The City Harmonic – It’s How You Finish

For us, we always imagined people singing along to these songs. Certainly some of them were more congregational in focus and some of them we songs we’d never expect someone to sing in their church, but in our head, that’s what we were—a worship band. We also saw ourselves as worship leaders because of that.

We’ve come back to the conversation several times with the label, wondering if we could ever revisit some of our songs in a live setting, and it’s just never worked out for one reason or another. But now, with us deciding to close the book, so to speak, with the last season of our band, nothing else makes sense. We had to do this live worship thing and give a lot of these songs the context we’d wanted them to have anyway. We love studio records too, but doing the live worship thing has its own flavor and quality. It’s great to end with this.

CCM: What are the emotions around a release like this knowing it’s the final statement, so to speak?
ED: We have the most boring break-up story ever, because the truth is that there’s just no drama [laughs]. We’re good friends. Everyone is looking for each other to succeed. There’s a real sense of it being the right time and being faithful to what God called us to do. That’s why we called it Benediction, and some people might see that as “goodbye” but we’re thinking of it as a sending. We’ve always tried to communicate that worship music in any setting should spur us on to be the hands and feet of Jesus in our neighborhoods. For me, this album is, in a sense, us sending each other on to do good work and be faithful to Jesus in the midst of that.

So the mix of emotions are very real. We’ve decided that it’s right for us to do our own things separately even though we’re still good friends. I think for a lot of bands, there are practical things that happen where someone leaves for a new season or they’re called to something else. The options are to keep pushing because it makes business sense, and those sorts of options were all on the table as we talked things through. But it’s all about how you define success. Just because something is working doesn’t mean it’s successful. We probably need a more kingdom-minded definition for that. We could have kept going, I think, but we didn’t feel it was the right thing to do in being faithful to God.

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