NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

  Earthsuit formed in 1995 when Adam LaClave and Paul Meany started attending the same church in New Orleans. The two led worship at the church, forming a band that would eventually play at the Cornerstone Festival and sign to Sparrow Records . The band expertly mixed funk, jazz, reggae, and blues with rock and hip-hop. Their debut album, Kaleidoscope Superior , released June 20, 2000, was a moderate success in Christian Rock, but beyond the somewhat lackluster commercial success, the band was what some of the biggest names in Christian Rock were listening to from Martin Smith of Delirious? to Kevin Max of dc Talk to Rebecca St. James, for whom the band wrote a song on her 2000 album, Transform . LORD, HIT ME ONE TIME, INFILTRATE THE MIND. Earthsuit’s sound was a bit eccentric to be commercially viable in the Christian market. Influenced by The Police and The Beastie Boys and adding various New Orleans flavors, half of the album sounded like a jazz version of...

Twenty years ago, Blindside released their second major-label album, About a Burning Fire . The songs on the album helped to form the classic sound for which the band is remembered while pushing the band creatively. The album features a collaboration with The Smashing Pumpkins ’ Billy Corgan on “ Hooray, It’s L.A. ” The song “ Roads ” flirts with jazz and the song “ Shekina ” features orchestration and Swedish yodeling, molding Blindside into more than a hardcore band with a softened sound for radio potential with some of the mellowest songs in their discography. The album’s final song, though, the title track “ About a Burning Fire ,” features mostly unclean vocals similar to the band’s earlier work. Most of the songs on the album are heavy with lead singer Christian Lindskog balancing clean vocals with occasional screams The album’s lead single “ All of Us ” bubbled under the Modern Rock chart but the video was a hit on Fuse TV . The second single, “ Follow You Down ” was a hit o...

East West  was a Christian hard rock band that released two albums in the early 2000s. The most successful single from their debut album  The Light in Guinevere's Garden   was the guitar ballad " She Cries ," in which the band didn't scream the lyrics. East West's two releases are between two very important releases in Hard Christian Rock:  P.O.D. 's  Satellite  and  Underoath 's  They're Only Chasing Safety . The band's follow up,  Hope in Anguish  was produced much better than  TLiGG.  The grungy sounds of slow songs and the gut-punching screams of the heavy songs met the drums, effects petals, and truly depressing lyrics--dealing with addiction, child abuse, and the music business. Four of the songs--three of the non-screaming tracks--made their way to Christian Rock radio. East West was a band that showed that they could write a hit and have a heavy album.  I COULD NEVER REALLY FIND THE ANSWERS.  Three years ...

I n Western North Carolina, we had two modern rock radio stations. From upstate South Carolina there was  93.3 “ The Planet,”  an Active Rock radio station that played lots of ‘90s rock and neo-90s rock. They loved grunge and post-grunge. They played  Nickelback ,  Seether ,  P.O.D. ,  Flyleaf ,  Puddle of Mudd , and that kind of music. Then there was Charlotte’s  106.5 “The End ,” an Alternative rock station. While playing much of the same music, they also featured some newer groups, such as  Silversun Pickups ,  Thirty Seconds to Mars , and the occasional  The Almost  or  Saosin  song. The Starting Line was one of those emerging bands that was starting to be picked up on radio. The first single, “ Island ,” from the band’s third and final (latest) LP,  Direction ,  was a kind of break out for the band to mainstream alternative rock. The band had toured on their two previous albums and built up a fan base t...

  My Christian school took an annual mission trip in the spring to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The school had partnered with a church in the inner city that had a Habitat-for-Humanity sort of outreach. It was one of those "I feel more ministered to" type mission trips. We ended up doing a lot of grunt work for ongoing projects, but we were made to believe that we were of some use. Of course, this was before I learned that most of the churches built on mission trips overseas have to be torn down the minute the  missionaries  step on the plane because of course unskilled builders don't know how to build--but I digress. DO YOU HAVE THE TIME TO WASTE AWAY THE DAY?  One of the rules of the mission trip was that we were only allowed to listen to Christian music. It could be any genre, but it became a time for some of us to show off our CDs of the hard rock, metal, punk, and Emo-Christian records that made their way to the Family Christian bookstores. Sometimes we'd listen to G...

  OneRepublic had finished recording their second album, Waking Up , but had two more days with the studio. But the band’s bassist/cellist Brent Kutzle told lead singer Ryan Tedder that he wanted to stay in the studio to flesh out an idea he had. That night, Kutzle wrote the band’s biggest hit from the album, “ Good Life .” Waking Up’ s singles paled in the shadow of OneRepublic’s first hit “ Apologize ,” which reached number 2 on Billboard’s Hot 100 . “Good Life,” the album’s third U.S. single, reached number 8 on the Hot 100. The album’s first two singles, “ All the Right Moves ” and “ Secrets ” failed to reach the top 10.  Besides radio play, “Good Life” was played in many television shows and commercials. This upbeat song has optimistic, sincere lyrics, making it refreshing among often negative or trite optimism in pop music. SOMETIMES THERE’S BULLSHIT THAT DON’T WORK NOW. I remember a time in the early ‘00s when so many bands and artists on the radio were Christian or...