Neon Steeple (buy) was a standout album built upon Crowder’s roots—a little Texas, a little bluegrass, and (why not?), a little EDM.

“My parents let me play way too much Atari and Nintendo,” he says. “I like the beeps and blips. All those 8-bit sounds. It pulls to the surface happy, playful, childlike feelings.”

Blips and beeps collided with bluegrass, making Neon Steeple one of the most successful albums of 2014 and solidifying Crowder’s position as one of the most innovative and talented musicians of Christian music.

Riding high the wave of Neon Steeple’s success, as Crowder prepared for his next album, his mindset was in a similar place—at first.

“The lyrics of Neon Steeple had a Southern Gospel thing going on,” he says. “Good ol’ Americana. A thing everybody in the U. S. of A. could relate to outside of Christian culture; something that’s part of our collective history. For American Prodigal, I wanted to turn the dial just a bit. Hand and foot music, foot-stomping and hand-clapping, chant-type melodies and lyrics. Spirituals.”

With his eyes and ears finely and firmly tuned down south, Crowder and his family made a move from Texas to Atlanta, Georgia. It was there that a new direction, inspiration, and sound began to reverberate around him—simultaneously echoing inside of him.

“When I landed in Atlanta, we were literally moving into the birthplace of bluegrass,” he says. “The Scotch-Irish had brought all their music down. There was so much country, it might as well have been Nashville.”

Nashville it was not. In fact, while Crowder did land squarely into bluegrass territory, just around the corner was another world altogether.

“So I move to Atlanta to a neighborhood I knew nothing about, but was exactly where the roots of the music I was hoping to make came from. And then, right across the train tracks that the cotton mill sat next to is the Old Fourth Ward,” he says. “The birthplace of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement.”

CLICK “4” TO ADVANCE

Leave a Reply