Building 429 lead singer/songwriter Jason Roy is one of
those guys who recognizes he’s completely flawed and has to
rely on the grace and majesty of our Lord Jesus Christ for
guidance.
I’ve been so fortunate to spend several occasions with
Jason, and during each and every moment, his humility and
devotion to Christ shines even brighter.
During our recent conversation, two months prior to the
band’s release of their Iris to Iris record and on
the eve of playing in Toby Mac’s Portable Sounds
tour, where Building 429 will lead the frenzied crowd in
worship, Jason took a moment to catch up with Apostles
That Rock and share some news about the upcoming album
and tour.
I can’t
tell you what a great looking album cover this is.
It’s one of those really cool things that actually comes to
life better than you thought it would, you know?
You
must have played around with it for awhile to achieve the
final product.
It’s actually a late night search on Google. I searched
The Eye of God, because the title of the record is
Iris to Iris, and NASA came back with this photograph of
a star that was dying 600 trillion miles away called The
Eye of God, just like that. We just combined the human
iris to the photograph.
You
just know that God’s working at that point.
Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
That
seems to me it could be the theme of your upcoming record -
that The Eye of God took over after you decided to step out
of the way and surrender.
Absolutely. There was a moment where all systems weren’t
go…actually there were two moments.
The first moment was the realization that the twenty songs I
wrote for this record just weren’t any good, and that was
scary. And then I spent two days praying, God, ok, you
gotta tell me what You want me to say this time. I’m one of
your ambassadors, what do I need to be speaking about here?
Obviously You, buthow? And for two days I
prayed that prayer and God really began to reveal to me the
fact that I’ve always told stories about my life and how God
has applied to me, and how God had been faithful and so I
thought, ‘Ok, now people will be able to see that and make a
decision for Christ based on that.’ But God really began to
reveal to me in those two days, ‘You know what? They can’t
see a clear picture of Me through you because you’re just as
flawed as anyone else. What they need to see is Me,
period.’
So on the second day when I was praying, God, what do You
want me to say? As clearly as I’ve ever heard the voice
of God in my life, I heard a clear and concise message; it
was one sentence: ‘Jason, just sing to Me.’
And it shocked me. That began the writing process for me.
I just began writing songs with the hope that people would
be drawn in; they would be able to sing the songs to their
God themselves, to their Creator.
When you think about it, the people who were changed
instantly and forever in the Bible were the people who met
God face to face, they’d fall on their face on the holy
ground and worship Him in awe the second that they saw God,
or you can fight him and end up with a broken hip, it’s your
choice.
That was the whole idea behind the record; let’s write songs
that encourage people to sing them for themselves. I don’t
want to be a performer anymore now; I just want to lead
people to the throne. So we titled the record Iris to
Iris because we want to be leading people to a place
where they’re so close that all distractions disappear and
they’re simply eye to eye with God.
And the
new single reflects that exact premise.
I think it’s really a return to our roots for us. It was
one of the first songs written for the record. It’s a song called, You Carried Me
and it basically talks about . . . well I’ll tell you the lyric.
The lyric says:
I’ve been so busy
I missed the reason
I missed Your love
And I nearly missed it all
Still You’ve loved me
And You’ve healed me
You’ve given all
And that brought me to Your cross
I stand only because
You’ve given me grace to walk
Only because
You carried me
That’s the heart behind the song. It’s just, ‘Lord, forgive
me for what I’ve missed; the only reason I stand where I do
is because You’ve given me grace to walk. The only reason
is You’ve carried me to this place.’ That’s the whole idea.
I would
think the experience for you of writing this record was
probably the most intensely beautiful experience you’ve had
as a songwriter.
Yeah, absolutely, by a long shot. There’s a song on the
record called Majesty, and I sat down and I wrote it
and I finished it in 15 – 20 minutes. It was one of those
moments where when it was done I looked at it and I read
everything and I said, I don’t think that I need to change
anything, I think it’s all there. And I believe the reason
that happened is because God literally wrote that song, I
just happened to be sitting in the room with a pen in my
hand ready to write down what He spoke.
