Join @thebuzzknight for this episode of "takin ' a walk" with Joel Smallbone from For King & Country. They are a Christian Pop Duo made up of Joel and his brother Luke and Joel discusses their new Christmas movie, album and tour, their future plans for recording and touring and the healing power of music.
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Taking a Walk.
I believe music with the capital M is spiritual by nature. I actually don't even think you have to put a spiritual overtime to it lyrically. I just think music is inherently spiritual as a spiritual language.
Welcome to this episode of the Taking a Walk podcast with Buzz Night. Today, Buzz speaks with Joel Smallbone from for King and Country, the Christian pop duo from Australia. Joel and his brother Luke make up the band that spends the cocoon of sounds, enveloping listeners with inspiring sounds. They're a quadruple Grammy winner, and they're releasing A drummer Boy Christmas both as a feature film and a new album. Let's welcome Curb Records recording artist Joel Smallbone from King and Country on Taking a Walk.
Thanks for being on. I really appreciate it. We have a lot to unpack here.
We want to talk about, but a drummer Boy Christmas album.
We want to talk about.
The cinematic concert experience, and we want to also talk about the tour, so we're going to get to all that. Congratulations on it, you ambitious young lad.
I receive it. I receive it. Thank you man.
So tell us about your upbringing in Australia and how that really influenced this great musical journey.
Yeah, I mean it's like any It's like any great journey. It starts with one step right, and I feel like the Australian childhood beginnings, albeit in many ways so simple, were so profound. I mean, buzz some of my first memories. We're looking at vinyl forty five records of like rock bands and Striper and Wyeheart. And my dad was a concert prom er, so he'd bring artists down and often say that music me even more than I chose music, because we were just inundated with it for at such a young age. And then fast forward to when we moved to the States. Our sister Rebecca and James started traveling as sort of a gospel Christian artist, and Dad needed cheap labor, and he looked around and saw that he had five sons, and so we became the road crew, so stage managing, background, vocals, lighting, and it really taught us how to put on a show. But not only that, it taught us the sort of hallmark importance of compromise and creativity and collaboration, these these things that if you do not have the ability to compromise or collaborate with people, it's over before it begins. And so I'm man, I'm so grateful for the younger years of what would become for Keen Country. But more than that, just as a family and as young men learning how to create together.
So did you and Luke always get on?
Well?
Now, could you answer that a little more quickly? Luke and I didn't get on well, because you know the whole if you've got two magnets and you sort of you know, you flip them around the right way, and they just but if you flip them around the wrong way, they just repel each other. Luke and I were two magnets flipped around the wrong way. In that I'm the older brother and as a teenager, you know, there are certain things that are sort of unforgivable sins for the younger brother. One, the younger brother should not get taller than the older brother, and he's four inches taller than me. Two, the younger brothers should not be a better sportsman than the older brother, and he's a better sportsman than me. And three, the older the younger brother should not be a better singer and more naturally talented than the older brother, and I think he is, and so it just made this hot, hotbed buzz of resentment from me. And ironically and sort of poetically, it's music that brought us back together. But you know, when he was nineteen and I was twenty one, he was he'd torn his acl in his first game of his junior year, and I'd come to him and at dad's request, and said, do you just want to write some songs together? He'd never written a song before. I had been writing since about fifteen or sixteen, and we never stopped. Here we are and music, really, music brought us back together in any ways.
So talk about the evolution of the band names to the present.
Yea, oh man, there's awful band names, you know. One of them one of them was was Osterville wanted to be like Australia to Nashville, a Us to Ville, the vill you know, put together one time, Buzz, we just said we went into a coffee shop. We said we're not leaving this coffee shop until we came out with a band name. And we walked out with Joel and Luke as our benning and then honestly, we started getting closer. I we were very close to actually being called Church Hill, just less of an homage to Winston and more of a just an idea of like a city on a hill, and it just felt regal. And then I came up with the phrase all the King's Men, and it just thought there was something about I wanted to have a name that started with A because you know, everything was digitizing at the time, and I always wanted to be at the top of the list, you know. And then I actually walked into the studio, I said, what about all the men? And was our producer, Sean Schenkle that swung around his chair and he said, do you remember that British phrase for king and country? That you know, when soldiers were charging in to bleed for what they believed and to stand for something great them themselves, they would chant the king and Country? And I kind of thought, we we haven't looked back. We thought that's it. So we jumped on you know, the World Wide Web and it was great. And then in that day, this was ten years ago, we jumped on MySpace and you know, thank god that was available, you know, and the rest is history. As they say, the rest is history.
