Becoming Who We Are

Flushing the system and clearing the deck.

Kings Kaleidoscope is celebrating the tenth anniversary of their debut album BECOMING WHO WE ARE (released October 27th, 2014) with a once-in-a-lifetime performance on October 27, 2024. The original & current band members will perform the entire album to celebrate the triumphant 10-year frenzy that is Kings Kaleidoscope.

Chad and Matt recently had a conversation reflecting on the unique backdrop and circumstances leading up to and surrounding the album’s creation:

Matt:

Let’s time-travel a bit. Take me back into your headspace ten years ago. What was driving you at the time Becoming Who We Are came to be?

Chad:

Becoming Who We Are really starts with me being a kid and going to my first major Christian festival, Creation West Coast, which was probably up to 30,000 people, back when Christian festivals were still huge. I was 13, and I went maybe four years in a row. 

I remember they'd have all the big concerts like Switchfoot or TobyMac, and then they'd have one night where there’d be a major worship act, Chris Tomlin or Stephen Curtis Chapman or something like that. I remember being on that hill with the night crowd, 20,000 people, and there’d be all these people singing worship songs and really into the music, and I just couldn't. It just would not translate for me for some reason. I never connected with it musically, I didn't like the language of it. I thought it was really boring and bland. But, I loved that people were having this church moment. And that is the seed of Kings Kaleidoscope, in a sense. I wanted to figure out how to make worship music that didn't feel like that, because I felt left out.

Matt:

What do you mean by “left out?” And what did worship mean to you at that time?

Chad:

It just felt unnatural to participate in the music. I wanted to pursue and connect people with God in that way, but I wanted to create something that was drastically different. I wanted to let my spirit and my emotions freely engage, and let all of my senses dwell on God with all these other people, with the music. It's a magical thing. I wanted it, but I was really distracted by it feeling so unnatural for me.

Now fast-forward to: I'm 22 years old, and I have found my way to this very punk, contrarian megachurch that is giving me the perfect opportunities to do this in some ways. I'm leading worship at one of the big campuses every week and things are fine, but I still have a very ambitious bent towards sharing this stuff with the world. I still really wanted to record and make music and release it. And at the church that wasn't happening so much.

I remember they passed on us to do the first big major album and gave it to Citizens instead, and I was pissed. I was 23 or 24 at that point, and I thought Kings Kaleidoscope was doing the most exciting thing in the world with worship music; how could they pass on us? And then they passed on us again. And at the same time, things were getting so toxic at the church, and my wife and I were trying to stick it out and help people as the ship went down, but we ended up having to bail, and we bailed right as Kings Kaleidoscope was probably 70 percent done with Becoming Who We Are. They had finally let me start recording it, then we had paused, and kept recording it, and paused again and I left. I tried to buy back the files from the church. Like, “Hey, I have an album that's mostly done. It's not even masters yet. Can I buy it?” And they said no.

I was really frustrated at the time, and I think some of that fueled my drive to be like, all right, eff this, I'm going to go figure out how to record an album for the first time. I’m going to re-record it by myself on my laptop. And the next four or five months was just me doing that to get the album done.

Matt:

So, the seed was planted, but you weren’t able to do what you wanted to do, and that became a problem to solve. You came up with the solution that was supposed to go out into the world, and then even that was being suppressed.

Chad:

It’s weird. It's like, not even the church that I worked for initially was gonna “sign” Kings Kaleidoscope. In a way, they weren't stoked on propping us up and giving us a platform initially. And then by the time they were, the whole thing was failing and falling apart. So, we had to go out and do it ourselves. We did put it out with Tooth & Nail, but it wasn't like a long A&R situation. BadChristian helped with the vinyl, but the album was mostly done at that point and I was writing the rest of the songs by myself. 

Matt:

So it was a mix of songs that were used for worship at church and songs about yourself, and in a way you were transitioning into being a Christian Tooth & Nail artist.

Chad:

Yeah, there were two songs we played at church on the album, “How Deep” and “All Creatures.” Every once in a while we'd play “Grace Alone,” but not often. That was Dustin's song and it was more of a special. So maybe you could say three, but the rest of them were songs I wrote with Brian and Zach who were at Mars Hill at the time, like “Defender,” “Felix Culpa,” “Fix My Eyes,” and “139.” Those were co-writes that were intended to be part of the church's catalog, basically. The whole album feels more like a mixtape to me, because there's a couple of songs we'd play on Sundays, there's a couple of songs we wrote with the Mars Hill writing team, and then there's me writing songs by myself for the very first time, like “Zion” and “Dreams” and “Glorious.” I'd actually never written a song by myself while I was at Mars Hill.

