MercyMe: Going With It
11-20-2007
by Kevan Breitinger

In my recent conversation with MercyMe’s frontman Bart Millard, he bravely confessed the sad and terrible truth behind the three-week creation of their fabulous new album, All That Is Within Me.

CMCentral (Kevan Breitinger): Hey Bart, thanks for making the time to talk.

MercyMe (Bart Millard): Sure, I had to talk to the first female Kevan I’ve ever heard of. (Laughing) I thought it was a joke.

Hey, it could be.  I listened to the new album last night and LOVED it, the best one yet.

Oh, very cool, I’m glad to hear it.

I’m guessing there’s some serious Beatles fans among you, huh?

Yeah, there’s quite a few. We saw the Beatles show in Vegas and couldn’t get enough.

(Laughing) Well, I’m loving it, very Sgt. Pepper.

I take that as a huge compliment, thank you.

Well, I read that you only had three weeks to get the album together?

Well, it was pretty much our own fault. We were on tour with Audio Adrenaline in the spring, and it was their last one, so every day was a circus. Their mission in life is to enjoy every day of their life (laughing) so every day we got up was like another day at church camp.

Our plan was to write the album while we were on the road, and that never happened. So the tour ended the fist of May, we went into the studio the third week of that same month, and we didn’t have a single note. Normally you’ve got a couple of songs in your back pocket, but we didn’t have anything. So we locked ourselves in a Sunday School room in Greenville, where we live, and just started playing everything we could possibly come up with. We played grooves for hours and we’d record everything to our laptops. Then I’d go home and sort through it all to see if there was anything worth writing. When we finally went in the studio we had one song finished (laughing), and everything else was just ideas.

And so we were spending a lot of money in the studio to literally record the verse, figuring out how long it should be, where the chorus might go, the bridge… (laughing). Other than “God With Us,” everything was done that way. And then I’d go off into another part of the studio and try to write lyrics and melody to it. It’s so backwards, I don’t recommend ever doing it (laughing), it was very stressful, but it’s cool to see how it turned out. We’re very pleased with how the project wrapped up.

Yeah, you wouldn’t think something this fresh would come out from under that kind of pressure.

That may be part of the reason. Sometimes you can over-think everything. Not having several months to sit there and talk yourself out of doing things that you wanted to do worked for us, it just wasn’t an option. We went with our gut and stuck with the first thing we recorded. But I don’t think the album is a stretch at all, I think it’s exactly who we are and what we sound like. It was almost like, the quicker we did it, the more ‘real’ it became, because we didn’t have a chance to change anything, to put make-up on it, fix its hair, re-dress it (laughing). It just is what it is.

It seems to me like more of a rock-oriented project than earlier pop-rock albums. I also enjoyed, and I usually don’t, the heavy orchestration and the strings. They brought something very different to it.

Yeah, we went to Abbey Road in London and worked with the London Symphony on that after we had finished most of the recording. We’d been wanting to go to that studio for so long. And Brown Bannister (producer) did an amazing job of putting it all together. Like on “Goodbye Ordinary,” I absolutely love the strings on that.

Yeah, me, too.

When we wrote that one, we said in the studio, ‘it cannot be too Beatles.’ Like, I want to be accused of ripping them off (laughing), because I love their music so much. So once we said that, Brown said, ‘we have to go to Abbey Road. We have to have the same people who played on “Eleanor Rigby.”’ There’s a trumpet on the back end of the song played by the same guy who played it on “Penny Lane.” Some cool stuff, so yeah, it was fun to do that song.

Yeah, and very inventive. They’re always zigging just when you thought they’d zag.

Exactly. I’m glad you like it, because we were kind of nervous about it being the first track on the album, but it was our favorite, so we went with it.

It was my favorite too, and got me up for the whole album. So nobody really has a classical background among you then?

No, not really. Jim, our keyboard player, is probably the most trained among us. No, we’re just rednecks (laughing).

Well, that’s really not gonna work with me because I’ve heard your Hymned No. 1 album, so I already know you’re not a redneck (laughing). But let me ask you this: what motivated you to direct this album toward the church, Bart?

Whenever we’d sit down and talk about what the next record was gonna be like, the one thing that kept coming up was worship. There’s been one song on every record that was a corporate worship song. Like “Cannot Say Enough” on Almost There and “Word of God Speak” on Spoken For, and the title track of Undone. And it’s always our favorite moments at the live shows to see people singing along with the corporate worship vibe.

So we asked ourselves, since we always add in that one song that ends up being our favorite, why don’t we just make the record we want to make? We want to write songs that hopefully the church will sing long after we’re gone. If it’s our favorite moment, let’s create more of them. Let’s make an album that people can sing along with from beginning to end. “God With Us” was the first song we wrote for the album, and it kind of became the catalyst for the whole idea.

Originally, it was gonna be a full-blown worship album, along the lines of Third Day’s Offerings.  We planned on doing some cover tunes, but once we got to writing it, we were on a roll, and said, ‘let’s keep writing and see what we got.’ And we had got to the point where we had written songs like “My Heart Will Fly” and “God With Us” and “Sanctified,” songs the church can sing. And we thought, you know what, we can’t NOT go with songs like “Goodbye Ordinary,” they’re just too much fun to do. It was great to mix the two and come up with a project like this. It wasn’t a stretch. In fact, this probably sounds more like MercyMe than some of “Coming Up to Breathe.” It’s definitely us realizing we’re called to reach out to the hurting, to try to help with their healing process, and we know this is who we are as a band. It’s what people expect of us sound-wise, so let’s not fight it, let’s embrace it to the best of our ability.

That’s always the best way to go, isn’t it? Just embrace who you are, go with it.

At some point you get comfortable in your own skin and everything starts to click.  

Anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up?

No, it’s been awesome, thanks.

Well, thanks again for your time, and the great sounds.

My pleasure, bye.