I wanted to challenge and push church music as far as I could push it creatively. And that’s a young man’s kind of striving, but I definitely had it. But there weren’t a lot of people to look up to with that. Now, if I look back at it, you know who was doing that? It’s kind of like what Amy Grant or Michael W. Smith did.
I would say, to be honest, in the last five years Christian music as a “thing” became wide open in a pure pop-culture sense because of Kanye. Think about it, you have Kanye full-out making gospel records, you have Justin Bieber full-out making gospel records, you have Selena Gomez talking about it. You have all these major artists that are just, like, putting Bible verses up every day. And so it doesn’t feel culturally weird any more at all. And gospel music has had a big resurgence as well.
I see there being thematic limitations. The Christian artists who are making music primarily to support Christians in their faith and development, they’re the ones that are more hard to find right now
In a weird way, I would say Kings Kaleidoscope is just the most Christian band ever. We just make music about being a Christian, for the Christian
“We need to fully pull apart all the layers of why we trusted this nasty thing, this organization that took over our legitimate faith.” And all that deconstruction, after it had simmered for a long couple of years, I was kind of like, “All right, is anybody going to turn the page and remember that, like, faith is delightful?” Like, Jesus is never disappointing you, ever. The church is, but Jesus himself is never going to. He’s going to let you down in your own mind of what you think He should be. But as an actual creator, companion, and God, He’s everything you could ever want.
It’s actually a better way to live than to be running around a cul-de-sac of doubt and frustration and bitterness all the time.
I would just say they’re not for me. That’s what I’ve grown to say. I don’t try to say something’s shit anymore. I just say it’s just not for me. I just don’t vibe with it. I usually say it doesn’t resonate. Like, if I see one more perfectly overhead-lit circle worship session with like twelve singers, that probably would have felt so fresh to me, but now I’ve seen it a million times
Aesthetic fatigue erodes the sense of the spiritual: once a worship format has been replicated a million times, the overhead-lit circle becomes formula rather than encounter. What these artists are after is freshness — not novelty for its own sake, but the condition under which an environment can still make someone feel something.But, it doesn’t mean all the people in it feel like they’re part of the formula. They might have a genuine experience in the formula. I just am not interested in it
We do it all ourselves. We move all of our own stuff. It’s probably one of the most all-hands-on-deck bands you’ll ever see. And nobody really realizes it, but it is.
I think we’ve always chosen the DIY path because it actually feels more right to me, and a little bit more creatively inspiring. There’s a freedom in it. There’s a spontaneity in it. The more hands you have in the pot, you just can’t do things fast. And I like to move fast. With more label and industry people around, it can get really bogged down. And I’ve always wanted to maintain that control creatively
I don’t kill myself on Instagram, I delete it for months at a time in the summer. We only have 50,000 followers. I’m not saying this to brag, but no other band that does that can sell 500 tickets at a drop of a pin in the country, and a thousand in some cities. That doesn’t happen.
A band that intentionally underuses its brand — deleting Instagram for months, maintaining only 50,000 followers — yet can sell 500 tickets anywhere on demand. The message is strong enough that the platform is unnecessary. This is the inverse of the attention economy: sufficiency over scale.And it’s not like it’s always been bad. When I think back to even stuff my parents grew up with, I’m like, what happened to artists like Michael W. Smith? That guy was wild. His band was incredible. How did we get to really boring church music? Obviously I’m leaving gospel outside of it, because there’s always a lot of wild musicianship in gospel. At the two churches I worked at, a lot of my energy was this kind of lame, outperform every other fish in the pond, outdo everybody else’s arrangements. Which it’s like, you’re in a small pond, it’s not that cool. And it’s ultimately a shallow buy-in. The people that got into Kings Kaleidoscope because we could arrange “Come Thou Fount”? They’re not really Kings fans. Like, what songs have we written that have really helped them and fueled them? I don’t mean that in a mean way, I just mean that’s not who we are as artists. That was just like me on, like, a vendetta path. Which, there’s good that comes from it. But it feels a little immature to me now to just try to be better than whatever CCM has to offer. Because it’s CCM, it’s always going to be terrible. That’s not much of a goal.
Does it need to be better? CHAD: No, it doesn’t need to be better. That’s the other thing I’ve started to see, is that I’m not making music for those people, and I never was. And I’m not going to change their opinion of what they like. Because taste is made by the gatekeepers and the people who hold the channels. We don’t hold the channels, we don’t have the keys to the gates. I’m not going to change anybody’s tastes.
I don’t know if I want that pressure either, because the closer you are to, “we sing this in church and this is a song only for people to sing to God and we make a lot of money doing it,” I get kind of scared. And I already am scared that I make a living singing about God. That’s already scary enough. But then, like, to only sell that to church corporations so they can have their people sing…if I did that, I would probably make five times the amount of money that I make right now and that would really scare me. So I already hold that very delicately.
I’m less focused on their audiences that they’ve cultivated and I’m more interested in the people left out, who would not be served by that channel or that stream. The people that are like, God, I wish somebody would encourage me towards faith, but I cannot hang in any main commercial evangelical stream in America. There’s so many people in that stream and that’s who’s inside Kings Kaleidoscope. And I think that’s who Kings Kaleidoscope fans are because of that.
The decision to serve the people left out of commercial evangelical channels — rather than compete with the gatekeepers — reframes the artist’s role. Instead of taste-influencing or unique contribution, the aim is encouragement toward faith for those who cannot connect through the mainstream stream. The audience is defined by exclusion, not preference.INTERVIEWER: Do you feel like the ocean’s a little bit bigger for this subculture of Christian art? CHAD: If you had asked me ten years ago, when I was working in a church, “Does worship music need to change?”, I would have said yes. And I would have had all these reasons why it’s terrible theology and it’s bad musically, and it’s shortchanging what we can do artistically. All this stuff. But now I feel like it’s kind of happened. If you want to, you can get on Spotify, Apple Music or whatever, and find tons of Christians making really good art that is very interesting. Like, it actually is different. And there’s a little piece of me that honestly is like, I think I got to be part of the tip of that spear, you know what I mean? Like, I made a Good Friday album that was insane when I was 22. That inspired some kid somewhere. I know it did. I did that ten years ago and I kept doing that, the albums we have, there’s so much other stuff, and I got to be a part of that.
The mature posture: gratitude for impact already made, without clinging to it as identity. Everything that follows becomes another opportunity for discipleship rather than another bid for influence. The “tip of the spear” phase passes; what remains is the question of what the work is actually for.INTERVIEWER: What is your take on people who just want to see the whole thing fall apart? CHAD: I think when it comes to the people who were hurt by church or had brutal experiences, the blueprint they had laid out using some kind of theological system or religious system…when it all failed and fell apart and they’re torn up or angry or want to see the church kind of fall apart…my gut, at the moment, is that the things that you’re actually mad about, if you pinpointed them, God is more mad about. He’s angrier than you are. He’s angrier than you can ever be, and He’s going to take care of it better than you ever can.
