Newworldson Interview
02-05-2008
by Kevan Breitinger
My conversation with Newworldson frontman Joel Parisen was as stimulating as the band’s own rootsy rock sound.
CMCentral (Kevan Breitinger): Thanks for making the time to speak with us, I appreciate it. I’m loving the new album, it’s some of the freshest music I’ve heard in a long time, and much needed.
Newworldson (Joel Parisien): Oh thank you so much, Kevan. That makes a big difference.
I’m also a big Stevie Wonder fan, and I wasn’t surprised to read you guys are as well, because you have that same funkmaster thing going on.
Stevie’s probably my biggest influence. Growing up the only Christian music I listened to was black Christian music, and secular artists that sang about the Lord in their music, like Donny Hathaway, Bill Withers, Aretha Franklin and the Staple Singers. I got so much out of Stevie Wonder’s willingness to share his faith with a secular audience, in the 70s.
It’s funny, my experience was just the opposite. I loved all those same artists, but didn’t become a Christian until afterwards, when I realized oh, that’s why their music resonated with me so much!
That’s kind of my story too. I didn’t grow up as a church kid. I had a radical transformation late in my teenage years. Then I realized, like you said, why my favorite artists were reaching me the way they did.
So you guys came together pretty organically, right?
Yeah, I like answering this question because the more we tell the story the more radical it becomes to us. Every member of this band has been a professional musician since their high school days, even though we’re different ages. We all followed the same career trajectory, deciding we were gonna be professional musicians making a living in the secular world where we could: in bars, in recording sessions, where ever we could pick up any work to make a living.
I met Mark (Rogers, drummer) a long time ago. I recorded my first record when I was 19, and Mark owned a studio at the time. I came in to record, and he was drawn by the spiritual content of the lyrics, as he was a very strong Christian at that point. So he offered to lay down the drums, and from there we became fast friends, and Mark has been a mentor to me ever since. Through the years, our paths crossed all the time professionally. Years later he called and told me about a gig he had been playing at a jazz martini club, with a guitar player who was leaving. He invited me to come out with my material and we’d try a gospel night in the bar, see how it flew.
I’d never met Rich (Moore, guitar/bass) but we were gonna meet at the show, the three of us. But I ran into Josh (Toal, guitarist), who is younger than me and was on his way back to school, and he asked to jam with us, so I brought him to the gig. But after we played the first set, we knew we had something special; there was instant chemistry musically and as people. It was a great night, with everything coming together so organically it was kind of freaky. Josh decided not to go right back to school; he recognized it was something really important and felt called to stay on. Oddly enough, and I say ‘oddly’ even though we know what it means, he ended up meeting his wife three weeks later, as a result of taking this risk. His wife is Mark’s god-daughter.
Wow, that’s a wild story.
We were afraid of how people in the bar might respond, as our music is obviously about the gospel, it’s not hidden at all. And alternatively, how will our church respond to our playing here? We still play this gig from time to time, and we play from 10 at night to 2 in the morning. But everybody embraced it. Our church thought it was a great outreach and came out to support it. So we’re presenting the gospel in an environment where people are drinking, and even acting like jerks by the end of the night sometimes. But I was so convinced that that’s where Jesus would have been and I had faith that we were called to walk this fine line from an outreach perspective.
Absolutely. The strange part is that we would question it.
There is the Scripture where Paul warns believers to avert their eyes from wickedness. And I understand that Scripture. At 
the same time, I read the gospels that show that Jesus was in the dark places where people needed Him most. I don’t think that the verses deliver a conflicting message. But I get a conflicting idea about what it all means. Because I am in a dark place and it’s hard to avert your eyes there, where you’re seeing people who may be being ruined by alcohol. So it hasn’t always been easy, but I see the transformation happening.
People who are clearly not believers come up to me and say that one song really touched them or spoke to their heart. I never thought of myself as an evangelist but as a musician with a gift from God. I was conditioned to think of myself as a paid entertainer but to start to see this ministry form in what we were doing was very scary. I think all of us went through separate periods where we questioned whether we were qualified to do this.
