MercyMe
HAVE MERCY
MercyMe Follow Their Stellar Debut with Spoken For
In 2001, praise & worship band MercyMe became the fastest-selling new artists in Christian music history. Almost There, the group's major-label debut, was quickly certified gold, and "I Can Only Imagine," the song frontman Bart Millard wrote for his late father, went on to snare Dove awards for Song of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, and Contemporary/Pop Recorded Song of the Year. So what do you do for an encore? Bart Millard spoke with Barnes & Noble.com's Lisa Zhito about the past year and the group's newest effort, Spoken For, which aims to bridge the gap between modern praise & worship music and contemporary Christian pop.
Barnes & Noble.com: Your success over the last year must have really been a shock for you guys. Did you have any clue how big Almost There would be?
Bart Millard: Yeah, I was surprised. As an independent band, we had been pretty successful; we sold [1999 indie release] The Worship Project through the Internet and bookstores, and we sold 60-70,000 units of that. For an independent band, that was unheard of! And when we signed with our label, INO, we knew "I Can Only Imagine" was a really special song. But the fact that we're still scanning 14,000 a week is blowing my stinking mind! I'm floored every week when the scans come out. In the mainstream music world that's nothing, but in Christian music, it's phenomenal.
B&N.com: That certainly raises the bar when it comes to the follow-up. What was the atmosphere like recording Spoken For?
BM: There was a lot of pressure, but I preconceived this in my mind, I put pressure on myself. INO never said, "You wrote 'I Can Only Imagine,' you have a huge hump to get over, what are you doing now?" They're like, "You guys be who you are, that's what's going to sell." They've been nothing but encouraging; in fact, they're trying to calm me down! I've had many conversations where [label president] Jeff [Moseley] has said, "This is a great thing to build off of, count your blessings, there are bands that wait their whole careers for what you've done in a year at INO."
B&N.com: A lot of the songs on Almost There were actually pretty old. It must be refreshing to be able to say something new.
BM: Yeah, the last album had a handful of songs on it that were between six and eight years old. This one is all brand-new songs. For the first time we're singing and speaking about where we are now, and obviously we are more passionate about that and where our lives are now.
B&N.com: The title track is a really eloquent declaration of faith.
BM: We wrote "Spoken For" two weeks after Almost There was finished, it almost made that album. We kept doing it live and got a huge, huge response from students and adults. We got e-mails almost every day from people asking where they can find that song. That took a lot of the pressure off. When you have a crowd saying, "we want this, we want this," that gave us creative freedom to stretch on some of the other songs.
B&N.com: What about the rest of the album? What's your take on it?
BM: As for the music, it's been a little hard; you stretch yourself out trying to follow up what happened with the last album. But we say this album is ten times better than the last album. As a worship experience, it's our heart, it's the best we could possibly do. The songs --- I'm thrilled with them. We're not straying real far from where we are -- we're a pop rock band, we're not trying to reinvent ourselves.
B&N.com: You wrote "I Can Only Imagine" about your father, who died of cancer when you were a teenager. Did you know how much its message would resonate with other people?
BM: That song literally won't happen in my lifetime again. It was cool to experience that. I wrote it in '99, but it had been in my heart for six or seven years. When you write something that personal you know it's special to you, but you don't really care what other people think of it, it's not written in that vein. But it's cool that it's connected with so many people. Before we had ever signed our record deal if you had asked us what is our best song, I'd have said "I Can Only Imagine." And that tells us we're on the right track, because if you say it's your best song and it stiffs, maybe I should get another job!
September, 2002
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