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Cochran This time we probably had a little more extensive writing time than we've had in the past.

Scheuchzer And on our own. I think I brought more songs to the table than in the past. I think we got so used to budgeting our time. [Everything] has been such a whirlwind since "Imagine" took off. The first year was huge in Christian music and we were busy doing that. And the next year was huge in mainstream music, so we kept staying busy. When [guitarist] Barry [Graul] came into the band, he's like a songwriting workhorse. He's always building tracks for Bart [Millard] to write or to send to publishing companies. He's a juggernaut of songwriting.

Robby Shaffer (drums) To answer your original question—not that they weren't answering it—when you think of some of the biggest artists in Christian music [at] the peak of their careers, they went in other directions, and it worked, like dcTalk, Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith. [These artists] were loved the way they were. Music was changing, so they changed with it, and it worked for them. Those are albums you remember. You remember Jesus Freak. You remember Lead Me On. And hopefully you'll remember Coming Up to Breathe kind of in that same light. That's what we were going for. It's a turning point for us. Hopefully it won't be just the one song—hopefully it will be the whole album that people love.

The advent of iTunes is responsible for people embracing the "one song" rather than a complete body of work.

Shaffer We wrote 30 songs for this album. We narrowed it down to 15 to 20 going into the studio. We wrote a couple more in the studio. We ended up with 16 or 17 songs that we love—all of them. It was like, "How do we narrow this down to 11 or 12 songs to put on an album?"

Bryson When we did other albums, we had 12 songs and that was all we'd written. That was all we'd had time to do. Sometimes we'd written only nine.

In the past, it was easy to tell those "throwaway" songs.

Cochran I totally get what you're saying. It's hard to make an entire album that you're really happy with. How people buy music nowadays, if they like a song, they'll buy that one song. I think the great thing with this record is that we felt like that with every song. We had so many songs to choose from. That's the first time that's happened for us.

Scheuchzer This is the definitely the most complete record we've done. It doesn't feel like there's something missing or something that's just filler. I love it; I'm a fan of this record. I haven't necessarily been that in the past, and that's probably because [the albums] have been so hodgepodge, thrown together at the last minute. And all the experiences that went into making this record—being in Allaire, having the time, having the songs when we went in and already being excited about them—all the memories attached to this album just make it so special to me.

Barry Graul (guitar) All that to say, in today's "singles" mentality, we did save a couple of singles for exclusive releases. So I think that we really serviced a lot of the market, both sides of the market. We just re-recorded the whole record acoustically for video and audio. Doing that just drives home the record as a whole. You need to cover all your bases these days, in such a digital age.

Shaffer Just from a marketing standpoint, because of iTunes and other downloading avenues, to sell an actual CD you almost have to get gimmicky in a way. "Buy this album at Wal-Mart and you get a special DVD." "Buy this album at Target and you get a song nobody else has." You know what I'm saying? You have to get creative to even sell a CD.

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