Christian band works to avoid becoming yesterday’s news
Christian band Newsboys, drummer Duncan Phillips said, could rest on nearly four decades of sizeable laurels.
But it’s not fair to the audience, he said, nor the band, which plays Century II on Saturday night.
“It’s like you keep on reapplying for the job,” Phillips said in a phone interview from his Tennessee home. “We always joke that each record is reapplying for your job again, because people might have liked what you did in the past, but if you’re not out there continually chasing the dog down so to speak, you go backwards.
“You become a nostalgia band,” the Australian native continued. “There’s elements of that in the act because we have been around for a hot second now, but there’s two and three generations now coming to see Newsboys. They all know the songs, and it’s really cool.”
Newsboys, which began 39 years ago, released its 20th album, the eight-song “Worldwide Revival (Pt. 1)” in July, with the second part due out next year.
“It’s the next iteration,” said Phillips, who’s been with the band 30 years. “Musically it’s fresh for us but breaking up the music into two sections helps us get the music out quicker. To get 10 or 12 songs together is harder than people think. We thought we’d do seven or eight songs and have the back half be seven or eight songs.”
“Worldwide Revival,” he said, shows a natural progression of the group.
“Our biggest fear, if we have a fear, is becoming obsolete,” he said. “You’ve got to keep chasing down that elusive hit. I love the process of writing and making a record. You’ve got to stay hungry, because if you don’t you become a legacy band real quick.”
That continual evolution, he said, is for the fans as well as Newsboys.
“If you keep on making the same record, you’re going backwards,” Phillips said. “The fans, whether they realize it or not, their musical tastes continue evolving as well. I don’t think you want to become the fad, because when the fad dies, so do you. You want to be aware of what is going on around you.”
Newsboys, he said, keeps tabs on what other Christian pop-rock bands are doing with their music and responding without copying the style.
“As we grow and mature, we listen to new music that colors the music we come out with,” Phillips said. “It is definitely a new, fresher sound for us. But it’s not like we’re trying to be 18 years old, either. That would be weird – a bunch of guys trying to be a boy band. That would be like U2 coming out with a K-POP record.
“We’re definitely as a band more mature,” he added. “And I don’t mean old, but musically it’s a lot more mature than what we’ve done in the past.”
Newsboys pulled off a feat that bands of any genre might find hard to accomplish – introducing a new leader singer, as it did in 2009 when former dc Talk vocalist Michael Tait began fronting the group.
“It was very risky, but we had no other option,” he said. “Our other option was to pack it all up and do something else, but none of us wanted to do that.”
Phillips recalled that, in days before the internet was prevalent, word about a new lead singer hadn’t permeated the planet. He and the other two members of the band walked on stage during early concerts to introduce Tait, a 180-degree difference in looks from the previous lead singer, Peter Furler.
“We went from a bald white guy to a Black guy with dreads,” he recalled. “We’re making a statement here, let’s see what happens.”
The philosophy at the time was, “If you don’t like it, the old Newsboys is for you and that’s cool. We want to soldier on because we love what we do and have more to say.”
Tait was an unexpected choice, Phillips said.
“We were frenemies back in the day when Newsboys and dc Talk would tour together,” he recalled. “We had a very healthy competitive streak between the two bands.”
There was still uncertainty among the band whether a new lead singer would pass muster with fans, until the first Newsboys album came out, debuting at No. 4 on the all-genre Billboard album charts, topping Justin Bieber’s sales.
Newsboys concerts, Phillips said, are meant to satisfy those who grew up with the different generations of the band.
“We’ve got the legacy side because we’ve been around a lot of peoples’ lives. A lot of people grew up with Newsboys as long as they remember,” he said.
Among the band’s biggest hits is “God’s Not Dead,” which inspired a 2014 movie and three sequels. A fourth, “God’s Not Dead: In God We Trust,” will be released Sept. 12, and the band makes another cameo appearance.
As the band rehearses a new tour to begin later this year, Phillips said group members still get a thrill that audience are taking to the new music as well as the classics.
“I never get sick of that moment when you know the crowd knows the song and they’re singing it back to you. That’s one of the most fulfilling moments as a musician that you can ever have,” he said. “It doesn’t get more special than that.”
NEWSBOYS
When: 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 31
Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas
Tickets: $24-$125, from selectaseat.com, 316-755-7328 or the Century II box office