"The entire time we were making Cities I couldn't stop thinking about how excited I was for the world to hear it," says producer Aaron Sprinkle (MxPx, Hawk Nelson). The world indeed. Sprinkle's recent collaboration with Winter Haven, Florida's Anberlin has resulted in one of this year's first breakout albums. As he puts it, the band "took their unstoppable approach to rock & roll to the next level," and adds, "I feel very privileged to have been a part of it."

No doubt, the gratefulness abounds, extending far beyond the five-star producer. Beyond the album's muscular artistry, there's the little fact that Cities debuted in February at No. 19 on the Billboard 200 sales chart by selling more than 33,500 copies its first week out.

Make no mistake, though, this is no overnight success story.

GODSPEED

Talking by phone just two weeks prior to the release of Cities, singer/lyricist Stephen Christian admits that, while the past five years have been full, they have flown by. "It went like a whirlwind from the beginning," he says.

"We formed Anberlin in early 2002, out of the ashes of several local bands here in the Tampa and Orlando area, and by that summer we had a contract with Tooth & Nail Records-we got signed one month after I graduated from college."

Christian graduated with a degree in psychology, which he says still comes in handy, but admits he really wanted to make music for a living. "We got together, more or less the four of us, because we really wanted to take music not only seriously, but we wanted to develop it as a career. We quit our day jobs, and headed out on the road. I set aside the idea of looking for a job to focus on music."

While Anberlin has had a bit of a revolving door in the rhythm guitar department, Christian says that working with his friends Joseph Milligan (guitar/music composer), Deon Rexroat (bass) and Nathan Young (drums) has created a surrogate family. "The four of us have been playing together so long, there's a cohesiveness on stage and off," he says. "It's been amazing; they're more than bandmates, and more like brothers."

The band earned major label interest almost immediately, but eventually settled on working with the indie alternative label known to work with artistic Christians both in and beyond the faith-based marketplace, because it seemed to trust the band's ability to create good songs from the get go.

"We went up to Matt Goldman's (Underoath, Copeland) studio in Atlanta, Georgia and had him do our demos," says Christian. "He said, 'These are good,' and sent them to a friend at Warner Brothers Records, and that spread the word to other labels. Once we got the contract offers to look at, we realized that Tooth & Nail actually gave us the better offer. A lot of the major labels were offering development contracts, so there was not much to them. Tooth & Nail offered us something better, and two of our favorite bands, The Juliana Theory and Further Seems Forever, were there, so it didn't take long before we were signed to Tooth & Nail."