Owen Thomas (second from left) and his fellow Elms infuse their classic rock sound with spiritual insight and small-town perspective.

Unlike many bands that leave the cozy fold of Christian music with bigger mainstream ambitions, The Elms weren't disgruntled at their former label benefactors for not hitting it big. Neither had they forgotten their faith-based beginnings—playing festivals, tours and other avenues in the tightly-knit CCM circuit. When their time was up, the band simply quietly transplanted itself from the subculture's confines, looking for a new place to take root—and finally landing with Universal South, which they deemed the perfect terrain for their artistic renaissance. The result was The Chess Hotel (Universal South), the band's magnum opus but also a conceptual case study on the socio-cultural plight of the Midwest—namely, the band's own home state of Indiana. In this conversation, frontman Owen Thomas discusses the band's transitional season, their growth, and how they hope the new album will shake small-town dwellers—geographical, spiritual, or otherwise—out of their comfort zones..

Your group started off as a modern rock act with splashes of Brit pop and other influences. Why shift to barebones rock 'n' roll?

Owen Thomas: We probably played five or six hundred shows over the last two years, and that has a dramatic way of forging a band's sound. After you do it for long enough, it becomes less and less about what you want to sound like, and more and more about what you actually sound like. We found over the course of the last two years was that sometimes we stuck our toes into the Britpop pool, sometimes the modern rock pool, sometimes the power-pop pool—and we always came back to a heavy, blues-based, loud, raw, organic, '60s-inspired rock sound.

When we were just getting started, we were listening to so much different music, and it was all influencing us in so many different ways. I'm still very proud of the songs on those first couple of records, but I think we were going in a lot of different directions. Now, I feel we've grown up a little bit. We've let the road mold who we are. Our collective character really comes out. So now, I don't think we're playing anything other than what we were born to play.

How do you feel about that earlier material? Do you disregard it in favor of your new sound?

Thomas: On this tour, we're playing 99.9 percent new material because we have a new album to promote. Also, we're very passionate about what we do. We do play one or two songs from our last album, Truth Soul Rock & Roll, and very rarely do we play anything from the first record. If we're doing a headlining set, then I'd say we play literally the entire new album, and maybe a cover song or two.

Why do you think The Elms never really took off with those first couple of albums? Was it a lack of creative freedom or the label's belief in you?

Thomas: There was never really any sense of the label or anybody lording over us to sound a certain way. They were very trusting of our band and let us do what we wanted to do. And the new label relationship is that way, but even more so. I don't think we would've liked to have launched this rock band—the way we are now—in the old CCM world. I don't really know that'll ever happen for a band like us because I think there's an inherent element to our music that's kind of almost…

Rebellious?

Thomas: : Yeah! It's almost inherently rebellious. The kind of music that we make, and the kind of risk that we love about rock 'n' roll, and the kind of danger that we love about what you can say and the way you're meant to feel and the things that it's meant to make your body do—things like that, people in Christian music are just generally not receptive to.

I don't think anybody at our former label or the team that we had—agents, management—I don't think that anybody didn't believe. And I almost feel like the gatekeepers—the radio people and the retail people—they all believed as well. We played so many events for these people, and they all really believed in our band. I think they all got it. They just kinda didn't want it, if that makes any sense. The things that we stood for, what The Elms was trying to accomplish, that's not what Christian music does.

If you're looking for a truly risky and rebellious experience in music, I don't know anybody who's listening to Christian music for that, for something that's completely unbridled and completely unchained, something that's raw and down and dirty.

Anything you would've done differently??

Thomas: If I knew then what I know now about Christian music—the fact that it exists largely to serve the church—I probably would've never signed up for it in the first place, because our goal as a band was never to exist in the church. It was always to exist for rock 'n' roll fans. That's not something the Christian music industry does. I don't think it was anybody's fault that we didn't blow up. I just think it was like asking two very, very different worlds to hold hands.

So we ultimately spent two years literally pulling up stakes from that whole world and turning down a lot of shows and doing a lot of things that, in the moment, we didn't want to do. But we knew that in order to make important investments in changing our entire scenario, we had to do that. So we spent the last couple of years uprooting.

Your previous album was titled Truth Soul Rock & Roll. Would you say rock 'n' roll takes a backseat to message in Christian music?

Thomas: Yeah. I think there's definitely a faith-based perspective we come from, and the people out here on the road are definitely feeling that. Whenever we play in front of club crowds or general-market shows, we've always felt that. I've had people came up to me after a show and say, "I've been going to shows for 20 years and I've never felt what I felt when you guys were playing"—as if there was something spiritual taking place.

