From CCM Magazine

More Christian Than Artist

After twenty years of doing this, I’ve developed a rhythm to my interviews. That can be a crutch, but often it is just part of a signature experience for the audience. I listen, I follow the interesting detours, I know when to interrupt and when to let someone keep going. Even when the person across from me is famous, intimidating or particularly passionate, I usually feel relatively in control of the conversation.

KB was different.

This may have been the most overwhelmed I have ever felt by a guest, and it didn’t start that way. Before the cameras were rolling, the man sitting in our studio was kind, creative, reserved and almost surprisingly quiet. He listened carefully and went with our team through the concepts for the live performance and photoshoot. There was an ease about him that did not immediately resemble the guy whose records can sound like a revival meeting breaking out in the middle of a mosh pit. Then we sat across from each other. The camera turned on. And I got hit by a train.

Suddenly, sitting across from me was the kid who had started college at 16 and once imagined a future in law before walking away from that trajectory to study the Bible.

Trust me, the lawyer is still in there.

And, unmistakably, so is the preacher.

I would ask a question and KB would not simply answer it. He would build a case. One thought would connect to another, then to Scripture, then to culture, then back to the original premise. Occasionally I would try to steer us toward the next subject only to realize he was still assembling the argument from the previous one.

At one point even KB seemed to realize what had happened.

“My goodness, my goodness, my goodness,” he said. “I already preached a sermon to myself.”

He wasn’t wrong.

There were moments during our conversation when I stopped feeling like I was simply interviewing KB and started feeling like KB was preaching directly at me.

“The goal for us is that we would be more Christian than we are artist. I want my Christianity to be a modifier of any other label you give me.”
– KB

And, if I am being truthful, some of it was convicting.

That is an unusual thing for me to write in a cover story. I am there to ask questions, challenge assumptions when necessary and hopefully create a conversation that tells you something you did not know when you started reading or watching. But pretending an interview did not affect me would be its own kind of dishonesty.

KB is intellectually quick, theologically intense and almost incapable of giving a casual answer to a question he believes matters. Yet none of this felt inconsistent with the quieter person I had met before the cameras came on. They felt like two expressions of the same man.

Christianity itself gives us language for that kind of apparent contradiction. Jesus is described through images that should almost oppose one another: the Lion and the Lamb. A King and a carpenter. Authority powerful enough to command the sea and humility willing to wash feet.

Strength and gentleness are not necessarily competing ideas.

KB took me directly there when we began discussing the danger of looking at Christian artists, pastors and leaders and assuming that because they speak with confidence, they somehow live beyond the doubts and temptations everyone else experiences.

“The audience is experiencing [that] with every Christian hero they have,” KB told me. “Every human being on this planet is experiencing all of the threats that you feel to your faith. They are experiencing them too.”

That answer seemed to unlock something in him.

“It is important to realize that the pattern of the Lord Jesus is that by His wounds we are healed,” he continued. “It was His willingness to suffer and then show it to you.”

KB’s point was that we often want our strongest Christian voices to look unbreakable. He wanted to point instead to a Jesus who could be powerful and wounded at the same time. “We are wounded healers.” He was not speaking theoretically.

“I know I have not done a good job in my music showing my wounds as much as I should,” KB admitted. “On this project, I told the story of my abuse as a child… because I realized that there’s a narrative shift that needs to happen.”

Christian leaders, he continued, are not leaders because they belong to some separate spiritual category.

“We become angry, angrier with each other, more isolated. And not realizing that this whole time we are being monetized by the platforms that we’re on, while we’re trying to monetize things on the platforms that we’re on.”
-KB

“We are folks that are tempted. We are folks that fall. We don’t get it right all the time either.”

That matters because KB has built a career on certainty. His music does not hide what it believes. There is no squinting at the lyrics trying to determine whether a Christian message might be buried underneath. KB makes Christian hip-hop in the most literal sense of the term. His records can be theological, confrontational, celebratory and complicated in the way a conversation with someone who desperately wants you to understand something can be.

At one point I asked him whether he even considers his music worship music. “Absolutely,” he answered. His definition was characteristically broader than genre. “When I think about what worship is in Scripture, this sort of bowing down before this reverent pursuit of this great, grand, glorious, majestic, powerful, awe-inspiring, fly God… I don’t think you can call your music Christian if that isn’t in it. And if that is in it, it’s by definition worship.”

There is the preacher again.

But the certainty is not supposed to suggest invulnerability.

In many ways, KB’s new album, THIS CANNOT BE SOLD, is an argument against exactly that kind of performance.

Its title reaches nearly twenty years into his past.

KB was 16 years old when a Christian hip-hop album helped lead him to Jesus. The record was called Bloody Streets Volume One. He did not initially even realize it was Christian music. As he describes it, the “bloody streets” were about the blood of Jesus covering people others believed could not be reached.

On the front of that album was what looked like a parental advisory sticker. But if you read it closely, it did not say “explicit language.”

It said:

“This cannot be sold.”

“Bringing it back almost 20 years,” KB told me.

The phrase stayed with him long enough to become the title, and eventually the thesis, of his own record. But KB told me he did not begin the album with a clever title or marketing plan.

“I think that I start from burden,” he said. “I only try to make songs about things that keep me up at night.” He wants to make work that feels necessary.

“I try to… put projects out in the world that I feel like if they did not exist, something is wrong. That it would be wrong for me not to do this.”

As the songs began to take shape, so did the burden behind them. KB had become disturbed by what he describes as “performative Christianity.”

“We are sort of turning righteousness into opportunities for content,” he said, before moving into what he calls “tribal Christianity,” where faith becomes another way of signaling allegiance to the people whose approval we want.

It is a particularly fascinating argument coming from someone whose livelihood depends, at least in part, on putting Christianity into content. KB knows that contradiction is there.

He is an artist warning about celebrity. A man with an audience warning about audiences. A content creator warning about what content can do to the person creating it.

But THIS CANNOT BE SOLD is not KB pretending he has escaped any of those tensions.

It is him drawing lines inside them.

During our conversation, I asked whether he had actually been forced to take certain things in his own life “off the market.” His answer stopped being theoretical almost immediately. He said there are opportunities he has turned down, even concerts that could pay as much as a year’s salary. “My loyalty to the Kingdom, me not losing myself and becoming something that is ego, that lives in egomania and is self-centered… I want to remain a friend of God. That is my priority.” He paused before adding the cost. “If I have to choose, then I’m going with the thing that keeps me with Him. And that would cost me in some ways in this world.”

THIS CANNOT BE SOLD can be a question. Maybe even a challenge.

“I wanted to be a voice crying out in the wilderness, as it were. Reminding people that there are realities that exist outside of monetization. They exist outside of our algorithmic preferences.”
– KB

What in your life has no price? What part of yourself cannot be converted into opportunity, attention, content, influence or money? And perhaps more uncomfortably:

What have you already sold without realizing it?

