Phillips, Craig & Dean
Unstack the building blocks of your life, and take a good hard look. Free yourself from the weight of expectations. Unpack your dreams and see if they still exist. Now… take a deep breath, exhaling whatever has kept you arms length from God. Because if you can, you’ll experience life the way it was meant to be. Simple. Honest. Real.
For Randy Phillips, Shawn Craig and Dan Dean—Philips, Craig & Dean—that’s where they’ve landed after 12 years, 9 albums, and 16 #1 songs… in a season of getting back to basics. Of stripping away what just takes up space to make room for what matters most.
Shawn finds himself finishing up his Masters of Divinity degree, a life-long goal that spent time on the back burner while PCD hit the road. After years as a “music minister,” Dan has wandered into uniquely challenging water and is now a full-time pastor. And Randy (and his wife, Denise) has revisited fatherhood after a 14-year hiatus, completely enamored by his new baby girl, Lily Pearl.
Since music is a reflection of life, the latest project from Phillips, Craig & Dean, Let Your Glory Fall, encapsulates one central truth: If there’s anything good, anything true, anything amazing, anything worth living for, it’s all from God and for His glory.
All prolific songwriters and experienced leaders of worship, Phillips, Craig & Dean set out not so much to follow up Let My Words Be Few, their most successful album to date, as to find songs that Christians would embrace.
“The idea behind any album is never a market-driven thing for us,” Craig says. “We simply agreed that we would write songs we felt inspired to write, and we would pick the best songs from those. And when it all came down, everything we’d written came out vertical.”
That came as no surprise, he says, because so much of what the Church is embracing is vertical. “There’s a real shift toward songs that speak of a deep relationship with God,” Craig says. “The closer the Bride gets to the wedding, the more we long for intimacy.”
Ultimately, this collection of 10 songs, three of which were PCD-penned, gives listeners more than enough joy and motivation for praising God. “These songs are not about performance or who’s singing where or who wrote what,” Dean says, “We’re constantly looking for ways to improve worship in our own churches… and we believe these songs will evoke a response and move people, because we’ve been moved by them.”
With Let My Words Be Few producer Nathan Nockles (Watermark, Point of Grace, Downhere) back at the helm, PCD returns for their 10th album—the strongest and most vulnerable the group has ever recorded.
The joyful strains of the first single, Dean’s “My Praise,” are an energetic opener, the promise of great things to come. Craig’s contribution, “What Kind of Love,” along with Chris Tomlin’s “The Wonderful Cross,” emphasizes how the power of what Jesus did on the cross is central to worship, another essential theme of the album. Tim Hughes’ popular modern worship anthem, “Here I Am to Worship,” and the reverent, picturesque Stuart Townend hymn “How Deep the Father’s Love” give the album a sense of timelessness. The gospel infused “Everyday” and the contagious energy of “Hallelujah (Your Love is Amazing)” strike a fine balance with the slower, more intimate worship ballads on Let Your Glory Fall.
The power of the lyrics here notwithstanding, musically and vocally Let Your Glory Fall charts amazing new territory for Phillips, Craig & Dean. Nathan Nockles brings a razor sharp sound not immediately associated with such inspirational faves as PCD. In doing so, he takes their signature harmonies to a whole new level by stripping them of the layers of sound in favor of their individual, organic and God-given gifts.
“When you take away the stacked vocals, some of the bigness of the vocal disappears,” Dean explains of the revitalized sound. “Less stacked means more textured, and there’s not as much room to cover up the emotion, so you can hear more of what is real.”
The blend of their voices, Phillips says, “just gets better and better. Our vocals are very exposed, no sound effects, very raw… And the music embraces what the lyrics have to say.”
The result, they all agree, is the richest, truest vocal effort of their careers.
It’s as if these three men—professionally or individually speaking—have come full circle, having gotten a solid view of the big picture. It’s a picture of the vastness of God’s love…
“At 40 years old,” Phillips says, “you come to realize that all the striving and clawing, and all you’ve done to try to arrive somewhere—in all of that, God was there. He was my source, my strength. And anything I’ll ever accomplish, I only accomplish in light of His glory.” |
