go somewhere different with it and try to maintain the initial intent.”
I mean this song is about the love of God, and it’s not like we haven’t as a church explored the love of God before. But to find something that lets you rediscover and feel it and experience it in a way that’s similar to where you first were with it is unique and special I was determined that two words weren’t going to keep people from having a similar rediscovery. Because there’s something really, really special about the song. The only people who were going to be upset are going to be those who have already fallen in love with the song. They’re welcome to stay with the “sloppy wet” if that’s what they’d like. We’ll take the heat and allow the song to get a lot of places that it hasn’t gone before.
Did you ever consider just leaving the song as is no matter what people’s issues were with it?
No, not at all. I think of music in a different way than that. Maybe it’s because I come from a congregational setting where you’ve got a hymn like “Amazing Grace” that took 50 years to find its melody and the verses. Knowing that hymns are so fluid, it’s always going to take some time to find the right language for it. For most people it existed in a form that it was and people got to experience it and I hope that by letting it change and evolve, more people will get to know it.
Have you come up against issues like this considering the music that you play is so varied and is not your typical worship music?
From record one, people have said, “Hey this is a great record but these aren’t songs that you’ll find useful in your corporate settings.” Well, for you these aren’t congregational songs but for us these are all congregational songs. There’s an awareness that these don’t fit in a lot of places which is awesome because to point back to our world tour experience, it’s a disappointment to me that there aren’t more organic expressions of unique communities happening. That there’s this tendency to co-opt whatever’s happening elsewhere and stick it in to your unique setting rather than allowing the creators and creative types among your community and try to make something that’s your own. I understand and appreciate that it doesn’t fit everywhere and I would hate to think that we would feel any sort of need to be something other than just providing a voice for the people we’re in front of on a weekly basis.
Looking at your YouTube channel and your Twitter account, you guys put out a very goofy image of yourselves. Do you make sure that that sort of material gets out to balance out the depth of the message in your music?
You’re exactly right. You’re on to us. Early on, we felt like there was a tendency to ask too much of music. Talking about the fluidity of language, if I was to say the word “worship”, what would come to mind for most people is a setting of a lot of folks staring at a screen with words on it, singing and I don’t think that was always the case. That’s a recent phenomenon that that word would evoke that thought process. So it felt like we’re asking too much of music in the sense that you’re setting up the segmentation of our spiritual experience. When I think what we’re trying to do is involve the human in more holistic way and humor is a really easy way. People put their guard down. It just lets the human be more human and in the process you get people to be more human rather than posturing. If you can provide something that takes the legs out from under the initial pretense or posturing then you get to a more authentic place with a person. There’s an attempt to add irreverence in a thoughtful reverent way.
The other thing that my friends wanted to know is whether you would ever shave off your goatee?
I have! It was in the year 2000, just before midnight, and I’m in this little bathroom in the house that we had and I’m about to be the spiritual cleansing moment. And at the time I had hair down to my shoulders. So I got the Bic out and I went for it. Midnight happens and I come out of our bathroom and my wife sees me and…I had neglected to run this by here because this was a personal cleansing moment. But apparently if you make any massive changes to your facial follicles and any thing on your hair, this is something you’re going to need to run past your significant other because she said, “You put that back” and started feeding me all kinds of vitamin E and horse mane and tail and stuff. That’s the one and only time that that beard’s gonna go anywhere. I got in a lot of trouble over that.