For KB, one of the easiest things to sell without realizing it may be our attention.

“The algorithm is shaping us,” he told me.

That sentence could sound like the beginning of any number of conversations about social media, but KB’s concern is less about screen time than what those screens are teaching us to become. “They have found that there’s something that sells better than sex, and it is rage.”

KB sees a machine that rewards us for becoming louder versions of ourselves while convincing us that we are the ones using it. “We become angry, angrier with each other, more isolated,” he said. “And not realizing that this whole time we are being monetized by the platforms that we’re on, while we’re trying to monetize things on the platforms that we’re on.”

Christians are not somehow immune to this.

“We as believers can get caught in that same space where we do not see our engagement online as a mission field for trying to bring something different,” he said. “We just become reinforcers of what already exists.”

KB’s goal with this album, he told me, was to interrupt that cycle.

“I wanted to be a voice crying out in the wilderness, as it were,” he said. “Reminding people that there are realities that exist outside of monetization. They exist outside of our algorithmic preferences.” Then the preacher showed back up. “There is a King with a Kingdom that is here and coming,” KB continued. “Jesus reigns and His Kingdom will not be shaken.”

For all the sophistication of the problem he is describing, KB’s answer is strikingly old-fashioned. Church. Prayer. Community. That becomes especially important when the person being shaped by the algorithm is also a celebrity. KB knows the irony of warning people about fame while being famous. His music reaches millions. People know his face. They buy tickets to watch him perform. They quote his lyrics back to him. He has the same social media platforms he is warning everyone else about.

But his concern is not that influence itself is sinful. It is what happens when influence becomes the place where you begin discovering your identity.

“The goal for us is that we would be more Christian than we are artist,” KB told me. Then he repeated the thought in a way that made clear this was not a throwaway line. “I want my Christianity to be a modifier of any other label you give me.”

That sounds simple until you consider how completely the music business is structured around doing the opposite. An artist is supposed to build the brand. Grow the audience. Protect the image. Keep people interested. Stay visible. Stay relevant. Turn moments into content. Turn content into engagement. Turn engagement into tickets, streams, merchandise and whatever metric comes next. All of it is considered the evidence that everything is going well. The danger comes when those become the measurements of spiritual success too.

“If my life and those who don’t name the name of Jesus and we both have similar audience sizes look exactly the same, we are failing,” he said. That may be a difficult statement for any Christian artist to hear. However, what does success look like when the number getting bigger cannot be the ultimate answer?

KB’s response is almost aggressively unglamorous. Go to church, because you need church. “You can’t afford not being a part of a church. You cannot afford making your label your pastor.”  Then he kept going. “You cannot afford traveling all year long, disconnected from community and being surrounded by people you pay. You can’t afford that… don’t believe the internet. The internet is telling you that you are this godly sage who every time he or she walks into the studio, you’re spinning out gold and changing the world,” KB said. “Everyone cares what you think. And when you speak, people clap.”

Try to stay painfully grounded. “Go stack chairs at the church.”

There may not be a better image for what KB is trying to communicate on THIS CANNOT BE SOLD. The same person who can stand in front of thousands of people, microphone in hand, needs a place where he is simply another guy moving chairs after service.

It also helps explain why the album refuses to neatly align itself with the boxes that would make it easier to market. By the time we reached its final title track, KB was talking about another marketplace entirely: the marketplace of teams. Political teams. Cultural teams. Even Christian teams. He is not pretending he has somehow risen above any of them. “I’ve got teams,” he told me. “I’ve got political leanings. I have got folks that I want to win. I have a bias. I have it.” But KB’s argument is that Christianity has to retain the authority to tell your own side no.

“All of those things have to be subordinate to the agenda of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is bigger than every single movement on this planet.” That becomes especially uncomfortable when the teachings of Jesus interfere with winning. “I think that the core message of the New Testament is that if you understand what essential Christianity is as something other than fervent love for God and love for people, you have misunderstood the New Testament,” KB said. “You’ve misunderstood Jesus.”

KB is not asking whether you have convictions. Clearly, he does.  He is asking whether there is anything above them and anything capable of correcting them. But if THIS CANNOT BE SOLD were only an album of KB telling everybody else what they need to surrender, it would collapse under the weight of its own message. Eventually, he has to put something of himself on the altar too. And that is where this record gets much more personal.

One of the strange things about spending this much time talking with KB is that I cannot say I walked away knowing a whole lot more about the day-to-day details of his personal life. I learned a tremendous amount about what he believes. How he thinks. What concerns him. What he believes Christian artists should guard against. But the quieter guy I met before the cameras came on remained, in some ways, quiet. The album does not. The album gives us more than a peek into the personal side of KB. The theology is still there, but now it is colliding with childhood, fatherhood, marriage, suffering and the distance between what you believe and what you sometimes feel. The guy who spent much of our interview constructing theological arguments made a record that preserves the sound of the argument no longer being enough.

“There’s going to be friction between what you believe to be true and what you are experiencing,” he said. “I will trust God when I cannot understand what He’s doing… I will believe in His goodness when I don’t have good arguments to believe.”

There was the lawyer again. Except this time, the lawyer had run out of arguments. “That’s what faith is.”

When the cameras turned on I may have been hit by a train. By the end of the conversation, though, I at least understood where the train was headed.

THIS CANNOT BE SOLD is available now.

 

  LISTEN NOW  

Just one month after the passing of beloved worship songwriter Brian Doerksen, his first posthumous song has arrived ahead of his final album. And all it begins with a Whisper.

“Whisper,” the first song from Doerksen’s forthcoming final album, is available now, offering listeners the first glimpse of a collection of music Brian had already written and recorded before his passing. The full-length posthumous album is set to arrive October 2.

For a songwriter who spent decades giving the Church songs like “Refiner’s Fire,” “Light the Fire Again,” “Come Now Is the Time to Worship,” “Faithful One,” “Hope of the Nations” and “Today (As For Me and My House),”there is something particularly moving about knowing there are still songs left for us to hear.

Brian’s team acknowledged just how tender releasing this music feels so soon after his death.

“One month after Brian’s passing, releasing new music feels deeply tender,” they shared in to us in announcing the song. “We know this moment will be received in many different ways. Through tears, memories, gratitude, comfort, and perhaps simply a quiet pause to listen.”

But this isn’t a collection assembled after the fact. These songs were already Brian’s. He intended for them to be heard.

“These songs were already part of Brian’s journey. He wrote them, recorded them, and gave them to the world. Today, we have the privilege of opening the door and letting one of those songs speak again.”

And the fact that the first song is called “Whisper” feels almost impossibly appropriate.

