Leeland: Tightly Focused
02-25-2008
by Kevan Breitinger
I wasn’t at all surprised to find a conversation with Leeland to be seriously spiritually focused, just like the new album Opposite Way.
CMCentral (Kevan Breitinger): Hey Leeland, thanks for calling. I spent the morning with the new album and really enjoyed it.
Leeland: Thanks so much, Kevan, that’s awesome.
You guys seem to have so much hype to deal with. How hard is that for you?
We try not to focus on it too much. You’re glad people are excited about your record or think you’re a great band, but the “hype” can be a good thing or a really bad thing. If you listen to it too much you can get yourself freaked out, or begin to think that it’s all about you. For us, we know that it’s just God that brought us here. That’s how amazing God is. So we try not to focus on it too much. And then we come back home and our parents keep us grounded on planet earth. That’s a good thing.
Sure. Forget about it, just take the trash out, right?
Exactly. Jake (Holtz, bassist) was home once talking to his Mom, my aunt, right after the Grammys, after we had done all this cool stuff, big shows and things like that. She thought it was awesome, and said, “Oh wow, that’s so cool! Now we need you to get down to the church and fix the roof.” So Jake spent that day up in the freezing cold working on the roof (laughing). We’re thankful we have our church and our family to keep us from getting big-headed.
To help you keep it real.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, it’s pretty apparent to me, from both albums actually, how strongly you are focused on the Lord. A lot of bands come across like that, but yours seems a bit different. I know you just got married and are maybe thinking about starting your own family soon, but I wondered if your strong focus comes from your own upbringing.
Yeah. My mom and my dad have been involved in ministry my whole life. They always did music ministry, and then the 
past five years they’ve been pastors at our own church in Baytown, Texas. Before that, when I was 11 years old, we traveled for two years as a family of traveling evangelists. We’d go from church to church preaching about God and singing, leading worship. We drove from place to place in a Lincoln Town Car. The presence of God was so thick as we ministered every night. God would show up in such a powerful way, like the kind of presence where you can only fall on your knees.
It was a great time for us spiritually, and when we came back home we were in a different place than some other kids. My parents always told me that I could have a relationship with God, and that my relationship with Him had to be my own. So even at the age of 11, us kids were praying and seeking God always, and we had a lot of fun doing it. When we got back home we started the church. My brother was a youth pastor at 16. At first it was just us and our cousins, but then it grew a bit. And I led worship, and our band was formed out of that experience.
Wow, I’m glad you shared that. With all that’s written about you, I had never heard any of that. But I’m not surprised, as your music does come off as being very Spirit-led and empowered. I understand now why you sound the way you do. I know the album’s theme is to encourage listeners to live for God, and with some of the songs and the title even, it comes across as a bit of a challenge to the church. Is that accurate?
The major theme of Opposite Way is to challenge the church to really live out their whole lives to God, rather than to just sing about it. And that’s a hard thing to do. It’s not something that you just get down pat, but it’s a fight every day to do it. You have to overcome your flesh and give your spirit over to God.
The second theme has to do with witnessing. “Wake Up” talks about breaking past the four walls of the church and getting out there to tell people about Jesus. It’s something that has been a huge challenge to me in the past few years, getting out of my shell to talk to people about Jesus. There’s a guy I met, Bill Johnson, who wrote a great book about this, “Dreaming with God.” His ministry is literally just witnessing to people, that’s all he does. He walks around telling people about the Lord, and he’s so passionate about it, that he sparked a fire in me to do it more. Some of the new songs flow from that inspiration.
It’s very important to live a life before your friends that shows them God, but it’s also important to speak about Him. It’s one of the things that we’re really lacking in the church. It’s not just about having video games and a great youth center, all this incredible stuff. If that’s the center of our focus we have it all messed up. Our churches have to really hunger for the presence of God, and the reality of God, not just a cool youth center with great lights. So that’s what we’re trying to push for in this record to a generation of promise.
It’s funny how the pendulum seems to be swinging back that way now, and I’m real glad to see it too. It’s great to be hip and to have cool toys, but nothing can take the place of the reality of God. It seems crazy that the church would get away from that, but we have. Another of my favorite tracks, “Let It Out Now,” seems to be a challenge to the church as well, to our mindless conformity. Not our conformity to Christ, but to our conformity to, well, church. Sometimes those are two different things, unfortunately.
Bill Johnson’s book has a line that says we need to be less worried about being culturally relevant but better yet, become what the culture hungers to be. The world hungers to be the children of God, they want to be a part of the Kingdom of God. We see that happening in a lot of different countries, but America has everything it needs. Some countries are pushed into God by their great need, by the famine or by violence. But we need to bring back to America the recognition of our great need for God.
I agree. Now I read that this time around more of the band members contributed to the writing. Did that change the process a lot for you?
It was a lot of fun, but it didn’t really change much. We didn’t have a lot of time for writing as we were out on the road playing festivals during the time we had set aside to write the new record. So we decided to write in the van as we traveled. I had ideas for a few new songs, so me and Jack (Mooring, keys) went to the back bench, pulled out guitars and started writing, but then Mike (Smith, drummer), Matt (Campbell, lead guitar), and Jake ended up coming back and jumping in too. “Count Me In,” “Don’t Go Away,” and “Opposite Way,” all those songs we wrote together. I wrote most of the melodies, but the guys are really coming into their own. Me and Jake wrote “Beginning And The End” together, and that was fun.
Oh, I love that one!
We had a lot of fun collaborating together, and there are still a few I wrote by myself on the record.
Yeah, the fun showed through. But this album also reached deep into my spirit and I gotta tell you how much I appreciate that. Is there anything else you wanted to make sure we cover today?
Just that we’re called to be light, and you can’t be a light in a dark place if you’re half a light. We gotta shine. So I’d encourage people to seek Him, to develop a relationship with God. Don’t just worship God in a song, worship Him with your whole life.
Amen. That’s a great way to go out. Leeland, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you, Kevan, it was awesome.
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