Although some artists may be comfortable singing about an issue or a concept without engaging it with their life, KB is definitely not one of them.

The Reach Records artist's background in ministry through his hometown of Tampa, FL and four years studying theology at Trinity College have equipped him with both on-the-ground experience and a solid knowledge of the Bible that infuse his songs with irresistable vitality and urgency. In addition to multiple features with artists like Lecrae, Andy Mineo, Family Force 5 and Tenth Avenue North, KB has released full length album Weight and Glory and recent EP 100.

During YC Alberta in Canada, KB sat down with NRT's Mark Ryan to share about his music, recent journey into fatherhood, and the burden for people that keeps him rapping.

Give us a run down on KB, who you are and what drives you.

I'm stationed in Tampa, Florida with my wife and brand new son KBJ. I'm a dude that's been walking with Jesus since I was 16 years old. I have always loved hip hop, always considered myself to be a part of the culture. When I believed in the Gospel, my life was radically changed. I lost my sin but I didn't lose my hip hop. That's the lane I live in to this day, which by God's grace has become a living for me and a nationally acclaimed craft.

Tell me what missional living is like in Tampa.

It is extremely important as an artist to have a burden and a people that you're fighting for. As you're traveling and the demands are picking up, you find yourself in front of more people, but you also find that you become disconnected from people because your exchanges with them are so quick and very superficial. You look amazing with lights shining on you and drums and a DJ and subs, and it can make you seem glorious in the eyes of people that you're rapping to. That can skew your understanding of who you are and disconnect you from reality.

What I have found in people I have respected is that no matter how famous they become, they stay very human. That only came from the fact they had a burden for the people. My burden is that the Kingdom of God be formed and manifest everywhere on this planet. What embodies this on a day to day basis is the people of Tampa.

I'm not necessarily making music to them, shouting it from the rooftops. I'm actually down experiencing the things I'm rapping about. That's what Tampa represents for me. When I think about a song, I can see real people that I know, how this would affect them, how they would hear it. The issues that are represented in the city influence my walk, so when I do go to another city or country I feel like the compassion doesn't have to be something I'm acting. I really feel compassion for the people I'm in front of because it's a life that I live on an everyday basis.

How do you communicate the urban struggle to a suburban audience? How do you get that message across even to a non-traditional hip hop audience?

It goes back to the burden. Hip hop, for it to be acclaimed as genuine hip hop, has to have roots in reality. It's coming out of a world that we exist in, so in secular hip hop what you hear a lot of is folks who are rapping about what they see around them. The ghetto mentality is a real story, and the issue is that people need to know what's going on, but often, like any news source, there's an agenda behind the report. So you're not just saying "this is what's happening," but you're saying "this is happening but I celebrate and perpetuate these things by the way I live my life." It's subtle, but it happens a lot.

I think for every audience we're in front of, we want to invite you into the burden that we feel. As we're recognizing the issues in the city, as we raise the social issues and the fight against injustice, we also don't want to lose the agenda, because the agenda behind everything we sing is that we want to see folks come to Christ. If sin is not the biggest issue, then Christ won't be the biggest solution. That is really what's happening in the urban community, same as is happening in the suburban community and anywhere and everywhere that sin is pervasive and needing an answer.

So you've been a dad for 12 days. What has that experience been like?

It's been amazing. My little guy is healthy and happy, and every day we are experiencing more of God's grace and mercy. We want to give our son to the Lord's service, and we're praying for him and his little infant body, that the Lord will be shaping his heart to love Him. We want to raise him under fear of God to show our appreciation for Him and His mercy towards us. We're just overjoyed to be parents.

Let's talk about a song off the EP. The song that gripped me was "Doubts." How did the thought of becoming a father impact the song?

The song came from a place of honesty for me. For a lot of us, talking is way easier than living. One of the issues for believers is that we use so much God talk that it's easy to talk the talk so well that people really don't care if you walk the walk. I've yet to be booked because they've been so impressed by how I sacrifice for my wife or for my community. It's been because of the way that I talk. The challenge of our culture is that it lends itself to making us good talkers. I have fallen victim to that, and I have participated in that, and I've wanted to make myself more spiritual than I actually am by just talking and saying the right things.

One of the things you don't want to say is that you have doubts, that you doubt the very things you share with other people. There's recently been two situations where I knew what the bible said about a certain situation. One was adultery, and the other was when I was in Africa standing in front of an audience of people in a village that had genocide and rape committed against them. I'm looking at these people, and my job was to tell all of them that God is calling you to forgive.