Brian spent a lifetime writing worship music that encouraged people to listen. To God, to each other, and to those quiet places within ourselves that can so easily be drowned out by everything else.

As his team beautifully put it, sometimes the things that matter most aren’t shouted.

“Sometimes they arrive softly.

Sometimes they come quietly.

Sometimes they come as a whisper.”

Doerksen was one of the defining songwriters of the Vineyard worship movement and helped shape the language of congregational worship throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. His songs traveled far beyond Vineyard churches, crossing denominations, countries and generations.

Following his passing, Vineyard Worship remembered him as “one of the fathers of Vineyard Worship,” adding that through his “songs, leadership and friendship, he helped shape worship in the Vineyard and, far beyond that, the worship of the global Church.”

It isn’t simply another release in a decades-long career. It is an opportunity to hear something new from an artist whose story we thought had already reached its final note.

There will undoubtedly be tears attached to these songs, but for the millions who knew Brian primarily through his music, this final collection also offers a gift: a little more time with him.

“Whisper” is available now, with Brian Doerksen’s final posthumous full-length album arriving October 2.

LISTEN TO “WHISPER”  

While digging back through our recent CCM Magazine Cover Story session with Colton Dixon, we unearthed a bonus performance we hadn’t released, and this one was too much fun to leave on the cutting-room floor.

“Up + Up” has racked up million of streams since its release, becoming one of Dixon’s biggest hits. But for this CCM Magazine performance, he completely reimagined it.

Just Colton, keys, a drum pad and a pretty wild intro.

Watch Dixon build the song live in the room gives “Up + Up” an entirely different energy. It’s stripped down without exactly being quiet, keeping the pulse of the original while showing just how much one guy can do behind a keyboard.

WATCH: Colton Dixon Performs “Up + Up” Live at CCM Magazine

This bonus performance was recorded during Dixon’s CCM Magazine Cover Story shoot, where we sat down for an extended conversation and captured several additional exclusive performances.

WATCH/READ: Colton Dixon’s CCM Magazine Cover Story + Performances

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Why are you still making new albums? The economics have changed. Album sales certainly aren’t what they once were. For a band with a catalog stretching back more than 40 years, there is a perfectly viable business model that involves getting on a bus, playing the songs everyone already knows, selling some shirts and going home.

Stryper could absolutely do that. Instead, on September 25, they are releasing their 18th studio album, Throne of Thorns. After listening to the record and sitting down with brothers Michael and Robert Sweet, I think I understand why. They still love doing this.

That sounds simple, but Throne of Thorns sounds remarkably uninterested in being a nostalgia exercise. It is a rip-roaring rock record. It is heavy, melodic and full of the guitar harmonies, huge vocals and occasionally ridiculous level of musicianship you expect from Stryper.

“If you don’t [love it], then you’re not going to be as productive,” Michael told me. “You’re just not going to have that passion and that desire and that drive.”

There is always a temptation for a band with this much history to prove it can sound current by chasing whatever “current” happens to mean that year. Michael readily admits Stryper has experimented with that over the years. Eventually, you have to remember what made people care about your band in the first place.

“You try to reinvent the wheel, you try to be this new invention of yourself when you realize at some point, why are we doing that?” Michael said. “Some bands try to go somewhere else and get too modern, and they lose sight of what put them on the map.”

Robert sees Stryper’s identity as something almost impossible to escape. “You always have your elements,” he told me. “You are yourself, so you can’t really escape yourself.”

For Stryper, that includes those instantly recognizable harmonized guitars. “That’s just Stryper,” Robert said. “Mike and I sat down and went, ‘Okay, this is going to be a signature part of our sound.’” You hear that all over Throne of Thorns.

This won’t be a track by track breakdown, but I will give you some of my highlights. “Hollywood,” one of the immediate standouts for me. For a band whose history is so intertwined with the Sunset Strip, the song allows Stryper to look back at a time I wish I could’ve seen with my own eyes. “That’s one of my favorites,” Michael said. “The song itself is just about kind of reminiscing about the past, the Hollywood days, the glory days.”

Robert remembers that world vividly. “If you wanted to get a record deal and become a big band, and you were in California, you went and played on the Strip,” he said. Today, many of those places are gone. “It’s not quite what it used to be,” Robert said. “There’s a remnant of it.”

There is something fitting about Stryper being one of those remnants too, except they aren’t a museum piece. As I worked my way through Throne of Thorns, I was waiting for it. You can give me all the screaming vocals and harmonized guitars you want, but eventually I need the lights to dim. “Ashes to Roses” arrives. Ah… a power ballad.

Michael sees those songs as every bit as essential to Stryper as the heavier material. That combination was there early. The influences of a band like Journey was always every bit as much as Iron Maiden, and you can still hear those two worlds colliding.

Then there is “Shadow Breaker,” the album closer, which I described to them as the final boss of a video game. It feels like a song you simply can’t follow.

Michael calls tracks like it the “bookends” of an album.

“You got all the books in between, and it’s important. You need those bookends,” he said. “You instantly think, okay, that sounds like Stryper now… Those are our roots.”

The real test for a veteran band, though, is whether the new songs actually make it onto the stage. Michael told me Stryper’s set has increasingly become almost a 50/50 split between classic and newer material. Even better, audiences aren’t treating the new songs as a bathroom break.

“When we do new songs, the crowd seems to get into it as much as ‘To Hell with the Devil,’” he said.

So I eventually asked the obvious question: Is there really anything left for Stryper to prove?

Robert doesn’t think so. “I don’t know if there’s really, from my point of view, if there’s anything left to prove,” he said. “I just always want the music to be the best it can be and reach out and, you know, touch someone.”

For Robert, that cannot be separated from the calling behind the band. “It’s always been our goal and our hope that the Holy Spirit would speak through the music and speak to the audience and touch hearts,” he said. “We’ve had the honor of hearing so many beautiful stories of people telling us that.”

And that brought us back to the question I started with.

Why make album number 18 when people don’t buy albums like they used to?

Michael had an answer that should probably be heard by every artist fortunate enough to still have the opportunity to create.

“While you’re here on Earth and while you’re still able to do things, do things,” he said. “Don’t shut yourself down with comments like, ‘It’s not worth it anymore’ and ‘Why should we record? Because no one buys albums anymore.’”

When he hears bands talk that way, Michael thinks they’ve lost touch with the reason they started.

“It was for the passion of the music, the blessing of the music and the gift of music. Get back to that. Stryper still has that,” he said. “This is a gift. I can still do it. I want to do as much as I can while I’m still here.”

Robert immediately picked up the thought. Money, contracts and the business of music can start “robbing your joy” and separating you from why you picked up an instrument in the first place. “When you’re a teenager and you start playing it, you’re doing it because you love it,” Robert said. “I would just tell bands out there, try not to ever lose that love for it.”

