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Part of the reason we sound like we do is because we see music and recording as a compositional tool. People ask, "Hey, can you tell me why you did this with a song?" And all I can tell them is, "I guess we're too nerdy and we made this thing with this noise and it sounded cool." For us it's about putting a song together, expressing the faith side with our giftings and expressing the story in the grandest way possible, using every available color in the palette.

Are all of your songs a record of what your church community has experienced?

Crowder Everything that we have ever recorded is a documentation of what our community has done. Remedy became a response to A Collision. We made A Collision about mortality and finding life on the other side. Then we went through the stuff that we were singing about [with the tragic death of pastor/best friend Kyle Lake, who was instrumental in the creation of A Collision].

After taking the journey of creating A Collision, we got together in our church community and expressed ourselves in the hope that we found, and here we are with a few songs that articulate what that was. These songs [on Remedy] express what we did in finding life. It was us making music for us and our church [in response to what we were going through]. Looking back, we couldn't have planned that.

How did you get from an epic 73-minute mapped-out A Collision to the simpler 10-track album Remedy?

Crowder: You were set up for an album like Remedy, though you might not have realized it. We're kind of weird to think that far ahead but we knew that the next [full-length] record after A Collision would be a set of simple songs in a simpler format that are really accessible. So we put a sort of apology/explanation at the end of A Collision [in the song "The Lark Ascending (Or Perhaps More Accurately, I'm Trying to Make You Sing)"] when it says, "And I'm trying to make you sing, from inside where you believe, like it's something that you need, like it means everything. And I'm trying to make you feel that, this is for real, that life is happening, that it means everything, I'm just trying to make you sing." You're set up to move from this epic A Collision to a collection of songs to sing on Remedy.

I understand the record was also inspired by social causes?

Crowder Yes, we started looking at how social movements and music have gone together, especially with movements like the (RED) campaign with corporations and celebrities coming together. All of these major corporations have postured a response to show their shareholders and customers that they were concerned about people less fortunate in different world crisis issues.

How did you interpret that?

Crowder It feels like there's a shift in which the mainstream culture and the mission of the church are lining up. We felt that this is a significant moment we should look at, since music and social change go together. It seems there is always music attached to social change. Music allows a community and individuals in the community to express themselves and then turn minds to social action.

We thought about what this music of change would sound like in our own church, as this movement for social change was an undercurrent there as well. We discovered it's really hard to fit grand ideas of justice into a song and not turn it into something trite. What we were after here was to make songs that move you to act, rather than present more ideas and dialogue.

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