Now we’re not entertaining people anymore, we’re in very different territory. We’re answering a calling that God has clearly given us, and He placed us here. I could go on and on about all the blessings and synchronicities that we experienced as we played that show for just about a full year on Tuesday nights. A large representation of our church came out so we had a blend of Christians and non-Christians. Like you said, it seems so clear that that’s where Jesus would want us to be, but from a religious perspective, it’s hard to know which Christians might be offended by that. So we weren’t always sure what was appropriate.
But I think the evidence is that God is continuing to bless us and give us opportunities. Now two years later we’re signed with a record label that feels like family and there are all these opportunities, like touring with the Newsboys, and I think it is God rewarding us for listening to that call and taking that risk.
And it sounds to me like part of your mission might be to reach out to that Christian audience that needs to be challenged with some of the message behind your ministry.
That was a shift that started to happen about a year and a half ago, when we started getting more and more opportunities to do Christian events, and conferences, and then GMA. We started playing more in front of predominately if not entirely Christian audiences. And we really started to question our own authority and qualifications. None of us have any Christian schooling or ministry training, but we take our role very seriously when we’re preaching the gospel from the stage.
In our former outreach all we were doing was sharing our excitement about God and our relationship with Him through our lyrics, in an environment where that doesn’t usually happen, and praising Him before people who had maybe never heard of Him before. That seemed easy to us, but to get in front of Christians and expand the scope of our ministry to now enrich somebody’s walk?! That was challenging to us. I prayed heavily about it, and I found it’s increased my thirst for the Word of God, to give me more confidence and authority as the songwriter and lyricist of this band. I want to make sure that my theology is sound. But I wrestled it for a while, until God gave me a peace and said, ‘dude, all I want you to do is talk about your relationship with Me. It will resonate with other Christians. Talk about your stumbles and your feelings about being unqualified, write that into a song. I already have preachers, but you’re here to share your testimony with people. When you go out on a limb, trust the Spirit to put the right words in your mouth.’
And I’m finding that happening when I share from the stage, as I’m faithful to pray before every show. My whole concept of the word has changed; now I trust that the Word is imprinted in my heart, and that Jesus living in me will supply the words and truth that I need to minister. Does that make any sense?
It makes complete sense, because that’s the promise, that the Holy Spirit will provide the exact word that we need when our hearts are right. Well, seems like the album went just as smoothly, because I read that much of it was recorded live off the floor, some of it in one take?
In today’s modern recording environment, where we have so many great tools at our disposal, I think we tend to over-produce music. Fortunately because of our experience as musicians and as producers, we knew that was the wrong way for us to capture what we do live. Everything about this album has been us trying to capture that live chemistry we have as a band. So when we went into the studio it just made sense for us to get into a room big enough for us all to play at the same time, without headphones, so we could listen to each other. All of the rhythm section stuff was us playing in the same room at the same time. Rather than obsessing over it, when we felt like we had the performance, we just moved on. We didn’t want to add on a lot of ingredients that aren’t there live, because our live show is working, so why take away from it? We sang the vocals the same way, all at the same time. We wanted the vocals to have that same kind of performance energy. We might have spent a total of six days in the studio to track the entire album.
Well, it’s a common sense approach that seems to have worked well for you. And people do respond to honesty, lyrically and instrumentally. Joel, is there anything else you want to cover before we bring it to a close?
Yeah, there is. We’re really excited about the relationship we have with Compassion up here in Canada. Each one of us in the band sponsors a child, and in order to give our live appeals more credibility, they brought us on an exposure tour to the Dominican Republic last July, so we got to meet our sponsor kids and their families and see what the organization is doing in that country. I can’t overstate how life-changing that experience was for us. As much as we enjoyed and appreciated our tour with Newsboys, and we did, I really, really love those guys and their crew, however, we’re really looking forward to headlining our own tour this fall. Because then we will have the chance to do a Compassion appeal every night, and it’s a new wing of our ministry that we’re really fired up about.
We want to encourage Christians to take the opportunity to answer God’s call to us to care for the poor. I think that commission is so important, especially to believers living in America and Canada where we have so much.
Well, I’ll be looking forward to hearing that next fall. Thanks for your time, Joel, I really appreciate it.
Well, I’ll keep you in mind and shoot you an email when we’re getting over to your area next time.
Thanks, Joel, talk to you later.
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