Throne of Thorns isn’t trying to convince us they’re still 25. It isn’t an excuse to put another product on the merch table. It is a band that still loves making music, still believes it has been called to make it and still believes that music can reach somebody.

And maybe the best way to celebrate a band’s legacy isn’t always to ask them about what they did 40 years ago. Sometimes it is to listen to what they’re doing right now.

Of course, Michael and Robert stayed with me a bit longer, and with the 40th anniversary of To Hell with the Devil arriving, there was no way I was letting them leave without going back to 1986. Check back in on the anniversary – October 24, 2026 – for that portion of our conversation.

There are certain facts you hear and immediately assume someone has made a mistake.

CeCe Winans has won 18 GRAMMY Awards. She is the best-selling and most-awarded female gospel artist of all time. Her music has accumulated billions of streams and impressions. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She has sung everywhere from churches to the White House. She has spent decades as one of the most recognizable voices in Christian and gospel music. And in 2026, CeCe Winans is embarking on her first headlining arena tour.

Wait. What? Somehow, through an apparent glitch in the universe, CeCe Winans has accomplished just about everything an artist can accomplish without ever doing a headlining arena tour of her own. That oversight is finally being corrected. This October, Winans will launch the COME WORSHIP! Tour, her largest headlining run to date, taking over arenas in 16 cities with Charity Gayle, Red Worship and Terrian joining her for the multi-generational worship gathering.

And because apparently one major CeCe Winans milestone at a time isn’t enough, she’s heading into that tour with another No. 1 song. Winans’ “Worthy Of It All (Worthy)” has simultaneously reached the top spot on both the Mediabase Christian AC and Billboard Christian AC charts, adding yet another chart-topper to a run that has included “That’s My King,” “Goodness of God” and more.

“All glory belongs to God for this,” said CeCe Winans. “I’m just so grateful and humbled. This song has always been about pointing people back to Him, and seeing it resonate the way it has; that’s Him working through every person who had a hand in it.”

The song combines two modern worship favorites: “Worthy Of It All,” written by David Brymer and Ryan Hall, and “Worthy,” written by Mack Brock, Chris Brown and Steven Furtick. Released earlier this year, Winans’ version has steadily grown across radio, streaming and live audiences before reaching No. 1. It’s also happening during a season when Winans seems less interested in slowing down than finding new mountains to climb.

Her recently released The Hymns debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Gospel Albums chart, returning Winans to the sacred music that helped form her. Now she is taking that catalog, along with decades of classics and a remarkable run of new worship songs, into arenas.

And, again, we feel compelled to emphasize: for the first time as a headliner.

The COME WORSHIP! Tour begins October 8 at Heritage Bank Center in Cincinnati and travels through St. Louis, Tulsa, Fort Worth, Indianapolis-area Fishers, Cleveland, Norfolk, Greenville, Birmingham, Pensacola, Atlanta, New Orleans, Orlando, North Charleston, Tampa and Jacksonville before wrapping October 30. The scale may be new, but Winans says the purpose behind it isn’t.

“I could not be more excited that Charity Gayle, Red Worship, and Terrian will be joining me on the COME WORSHIP! Tour,” says Winans. “My prayer for this journey is that people of all ages feel welcomed and encouraged, and are reminded that when we lift up the name of Jesus, he meets us right where we are. I pray that communities will gather together, put aside our differences and worship together.”

It’s an impressive lineup in its own right. Charity Gayle brings songs including “Thank You Jesus for the Blood” and “I Speak Jesus,” while Red Worship and Terrian represent another generation of Christian artists who have grown up in a musical world CeCe Winans helped create. For them, the significance isn’t lost.

“We are absolutely buzzing with joy to hit the road this October for the ‘COME WORSHIP!’ tour. Sharing the stage with CeCe Winans; a pioneer who has paved the way for so many of us, is a dream come true, and to say we are honored would be an understatement. We are approaching this opportunity with deep humility and expectancy, eager to partner with her to lift up the name of Jesus and create an atmosphere where Heaven touches Earth,” Red Worship shared.

Terrian echoed that excitement. “I am deeply honored to be joining CeCe Winans, Charity Gayle, and Red Worship on the COME WORSHIP! Tour! I look forward to lifting up and honoring our God through song with so many of our brothers and sisters in Christ. Is it October yet?!??” There is something particularly fitting about the lineup.

CeCe’s career has now stretched long enough that the artists joining her aren’t simply peers. They are part of generations of singers and worship leaders who have followed roads she helped pave. Yet instead of the story becoming a victory lap built around nostalgia, Winans continues to release music that is competing at the very top of Christian radio right now. That’s what makes this moment more interesting than simply adding another trophy to a very full mantle.

This October, CeCe Winans is finally walking onto an arena stage with her name at the top of the bill. Consider the timeline corrected.

TOUR DATES:

• Thursday, October 8, 2026 – Cincinnati, OH – Heritage Bank Center
• Friday, October 9, 2026 – St. Louis, MO – Chaifetz Arena
• Saturday, October 10, 2026 – Tulsa, OK – BOK Center
• Sunday, October 11, 2026 – Fort Worth, TX – Dickies Arena
• Wednesday, October 14, 2026 – Fishers, IN – Fishers Event Center
• Thursday, October 15, 2026 – Cleveland, OH – Wolstein Center
• Friday, October 16, 2026 – Norfolk, VA – Chartway Arena
• Saturday, October 17, 2026 – Greenville, SC – Bon Secours Wellness Arena
• Wednesday, October 21, 2026 – Birmingham, AL – Legacy Arena at the BJCC
• Thursday, October 22, 2026 – Pensacola, FL – Pensacola Bay Center
• Friday, October 23, 2026 – Atlanta, GA – Gas South Arena
• Saturday, October 24, 2026 – New Orleans, LA – Smoothie King Center

There are certain Bible stories you have seen illustrated so many times that you almost forget you have never actually seen them.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the fiery furnace is one of those stories.

This week we got that chance to attend the premiere of Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, the latest theatrical release from EKKL Entertainment. And if the atmosphere surrounding the premiere was any indication, there is a lot of passion behind this one.

Before we get into the movie, check out our red carpet highlights below. We caught up with CCM favorites Michael W. Smith, Aaron Shust, Trevor McNevan of Thousand Foot Krutch, Tommee Profitt and several members of the cast and creative team. And stay tuned, because we have much more coming from those conversations.

Directed by brothers Matthew and Daniel Kooman, Daniel and the Fiery Furnace takes us into the opening chapters of Daniel and the Babylonian exile, with Aladdin star Mena Massoud stepping into the role of Daniel and The Chosen‘s Elijah Alexander trading his familiar role as Atticus Aemilius for the considerably bigger robes of King Nebuchadnezzar.

