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Booking Casting Crowns - Christian Music Artists - CCM, Adult Contemporary, Alternative CCM - © Richard De La Font Agency, Inc. - For serious booking inquiries only, click here: For More Information
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Talk
with enough people over the course of a lifetime, and hopefully you'll
run into one - a person with such clarity of thought, such focus of
purpose, and such timely insight that you'll want to turn to them at
every available opportunity. They provide you with exactly what you need
to hear at exactly the time you need to hear it.
Now take that focus and house it in a person of equal parts humility and
honesty, whose self-deprecation and humor only serve to heighten the
message. Then wrap the insight up in the musical work of a dedicated
group of friends, and shepherd it through the experiences of veteran
artists Mark Miller of Sawyer Brown, and
Steven Curtis Chapman, and you
have a band with the uncharted potential to impact the world in a myriad
of ways.
You have Casting Crowns.
At the core of Casting Crowns is Mark Hall, a man who never would
have thought leading a band into the wilds of the business of music
would enter into his calling. His place, he thought, was to serve young
people.
"I've been a youth pastor for about 12 years, and every church I've been
in, music's always been a part of it," Hall says. "We'd usually start up
a band made up of students so we could lead worship in our Wednesday
night programs, and as the student ministry started to grow, the band
would go off and play and do things in the area."
"I had the thought that maybe I could write for other bands," he says,
"because traveling around playing was not something I thought I wanted
to do."
The unit now known as Casting Crowns grew out of two of Hall's
stops along his youth ministry path, first coming into being while
leading a youth group in Daytona Beach, Florida, then transplanting and
growing when Hall and his family accepted a position in Atlanta.
The band recorded two well-received independent records, distributed
mainly in the Atlanta area. "There was the temptation to send our CDs to
record companies," Hall says, "but we prayed about it and came to the
realization we needed to keep doing our music our way."
When you talk with Hall, you come to realize that beyond his
self-effacing way, he's an exceptionally bright guy. His speech pattern
is littered with exclamatory asides that only serve to punctuate the
story he tells you, and most often those asides serve best to praise
those who have touched his life.
"Meanwhile, this college student in Daytona named Chase Tremont - my new
best friend in the world! - has one of our CDs," Hall says. "He plays
basketball at Flagler College in Florida, goes off to a camp there, and
finds out his coach used to play basketball with a guy named Mark
Miller."
It's at this point where one of Casting Crowns' soon-to-be
shepherds comes into the picture.
"Chase and Mark get to know each other, and in the midst of a
conversation one day, Chase figures out that Mark is the lead singer for
Sawyer Brown," Hall says. "After that,
Chase said, 'Oh, you've got to hear this band.' Mark must get a million
of these things a year, but he likes it and gives us a call."
Miller, the hyper-animated frontman for the veteran country group,
doesn't know what he can do for the fledgling band, but wants to be
supportive in any way he can. "I could tell by Mark's writing that he
wasn't doing anything other than speaking from his heart exactly what he
was seeing and what was around him," Miller says. "It didn't surprise me
at all when I found out later that he was a youth minister, because
basically these were messages to his students."
"The first thing you hear, before you sit there and digest the lyrics,
is Mark's voice. I knew a couple of things when I first heard it. I knew
they couldn't afford to go in and mess with his voice, so what I was
hearing was what he could deliver, so I was pretty blown away by that,"
Miller continues. "Then the songs were really different to me, they came
from a different viewpoint than what you would normally hear within
Christian music. The lyrics would immediately make you think, 'This
guy's a hard hitter.' He's makes no bones about it; he's not hiding from
anything. For me, in Christian music, that's a rarity."
Miller hung onto the two Casting Crowns independent records,
waiting for the right opportunity to tell other music industry
colleagues about the band. That right moment came on a spring vacation
with the families of two longtime friends, new Provident Label Group
president Terry Hemmings and an artist with an equally impressive track
record to Miller's, Steven Curtis
Chapman.
"I've known Terry for quite some time, and he's heard some things I've
produced for Christian artists, and we'd been talking about doing
something together for three or four years," Miller says. "After my
first conversations with Mark, I could tell immediately that this was
the kind of person I wanted to be involved with, that Steven would want
to be involved with, somebody with true Christian integrity, not just a
coating you spray on and then wash off at the end of the day."
"I collected all the information, talked to Terry and Steven about it,
and Terry got real excited about it and said, 'Let's just do something
with them,'" Miller says. That something has manifested itself as Beach
Street Records, the new PLG imprint captained by Miller.
Meanwhile, Miller knew it was time to go out and recruit what would
become the imprint's flagship artist. "I called Mark back," Miller says,
"and his response was exactly what you'd want to hear. Rather than
saying 'When do we leave?' or 'How much money am I going to get?" it was
'Am I still going to be able to be a youth minister?"
"My response was something like, 'Sure, Mark, but your congregation may
be a whole lot larger than you would have ever imagined.'"
The pieces fell together quickly for Miller's new venture and the band
it is introducing to the world. Casting Crowns entered the studio
with Miller and Chapman serving as co-producers, and the self-titled
result is a rich-sounding edgy-pop record that refuses to shy away from
the sometimes hard-to-hear truths presented in Hall's lyrics.
"I really feel a burden for the church," Hall says. "Right after
somebody gets saved, right as they're starting to grow, they essentially
have the wool pulled over their eyes that tells them that religion is
what they have stepped into. 'Here are the laws that relate to this,
here are the rules for this other thing, here's your discipleship
notebook, here's your T-shirt and this is what you have to do.' And the
feeling is that when you come to church; if you did fail at whatever,
don't let anybody know it."
"So they show up acting like everything is fine and are surrounded by
people who aren't fine, and that's what religion is. The world simply
wants nothing to do with that. They want to see people that are real. It
doesn't bother the world that we mess up, what bothers them is that we
act like we don't," Hall says.
And even though Hall and his Casting Crowns bandmates are
currently in a whirlwind of activity the likes of which they probably
couldn't have dreamed, they're not about to take their eyes off the
fundamental message they wish to share.
"I want to shake people up and help them see that Jesus is not a
religion, and God is not a book," Hall says. "You can't pray to a book
and you can't draw strength from an idea or standard.
"If there's no relationship with Jesus as a person to you, you're in
trouble." It's about life, not religion. It's about relationships, not
books - timely ideas not many of us think about, much less in that way.
Casting Crowns is what we need to hear at exactly the time we
need to hear it.
Casting Crown members are --
Notable songs include --
Casting Crowns may be available for your next special event. For booking information, click HERE!
To book Casting Crowns
for your special event, contact Richard
De La Font Agency, Inc.
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