Yeah, So tell me about a typical songwriting process that you guys go through. Yeah, And I want to stop you, Joel real quick. This is a fact of the way the world is right now. So I'm sorry. The ups truck is pulling up and my two.
Maniacal dogs are going nuts downstairs, so please don't let that distracts you.
Oh I can't.
I can't hear them.
We have a great Dane, so every now and then I'll be in an interview. I'm at the management office now, but this great Dane will sort of, you know, this one hundred and thirty pounds beast will sort of pass by the camera. So not not today though. So music and songwriting, it's interesting. You know the statement buzz that art imitates life. I would also say that art imitates process. So if your process is too rigid and consistent, your art will inevitably feel rigid and consistent, and sometimes not in the best way. And so I'm a very methodical thinker. But when it comes to songwriting, I'll actually try to break the whole thing up. I try to you know, it might be a beat that inspires us, and it might be taking two verses or two ideas from different songs and merging them together. You know, one of the ideas that we came up with for his so Uncle Fixed my Eyes was Luke came up within the shower and recorded on his eye, you know, on his iPhone. I wasn't there to verify, but I'm told. And so you just create safe spaces where and try and keep this humble spirit of possibility of like what what could happen here? And that's for us where good art usually shows up. But when you go in and you're like, well we're going to do this and this and this, first of all, I tend to sabotage those environments. So I'll just I'm not I'll just boy I sort of, I'll just do like a sort of a mild boycott. I'm like, I'm a creative boycott. I'm not going to do this. And but we we have selected, you know, a handful of really good men and women that we work very closely with and and we branched out of occasionally. That trust is so key in the process as well.
You know, Well, and how did you end up with the amazing folks at CURB? I love them. I've met so many of them over time. They're just the nicest people. How did that come to pass?
The closest illustration that probably put to the Curb relationship was an arranged marriage because we were on Warner and then we got shifted over to Word Warner, and then Warner got bought, and then Warner sold Word and Curb had always had a small portion of Word, but then they about seven years ago, they actually bought Word records holistically and they became Curb Word in essence. And it's interesting, you know, to take the arranged marriage to the end of itself. Sometimes those arranged marriages actually really work well, uh, you know, and sometimes the people that set them up actually knew what they were doing, and sometimes they work better than when you've just chosen two people. And so, uh, it's it's there's been a lot of twists and turns when it comes to you know, labels and contracts for Luke and me. But by the grace of God and Curb's no exception, we've always found a way, as has the label to or Land on our feet. We never we never got into that we were closer points. We've never got into that moment where it was like the gridlock. You know, you hear about the infamous artists label gridlock, where the label doesn't want you to do anything and they won't release you, and you you're stuck. Fortunately, we've never gotten to that point and we're far from it with Curb and their leadership.
Well, when you got a guy like r J Meetscham involved, good things are bound to happen because he's a He's a solid, solid sore. So the spiritual nature and the black end of spiritual and pop is really just an amazing combination. The music is so uplifting and makes you just feel feel great. Do you personally believe that music has really healing powers?
I personally believe that music is the language of the angels buzz like I. It's this unexplainable. What else can can pull you out of depression? You know what else can spore you on on that run? What else can restore a relationships? You know what else can change literally metaphysically the way you see yourself or the world, or God or those around you. It's magic, you know, it's it's miraculous and the chance to stew it. This miracle for Luke and me is really profound and The short answer is yes, I believe. I believe music with the capital M is spiritual by nature. I don't I actually don't even think you have to put a spiritual overtone to it lyrically. I just think music is inherently spiritual. It's a spiritual language. Now, like anything spiritual, there can be a dark spirit or a light spirit. And I've heard music that I, you know, I felt had a very deep darkness to it, but it's still spiritual. You know. We've just probably chosen to focus on the light and invite that into the room and sort of look heavenward as we write, and and and and yet try to do it in a way that does not feel sort of fluffy and kitchy and Paul Mark at least we hope.
We produced this other podcast called Music Saved Me about the healing power of music. And have there been moments where you have been personally at a low moment and a particular song or an artist has lifted you up at a difficult time.