And those two are the reason this movie works as well as it does.

But wait… Daniel Isn’t in the Fiery Furnace

First, let’s deal with the title.

If you know your Bible, Daniel and the Fiery Furnace might initially cause a little head scratching. Daniel, of course, isn’t one of the guys who gets tossed into the furnace. That distinction belongs to Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.

But the movie isn’t simply retelling the furnace story. It is telling the larger story surrounding it, adapting the first three chapters of Daniel and establishing Daniel’s relationship with Nebuchadnezzar, his friends and the empire in which these young men suddenly find themselves living.

Once you see the movie, the title makes considerably more sense. This is Daniel’s world, and the furnace becomes the defining test of faith within it.

Mena Massoud is probably the face most mainstream audiences will immediately recognize. He starred opposite Will Smith as Aladdin in Disney’s 2019 live-action remake, and here he brings a real emotional strength to Daniel. As a dad of twin girls who were the perfect age when Aladdin came out, I’ve probably seen Massoud’s performance hundreds of times at this point. So I already knew what he could do and I wasn’t surprised when he absolutely knocked it out of the park.

I was less familiar with Elijah Alexander coming into this film and he blew me away. He delivers an award worthy performance. Alexander, who viewers of The Chosen know as the Roman investigator Atticus, gives Nebuchadnezzar far more humanity than the standard Bible-movie villain treatment.

His Nebuchadnezzar is powerful, intimidating and deeply proud, but Alexander also finds the insecurity underneath all of it. This is a king with a fragile ego, and occasionally one who is more relatable than you might expect him to be.

That makes his relationship with Daniel fascinating.

Alexander and Massoud have undeniable chemistry, and the movie is at its strongest when the two of them are simply allowed to play opposite one another. You begin to understand why Nebuchadnezzar would be intrigued by him, trust him, become frustrated with him and, at times, seemingly have no idea what to do with him.

Alexander and Massoud don’t play these roles as Sunday School cartoons. They play them as humans. That’s much more interesting.

The film was shot on location in India, and visually, Daniel and the Fiery Furnace doesn’t always attempt the ultra-polished photorealism we have come to expect from $200 million Hollywood productions.

There are moments where the effects or production design reveal the realities of making an ambitious biblical epic without an unlimited budget.

Oddly enough, I didn’t always mind it.

At times, the movie takes on an almost painted quality. Babylon can feel slightly heightened or dreamlike, which actually works with material most of us have spent our entire lives visualizing only in our imaginations. We don’t actually know what Daniel’s world felt like from moment to moment. We have Scripture, history and archaeology, but every illustrated Bible, and sermon has helped us build our own mental version.

The film gives those names faces and those places walls without completely robbing the story of that imaginative quality. I also appreciated the filmmakers’ willingness to let the ancient world sound different from ours. While the movie is largely in English, other languages weave their way through the story, including Hebrew in moments of prayer. Those touches help remind us that these weren’t English-speaking Bible characters waiting around to deliver familiar lines.

They were people displaced into a foreign empire.

There is also a surprisingly strong CCM connection running through this entire production.

Michael W. Smith serves as an executive producer, but his involvement actually began with his son, composer Tyler Michael Smith.

Tyler wrote the film’s original score, and Michael has said he first encountered the project while watching his son work on the music. What he heard, and then what he saw of the movie, convinced him there was something special happening here.

It’s a pretty great full-circle moment for anyone who knows Smitty’s love of cinematic music.

And then the credits roll. Suddenly Trevor McNevan of Thousand Foot Krutch and TobyMac come crashing into ancient Babylon with “Walk Thru Fire.”

That should absolutely not work. You have just spent nearly two hours in a biblical period piece and suddenly Christian rock’s most recognizable voices arrives.

And then… boom. It works.

“Walk Thru Fire,” written by McNevan and produced by McNevan and Micah Kuiper, plays over the end credits and somehow pulls the themes of the film directly into the modern world.

It is a reminder that the furnace is not really the point of the story.

Faithfulness when you’re standing in front of it is.

Part of the fun for us was getting to experience this one with the people who made it.

The Franklin premiere had that increasingly rare feeling where cast, crew, musicians, friends and family weren’t simply showing up to promote a product. You could feel how personally invested many of them were in what was on the screen.

Biblical filmmaking is difficult.

Audiences already know the ending. Many know individual verses by heart. Everyone has their own mental picture of what these people looked like and how these moments unfolded.

Daniel and the Fiery Furnace doesn’t attempt to reinvent the reason these stories have endured for thousands of years.

Instead, it gives us an opportunity to sit in a dark theater and experience them again.

And when Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego finally stand before that furnace, knowing exactly what comes next doesn’t make the moment any less powerful.

Daniel and the Fiery Furnace opens in theaters September 18. Keep watching CCM Magazine for much more from our red carpet conversations with the cast, filmmakers and artists behind the movie.

On October 2, one of my true heroes, Glenn Kaiser, will play his first Nashville show in decades. It’s a small line in the world’s festival calendar, but for anyone who came up through the world Kaiser helped build, it’s a significant one. 

Kaiser and his wife, Wendi, fronted Resurrection Band, one of the earliest bands to bring hard rock into Christian music spaces that, in the 1970s, mostly weren’t ready for it. The band’s uncompromising sound and lyrics made them pioneers of what would become known as Jesus rock, years ahead of an industry that eventually caught up to them. When the Christian festival and label world didn’t know what to do with a band like Rez, the Kaisers didn’t wait around. As co-founders of Jesus People USA, an intentional Christian community in Chicago, they and their fellow pilgrims built their own recording studio, record label, and, eventually, the Cornerstone Festival, which ran for 28 years and became one of the most influential faith-rooted music and arts festivals anywhere. Cornerstone gave early stages to artists who went on to shape the wider music world, including Switchfoot, Sixpence None the Richer, and P.O.D. 

Cornerstone is personal for me. I was at the first one in 1984,right before I turned 14. I started True Tunes there in the late ’80s, joined the festival’s staff in 2000, and spent most of the 2000s as the main stage MC until the festival ended. I directed a documentary about it, Cornerstone Festival: 20 Years and Counting. So, when I say having Glenn Kaiser play a show the night before Wild Bison Festival is an honor, I mean it specifically: a little bit of Cornerstone’s DNA gets to be part of what we’re building here in Nashville.

The weekend starts Friday, October 2, with a free conversation at noon at the Museum of Christian and Gospel Music, where I’ll interview Glenn and Wendi about their journey. That night, Glenn plays a rare solo set on cigar box and acoustic guitars at The Well in Green Hills, with my band The Wayside opening – just like we used to do in Chicago. A very small number of tickets are available for $20 (get them here), and the show is sponsored by the museum. 