Everything felt like a stretch. My wife and I were both leaving our jobs, our community, our church, and at the same time trying to write an album. And then that same summer, we lost our first son to a stillbirth. We lost another very close family member right after leaving the church. So it was just a lot of things at once; pressure on multiple fronts in multiple ways. And for some reason, I just funneled all of that energy into, “I'm going to get this album done and nothing's going to stop me.”

What do you remember about that time?

Matt:

I mean, I remember all of those things. I remember the recording process, I remember the feeling of those sessions. I remember you trying to get the files back. It was a lot of fighting, you know?

Chad:

Yeah, in a sense, leaving the church was kind of like a fight.

Matt:

It’s such a unique transition though, to go from being a church band to a Christian band on Tooth & Nail. It might sound kind of similar, but it’s really a pretty big jump, as far as who it’s for and how it’s consumed. And you were trying to figure it all out for yourself without really knowing the path or how it was going to work. But it is a fundamental transition of culture.

Chad:

The unique thing is that I grew up just wanting to inject a completely alternative voice into American Christian music. That was a given. But I never dreamt of being an artist. I just thought I was going to do it with a church on Sundays, and record albums and they'd go out into the world, but never touring.  That was a weird thing, actually, when we signed with Tooth & Nail. We said we weren’t going to be a touring band because we had literally never thought of ourselves that way. We thought I would end up being a worship director somewhere else and keep making albums, but the playing of the songs would be on Sundays. And they were like, okay, are you sure? And we said, yeah, we're not going to tour, we're just going to make albums. We're going to be a studio band. But what ended up happening over time is we became more and more what a regular band would look like. When you pull the band out of a Sunday morning church context, it almost becomes unnatural to write songs for a congregation to sing together because that's not what we're doing anymore. We're at my house every Tuesday night. And subconsciously I am writing narrative faith songs, and they're becoming more like modern Psalms, just a guy on a faith journey, writing these prayers and poems, and they end up becoming the songs because that's what's happening in life.

I'm not at church every Sunday anymore trying to rearrange a hymn or some worship chorus to be more creative. I don't even really remember having many plans after that. We were just going to do this one album and we were not even going to tour, and we didn’t for like two years. So it doesn't feel like this album came from a childhood dream to be a band, where we got signed and we put out an album out and then we went out and played the world. We just went right back into writing the next one and stayed in Seattle.

Matt:

So, that explains the disconnect then, in that you didn’t really experience this as a normal album cycle, even though it was a normal album that did, in fact, have a cycle. It was an unresolved project that had to be resolved by being made.

Chad:

It felt like we were flushing the system and clearing the deck. We want to have this voice in this space, and we have a few little things left over from church, and we have some songs I wrote at the church studio. So I guess I'm going to write a few more songs in my loft apartment in Ballard, and we just have to get it out. Like, the church falls apart, my family's going through a ton of stuff, let's just flush the system.

And as soon as it came out, there was this dropout into a kind of burnout, because I had been at this really toxic church, my marriage was going through a lot, I was very newly married…everything about the environment was not healthy. And I had this ambition to funnel all of this emotion into the album. But it didn’t really feel like I had a new career. That whole time, what I was actually doing to make money was DJing corporate events. Kings Kaleidoscope was trying to sell merch and vinyl and stuff, but we weren't making a lot of money on that. I didn't know if it would ever really become my life still, I was just grinding out other side hustles. For two years, all of 2015 and 2016, I think we only played six shows, random things like a conference that took a risk on us as a new band, or some church somewhere who had us play a little concert or lead worship. Six shows for two years as a new band. That’s really crazy.

Matt:

It’s so backwards, because normally, as a band, you release your first thing, and it gets big, and you start touring, but you’re touring for no money, and just grinding it out and building a fan base.

But you skipped that, and released this music but don’t experience any kind of growth period. You just went straight into being a known headliner or something like that, skipping what for many bands is a very formative time.

Chad:

Yeah, and this led us to say, well, we better just start working on the next album, because what else are we doing?

In a lot of ways, Beyond Control really feels like my first album, because with Becoming Who We Are, I had to answer this big question: Can I even make an album? And then I did. But the question with Beyond Control was, can I actually write songs? And that is really when I had a story, of that time after Mars Hill, after fighting to get this album out and flushing the system, when I really crashed and had a lot of anxiety in my life. So I wrote an album about that. And it actually felt like I was writing songs that are real. They're about a specific time. There’s a concept here, and my band's putting this out, and we are going on tour.

That also was the first shift, because when we started going on tour, some people in the band were like, we loved being a part of this thing, and we'll record here in Seattle, but we can't really go on tour. We're just church volunteers who are all friends, but we're not going to have a life of being full-time musicians. So that was when we solidified our first lineup of people who were committed to the band, and not this broader collective of friends from church. 

