Hillsong UNITED – Right In Step

CCM: Can you speak into some of the intentionality behind the album artwork and the overall vibe of Wonder, you know, beyond just the music?
JH: You hear and see nostalgia across the album and the artwork, but you’re also seeing it across the full measure of culture—there’s this real press back into things that are old school. I think sometimes we can get so swept up in trying to reimagine, re-articulate, or dress things up in some new way in order to make it feel new or to impress people—who knows why?

I think people are desperate for how things used to be because [everything] feels so unsettled now, and that manifests itself in art, fashion, in all kinds of different things. So, from our point of view, I’m like, “Man, nostalgia is a beautiful thing,” but you only experience real nostalgia when you’re old enough to have come full circle [laughs]. But I’m looking around at kids and teenagers, and they’re wearing t-shirts for the bands I fell in love with when I was their age, and I’m thinking, “Do you even know the music?” Then I was thinking about the fact that I was wearing band t-shirts for bands that I’d never listened to at the same time, and I’m realizing now that it’s actually the same thing. [Laughs]

And the thing with the Gospel is, we don’t have to repackage this thing. The thing is good, and there’s things that were beautiful and that worked 20 years ago, and that spoke to me when I was a teenager, and it’s like, “Let’s go back to that stuff.” So, musically, we did that. Rather than thinking about it too much and trying to find new references, we just would have these really fun conversations with our vinyl player and records and go, “Oh, man. The first record I ever listened to was ‘this,’ and I remember sitting there in front of the CD player, or whatever, and just reading the booklet and reading every single word as it played over and over again.” I liked Phil Collins and Don Henley and all those guys that my parents liked, and they were the only records we had. We went back and listened to it, and it just fired us up to fall in love with why we got into music in the first place, and [in the same sense] what it was that made us fall in love with Jesus the first time. Lyrically there’s a bit of a reclamation there of some old things that are still good.

CCM: Joel, what does it mean for you to take a step back for yourself—to do more listening instead of speaking/singing?
JH: I think one of the things that I love about all the guys and girls who are a part of Hillsong UNITED, is there’s definitely a healthy reluctance to everything that we do. And yet, at the same time, there is a willingness to step in. It’s a paradox that you have to balance, one you have to kind-of figure out, but it doesn’t have to be one or the other it can actually be both.

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