Love to Tell the Story: Artists Release New Albums, Enter Literary Territory
By Christa A. Banister, senior music editor, gmclife.com
On the band’s upcoming album, Until the Whole World Hears, Casting Crowns gets back to the basics of faith, namely the importance of having a relationship with Jesus.
Although his goal is to “make as many albums as U2 has,” Casting Crowns frontman Mark Hall isn’t interesting in simply making music for music’s sake. In fact, if the multi-tasking artist/youth pastor has anything to say about it, he’ll never write a song that draws too much attention to itself musically.
“With our records, I’ve never really set out to a certain thing musically. Given that I’m a youth pastor, the music is the plate the meat is served on,” Hall says. “Sometimes I think there are some really great lyrics out there, but the message gets lost for that very reason. And when you’re in student ministry like we are, there’s an urgency to what we do. The message has to be there.”
Picking up from where they left off on 2007’s The Altar and the Door, Until the Whole World Hears, which hits store shelves on November 17, focuses on having that personal relationship with Jesus – the one that stands the test of time once you’ve left the comfortable confines of church and step out into the real world.
“On the last album we really dealt with the disconnect of who we are as believers and how we actually are at home, at work and how it seems so much easier to live for God when you’re at church because you’re surrounded by people who are like-minded,” Hall says. “They challenge us, and basically are our spiritual heroes. But those spiritual heroes don’t go home with us. So when you get home, it’s really just me and my own walk with Jesus. I can’t have my pastor’s walk with Jesus.”
And once someone’s walk with God kicks into high gear, Hall says that people will start “living their lives on purpose.”
“It just starts happening,” Hall says. “You may be able to motivate people into reaching the world for a good hour, but it's going to go away. In our culture, we've been trying to ‘shout them into shape,’ but that's just not going to happen. So this record is about once you start walking with God yourself, you're going to see the world how Jesus sees it. You're going to want to reach the world like He reaches it, and you're going to do it in His strength and not your own. Everything you do, you’ll do it until the whole world hears.”
Continuing the conversation sparked by the album, Hall also recently wrote a book, along with contributor Tim Luke titled Your Own Jesus: A God Insistent on Making it Personal (Zondervan).
“It walks through our songs with stories and sermon moments and investigates what it looks like to have your own friendship with God,” Hall says. “It blends perfect into the message of Until the Whole World Hears. The way I’m seeing what God is saying is that people don’t complete me. God completes me. So now I can pour into people. I think the reason that marriages struggle, that families struggle, that friendships struggle is because we’re walking into the relationship empty and expecting a person who is hurting to somehow fill us up and get us going. That’s a role only God can fill.”
For more information on Casting Crowns, check out www.castingcrowns.com.
Real Life Conversations
Mark Schultz has always found that the best songs come out of life experience. Now, three years after his last project, he’s finding plenty of new inspiration for a fifth album, Come Alive.
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Mark Schultz has written five album’s worth of songs over the years and has recently logged thousands and thousands of miles when he biked across the country (more on that in a moment). But even with those seemingly gargantuan feats behind him, he’s currently pursuing his most difficult adventure of all – writing his first book that’ll release sometime next year.
“I’ll be honest, I’m not a book-writer, so I’m not good at it. I’m better at writing three-minute songs because I can get those over with, in a sense,” Schultz says with a laugh. “It’s difficult to take everything you’ve experienced on something as amazing as this bike ride was, boil it down and hand it to people. That’s hard for me. What I realized as I wrote this book is that after about three or four pages of talking about what I’m doing on the bicycle, I get bored with it. But when I’m talking about the people I met along the way, well that’s where the excitement is.”
And during the cross-country journey, Schultz says he learned an important principle that has helped a little with the recent book-writing adventure, too.
“I had to stay present and not think too far ahead – and not think too far behind – about how bad that last hill was. Then after crossing two or three states, your mind and your body have an argument. Your body goes, ‘Are we going to do this?’ and your mind has to make a decision. Yes or no?’” Schultz says. “If it says ‘no,’ you get off your bike and you throw it in the lake; then you go home. But my mind said, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do this’ and as soon as my mind told my body we were doing it, there was no other way. It was all okay and it got me here after that.”
That one-mile-at-a-time philosophy has helped him tremendously in finishing his book, even if Schultz admits that it’s more difficult than the bike trip ever was.
Far more in his comfort zone was writing songs for his recent album, Come Alive, an album that Schultz feels “comes across a little more aggressive and upbeat” than his previous efforts. Also providing a new challenge to the longtime singer/songwriter was writing songs with the congregation in mind, something he hasn’t really done before.
“I wouldn’t consider myself a praise and worship singer/songwriter but there’s some songs that lend themselves to that on Come Alive,” Schutlz says. “I can’t teach the audience a story song in a concert, but there’s a few songs on there like ‘God of Glory’ and ‘Love Has Come’ that I can teach them the chorus once, and by the end of the song they feel like they’ve known it for years.
“It’s fun to write a song that’s more corporate, which is stepping out a bit for me,” Schultz continues. “Someone came to my show the other day and said, ‘What is really fun about this is that instead of just sitting there singing, you really got us involved in the show and we felt like we were a part of it.’ That’s very refreshing to me.”
For more information on Mark Schultz, check out www.markshultzmusic.com.
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About the Writer
After graduating with a B.S. in Journalism from North Central University in 1998, Christa Banister moved from Minneapolis to Nashville, Tenn. and eventually started working at CCM Magazine/Salem Publishing in various editorial capacities as an editor, columnist and website guru for five and a half years. After that, she launched her own freelance writing company and writes for numerous clients including Salem Publishing, Crosswalk.com (she review movies for them each week), Christian Single, Christianity Today, Threads Media, Songs4Worship.com, PassAlong.com and also helped kickstart the first Christian music blog for MTV. In addition, she also writes bios for professional recording artists and authors and penned her first two novels, Around the World in 80 Dates and Blessed Are the Meddlers for NavPress.