So there is a sense of purpose to your music.

Thomas: I feel that's something that we still aspire to and always will. The most pervasive and important part of our lives is still our faith. The reason our band wants to get in front of rock audiences is so those things can happen, and we can actually feel like we're being truthful in the work by being out there and getting the spiritual wheels turning in people's minds and hearts. I don't want to say that the reason our band goes out and plays shows is to evangelize. That'd probably be a little misleading, because we also exist to go out there and tell people about the plight of little towns in Middle America.

Your new album, The Chess Hotel, is rife with stories from Middle America. Were you intentional about this theme?

Thomas: It's absolutely intentional. Over the past couple of years, there were times where all we had to do was be introspective. There were a lot of times when we only had each other to believe in. We never wanted to be a band that existed exclusively to rock. The artists that we aspire to be like—Bruce Springsteen, The Who, U2, Tom Petty, John Mellencamp—these are all acts with a heartbeat, if you know what I mean. They weren't out there just to rock; they also existed to enlighten people to a cause or enlighten people to the living circumstances of people around them. It was more of a global conscience happening, and music was just a vehicle. I really feel that's what our band aspires to.

How did your heartbeat, your cause, come about?

Thomas: I was on the road one time and I got a call from one of my greatest friends in my hometown of Seymour [Indiana], who I graduated high school with. We were playing the House of Blues that night in Chicago. He called me and he said, "What are you doing?" So I said, "I'm in Chicago. I'm at the House of Blues. I'm having this great time. I'm going to go do this new record." And I said, "What are you doing?" And he said, "Um, I got a new job. I'm going to be inspecting bulbs at this company outside of Seymour." And I said, "Cool." And he said, "It's full medical benefits." And I said, "Great." And he explained to me the whole job.

And I just had this extremely profound experience. I'm thinking, I'm out here on the road. I'm playing the House of Blues. I'm making records. I'm flying around the country between L.A., Nashville and New York. And this kid is inspecting bulbs.

And I know this kid and his ambitions are—and they were never to be inspecting bulbs for a living. He was kind of a victim of his circumstances. These are all my friends, people just like this—inspecting bulbs, working in mills and factories and farms. So I think this position of putting my life against theirs and looking at the two—how vastly different they are—was the most compelling thing. And then looking at my friend's life and going, "I think my life would be perceived by some to be lucky or to be extraordinary," where the bulk of Americans live an existence like my friends do.

That was two years ago now. But that really made me say to myself, "I'm going to try to educate people to come out of those parts of Middle America." It's been a little while since somebody our age has talked about them. Mellencamp kinda had his glossed-over view of how great small-town life was—and maybe it was when he was writing those songs. But now people are just trying to scrape by, and they hate their lives and their jobs. I play cards with these guys and I see them whenever I'm home, and it's just really rough. It's a tough time to be an American, a blue-collar American.

There aren't many people making those observations nowadays.

Thomas: We wrote a few of these songs and we were talking to labels, and one of the label guys told me, "Man, it's like there hasn't been someone to step into Springsteen's shoes or Petty's shoes or Mellencamp's shoes—someone from your generation." And then he goes, "Are you attempting to do that?" And I said, "I don't think I'm consciously attempting to step in anybody's shoes. I'm writing about my friends. I'm writing about my little town, what it meant to grow up there, how everybody always wanted to get out. And I'm writing about how most of them don't get out."

So the dominatrix, the narcissist, the pregnant girl—these characters aren't fictional?

Thomas: No, no. All the people in the record that you read about—I don't use names, but they're very much real people who I know.

Do you identify with these characters, or are you writing from a vantage point, as if you've been able to remove yourself from that reality?

Thomas: Here's where I do identify with them: The Chess Hotel is our first endeavor in a whole new world. And for all practical purposes, we're starting over out here. We're trying to make friends again. We're on a brand-new label. So I almost feel like I'm on the grind out here on the road every single day, because we're driving ourselves from show to show, traveling across the country to let people know that we're here. I almost feel like it's a blue-collar way of touring. There's really precious little luxury about the whole thing, and I think that you need a lot of fortitude and a certain disposition to work like this. You need a lot of ambition to push through.

Visit our site's artist page to learn more about The Elms' career in Christian music, and click here to read our review of their album, The Chess Hotel. To listen to sound clips and buy his music, please visit Christianbook.com.

© Andree Farias, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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