ARTIST: Casting Crowns
TITLE: Lifesong
LABEL: Sony BMG
GENRE: Christian Rock
BITRATE: 200kbps avg
PLAYTIME: 0h 52min total
RELEASE DATE: 2005-08-30
RIP DATE: 2005-08-29

Track List

01. Lifesong                        5:17
02. Praise You In This Storm        4:59
03. Does Anybody Hear Her           4:30
04. Stained Glass Masquerade        3:52
05. Love Them Like Jesus            4:32
06. Set Me Free                     4:27
07. While You Were Sleeping         4:55
08. Father, Spirit, Jesus           5:11
09. In Me                           4:45
10. Prodigal                        5:45
11. And Now My Lifesong Sings       4:03

Release Notes:

Casting Crowns began as a student worship band in Daytona Beach, FL
in 1999. After 2 years of serving at First Baptist Daytona Beach, God
called Mark Hall (lead vocal), Juan DeVevo (guitar and vocals), Melodee
DeVevo (vocals and violin), Hector Cervantes (guitar and vocals), and
Darren Hughes (production manager) to Eagle's Landing First Baptist
Church in McDonough, GA in October of 2001. After arriving here, the
Lord led Chris Huffman (bass guitar), a former student from FBC, Daytona,
and Megan Garrett (keyboard, vocals, accordion), to join the band
immediately. Then about a year later, Andy Williams (drummer), joined
the group.

There, you have Casting Crowns.

At the core of Casting Crowns is Mark Hall, a man who never would have
thought leading a band into the wilds of the business of music would enter
into his calling. His place, he thought, was to serve young people.

"I've been a youth pastor for about 12 years, and every church I've been
in, music's always been a part of it," Hall says. "We'd usually start up a
band made up of students so we could lead worship in our Wednesday night
programs, and as the student ministry started to grow, the band would go off
and play and do things in the area."

"I had the thought that maybe I could write for other bands," he says,
"because traveling around playing was not something I thought I wanted
to do."

The band recorded two well-received independent records, distributed mainly
in the Atlanta area. "There was the temptation to send our CDs to record
companies," Hall says, "but we prayed about it and came to the realization
we needed to keep doing our music our way."

"Meanwhile, this college student in Daytona named Chase Tramont -- my new
best friend in the world! -- has one of our CDs," Hall says. "He plays
basketball at Flagler College in Florida, goes off to a camp there, and
finds out his coach used to play basketball with a guy named Mark Miller."

It's at this point where one of Casting Crowns' soon-to-be shepherds
comes into the picture.

"Chase and Mark get to know each other, and in the midst of a conversation one day,
Chase figures out that Mark is the lead singer for Sawyer Brown," Hall says.
"After that, Chase said, 'Oh, you've got to hear this band.' Mark must get a
million of these things a year, but he likes it and gives us a call."

Miller, the hyper-animated frontman for the veteran country group, doesn't
know what he can do for the fledgling band, but wants to be supportive in
any way he can. "I could tell by Mark's writing that he wasn't doing anything
other than speaking from his heart exactly what he was seeing and what was
around him," Miller says. "It didn't surprise me at all when I found out
later that he was a youth minister, because basically these were messages
to his students."

"The first thing you hear, before you sit there and digest the lyrics,
is Mark's voice. I knew a couple of things when I first heard it. I knew
they couldn't afford to go in and mess with his voice, so what I was hearing was
what he could deliver, so I was pretty blown away by that," Miller continues.
"Then the songs were really different to me, they came from a different viewpoint
than what you would normally hear within Christian music. The lyrics would
immediately make you think, 'This guy's a hard hitter.' He's makes no bones
about it; he's not hiding from anything. For me, in Christian music, that's a
rarity."

Miller hung onto the two Casting Crowns independent records, waiting for the
right opportunity to tell other music industry colleagues about the band. That
right moment came on a spring vacation with the families of two longtime friends,
new Provident Label Group president Terry Hemmings and an artist with an equally
impressive track record to Miller's, Steven Curtis Chapman.

"I've known Terry for quite some time, and he's heard some things I've produced
for Christian artists, and we'd been talking about doing something together for
three or four years," Miller says. "After my first conversations with Mark, I
could tell immediately that this was the kind of person I wanted to be involved
with, that Steven would want to be involved with, somebody with true Christian
integrity, not just a coating you spray on and then wash off at the end of the
day."

"I collected all the information, talked to Terry and Steven about it, and Terry
got real excited about it and said, 'Let's just do something with them,'" Miller
says. That something has manifested itself as Beach Street Records, the new PLG
imprint captained by Miller.

Meanwhile, Miller knew it was time to go out and recruit what would become the
imprint's flagship artist. "I called Mark back," Miller says, "and his response
was exactly what you'd want to hear. Rather than saying 'When do we leave?' or
'How much money am I going to get?" it was 'Am I still going to be able to be a
youth minister?" "My response was something like, 'Sure, Mark, but your congregation
may be a whole lot larger than you would have ever imagined.'"

The pieces fell together quickly for Miller's new venture and the band it is
introducing to the world. Casting Crowns entered the studio earlier this year
with Miller and Chapman serving as co-producers, and the self-titled result is a
rich-sounding edgy-pop record that refuses to shy away from the sometimes hard-to-hear
truths presented in Hall's lyrics.

That uncompromising spirit is heard on songs like "American Dream," which documents a
father's neglect as he chases after the material nature of providing for his family,
and "If We Are The Body," challenges Christians in the church to step outside the
exclusive circles we are involved in and see the needs of others around us.  "I really
feel a burden for the church," Hall says. "Right after somebody gets saved, right as
they're starting to grow, they essentially have the wool pulled over their eyes that
tells them that religion is what they have stepped into. 'Here are the laws that relate
to this, here are the rules for this other thing, here's your discipleship notebook,
here's you T-shirt and this is what you have to do.' And the feeling is that when you
come to church; if you did fail at whatever, don't let anybody know it."

"So they show up acting like everything is fine and are surrounded by people who aren't
fine, and that's what religion is. The world simply wants nothing to do with that. They
want to see people that are real.  It doesn't bother the world that we mess up, what
bothers them is that we act like we don't," Hall says.

And even though Casting Crowns is currently in a whirlwind of activity the likes of
which they probably couldn't have dreamed, they're not about to take their eyes off the
fundamental message they wish to share. "I want to shake people up and help them see that
Jesus is not a religion, and God is not a book," Hall says. "You can't pray to a book and
you can't draw strength from an idea or standard.

"If there's no relationship with Jesus as a person to you, you're in trouble." It's about
life, not religion. It's about relationships, not books. Timely ideas not many of us
think about, much less in that way. Casting Crowns is what we need to hear at exactly
the time we need to hear it.