DAVID CROWDER* BAND 29
“...what has been the best part about being in this band is that we’ve gathered ourselves around the idea of this kingdom that’s entirely upside down. The last are first. The poor are rich. Out of death comes life.” Of course, Crowder is also proud of the music the group has created, as well he should be.
manner of lamps and light into the place to see. That was awesome.” Well, he can smile about it now…
“We had this arc of a story, in a sense, that we wanted these six records to … we feel like we did what we set out to do, in terms of the creation of music and the collecting of all those songs in their respective format,” he says. “So that part of it, I don’t think we could be more excited about.“
What separated A Collision Or (3 + 4 + 7), the third album, from the first two was planning. “We completely mapped that one out before we hit the record button,” Crowder recalls. “It was all a Word document. We didn’t tell anybody at the time, but it was a concept record about death, and there were gonna be three different deaths that were represented in the work, so that was really cool to follow a script of sorts. We had this arc, where these records were connected and have siblings, and the creation story is the outline to give us boundaries for what we wanted to do with the respective records, so Day 1 is related to Day 4; let there be light, and then sun and moon appear. So there’s this connectivity that’s loose and yet very obvious.”
Even when asked to think back to the very beginning, which is hard (“Dude! I can’t hardly remember yesterday. That’s hilarious”), Crowder comes back again to the formation off close relationships when l l ti hi h discussing Can You Hear Us?, the first David Crowder Band full-length. “It’s all about hanging and relationships,” he repeats. “All the music stuff just takes care of itself, if you’re just treating each other right and having a great time together,” he adds. ”Man, that was a blast!” It didn’t hurt that that particular record was made in a barn and that the guys spent a lot of time playing daredevil on a couple of handy trampolines. “Every record, I look back and think of those relational moments,” says Crowder, further driving home the point. In addition to plenty of social interaction, Crowder also learned from the start that this group needs a lot of time to be creative; they cannot summon imagination on the clock. The principle that creativity takes time carried on with the next album, Illuminate. However, lights of ideas were about the only ‘lights’ going on during that recording. “The weird part,” Crowder explains, “is we were making a record called Illuminate, and there were no lights in the building at all. They didn’t initially have lights. We had to bring all
With Remedy, the band took a kind of step back, sonically speaking, so to speak. “We wanted to simplify things because that’s where we started with Can You Hear Us?,” Crowder explains. “It’s a very straight-forward record. [With] Remedy, we wanted to do the same thing. Remedy is about our actions and interactions with the world and people we live among. What is our social responsibility as Christians? Does our faith move from our heart and mind to our body and the way it works in the world? So that record was our first overt social statement, and one we really enjoyed talking about. And that was part of the reason why it was good to have it such a simple collection of songs,