Saturday, October 3, starting at 11:30 am, The Wild Bison Festival takes over Lipscomb University’s Bison Square: free, all day, two stages, headlined by Fulton Lee and presented in partnership with The Arcadian Wild, with sets from Broomestix, Pomegranate, Jolie Wing, and more, alongside student films and poetry. Glenn will lead an early seminar on the role music and community played in the Jesus movement of the ’60s and ’70s. The genres on the two stages span rock, pop, Americana, singer-songwriter, and country. What connects them isn’t a market category. It’s artists working with integrity and a spiritual point of view, whether that lands them in the “Christian” section of a record store or a playlist or not. Follow Wild Bison on Instagram @WildBisonFest for all the details.  

Thanks are due to the Museum of Christian and Gospel Music, International Justice Mission, and the students and staff of Lipscomb’s School of Music, the Music Industry Studies program, and Red Dog Productions (Lipscomb’s live music practicum), who make it all possible. 

 

Sometimes you schedule an interview. Sometimes the news just walks up to you.

Last night, Amanda and I were at the Nashville premiere of Daniel and the Fiery Furnace when we ran into our friend Tommee Profitt. With The Birth of a King Live already on the horizon, I decided to ask him the question I have been asking for months:

When are we getting The Resurrection of a King Live?

Tommee looked at me and immediately asked, “WHEN IS THIS GOING OUT?”

That was a pretty good indication something was up.

Then he broke the news.

“I’m announcing The Resurrection of a King LIVE in concert at the Grand Ole Opry,” Profitt told us. “You’re the FIRST ONE to hear about it!”

So now that Tommee has officially made the announcement, we can finally share our little backstage scoop: The Resurrection of a King is coming to life for one night only at Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry on March 24, 2027.

And Tommee is feeling just about every emotion possible.

“I’m so excited and terrified and all the things,” he told us. “And it’s happening.”

For anyone who has followed Profitt’s massive cinematic Christmas project The Birth of a King, the move feels like the natural next chapter. When CCM Magazine featured Tommee in our Cover Story, we went deep into the unlikely journey behind The Birth of a King and how a producer known for creating enormous cinematic worlds turned the Christmas story into something that has become a defining piece of his career.

But Profitt knew there was another half of that story to tell.

“I truly never thought this would happen… but here we are,” Profitt said in announcing the show. “After The Birth Of A King, I knew I had to tell the other half of the story. It was just gonna be an album.”

Then he heard what the music could become outside the studio.

While filming performances with a real orchestra, choir and artists, Profitt experienced the music at full scale. He told us that moment gave him the vision for what The Resurrection of a King could be live.

“This is how the music needs to be heard,” he recalled thinking. “It needs to be in a room with humans praising upward with God in the middle of it,” Profitt told us. “That’s what it’s meant for.”

Profitt’s music is built for scale. Huge orchestration, massive percussion, choirs and cinematic arrangements are part of the experience, but The Resurrection of a King gives all of that spectacle a very specific destination. This isn’t simply a collection of songs designed to sound enormous. It is the continuation of the story that began with The Birth of a King.

And now, for one night, it gets a room big enough to breathe.

“The Resurrection of a King is coming to life, LIVE IN CONCERT, at the Grand Ole Opry,” Profitt announced. “ONE NIGHT ONLY. March 24, 2027.”

Ticket presale begins September 21 at 10 a.m. CT, with Profitt encouraging fans to join his text list for the earliest opportunity to purchase tickets before the general on-sale.

If you want to understand how we got here, go back and watch our CCM Magazine Cover Story with Tommee Profitt about the creation and unlikely journey of The Birth of a King.

Then get ready for the other half of the story.

Because on March 24, 2027, The Resurrection of a King comes alive.

Watch the full Tommee Profitt Cover Story HERE

 

When Rock the Universe at Universal Studios Florida recently announced its lineup with 23-year-old Josiah Queen sitting in a headlining spot, we saw a few versions of the same comment: “Where are the headliners?” I think it’s time for some of us to take off our old-people blinders. I say that with love. And as someone who has spent most of his life listening to Christian music.

One of the fascinating things happening in Christian music right now is that the definition of a “big artist” is changing very quickly. If your mental list of headliners was formed 10, 15…or let’s be honest 30+ years ago, it can be easy to look at a festival poster filled with younger names and assume the star power has disappeared.

Your vision may be blurrier, but the movement is as clear as it’s ever been. I’d even argue that it’s often superior in quality and content. This week brought a pretty substantial piece of evidence.

Josiah Queen, the unassuming 23-year-old singer-songwriter from the Tampa, Florida area, just announced the Damascus Road Tour, a 17-date run across the United States and Canada in spring 2027. And these aren’t clubs, theaters, or mega Churches even.

They’re arenas. BOK Center. Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Van Andel Arena. Spectrum Center. Target Center. T-Mobile Center. Honda Center. Dickies Arena.

Seventeen dates. Seventeen arena shows.

That’s a pretty significant leap for an artist who still carries himself more like the kid who grew up loving Christian music than someone attempting to manufacture himself into its next superstar. And perhaps that’s part of why this is working.

Queen’s songs don’t feel particularly engineered. His voice isn’t polished into anonymity. The music can feel raw, personal and sometimes almost homemade compared with the enormous production surrounding much of modern pop. Yet the numbers SHOULD be impossible to ignore.

Queen has surpassed 2.1 billion global streams. His breakout “The Prodigal” has crossed 200 million streams. “Dusty Bibles” became his first Billboard Hot 100 hit and earned RIAA Gold certification in less than six months. It also reached Spotify’s Viral 50 in more than 15 countries.

“Can’t Steal My Joy” went to No. 1 at Christian radio. “Demons” did it again, while crossing 100 million streams. He’s already sold more than 260,000 tickets on his headline tours and amassed more than 3 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook.

Now he’s going into arenas.

At some point, “rising artist” stops adequately describing what is happening and maybe you need to catch up. This is where those Rock the Universe comments become interesting.

When people asked where the headliners were, they weren’t necessarily being dismissive. They may genuinely not have known. That’s the silo problem.

You can be extremely familiar with one version of hit music and almost completely unaware that someone in another corner of it is selling hundreds of thousands of tickets.

There is a new generation of artists emerging who aren’t embarrassed by Christian music’s history. They listened to it. They were shaped by it. Now they’re making their own version of it for an audience that consumes music very differently than their parents did.

Queen isn’t the only one. These aren’t hypothetical “next generation” names waiting for the old guard to eventually hand them the keys. The audience has already arrived.

The Damascus Road Tour begins April 8, 2027, and includes 17 arena dates across the United States and Canada. An exclusive ticket presale begins September 14, with the public onsale beginning September 18 at 10 a.m. local time.

