by David Dodd

I just love when a band screams out Yahweh in a song which is exactly what you did in Signature of Divine. 

We love that too.  Originally, it was a worship song that my brother Bo wrote several years ago, and it was one of those things that we had the CD of a live recording of the song in the van, and honestly, it wasn’t very good.

We listened to it and we just loved that song, so we decided to take it in as a band, rewrite some of the lyrics, and rethink the song musically.  I was listening to an interview with Donald Miller, who wrote the book, Blue Like Jazz, and he was talking about how some of the great art in the world had been inspired by God.  I started thinking about that, you know, what does it mean for us in terms of worship?  To me, the best beauty in the world is Christ in us and that vision of God working through us, that’s just such a crazy thing to see.

The first verse is: 

Cathedrals have tried in vain to show the image of your face.

But we are by Your design the signature of divine. 

Once we looked at the song from that perspective, it wrote itself in less than a day. 

There aren’t many people that we talk with who grew up in Possum Kingdom, South Carolina.

There aren’t many people in Possum Kingdom!

How small is the town?

I want to think that there are probably about 20 people, but there might be a couple hundred.  It’s a really small town. There’s a country store, that’s about it.  A lot of people when they talk about small towns say it has one stop light or whatever, but we didn’t even have one stop light; we had one stop sign . . . and the country store that kind of ran everything.  It was like the bank/grocery store/insurance company.  You could go one stop shopping.   

It was a great way to grow up, my dad ran a church camp and my brother and I both grew up there.  It was a great way to grow up and we loved it.  We were kind of able to run a little bit wild and that was a lot of fun. 

When your dad ran a church camp, is that when you became exposed to music other than gospel music?  Did you hear some music that gave God all the glory and for you and your brother, something really sank in to say, this is the direction we want to go? 

Both my parents were really into music.  My dad was a trumpet player in college and toured around with some older kind of bands like Roy Clark, Glen Campbell, and The Gaithers.  My mom was a piano teacher so there were always people coming to the house playing piano when I was growing up.

I think when I really started to enjoy music is when kids came into camp all during the summer.  There were hundreds of kids every week from all parts of the state and different parts of the country.  We were exposed to different types of music. 

I remember when the first dctalk record came out, and then we heard a lot of other music because we came across a lot of diverse music styles, you know, my mom being a piano teacher and my dad’s playing trumpet, so there was a lot of Chicago and 70’s rock kind of stuff so we got into a lot of the rock and even rap a little bit, I’m not ashamed to say, just all kinds of different styles of music. 

That’s where we really picked up the love for it and just started developing how the music was going to affect us during live shows and records and lyrics, just like everybody does.  We were just fans of music and that was all translated over time to our live shows. 

Washed by the Water has a great diverse musical style.  That’s a beautiful song.

Thanks.  That was definitely a real turning point for us in the record.  It was a song we wrote early on but it was definitely something that all of us knew had to be written in a way, it’s hard to explain how that is, but we just knew there had to be some differences in the second record from the first.  We were really after a song like Washed by the Water and the gospel element to it.  We’ve always loved that style of music growing up but at the same time we didn’t want to sound like someone else, we just wanted it to sound like our own take on that style of music. 

That song lyrically was a breakthrough as well because it’s a song that was more personal.  The song’s about my dad and the situation that all of us have gone through.  It’s a real experience about my dad.  This record is definitely in the direction of being more honest lyrically.

Bear, since you and your brother grew up with your dad as a pastor, talk to me about when the Bible became something more than a book where people would tell you stories from it as a kid, to something you really cherished, something you really absorbed in your heart. 

I think for me, the real test was going off to college.  That was the first time I was away from my parents for a long period of time, so that was the first time when I had a chance to really test what they were saying.  That was a really big moment when I realized maybe they were right.

I think I took it for granted that they were right when I lived at the house, I mean I don’t have that kind of testimony where I had gone off or had a terrible childhood and all that, but I had taken a lot of those truths for granted, and even though I had lived by those truths and I believed them, when it really became personal to me is when I had to start believing them on my own without my parents around. 

I went to school on a football scholarship and I didn’t go home for the first 8 to 10 months when I was at college.  I wanted to separate myself and find out what it was all about.  I think that was probably the moment when God spoke to me that I was going to be in the ministry and a lot of those things became real to me in that moment. 

How difficult was the decision you had to make by choosing music over football? 

It wasn’t too difficult for me to make, I mean a lot of people around me thought it was a much more difficult decision.

When I was graduating it was clear that I had to decide whether or not to go into the NFL, there were opportunities, there were agents around and those kind of things, but for me, I knew I wanted to have a ministry but I wasn’t sure right then exactly what that was.

The band has been given so many opportunities and I felt like God’s been grooming the band for something big, we weren’t sure what.  That was still five, six years ago, so it was a lot of time until we eventually got a record deal and were on the radio, but I just knew in my heart that was the place for me and what we were supposed to be doing.  The money wasn’t an issue for me so it really wasn’t that difficult of a decision. 

I think God gave me a love for music and I had that love for football up until a certain point, it was weird, it’s almost like a switch went off and it was turned over. 

To me it’s so obvious God softened your heart.  I mean you were named after one of the most successful coaches in college football history and weren’t you given a trophy for the South Carolina football player of the year in 2002?

Yeah.

You were named the best football player in South Carolina that year.  A wide receiver, right?

Yeah I was. 

So when you look at that, there are many people, including pastors, who could say God gave you that talent, that athletic ability, and when you go out there you could be this light for Christ and tell people about Christ, but your heart spoke the opposite. 

Yeah.  Two months after I started playing guitar I began writing songs.  I thought that was weird, the people around me thought that was weird, but I think God gave us songs, and my brother was the same way.  When I left for college, my brother started leading worship and he’s also in our band and writes songs with me now.   I think that was something we knew was something special from God.  I just knew what God wanted me to do and it’s hard to explain that when people ask, but I just knew.

I think with me there’s this overwhelming sense of peace when you know you’re doing what God wants you to do.

That’s very true.  That’s exactly the case.