For All Seasons – Breaking Through

They ended up still going and while they were gone, I remember feeling really convicted. I remember the Lord showing me Matthew 6 and how God provides for the flowers and the birds and how much more does He care for us. I remember thinking, “Do I actually believe this?” I was faced with that decision of whether or not I believed God would provide for me. When they came back from camp, I quit my job and went for it. We holed up in a classroom at our old university and made cold calls up the West Coast to plan a tour. We asked churches if we could come play and the Lord blessed us with opportunities to keep playing and dream about what we’re doing and caring about our art.

As far as signing with a label, that didn’t come to our attention until nearly three years ago. We had a record that did well on iTunes and we started getting calls from Nashville wondering about this California band that hit No. 1 on iTunes. We were so stoked. We didn’t have plans for that, but God has provided for us enough to keep going through so many different miracles along the way. And now we have a great label with Centricity that feels like family.

CCM: You said you had a lot of label attention, so why Centricity in the end?
JL: Through that process, we’d talked to a few record labels and, somewhere along the way, we felt a little stagnant. We thought things would happen a lot quicker than they did. Along the way, we started talking to Centricity and what impressed us most was that they had no intention of changing what we were doing. That was refreshing because some of the conversations we were having were trying to pigeonhole us. They asked, “Are you a worship band or are you performance artists?” We didn’t know. We didn’t plan this. We’re just responding to God in song. Sometimes the songs are fit for a church to sing on a Sunday morning and sometimes it’s a song to listen to or reflect on. Sometimes it’s a piece of art.

We were struggling for a time having to pick a different route and wondering why it had to be different. We were wrestling with all of that and then we found a place that said, “I don’t see why you can’t do both. Write great songs. Be honest. We love what you’re doing already.” To us, that sort of supportive atmosphere and then hearing how the company got started and how they care about their artists was very impressive to us.

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