In the situation with the adultery, I'm bound by scripture to call this individual to forgive. Being the talker I would say "Just do it. That's what I would do if I was there, because Jesus died for me and I've been forgiven, so I'm going to forgive." But that's not true. For me it really was a challenge. I began to doubt and ask, "Is the message of forgiveness a rational response for these people?" When I went to God and prayed and took my doubts to Him, He showed me that "yes, it is irrational for the human. But it's very rational for Me, because I can do the impossible. I understand how people work, and forgiving is freeing. As crazy as it might sound, you should trust Me because I know better than you do."

I came against my doubts. I said "my doubts are not going to grow up into denial. I'm going to deny my doubts and trust God." I find if I'm doing that, I find myself in a place of greater faith. So that's where that song came from.

Those doubts are still in me to this day about being a father. My dad did me dirty— how do I know I won't do the same thing to my son? How do I break this generational curse of being an absentee father that's attached to my last name? Can I do this? And I take all those doubts to Lord and say "I'm going to doubt my doubts, trust my God and leave it up to Him."

What were the bible verses that you were thinking about during the writing of the song?

I would say for sure Proverbs 3:5 "Trust in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding." And also Proverbs 14:12, "There's a way that seems right to a man but ends in destruction." Both of those touch on a key temptation in all of us: we have a long track record of failing ourselves, but we still find ourselves pretty trustworthy. We often have to be talked out of trusting ourselves when it really should be obvious that we don't know what we're doing. Those two verses allowed me to join arms with scripture and come against myself.

You've mentioned before that you dealt with suicidal thoughts. In your mind, how does the church begin to do a better job of removing the stigma around mental health issues?

The advances in mental science and the science of diagnosing mental illnesses as real illnesses has developed much more than it has in the past. Some would argue that it is overdeveloped now where there is nothing supernatural about the human psyche and it's all natural. But before it got to where it is today, people would take these issues to the church, and the answer that the people had was to encourage the people to always think about it as demonic.

I think most of us are on the same page that that's ridiculous, that there are chemicals in our bodies, our minds aren't disconnected from physical things. But that was an abuse that made its way well into our generation, where folks are still not recognizing mental illnesses and mental issues with a medical answer— it's all demonic for some folks.

On the flip side, I would argue that we have still gotten off balance, because now there is no room for the devil and demons and evil and the fact that they really do oppress and possess individuals. I know I'm a Reformed brother and we don't talk lot about that, but some of those folks need to come to Africa with me. What we want to do as a church is be balanced. We want to understand if there is something about your psychological condition that's stopping you from participating in the means of grace, like "I can't read, I can't pray, I can't study because I'm tormented in my mind."

We need to understand that there are some things we need to bring before the church to pray about and ask the Lord to heal and address, or sometimes it is a chemical imbalance that can be easily treated without you becoming addicted to some sort of medication. We want to assess those things very carefully, and recognize that we’ve been off on both sides.

What are you reading right now?

I'm reading two books, one by a guy who is becoming one of my heroes, Frantz Fanon, an African philosopher. He wasn't a Christian but he was a monster thinker, he was a revolutionary in North Africa. He wrote a book called "White Masks, Black Skin." It is really helping as I think about serving African Americans in particular. It really helps us to understand the effects of slavery on us. I am also knee deep in a book called, "The Man Christ Jesus" written by a dude named Bruce Ware. It explores the humanity of Christ. I'm almost done with it. It has been the single most influential book in the last two years in shaping how I think about myself, how I think about Jesus, and obviously when those things are shaped that shapes how you think about the world. I highly recommend it.

What albums are you looking forward to?

I'm really looking forward to Lecrae's album; he's been working on it for a while now. I'm a Lecrae fan, I always have been. I love his voice and the way he approaches songs. I'm also looking forward to Tedashii's album "Below Paradise" that comes out this summer. I haven't heard the whole album, what I have heard has been really good. I'm on the deluxe version. It's super transparent, and I think it's going to be a game-changer for Reach fans because he goes into very mature, real life struggles, so I think it's going to be really good for our fan base.

How can we be praying for you?

I would just ask y'all to pray for me and for everybody on Reach to be faithful above anything else. We're supposed to be Christians doing Christian music, and some scandal would put the movement down, so I really pray that folks approach us very excited about what we do but very concerned that they keep us before the Lord with our character and our faithfulness. We want to make excellent music for y'all, we want to kill it. But we have a lot of people relying on us, like families and communities and nations that are looking to us. What could undo it all is not a bad album, not putting a sorry single out, but if we really were to get caught up in some serious issue of gross immorality. So pray that we stay faithful to the Lord and to our families.