“This Is Our Time” by Fireflight, Friday, June 21, 2024
Fireflight became a massive Christian Rock band in 2006 when their video for the single “You Decide,” which featured Josh Brown of the band Day of Fire, became the most-requested video on TVU that year. The band debuted on Flicker Records after touring for years after being founded by husband and wife Glenn and Wendy Drennen in 1999. Glenn was the guitarist and Wendy the bassist of the band, and she would become the backing vocalist when the band added Dawn Michele as the group’s lead singer. The band followed up the runaway success of their debut album The Healing of Harms with Unbreakable. While Unbreakable was a success for the band, the members talked about the difficulty of making their follow-up album. Dawn Michele told Stars & Stripes making the record was “one of the most difficult times in our lives.”
IT STARTS TONIGHT. Just as ForeFront Records was in search of the “more Christian” alternative to successful Christian-adjacent acts, Flicker Records signed a band that was clearly influenced by Evanescence and Flyleaf. But with the Christian music industry being two to three years behind general market trends, girl-rock, and rock music in general wasn’t very successful on pop radio in 2015. Pop radio was shifting towards EDM with David Guetta and The Chainsmokers scoring hits in the middle of the decade. Amid the bleakest time to be in a band, Fireflight scrapped their original hard rock model and lead singer Dawn Michele entered the studio without her band to record Fireflight’s sixth album, Innova. Michele worked with three producers: Joshua Silverberg, Rusty Varenkamp, and Kipp Williams, all of whom, are primarily Contemporary Christian producers. Guitars are largely replaced with synthesizers. Dawn’s melodies sound lifted from Coldplay and Kesha at times. The sound of the album was polarizing to fans with little indication of stylistic change from their 2012 previous album, Now.
IT’S THE VOICE THAT CALLS YOU HOME. Fireflight released Innova on May 5, 2015. The project was crowdfunded and released independently after being released with their contract with Flicker Records. Innova sounds like an imitation of pop music without adding much in terms of lyrical content. One notable exception is the duet with Stephen Christian, “Safety.” Christian’s vocals add an earnest sound that the album seems to lack. All in all, the album feels like what happens when an industry that is already behind is playing catch-up with a band that is the epitome of the Family Christian “If you like Halsey, then you’ll love Fireflight” would sound like. This isn’t a new problem though, think about how DC Talk transformed from a hip-hop trio to a hard rock Nirvana-style band. The result is that it creates safe, family-friendly music teenagers forget about as soon as they are out of mom’s watchful eye. When I write about these bands, it’s not the music I listen to every day, but there is a nostalgia for these records--even the ones that were released when I wasn’t listening to Christian music. The lyrics and the music felt so important at the time, like we were on the verge of something great, like today’s song, “This Is Our Time.” What a disappointment came when we realized that it just meant God using an adulterer to stack the Supreme Court against non-Christians.
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