Emily: Everything!
Josh: I got a new haircut.
Emily: Nathan and I got a cat.
Nick: This [Air1 Club Awesome] tour has been nuts.
Emily: For us it’s the biggest tour we’ve been on. The amount of people that come every night is a little bit overwhelming. We're used to hanging out with the kids afterwards. We're not used to hanging out with 1,000 kids afterwards.
Almost as exhausting as the show.
Emily: But so fun.
Karl: It’s almost more exhausting because we only have a four-song set.
Is it tough to only do four?
Josh: Four feels good. It’s hard because you want to do more, but as a new band, you want to leave the audience with something that’s going to intrigue them.
The new album is awesome. My first favorite song is “Brave Ones.”
Nathan: Kevin [Young of Disciple] does an awesome job on that song.
How did you guys get Kevin? He’s not on your label.
Emily: He actually just happened to be in the same physical studio we were in at the same time.
Josh: Our producer was hired out to do Kevin’s vocals on a new record. We were talking about trying to get some other guest vocalist. Kevin was there at the right time.
Nathan: We were recording in the morning and then our producer would cut vocals for Kevin in the evening after we had left the studio.
Dreamers is definitely awesome. I was listening to the old stuff again. This is a big musical shift for you guys. So who’s playing synth?
Emily: Josh plays some of the synth, but a lot of it we actually have tracked. There was just a shift towards more production, a shift towards more pop.
Was that you guys or was it a mutual decision with the label?
Emily: I thought it was mutual. You think about the songs [from the album] we wrote at the end of 2009, beginning of 2010. To me, if we didn’t sound different, that would probably be bad on our part as artists.
Josh: We always wanted to do something that was more dancy, too.
The song "Lumineux" is very dancy.
Nathan: We always wanted to incorporate more synths and electronics, but just never had the time and the resources to be able to do it.
Was it difficult doing that switch, stylistically?
Nathan: It’s different. Some of the songs, we rock them up a little bit more live, because on the album it kind of calls for some of those lighter moments and more pop stuff. But live we always kind of do a little more rock.
Josh: It was a little difficult because everyone has their comfort zone that they want to be in. The record really stretched us.
Emily: It really stretched all of us. I stylistically used a lot of different parts of my voice that I hadn’t been able to use, but I feel like we really grooved throughout the whole process.
Karl: Every area like musicianship, songwriting, live performing, everything. It’s pushed us. We’re growing through it.
It seemed like just from following you guys since we were last together that the album almost looked like it wasn’t going to happen... or like, it was taking forever!
Emily: Dude... We felt the same way.
Josh: We told you like the label had said summer of 2012 was when the record was going to come out.
Emily: That’s when we started recording it. There was a lot of changing of hands with the label. Basically until we wrote enough songs that were good enough we were not going to be in the studio. It forced us to keep songwriting. That was, in hindsight, a very good thing. The record would not have turned out the way it did if we didn’t keep writing.
Josh: 80 to 90 percent of the songs were written in 2012.
Emily: It would have been a different record if we had put it out in 2012. There were lot of changes and it just kept pushing stuff back, but in the meantime we were writing. We were busy even though it looked like we weren’t doing anything productive. We sat down with Shawn [Cavallo]—he’s the lead singer for Manic Drive—and we were showing him all of our songs. He does all the songwriting for Manic. He was just like, “Do you have anything that’s not a push beat? Do you actually have anything that sounds like pop?” At least for me he really helped switch my thinking on the way I approach songs and then we wrote "Beautiful to You" together.
I feel like it really was a growing process and sometimes I don’t think God gives you the right songs until the right time, and I really feel like that’s what happened with this album.
Karl: The whole process we kept praying and asking God to give us these songs, give us these messages to reach people. We really feel good about it. We feel happy and proud and thankful that we have this lineup to share with people.
That’s what He wanted everybody to hear. How would you guys say you grew and changed in that process of waiting and starting over?
Emily: I think we’re really patient now. We really didn’t have a choice. It was like making sure it was right and not trying to rush it for the sake of hype. It’s our first record. Our fans and the people who already know us were very anxious for it, but for the most part the world does not know about us. There really wasn’t a rush and that’s how the label felt, too.
Our release date was scheduled for May something and then they pushed it back 60 more days and I was so bummed. I was like, we waited this long. I’m glad we did; now we’re a lot better songwriters, which will help us later in our career.
What’s crazy is you guys aren’t new, but the diversity on the record is something you see with new bands. They’re seeing to some extent like showing off everything they can do and seeing…
Nick: ...who bites?
Exactly. What have you guys found to be the songs that have resonated the most with people even so far?
Josh: For live application I’ve noticed that people really respond well to "Overcome."
Emily: I’ve heard a lot of people come up to me and tell me about "Dreamers."
Nathan: We’re only playing four songs on this tour, so they don’t get to hear everything, but "Dreamers" is one that I hear a lot of people talk about.