You generally think of an album as telling the story of a time period of two to three years, but our first album—and maybe it’s this way for a lot of bands—is actually the story of the previous ten years. It's that whole period of me cutting my teeth at church, trying to lead worship with turntables and just do anything alternative I can. Building up that whole contrarian motivation and disdain for franchisable, bland worship music and, and trying to be the antithesis of it. What you're hearing in Becoming Who We Are is the entirety of me from my teens into my early twenties doing everything I can to be that. And I do think that's what that album accomplished. If you put that album up against a Hillsong album, it's like a different genre, but with the same hope, you know what I mean?

Matt:

Hope, yeah. And going back to the conflict and the fighting, I see that too. I mean, it’s not that the music sounds angry, but there is an anger present, some sort of hopeful, positive expression of anger.

Chad:

Yeah, and I’ll give you an example of that: when we started our band, we said we'll never make a four-on-the-floor song, because that's the easiest way to make a worship song. So there were rules, and that was just one of them. So then it was like, all right, if we do a four-on-the-floor song, it has to be 220 beats per minute, and that became “Defender.” It's four-on-the-floor, but it's in 6/8, so the tempo flies and nobody can clap along to it. And that song isn't angry, it’s taken from Psalm 18, but there's an aggression under the music of me basically holding a middle finger to the format and going, “Oh, you want four on the floor? How about we do it super fast with crazy drums, and it's in 6/8.” 

Matt:

So it comes from an antagonistic spirit.

Chad:

I don't want to over-psychoanalyze myself, there's a billion layers there, but I just knew there must be another way to do this that feels more exciting, so I looked for a way to make it. But really, this is the first introduction to the world of the concepts and ideas that I've been thinking about for basically a decade since I was 13.

Matt:

So do you feel nostalgic about this album at all?

Chad:

For some reason this album feels the least nostalgic to me out of all our records. I'm very proud of the music on this album, but for a lot of the songs, the lyrics don't feel as much like they were mine. “139” is not my song. It's very good, and it's special, but it’s primarily me and Brian transcribing a David Psalm. And that's beautiful, but there's a difference there, even if the attitude behind it is all mine.

“Defender” is me having almost an entire musical demo, a lot of melodies, walking around the U District church with Zach Bolen in the sanctuary by ourselves, trying to figure out what the song what the lyrics could be about, and then going, “Oh, it could be about Psalm 18.” And Zach wrote probably 70 percent of those words. I know there's other pop artists who have people write for them all the time and they still feel a connection to the songs, but the whole thing just feels slightly less nostalgic to me than writing the next album where I wrote way more of it with Zach’s help.

Matt:

What about the influence of this album? What do you think its impact was on other artists and the music scene as a whole?

Chad:

There's so many types of faith-based music out there now, and I think there were a lot less lanes for that when this album was made a decade ago. I don't want to sound braggy, but I do actually believe that starting with this album, Kings Kaleidoscope had something to do with influencing the next generation of people to make a lot of different kinds of music. I think that's a fact.

There were a lot of big and well-crafted “Christian” artists in the ‘90s, like Michael W. Smith, but then in the 2000s, Christian radio became mostly worship music, Bethel and Hillsong and whatnot. And that was fine for Sunday morning, but it really lacked musicality and interesting storytelling and stuff like that.

I think Kings Kaleidoscope was really trying to say you can do both at the same time, and you can be as creative as you want to. You can tell modern Psalm narrative stories and you can go into a chorus on the next song on the same project and it can feel cohesive. And you can be really experimental, all at the same time.

I think this album has been a little bit of a “tip of the spear” example that has let a lot of people go off and not be afraid to use their own voices, which is great. That's probably the thing I'm the most proud of that's happened over the last ten years, just the ripple effect of us being ourselves.

There were a lot of conversations those first two years about the music that were like, this is so good and so far beyond the generic worship stuff, that it could play in the regular market. So why don't you just make a new band or become a solo act and just go write regular songs, and go tour with Foster the People or whatever the big bands were at the time. But I had this ferocious stubbornness to say, no, the most creative, aggressively fearless, best music I can muster goes to the church. That was a very strong point for me at the time, and it probably still is. The church deserves better than either a franchisable McDonald's worship model or the evergreen youth group market.

There's always going to be millions of Christian American kids who need something that's clean and fun, and those artists will change every decade, and that's totally fine. But there has to be a Radiohead, or something like that. There has to be somebody who wants to just experiment and play and push it and offer something alternative. I feel proud that we never varied from that.

However, I will say this: I don’t think church music is as bad now as it was ten years ago. And maybe I think that because I'm more mature now, and I'm not in that Mars Hill system where we thought we were better than everybody else, because that was definitely a thing. I went to see Elevation the other week and I just thought, hey, this is great. Maybe it isn't really for me, and Furtick's kind of a weirdo when he gets on the stage, but the music was great. The lyrics were great, the production wasn’t distracting or over the top. It just felt like I was 80 percent less critical than I would have been ten years ago at a big event like that. So there's some part where I have matured, and I just see how things have their own lane in their own space and place, and I don't criticize it.

