For the second time in three months, tobyMac sat down with
Apostles That Rock to dive deep into the songs on his
new record, Portable Sounds. There’s no one in
Christian music who unleashes more power and energy on
stage, but during our conversation his calm demeanor
continually points to the Cross and God’s Love. He openly
talks of his struggles and challenges as well as a couple
cool things about the tour bus.
Has it
been a challenge to take all of the energy and all of the
joy from this album and transfer it to the stage?
It’s been cool. After you and I are finished, I’m going
into rehearsals for the next three days to try figure out if
this album takes the show over or do we ease it in a little
at a time? These are all these thoughts from a spiritual
standpoint and even from a fanatic standpoint - how do we
choose what songs to run together to bring home a point? I
think about it a lot and pray about it even more. I need to
rely on God for that, I ask Him, Okay, God, what’s up? What
do you want me to do here?
Let’s
talk about the fanatical standpoint for a minute because I
saw the Diverse City tour 6 times and I never grew tired of any of it. The energy and the
entire stage presence was this incredible enthusiasm for our
Great God. When you’re creating the set list for the
Portable Sounds tour, do you almost feel like you’re
competing with your last tour, that you’re in a sense,
competing with yourself?
You always have to change it up enough to keep it
interesting for people that would see us 6 times and then at
the same time, you want to keep some of the same elements
because there are some cornerstones in the show that people
always expect. We were just talking about that on the bus
the other night and we were thinking about which songs to do
and which ones to keep in the new set.
You get
a lot done on that tour bus. Didn’t you write a lot of the
chorus to No
Ordinary Love on the bus?
Yeah we did, and we recorded most of it on the bus.
No
kidding.
Oh yeah. It’s a party on the bus. We recorded the chorus
to that song which I originally wanted to be on Diverse
City but it didn’t work, so it’s a chorus that we’ve
been sitting on for quite some time. I just couldn’t get
the verses right and I wanted it to be something special. I
wanted someone to guest on it and I didn’t have my guest
prepared for Diverse City and Nirva, who sings with
me on stage is amazing. You’ve seen us enough to where you
know she’s such a Godly worshipper, I mean she just loves
God. Amidst the chaos on our stage, she just worships God -
as clear as can be - everybody says that each night, so I
had her guest on it and she just killed it.
This song really is about that love that God offers to us,
and it’s not ordinary in any way, shape or form. I wanted
to go into, and I didn’t quite get there, but I really
wanted to go into acts of extraordinary love on earth like a
single mom raising three kids. That’s not ordinary love,
that’s well beyond ordinary love, but we didn’t get there.
There’s
another song on the record - All In
(Letting Go) - where you offer yourself to God to take
you, mold you, and you just want to surrender to Him. As
much as I love your energy and high decibels this song seems
like a very personal dialogue and commitment between you and
God.
It really is. That song is the thorn in my flesh; the
concept as Oswald Chambers puts it, to ‘give up the right to
yourself.’ That’s what he tells me almost every morning
when I read from his devotional, My Utmost for His
Highest, to give up the right to yourself.
It’s difficult when the number one problem in your life is
sort of being a bit of a control freak or a perfectionist,
so it’s that exact thought that drove me to write that song,
I was like, this is it, I’m finally going to take this
plunge, I’m finally going to let go, I’m going to be all in.
I’m not going to put one foot in the water. That song just
came out of my ever evolving fight of giving up the right to
myself because I want control of me, but God wants control
of me. When you’re inundated with the world telling you to
look out and take care of yourself, and then you open God’s
Word and it says love other people and deny yourself, the
truth hits you.
And man, that song is blatantly, probably more than any song
on the record, my own struggle, you’re right about that. I
love to lay my struggles out there because I know there are
other people out there dealing with the same thing. You can
hold yourself back; you don’t have to be a perfectionist, a
lot of people want control of their lives and every time the
world throws something super attractive at us we sort of
grab control back of ourselves and we want to go do that, so
to make that sort of declaration for me was healthy.
When you were very young, you noticed something your dad
wrote on the back of his business card and that meant
something to you.
He wrote: What does it profit a man to gain the world and
lose his soul?
And you
turned that into a song – Lose My
Soul.
I askedKirk Franklin and Mandisa from America
Idol to sing the vocals and they just belted it out.
They were great.
Your
part in the song sounds like another beautiful prayer:
Father
God, I am clay in your hands
I want
to stay that way through all my life’s demands
‘Cause
they chip and they nag and they pull at me
And
every little thing I make up my mind to be,
Like
I’m gonna be a daddy who’s in the mix,
And I’m
gonna be a husband who stays legit,
And I’m
gonna be an artist who rises above
the
road that is wide and filled with self-love
Isaiah
49:13 has a lot of meaning to you.
It’s given me strength for a long time: Behold, I am
doing a new thing in the land, it’s springing forth, can’t
you perceive it, can’t you see it?
I think that’s really important to me in my life as an
artist not to rely on anything because there’s a new thing
out there, and God uses this music.
What’s amazing to me is when He gives me those glimpses and
lets me recognizes that He chooses to breathe songs through
me that can actually affect someone’s life. There’s nothing
I can do, only God can do that. So when I get burned out or
get caught up in the craziness, I’ll hear from someone who
tells me that one of our songs touched their life and
suddenly it showers down on me that God is using these
songs, and for that reason I need to get on my knees before
God asking Him to give me the words that will remind people
of His Love.
Obviously music can’t change the world, but God can, and
music is one of his voices.