Emily: Also, "Beautiful Love." I think because that’s the single, it has been an overwhelming response. I don’t think we expected it to do as well as it’s doing right now at radio.
The title, Dreamers... tell me how you came up with the theme. It sounds like in the song you’re sort of relating being dreamers to people who walk by faith.
Emily: Totally. You’ve heard our old material. We had a song called "Dare to Dream," and that song kind of became a little bit of a mission statement for us as a band. For this new album, I was wishing we had another song that had a message like this because just so much resonates with us.
The one night before heading into a writing session the next day I was journaling, and I wrote a bunch of lines. The next day we went to the studio to write, and I was stoked because Pete Kipley [executive producer on the album] really liked the idea, and he had this really cool melody. I was so stoked because he actually liked the idea and we wrote the song together.
Before that we were actually talking about the "Brave Ones" being the title track. "Dreamers" was at the tail end of the process. I’m glad that song somehow got written, and what it says is really important. We’ve been kind of saying that through "Dare to Dream," but we wanted to write a song that was a lot more epic. "Dare to Dream" is more of a ballad.
“Dreamers” is a horrible way to end because you're left wanting more, because it’s so epic and big.
Emily: That was kind of the point because sometimes people end with a super chill song. I like it as the ending.
For a lot of bands, it's like the last three songs on an album are throwaways.
Emily: There are no throwaway songs on the whole album. We were taking with Brandon from the label. We met him for the first time and he’s like, "Every single song is good. Every single song resonates with me." That's good, because we tried not to write any filler. We wrote that many songs. You’d hope we wrote at least 10 that were very high quality music.
Switching gears... Emily and Nathan, how long you been married now?
Emily: Two years.
Do you get to process regular newlywed, um discussions—marital discussions with all these people around you in your van?
Emily: We got married October 2010 and we were songwriting a lot then, so we actually got to enjoy being newly married. We really didn’t tour a lot that year. I feel like that, in hindsight, was a really good thing.
Nathan: We’ve been dating since 2006.
Oh, so you met in high school.
Emily: Even then we were friends for a while, and then we were in drama team together, so there was this balance between being friends and also having a working relationship. That’s why I feel like the band works. Now we ask for two hotel rooms and they give them to us. I feel like that’s our time to be with each other and process everything because especially this tour has been really like—oh my gosh, what just happened? Did we really just do that? I’m just not used to having that many people screaming at me all the time.
And you guys probably just get to veg out, too.
We had a day off, and I was watching America's Cutest Cat. And then I watched Two Cute Kittens.
Did you watch it, too, Nathan?
Nathan: I was pretty much forced to.
Nick: I was watching 300 in the other room.
Josh: Nick and Karl and I share a room, and it's full-out bro-time.
Would you say that 90 percent of the people who are seeing you have never heard of you?
Emily: Absolutely. I’d say more than 90 percent. On this tour absolutely. We’ve never even been out here before, but because of Air1, which we love, people are singing along to "Beautiful Love, and it’s blowing my mind.
Our Founder, Kevin McNeese recently did the Rock & Worship Roadshow, and he got to be on a bus for like two weeks. He was telling me how horrible that was and now I’m trying to picture everything he said reduced to a minivan.
Karl: It’s one of the smaller minivans, too.
Nick: Spending so much time in a minivan, I can’t imagine what would be bad about a bus. There's so much more room for activities.
Josh: We could jump rope. Mini golf.
Emily: We’d be able to stand up.
It’s all about perspective.
Nick: You could throw something out the front window at a convertible and then run to the back and ask them to throw it back.
That’s the future for you guys.
Nathan: We’ve thought about it a lot, as you can tell.
Is there anything else you wanted to say about the album or what you hope people get out of the album?
Josh: I think we’re just very grateful that people have been patient with us. We’re just really hoping that anyone that picks it up enjoys what they hear and can be empowered by it and inspired by it.
Emily: That’s the overall goal. Obviously you write the album for yourself, but I feel like more importantly we wrote this for the fans who have been waiting and for the people who have not yet heard us.
Josh: We wrote it for you.
Aw, thanks!
Emily: Like he said, it's about empowering and encouraging. Somebody yesterday was like, “This is like my dream. This is what I’d like to do. By seeing you guys living our your dream, it encouraged me as a fellow young person.” That really sums up the goal of the album—that people would not just listen to it and be like, that was a cool album. They would listen to it and be like, "I’m going to go out and do what I feel like God is calling me to do.
You only get one shot.
Emily: You only get one debut album so I’m really glad we took our time with it.
Josh: We want the record to be accessible to and like have a worshipful feel to it. Not just like we’re some young Christian band. We want it to challenge people, multiple generations. I want my grandparents to listen to it and be inspired and then I want my little brother to listen to it and say, “That’s really cool what you’re doing.”
