It's been two-and-a-half years since United Pursuit Band's Michael Ketterer released Love/War/Solar System, a passionate, aggressive pop album that introduced 1980s-era synths before it was cool again. On top of that, he had accessible, songs about the human experience, which always points towards a need of God.

Now, after years of serving faithfully in the Knoxville, Tenn. area as a part of the United Pursuit community, Ketterer has more to say, and this time, it's vertically oriented. Along with his United Pursuit companions, Ketterer unveils The Wild Inside, a project that translates his family's very personal experiences into universal truths and expressions of worship. 

While on tour with United Pursuit Band, Ketterer took some time to talk about the heart behind the new album, and the ways he's being challenged to embrace the wild inside.

I've been really loving the album and I'm excited to get to talk about it. Catch us up with you and life and music and all that and your family since Love/War/Solar System.

I think when I talked to you last time I was fostering some children, but now we've legally adopted four of our boys that we have. So it's me, my wife, my biological daughter, then we've got four adopted boys and then we've got one foster boy that we're trying to adopt.

Really in the midst of that last album and this one, and during our worship times, there's been so much revelation God's given me about His heart as a father and all that comes with adoption. We've really been immersed in that for the past three years working with children. 
 
The trailer for your album is really emotional. I got misty eyed for sure and especially at the tail end when you're like this is a true story. For those who haven't seen it, you kind of mentioned that already, but I guess share your heart a little bit about sort of adoption and the father's heart in that.

Our children weren't the best behaved. They were born addicted to meth and you can see in the promotion video. Literally when [child services] found them, they found them in the woods. They were hiding from the police. So just going through all that's entailed with that over the past three years is really kind of what shaped the song, the music and it's definitely shaped my passion. I'm passionate about seeing people reaching out to these children.

The one thing that I want to make sure it's known is that along with the CD is my website, michaelketterer.com, and on that website if people feel impressed or moved upon to take a further step in adopting or looking into adoption or adoption for foster care, I offer a link there on how they can go ahead and get involved.

Also on that website there are other people who have been adopted, and people who have given their children up for adoption. Their stories are also on that website. Also there's a full story of my family and you can read that as well. It's all in there.

You know, the truth is, God sent Jesus to die on the cross so that we could all be adopted into His family. Adopting my own sons just opened my eyes to what the Father did for us and how he's committed no what the issues that we face. He's committed to see the healing and the freedom take place.

Those are the things that when you say I'm going to be a parent and adopt this child. Ours, like I said, came with a lot of baggage, but we've been committed to see them walking in freedom. That's a big part of what the Lord is telling me, but I just really hope with this album and also with the tour and travel that I'm able to spread the message of adoption.

This album is Michael Ketterer and United Pursuit. That distinction is different from your last album, so talk about that for a minute. Did you work with the band more on this? Why is that reflected there and what does that say about what you did on this album?

The last album that I did was kind of more my own, basically my own songs and things that I'd written whereas when we talk about United Pursuit, we're a community of artists, musicians, all kinds of people. Every week we do a thing called LoveWar where we all gather and we worship for a few hours.

We've been doing this now for seven years every Tuesday. So you can only play other people's songs for so long, especially when you're gathering for two-hour times of worship. The reason why it's two hours is just because we love it. We're in His presence. We start singing. It started out with about 12 college students. Now we're running every Tuesday anywhere from maybe 400 to 500 people of all ages.

In the midst of those times of worship, just spontaneously songs are being written. Most of the songs that are on this album have come from that spontaneous times of worship. It's kind of funny because that's why a lot of United Pursuit songs don't necessarily fit like a mold of like first chorus, first bridge, chorus. We just took moments. We took the moments out of two hours of worship and put them together.

When it says "with United Pursuit," it really means that not only were the songs written in the midst of the community, but also the community is what gets behind to see the album through. You'll be able to see that especially if you got a copy of my CD. You'll see the amount of people that were involved in making that music. It's just crazy. There were so many people who were involved in the process.
 
It was nice to hear a kind of shorter, subdued version of "Wild One," which was on your last album, to open the album. Why did you open this way?

The reason why I chose that as the intro is for starters the name of the album is The Wild Inside. When you're faced with the decision to just follow the norm, to just play it safe, or to take the adventurous choice, that's what we call "the wild." We're choosing the wild over what is safe and familiar and we're stepping out of the boat and that's kind of the terminology that we use. I feel like that it's like the voice of the Holy Spirit, because the voice of the Holy Spirit is always going to ask you—for the most part—to do the most uncomfortable, scary thing.

I also love the theme of "Awaken the Child." It's intriguing to me. Tell us what was inspired there? What did that come out of?

That's a combination of a song between me and Will Reagan. We pulled two of our choruses together, and it's really speaking of that trust that we have as a child. The thing I like to say is God uses the foolish things to comfound the wise. He tells us the way to get into heaven is to be like a little child and we spend so much of our time, even as believers in the church trying to figure it out.

We're trying to gain this knowledge or this understanding by searching the words. I'm not against all that, but it's like sometimes we need the Lord to make us more foolish. We need that child to come out in order to truly grasp the mysteries. If I become more foolish, if I become more abandoned like a child, then I begin to gain a greater understanding of the mystery of who our Savior is.
  One of the things actually I really love about United Pursuit is that you guys aren't really concerned about radio singles and such. It's all about the worship and the live experience and the equipping the church with new songs and stuff like that. What are you guys sensing is the destiny of this record? Where does it go from here once it releases? What are you guys hoping for?

That's a good question, but like you said, we're not very concerned because we make our albums very inexpensively, because we do them together. We're doing them out of our home and out of our own little studios and we've got friends in Nashville that let us play drums in their studios and then we've got buddies that mix and master.

The video guys are all in our community that make the videos. Sure, we may end up spending several thousand on an album, but we know that even if we just released that, our fans, our solid fans—would help us make that back pretty quickly.

So our motivation is not a financial one by any means. Simply our motivation for the music we make is just to sing the song the Lord puts on our heart. We're real good friends with a lot of people in Nashville, especially the CCM crowd, a lot or those guys. They meet with us and stuff. Part of them it drives them crazy because they're like, "We could sign you and we could do all this kind of stuff," and then there's another part of them that sits back and goes, "We wish we could do what you're doing."

It's just the freedom of singing the song that the Lord gives us, releasing it, and seeing what God does with it. If He encourage it, if people are worshiping to it, it's amazing. To me my heart behind this album was like to have a worship album you can worship too. You can also enjoy listening to. 

I just have a really big passion for that kind of thing, like believers taking worship and the heart of worship and really packaging it in more of a creative package to where it's not just the same thing you hear all the time.

I really do feel like our generation is kind of ready for that. I think if I actually had a hope and desire for this album above anything else outside of just seeing the heart of adoption being ministered to, it would be to maybe inspire other believers to be creative with their music and not to be so concerned about it fitting into the mold of Christian pop music or the Christian genre or just even what we're familiar with in worship.

I think that's why Christian music is kind of not really that good all the time. You have to go to these underground pains and find these really cool bands that are doing it and there are a lot of them, but I'm ready for more of that to happen and I would love maybe if this would inspire other artists to really be artists, even when they're worshiping.

It seems like God creates all these artists and then when it comes time to worship they go how can we be as unartistic and creative as possible.

(Keep clicked onto NRT for Part II of this interview with Michael Ketterer.)