HM Magazine recently interviewed Third Day’s Mac Powell & Co. Our HM friends were kind enough to share the Q&A with us…

HM: Hey, I have been enjoying the new record. It feels familiar, yet it sounds like you’ve pushed beyond the traditional comfort zones for Third Day. Was it just time to do something different?

Mac Powell: Yeah, it was a little bit of a lot of different things. The main thing is that we’ve done this for a number of years now—I forget the count, this is either our ninth or tenth studio record, depending on what you consider a studio record—and there was this sense of urgency in me personally, and I think in the rest of the band, that we didn’t want it to be, "OK, there’s another Third Day record."  I didn’t want that this time. I wanted it to be, "Wow, look at this Third day record." It needed to be a little different, it needed to be bigger and better.

HM: This is a very weird time in the music industry, by and large, and that has implications for the Christian music world. People are buying less CDs and downloading or sharing more. CCM Magazine is now only available online. The technology and the market and the generational shifts have everyone in a state of flux. As a result, what’s commonly called Contemporary Christian Music as a whole seems dominated by in-house focused worship product. Which means, the vision I grew up with—that Christians would make great, relevant and artful rock statements—has been pretty much abandoned. Instead of influencing the mainstream markets, we’ve carved out our own little ghetto niche, and are largely disregarded by the larger media forces of radio, etc. Where does all that leave Third Day?

Mac: For us, it’s always felt like, on the one hand we’re one of the main bands in Christian music, but on the other hand, sometimes you don’t feel like you belong at all. That being said, I’m very positive about our market. I love being a Christian band. To take what you said a step further, even if we went out and tried to be a mainstream band, and tried to not be a Christian band, we couldn’t pull that off. There’s too much music out there now, too much that’s been said. We can’t hide who Third Day is.

HM: Anybody with Google and some spare time can learn way too much about all of us. There’s no hiding or pretending to be something different than you are anymore.

Mac: But that doesn’t frustrate us; that actually makes us feel comfortable. To do something to sound cool or be different than that would finally sound silly. After 15 years, we know who we are. And in that, you’re still striving to do more and be better. Even musically there’s that balance—how do we play the music that’s who we are, and what we’re good at, and what our fans want to hear, and at the same time push it in a little different direction? There’s this constant balancing act, where hopefully you’re morphing a little bit—not too much, but enough to keep it interesting.