For King & Country.Photo: Courtesy Jeremy Cowart
Joel Smallbonewas lying in bed thinking. It was four days before Christmas in 2020, and he and brotherLuke Smallbone, who comprise Grammy-winning duo FOR KING + COUNTRY, had just finished their Christmas tour in Florida. Vaccines were on the horizon, but the pandemic was still raging. The world was shrouded in fear and frustration when he had an epiphany.
For King & Country.Courtesy Jeremy Cowart
One year later,What Are We Waiting For?— FOR KING + COUNTRY’s fourth studio project — is No. 7 on Billboard’s all-genre album chart. The 13-song collection is the follow-up to their Grammy-winning album Burn the Ships, and the Smallbones believeWhat Are We Waiting For?offers even more. Because the men could dedicate months to solely working on the album, they believe it is among the most lyrically and sonically concise works of their career.
“What are we waiting for?' is a universal question of inclusion, but I think the answer for each of us will also be different,” Joel tells PEOPLE. “My answer is I’m waiting for the moment that I’m not waiting for something. We recognize this is a record in three parts. It’s a family record. It’s a global record. And I feel like it’s one of our more overtly spiritual albums.”
Seated in Joel’s airy living room in front of large windows overlooking the family farm, the brothers explain that in late 2019, they were busier than ever. FOR KING + COUNTRY had just sung on the CMA Awards with Dolly Parton and followed it up with aviral performance of “Little Drummer Boy"on CMA Country Christmas that aired on ABC. The band’s thundering, percussive elements and theatric presentation captivated the audience and sparked a flurry of opportunities. The Smallbones were grateful, but they were also drained and weary just ahead of the holidays. When COVID struck three months later and forced society to hit pause, for them, the break was a monumental blessing.
“In music, the hustle is just very real all the time,” Luke, 35, says. “The leadership books say ‘No’ is the most powerful word that you have, but it’s the most difficult one to actually say. For us, [the pandemic] was an amazing moment to slow down.”
In the “intermission,” as Joel calls it, the men discovered how depleted they were and that if they continued to keep that pace, it would shorten the length of their career. They used the downtime in 2020 to recharge, spend time with their families and live life in a way that fueled their creativity and gave them something to write about.
When they decided to startWhat Are We Waiting For?in 2021, they had enjoyed almost a year off and already released “Together,” a collaboration with Kirk Franklin and Tori Kelly. A pre-pandemic discussion with Franklin at the 2020Grammy Awardssparked the duet, but its release followed a livestream of the same name the band organized about two months later. Joel says they wanted to “actually serve people where they are.”
“I think there’s a survivor’s remorse that we felt in it because there was some statistic you read that if you were relatively untouched health-wise or particularly financially, then you were in a very tiny percent of the human population,” he says. “There was a little bit of this like, ‘Golly, how can we do our part in the process?’ Unknowingly, it was part of the beginning of this album process.”
Just as “Together” falls under the global subhead, “RELATE” does as well. The song, their seventh consecutive No. 1 hit, came together in one afternoon — and they didn’t expect it. The writing room was eclectic. FOR KING + COUNTRY is Australian brothers who have accumulated the bulk of their success in the contemporary Christian genre. Josh Kerr is asuccessful country music songwriter. Tayla Parx is known for writing withAriana Grande.
“You just have the landscape in the room from nationality to where we live now to gender, to probably some perspectives on life,” Joel says. “Tayla got in the room, and it was just magic. She had such a spirit about her, such a depth of immediate understanding, which doesn’t often happen.”
“We’re so prone to our judgments and preconceived notions of people that if we could just recognize that we’re spiritual beings and that we’re all on the same proverbial sinking ship and once we recognize our own mutual struggle, then maybe there’s the ability for a sense of empathy and compassion to take over and we can actually be free,” Joel says.
Luke remembers sitting in the car with Jude, then 8 years old, when the boy asked: “You’re gonna die one day?”
The exchange inspired “Cheering You On.”
“I was like, ‘I am,'” Luke says. “Hopefully, it’s many years down the road, and you’re gonna have your own family. It’ll be different then. He thought about it and he goes, ‘Well, I’m gonna learn everything I can until that day comes from you.'”
“It’s like, ‘OK, how do we live in a new reality and not just sort of revert back to just coping?” Joel says. “I don’t think any of us will ever forget it.”
source: people.com