Yeah. I remember I was a teenager and it was when the Twin Towers had fallen, and you know, they obviously full fell on nine to eleven, and then you know, Not three months later, the American Football Super Bowl happened, and you two had been asked to perform that year, if you remember, And they played where the streets had no name, and they had this scroll of all of the lives that were lost in the attacks behind them on this massive white curtain, and I'm sitting in front of the Tube TV just moved emotional, you know, to the point of tears, And even now recording it affects me in the same way. This song and this voice and this band could literally reach through the Tube TV into millions or billions of lives simultaneously and impact and reframe the way they looked at this great tragedy. And that was actually one of the hallmark moments for me of going if music can do that, I'd like to be part of that, whatever that is. You know, Oh, I got chills.
What a great story. Thank you, Thank you for sharing that, that deep story. So let's talk about these projects, these multi tiered projects.
First of all, A drummer Boy Christmas the album coming out, and tell me how you feel about the creation of the album.
Yeah, Well, I'm gonna I'm going to invert the two projects because one really kind of precedes the other. So it was towards the end of last year and we were in the middle of what would end up being our kind of final arena Christmas tour for the moment, and we love Christmas, we love the Christmas season. We love taking these incredibly nostalgic, spiritual, emotional songs, these classics, and giving them the for King Country flair and sharing them every Christmas. The only trouble Buzz is that you can only be in one place at the one time when you're on tour, and the Christmas season is so short. Unless you're the Trans Siberian Orchestra, you can only go to like ten cities. And so every year we'd announced the Christmas tour and three quarters of America and Canada and the UK they're all upset. You know, Brazil, how dare you? You're not coming here? And so again it was sort of poetry in motion. We were in the middle of the tour and I just started getting pretty nostalgic and feeling like, man, this is an amazing tour and it's such a snapshot in time for us as a band. So three weeks before the last show, I called our producer, Josh wats our film producer and our film crew from our movie Unsung Hero through Lionsgate, and I said, hey, let's all head over to the Toyota Center in Houston, Texas, where it was twelve thousand folks there. It was the last show of the tour. I said, let's catch it. Let's capture a cinematic, constant experience, so that in twenty twenty four, instead of upsetting everyone when we announced that we're not going within one thousand miles of them, we can put this in theaters and it will be in driving distance of every American fifteen hundred theaters December fifth through the ninth, and potentially even beyond that. And that's what happened. We had a Grammy Award winning mixer and an Emmy Award winning film mixer tag team bringing it sonically to life, and had an incredible film editor who worked on our movie cinematically put it together. And this is when you know a buzz i. Literally, my wife came to me after she saw the screen of Mariah and she said, Joel, I think this is better than your live shows because every seat is a front row seat in the theater sonically, cinematically and so we're so proud to bring that to theaters. And then, as I said in the reverse order, because we captured that inherently, we had this beautiful live album. So we're not only going to be able to keep people company in the theaters. Is this Christmas and us you're in the greatest holiday of the year and the greatest news the world has ever known, But we're also going to be able to, you know, reach into people's homes and on their phones and into their cars and through the drum Boy Christmas Live album and kind of sonically keep them company as they're you know, mixing their eggnog and making gingerbread houses or whatever they do. That's Christmas.
Oh, that's tremendous. So folks can look forward to many opportunities to be able to hear, see, experience the band and the great music and the great vibe. So in closing, I know you have tremendous gratitude for your fans and how they follow you and speak to them right now as we close out this.
Episode, well, I'll start by saying, the reason we work so hard on this cinematic experience was for you, because we wanted to give our supporters and family in our American family, our Canadian family, our United Kingdom, our Australian and New Zealand family, the opportunity simultaneously to experience the story of Christmas and these, like I said, these incredibly nostalgic songs. So this, in many ways, we see this cinematic concert experience as a gift to you. And then secondly, we've announced this about a month ago, but we're taking we're stepping away from touring in twenty twenty five for the entirety of the year. And while I want you to know that we did that for you because it's time to create, and you're pouring out so much on the road that you need that time to be able to write. As we started this conversation with, and we're going to go into production for our next film next year, and so we're doing we're taking twenty twenty five off from touring to create so that we can come back to you in twenty twenty six sort of for King and Country two point zero with some new music and a new movie. And we see the honor of our lives to sing and play and now make movies for you as well.
Joe, thank you so much to you and your bro and your whole team, and congratulations on everything. I wish you well and good health this holiday season, and thank you for the joy of the music.
And thanks buzz.
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