I got to write with a guy named Chris Eaton who’s a British
songwriter, and you know, you take British worship and you
mix that with my southern drawl and that’s kind of scary,
but man, we had some of the most awesome worship experiences
writing songs like The Power of Your Name and a song
called Incredible. Those two songs were these
intense and intimate worship experiences with the Lord.
You
haven’t began the Portable
Sounds Tour yet but it’s quite a line-up. What kind of
feedback and dialogue have you had with Toby and his people
as to where you fit in on the tour?
You know, Toby is by far the greatest showman that has ever
stepped on stage and proclaimed Jesus Christ. And Toby
wants to put on an amazing show so he’s brought out two of
the most amazing live bands I’ve ever seen, outside of
himself with Thousand Foot Krutch and Family Force 5. These
guys are awesome believers and they’re just really excited
about having a good time and just rocking out for Christ.
I think where we fit into this equation based on dialogue
that we’ve had is that Toby desires to have a moment where
people really do lock into worshipping our Lord and really
lock into lyrics and experience a moment or have an element
of a change in the room, a place where things shift and we
really focus hard on the glory and the grace and the mercy
of God. That’s what we’re coming to do. We’re going to be
playing a lot of new stuff on this run, in fact we’ll have
an EP that we’ll be giving people from the record and
sharing new songs. We’ll pull out Glory Defined and
I think we’re going to do an acoustic set so people can
really concentrate on singing instead of watching us
perform.
I think
it’s a great mix because Family Force 5 are going to open
the night and stir people up and go crazy, and then for you
to slow everybody down and lead people in worship, what a
drastically great idea.
Well you know, Toby doesn’t do anything without a whole lot
of prayer and a whole lot of thought and that’s evident
throughout his career, so I’m really excited
about this package he’s put together and I think it’s going
to impact people’s lives.
Since
we talked last, I’ve launched an internet Christian Rock
radio station and I’m playing 9 Building 429 songs. I have
to tell you, one of the most popular songs on our playlist
is Shadow of
Angels.
Man, I’ll tell you, I have harped on that and harped on that
with people for a long, long time. I think that song, wow,
it’s just a matter of time before we get that out.
Maybe
record a live or an acoustic version, or offer it as a
hidden track on a future CD.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s awesome news, thank you! You
know, we almost re-recorded it for this record. It’s very,
very seriously talked about, and like I said, I think it’s
only a matter of time because I do feel that we missed
something there when we didn’t release it as a single.
We’ll see, little by little, you know?
Oh
yeah. Little by little…
As
close as this is to you, I don’t think we can ever talk too
much about Ephesians 4:29. So let’s take a minute and
devote a quick Bible study on Ephesians 4:29.
Our band name comes from Ephesians 4:29. The actual
beginnings of the band was about seven years ago when we
were looking for our band name and my wife, who was my
fiancé at the time, walked in and said, ‘You guys should
name yourselves something to do with 4:29.’ We didn’t quite
understand that so our first thoughts were no but then she
quoted the Scripture which says:
Let
nothing unwholesome come out of your mouth except
that
which is helpful for building others up according to
their
needs and that might benefit those would listen.
And in a moment, in a flash of - Oh wow, man, I haven’t
really been living that - kind of came over all of us
and that was the instant when we were like, ‘Ok, that’s our
accountability tool; we’ve got to use that!’
She said that her youth group had offered a 429
challenge where if anybody said anything that wasn’t
wholesome or wasn’t encouraging and uplifting, they would
say 429 to each other to remind each other what
429 meant.
And I think for me, more than anything, when you walk into a
room, the words you speak impart something, they impart
grace.
The same person speaking in different words could really
break somebody’s heart and chain them to their sins
forever.
If you walk in and you’re not graceful, then you can really
hurt somebody; you can send them away from the Lord Jesus
Christ.
For us in the band, with every word we speak, we need to
recognize that we’ve been given these voices and these words
and we need to use them wisely and make sure the people
around us are uplifted and encouraged so they can themselves
be the disciples they’ve been called to be.
