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...

  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 sign...

  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...

The Classic Crime released their debut album Albatross in 2006 on Tooth & Nail Records . The album charted on Billboard’ s Heatseekers Albums charts, and the band quickly became connected with both the Christian and the pop-punk scene, touring with fellow Tooth & Nail acts, joining the Warped Tour , and forming friendships with the likes of Relient K and Emery . The band filmed a music video for the first track on the album, “ The Fight ,” which appeared on TVU . In 2006, Tooth & Nail was in the middle of its golden age. Albums were selling and bands were bridging the divide between Cornerstone and Warped Tour. The Classic Crime was supposed to be the label’s next big band, but Albatross didn’t meet the label or the band’s sales expectations.  OUT ON THIS LONELY LANDSCAPE I AM FINALLY FREE. The Classic Crime’s debut album, Albatross, was produced by Michael "Elvis" Baskette . The band would work with the Baskette on most of their albums until 2017’s How to Be...