TOUR DATES:
Thursday, April 8, 2027 – Tulsa, OK – BOK Center

Friday, April 9, 2027 – St. Louis, MO – Chaifetz Arena

Saturday, April 10, 2027 – Indianapolis, IN – Gainbridge Fieldhouse

Sunday, April 11, 2027 – Grand Rapids, MI – Van Andel Arena

Tuesday, April 13, 2027 – Toronto, ON – Coca-Cola Coliseum

Thursday, April 15, 2027 – Worcester, MA – DCU Center

Friday, April 16, 2027 – Hershey, PA – GIANT Center

Saturday, April 17, 2027 – Charlotte, NC – Spectrum Center

Sunday, April 18, 2027 – Duluth, GA – Gas South Arena

Friday, April 23, 2027 – Hoffman Estates, IL – NOW Arena

Saturday, April 24, 2027 – Minneapolis, MN – Target Center

Sunday, April 25, 2027 – Kansas City, MO – T-Mobile Center

Thursday, April 29, 2027 – Anaheim, CA – Honda Center

Friday, April 30, 2027 – San Diego, CA – Viejas Arena

Saturday, May 1, 2027 – Glendale, AZ – Desert Diamond Arena

Friday, May 7, 2027 – Cedar Park, TX – H-E-B Center at Cedar Park

Saturday, May 8, 2027 – Fort Worth, TX – Dickies Arena

Universal Orlando Resort has revealed the lineup for Rock the Universe 2027, and CCM Magazine readers are going to recognize quite a few familiar faces.

Six artists featured in CCM Magazine Cover Stories are headed to Universal Studios Florida for the massive two-night Christian music festival: Jamie MacDonald, 1K Phew, Franni Cash, Katy Nichole, Megan Woods and CAIN.

Rock the Universe returns January 22-23, 2027, bringing Christian music to Universal Studios Florida after dark with a lineup that also includes Elevation Worship, Josiah Queen, Benjamin William Hastings, Rave Jesus, Strings & Heart and more.

Friday, January 22

Friday night will be headlined by Elevation Worship, with CCM Cover Story artists Jamie MacDonald and 1K Phew joining the bill.

The full Friday lineup includes:

Elevation Worship
Jamie MacDonald
Rave Jesus
Benjamin William Hastings
Strings & Heart
1K Phew
Joseph O’Brien
Maddi Jane
John Allan

Saturday, January 23

Saturday brings another particularly CCM-heavy lineup, with Katy Nichole, Franni Cash, CAIN and Megan Woods all taking the stage alongside headliner Josiah Queen.

The full Saturday lineup includes:

Josiah Queen
Katy Nichole
Franni Cash
CAIN
Megan Woods
gio.
Peter Burton
Sam Wesley
Torey D’Shaun

For CCM Magazine, the lineup feels a little like a Cover Story reunion. Jamie MacDonald, 1K Phew, Franni Cash, Katy Nichole, Megan Woods and CAIN have each sat down with us to go beyond the songs and share the stories, faith and experiences shaping their music.

Now, fans will have the chance to see all six during one weekend at Universal Orlando.

Rock the Universe combines its concerts and worship experiences with access to attractions throughout Universal Studios Florida, including Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts, Revenge of the Mummy, Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem, Illumination’s Villain-Con Minion Blast and Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon.

The weekend concludes Sunday, January 24, with a special morning worship service.

Tickets and vacation packages go on sale September 15, including single-night admission and the popular Rock Your Weekend ticket, which combines the Rock the Universe festivities with daytime access to Universal Orlando’s theme parks.

Rock the Universe 2027 takes place January 22-23 at Universal Studios Florida in Orlando.

For CCM fans, there may be no better place to see this many Cover Story alumni together in one weekend.

Wondering what Rock the Universe is actually like? CCM Magazine was on the ground at Universal Studios Florida for last year’s event, taking in the concerts, crowds, rides and the unique experience of turning a theme park into a massive Christian music festival for the weekend. Read our full Rock the Universe review and see why we think it’s worth the trip.

https://www.ccmmagazine.com/news/jesus-takes-center-stage-at-universal-orlando-resort/

Twenty-five years later, there are still certain songs I cannot hear without being transported back to the days and weeks after September 11, 2001.

Music was everywhere. It was at memorial services. It was underneath television montages of firefighters walking through smoke and rubble. It was coming out of car radios while Americans were still trying to comprehend what had happened. Songs written years earlier suddenly meant something entirely different. Lyrics that had nothing to do with terrorism, Ground Zero or national grief were repurposed because we needed them.

We needed language for something that didn’t have words yet. Some of those songs were explicitly patriotic. Others weren’t. A love song like Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” and the hard rock anthem of P.O.D.’s “Alive” became attached to the moment.

But one of the songs that became most inseparable from that time had already been released and was slowly climbing the charts. Five for Fighting’s “Superman (It’s Not Easy).”

I recently sat down with my friend John Ondrasik, the man behind Five for Fighting, as we approached the 25th anniversary of September 11. John and I have known each other for years, and our conversations often revolve around current events and what is happening right now. This time, I wanted to go backward. Because the story of “Superman” is really a story about what can happen when a song stops belonging entirely to the person who wrote it.

WATCH: Logan Sekulow’s full conversation with John Ondrasik

Before “Superman” became associated with firefighters and first responders, John was a young artist trying to convince his record company to release a piano ballad.

“It’s funny, I had a song called Easy Tonight that was a moderate hit, and the record company said, you get one more swing,” John told me. “And I’d seen Superman’s reaction in shows and people forget, you know, it wasn’t 1977 with the piano all over the radio. It was little boy bands, grunge music.”

The label wasn’t exactly thrilled about betting that swing on “Superman.”

“But I’m like, if I’m going down with one song, I’m going to go down with Superman.”

It worked.

The song began gaining traction, including in some unexpected places. John remembers getting a call informing him that “Superman” had gone to Number One in the Philippines.

“And I’m like, Philippines, let’s go.”

By September 2001, it was becoming a global hit. John had traveled to Europe to promote it and was in London on September 11.

“And of course, when the first plane hit, I got calls, turn on the TV, and then, like everybody else, when the second plane hit, I just started calling everybody I knew in New York City and was in shock and it took ten days to get back to the States.”

What John didn’t know was that while he was trying to get home, his song was changing. The song is about the man underneath the cape. It’s about vulnerability, responsibility and the weight of being the person everyone expects to be strong.

Suddenly America was watching real people do exactly that. Firefighters. Police officers. EMTs. Rescue workers. Ordinary people running toward something every instinct should have told them to run away from.

Television and radio outlets began pairing “Superman” with images and stories of those men and women. John wasn’t orchestrating it. He didn’t even know it was happening.

