David Crowder's 'Collision'
“For the past two years, I have ended most nights in concert with the following statement: When our depravity meets his divinity, it is a beautiful collision. This recording is about that collision,” says worship leader David Crowder about his group’s newest albumA Collision, which releases September 27.
The David Crowder Band’s first full-length studio album in two years, A Collision was born out of another conversation between Crowder and the same physics student that inspired the band’s number-one-selling sophomore release Illuminate, which explored the empirical facts about light, translating them into revelation of God and creation.
Crowder recounts the conversation:
Get Our Latest News for FREE
“We were outside of my barn just talking when he said to me, ‘Have you ever noticed the sky goes all the way to the ground? It’s like sky and then ground and we’re somewhere in between-our feet are on the ground but we’re walking around in the sky,’ and immediately I thought, ‘That’s our reality as Christians-redemption’s found us but we’re still in a desperate spot,” said Crowder.
For Crowder, that “desperate spot” was given a face with last December’s tsunami in South East Asia, which killed nearly 226,000 in the region.
“This was all said very soon after the tsunami in East Asia and seeing the images of that on television over and over and over-it was a visual of the depth of our fault, that even the ground under our feet is not right and the air that we breathe is not right and here’s this thing coming from thee middle of the sea and it’s tearing children from their parents…so granted rescue’s found us, but we’re still in a desperate spot and there’s a bigger rescue that’s even coming,” said Crowder.
That things are “not right” in the world is also revealed on cover art for A Collision, which shows a young boy looking up at a symbol showing the elliptical path of the atom around the nucleus, which, in comparison to scientific reality, is an improper depiction.
“This is the difficulty with symbols,” says Crowder. “They are never quite
proper; they are always a bit broken. This inadequate drawing roused both
hope of discovery and reminiscence of destruction in me as I thought, ‘We
are creating broken containers.’”
More than 73 minutes over 18 tracks, A Collision features the first studio
version of the concert favorite, “Here Is Our King,” which recently released to radio. In addition to other new songs from the David Crowder Band, the album includes a
cover of “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven” by Loretta Lynn, Sufjan
Stevens, “O God Where Are You Now? (In Pickerel Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?),” “The Lark Ascending,” by Ralph Vaughn Williams and the band’s first-ever take on bluegrass with “I Saw the Light” by Hank Williams, Sr.
As the band explored bluegrass music through Williams song, a fairy tale
collision occurred.
“We met Marty Stuart at the Dove Awards a year ago. He
was backstage wearing a black suit, aglow in rhinestones, sparkling down
both sleeves and spanning the back of his jacket in the shape of a very
large cross,” Crowder recalls. “None of this would have been entirely
strange if not for the fact our guitar player had suggested one day prior
that we should get Marty Stuart to help us with the bluegrass number.”
Soon after, the David Crowder Band found itself gathered around a microphone in the late Johnny Cash’s cabin outside of Nashville with Stuart, recording “I Saw the Light,” two of Williams’ verses, the one of Cash’s and one of Crowder’s.
For the rest of the recording process for A Collision, which was recorded over four weeks in Waco, TX in the barn behind Crowder’s house, fans were given an inside look through four 24-hour webcams and weblogs that documented the band’s entire time in the studio. Several dozen DCB fans even had a chance to meet, eat, and sing with the band through an open studio invitation Crowder posted up on the news section of the group’s website.
“The last week, I guess I was just bored, but we needed a big group vocal to happen this one tune, and I just put an open invitation on the website to come to where we were recording and sing on the record,” recalls Crowder. “I promised my wife I was like, ‘Nobody’s paying attention, it’ll just be a couple of folks,’ and we had between 150 and 160 people show up. And what blew my mind was that the first people that I met said, ‘Hi, my name is such and such, my name is such and such and we drove from Los Angeles,’ which is like a 22-hour drive. So we fed them barbecue and then we all gathered around a microphone upstairs in the barn and we sang.”
“Hopefully some of that excitement and enthusiasm will translate,” says Crowder.
For more information on A Collision including the complete track listing click here.
