That's good. That's a good lesson to learn. Yeah definitely. (laughs) It's a big one.
Unfortunately, it's usually one that we have to learn the hard way. (laughs) Oh absolutely. That's the fun part.
Well, the Bible does say that all things work together for the good of those who love Him. . . Right.
. . . and in this case, the "good" includes the goods, that is, the new album, Commanders of the Resistance. Yeah.
My first question about the album is about the title. What exactly are you resisting? Um, just wack music.
(laughs) We were just thinking about what does this record embody? What is it about? And it has a lot of different. . . it covers a broad spectrum of topics. So, there's not really one song that truly expresses what this record is about. And, we were like, what are we really trying to do here? And our whole goal is just that. . . Right now, if you turn the radio on, it's just a formula almost - in mainstream music especially. It's just that, it's a formula. There's a way of doing things and people are writing music based on what's out right now and what's hot. It doesn't feel like there's any heart in it.
If you turn on MTV, it's like. . . well, first of all, they barely even play music anymore (laughs), but it's like, there's no heart in music anymore on the mainstream side. It's just like, you know, this is what you write about, this is what you do. Everybody put together a formula and be this person whether it's who you are or not. No one's writing about stories or life experiences anymore. So decided to resist all of that and not write about stuff that has anything to do with what everybody is doing.
From the beginning that's what we've been doing, writing about what's actually going on. So that was the best title that we could come up with. It's like, this is what's actually going on. Let's resist the wackness. So we felt that we wanted to be commanders of that resistance.
(laughs) Fair enough. Now, when I listened to the album, I actually noticed that musically, some of the songs would've fit on some of the mainstream albums out there currently. Maybe not the radio hits, per se, but on the albums. Right.
I know that on the industry side of things, the marketers love to grab onto similarities in order to present bands and artists as a "positive" or Christian alternative to a mainstream counterpart. Right.
But I also noticed that all your press materials are devoid of such references. What are your thoughts on being an alternative to someone else? For us, it's like. . . I think we got that a lot when we started out and we realized that from the get and from the jump that everyone wants to compare and that's an easy way to get someone to buy your records. If you like Black-eyed Peas, listen to Souljahz, that type of thing.