But I also do think stuff's actually gotten better. And when I say better, I mean it is more diverse. The music feels less simple, and maybe my memory is deceiving me, but watching Elevation or Maverick City Music or whatever nowadays, it's like they just do more interesting things than Chris Tomlin was doing. And I know there's people in the past who you could say did really interesting things, like David Crowder or whatever, but it was still a lot of four on the floor and very simple chord progressions. I think maybe part of it is just that CCM has tried to ingest and co-opt some of gospel music, which is one of the greatest genres America has created. That just keeps lasting, the gospel music culture. So that influx is probably what feels a lot more fresh than it did ten years ago when it was super white and pretty stale.

So, that's different now, and I do feel less like there's something to solve. I feel less like Kings Kaleidoscope has to go be the “anti” to this monstrosity of CCM and worship music, because I think it just is what it is, and it's not really for me, and that's okay. And I also see that there's still millions of tweens and Christian teenagers every year that live in all these different states that are very different from the Seattle bubble I live in, and they love Forrest Frank, they need simple, positive youth group music, and I guess that's okay. I don't think it's actually any different than TobyMac or Carman or whatever in its utility. And I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just the next generation's version of it, serving the same market.

Matt:

So where is your angst and contrarian attitude directed now? Do you still have it?

Chad:

I am still very much a contrarian, but for the last few years it's been more directed at myself, which is very difficult. Maybe that's also part of maturity: you stop making the world or somebody else a bad guy. You start being able to see your own faults and your own habits and gaps in your own thinking. So maybe that's where it's going now.

Becoming Who We Are positioned us for people to go, “Wow, that's really interesting and fresh, and they're on Tooth & Nail, maybe they'll end up making a big worship smash.” Tooth & Nail submitted us and the “Dreams” music video got nominated for a Dove award. And then our friend Andy Mineo beat us, which is funny, but his video was probably better.

But then the second album, when we did “A Prayer,” that feels like it's the first album because we really got to say nope, this is who we are, we're not going to play the game. And we've never submitted to the Dove Awards again. We got pulled from every Christian bookstore and dropped from every Christian festival. And that's really been unhelpful in some ways, because it put us on an island. But on the flip side, I think that integrity of belief and creativity has made our fan base one of the most loyal fan bases out there.

I watch my friends go to the Dove Awards now, and the antagonist in me cringes when every year there's some stupid speech that's like “You know, the world's going to see how good our music is.” Let me tell you something: Most of the world wants nothing to do with your belief system. You can make the best music possible and maybe they will respect your music. But they're not going to resonate with it’s message. If all you're singing about is something they have no belief in, it’s just too out there. Just just do your own thing. The whole Bible is saying the way is narrow, and there's some people who are going to love Jesus, but most people are going to be like, “Nah, not for me.” And you're sitting here commercializing music about God saying like, “Well, someday everybody's going to get it.” Where is that in the Bible? How do you think that's going to happen? They literally don't want this. They don't want what you're trying to sell.

Sorry, that's a tangent, but it’s an example of a thing I still get hot on. There's plenty more…

Matt:

Any other thoughts about the ten-year show itself?

Chad:

The thing that feels most powerful to me is just being able to play the songs with the old members of the band. We really had no idea what we were doing, and I think about all the places where we were, the shitty apartments some of us were living in, where we were when we made this album…and it's still good. When I play it now as an adult, I think, holy shit, how did I come up with that when I was 21? There's even parts of that album that are demos from when I was in high school. So I am really excited to connect with the original members of the band on stage and think about all of our history together. I'm excited to play and sing with my sister again. I'm excited to have John and Drew drumming again; they're total beasts together. The three of us have known each other since high school, so it’s really exciting that we're still buddies and still playing music together and we made this thing together all these years ago.

We just had our first rehearsals last week, and I was so worried nobody would remember stuff and I'd have to be reminding everybody of everything, in full music director mode, but it was like total muscle memory. Everybody was just fine and it all snapped back really quick. So we're ready to go.

I don't know what the audience is going to feel like at all. I'm just ready to receive what the album meant to them and that energy, because we didn't tour it. We've only played like five or six of these songs before on the road, and there's 17 songs on that thing. There's only one time we ever played all of them, and it was the night of its release, October 27th, 2014. We played a sold-out show in Seattle at The Crocodile.

And now, literally the only other time we're going to play it, is ten years later, October 27th, 2024, in Seattle.

Buy your tickets for the 10-Year Anniversary of BECOMING WHO WE ARE today.