“I didn’t really realize till I got back how many news organizations have been using Superman to recognize those heroes that ran into those buildings,” he told me. “And for a young guy who just got used to hearing his song on the radio, it was pretty overwhelming.”

Nobody held a meeting and selected the official song America needed. Nobody commissioned John to write something about the terrorist attack. The audience heard something in a song that already existed and collectively gave it another meaning. John understands that now in a way he couldn’t have possibly understood then.

“It’s hard to wrap my head around it,” he told me.  “Music, as you mentioned, was very critical at that time. And songs have a way of providing solace, recognizing amazing people who do heroic things, something we can all sing together.”

Then came Madison Square Garden. The Concert for New York City was one of those events that is almost impossible to adequately explain to someone who didn’t live through that period. The lineup alone was staggering. Paul McCartney. The Who. David Bowie. Billy Joel. Elton John. Eric Clapton. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Bon Jovi. John Mellencamp.

And suddenly, Five for Fighting.

When I first saw John perform around that era, he was playing a side stage. Then, almost overnight, he’s at Madison Square Garden surrounded by the biggest artists alive.

“It was surreal,” he said. “As you said, if it was any other day to be on the same stage at Madison Square Garden with virtually every one of my living icons, right, would have been beyond a dream come true. Of course, that wasn’t what it was about.”

John remembers arriving and finding his trailer next to The Who. He was already nervous. Then he started looking through the show’s itinerary, expecting the new guy with the piano song to be somewhere near the beginning.

“I kept turning the pages and I didn’t see my name, and I’m like, oh, good, they forgot me because I’m so nervous.”

Then he reached the end.

“And I turned to the last page and it’s like, you know, Mellencamp, Billy Joel and Elton John… five for fighting… Janet Jackson, Paul McCartney.d.”

But the famous names aren’t what John remembers most. It was the people in the audience. “When you meet the families who lost loved ones, when you stood with the firefighters, I really kind of immerse myself in that.”

These weren’t anonymous faces watching a benefit concert on television.  “Those folks, virtually all of them had been down at Ground Zero, digging through rubble, for 30 days again, it gave me, a unique perspective.”

John told me the experience changed the trajectory of his career. “I think it changed, frankly, kind of the rest of my career because I saw how music truly matters.” Then he put it even more simply: “I saw how how music can really change the world and do things nothing else can.”

For John, “Superman” never completely returned to being simply another song in the setlist. Each September, it gets heavier.

“Every time we get around to this time of year, we’re typically out with my string quartet. And as we get closer and closer to 9/11, the song carries more weight.”

This year, for the 25th anniversary, he told me he plans to be in New York participating in events with firefighters, families and other heroes. But for “Superman,” September 11 wasn’t the final chapter of its story.

It was really the beginning of a song finding lives its author could never have predicted. After the October 7 attacks in Israel, “Superman” found another audience in unimaginable pain. Music had once again intersected with terrorism, grief, heroism and people desperately trying not to allow the world to forget.

John told me a new version of “Superman” began with a request from the mother of a hostage.

“We did a new version of Superman that was initiated, actually by the mother of Alon who’d been hostage over 700 days. She asked me, ‘can we do something musically to put the spotlight back on the hostages’?”

For John, the connection was immediate.

“And I thought Superman would be a good to remind folks that for our Jewish friends, October 7th is their 9/11.”

They made the video. It traveled around the world. John began showing it during his concerts. And each night he would tell the audience about one particular hostage, Alon Ohel, a gifted pianist. “At the end of every show I would say, you know, I hope and pray for the day when I can sit down and play Superman with Alon, who’s a fantastic piano player.”

Night after night, people applauded. But John admits he didn’t really believe that moment was likely to happen. “If you would have asked me, what are the odds of that? I would have said very, very low.”

And then it happened. Alon came home. And somehow this little piano song that a record company once wasn’t sure it wanted to release found itself on another extraordinary stage.

John Ondrasik and Alon Ohel sat together aboard the USS Nimitz and played “Superman” in celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States of America. John doesn’t have a complicated explanation for what that moment meant to him.

“It was a miracle. And and I can’t I can’t say anything more. You know, miracles do exist. And that was a miracle.”

Twenty-five years earlier, John had watched his song become attached to heroes he had never met.

Now he was sitting beside a man whose story had become another symbol of survival.

“Alon would not be alive without America,” John said. “So I thought having him sitting on that deck of the historic USS Nimitz playing for me spoke to a lot of people and was very significant.”

It was a beautiful moment.

 

It is a full-circle story nobody could have written in 2001.

John has now played “Superman” at Madison Square Garden for the families and firefighters of September 11. He’s performed for American troops through the USO. He’s taken his music to Israel and Hostage Square. He has watched a song about a tired and human superhero become a soundtrack for actual heroes, grieving families, soldiers and hostages.

“I always thought nothing would come close to The Concert for New York,” he told me. “But, you know, playing Superman and my song Okay, at Hostage Square in Israel. Actually, the night that Iran bombed for the first time, I mean, that experience again, it’s amazing where these songs take you.”

A songwriter can tell us what inspired a song. We can analyze the lyrics. We can document where it was recorded and when it was released. But artists don’t always get to decide what their songs ultimately mean to us. Sometimes history does that.

Sometimes a song you heard a hundred times suddenly plays underneath an image you will never forget, and from that moment forward you can never hear it the same way again.

On this 25th anniversary of September 11, there will rightly be countless retrospectives about what happened that morning, the nearly 3,000 lives lost, the firefighters and first responders who ran toward danger, the families whose lives changed forever and the America that emerged from those days.

But I also hope we remember the role music played.

Because for a while, songs became our unified voice. We didn’t all know what to say. But we could listen together. We could sing together.

“I saw how music truly matters.” Twenty-five years later, I don’t think there’s a better way to say it.

Five For Fighting with his String Quartet start their Fall tour September 19th.

For Tour Dates visit: https://www.fiveforfighting.com/tour

SKILLET: AFTER THE STORM

On paper, Skillet shouldn’t work. That sounds insulting, but I mean it as one of the highest compliments I can give them. Rock bands rarely get 30-year careers, and the ones that do certainly don’t tend to chart a trajectory that keeps climbing.

Thirty years into Skillet, I can turn on UFC Freedom 250 and there they are. WWE used “Legendary” to open Monday Night Raw for years. “Monster,” released more than a decade into the band’s career, has become a streaming behemoth surpassing 4 billion streams. The audience is filled with kids who were not alive when Comatose came out, now screaming those songs next to their parents and, sometimes, their grandparents.

That is not how this is supposed to work. John Cooper knows it. “No one is more surprised that we’re still a band than us,” he tells me. “I’m like… why would anybody listen to this? I’m still very shocked. We’re absolutely blessed.” He laughs, but he doesn’t dodge what he believes is behind it. “You can see God’s hand in it, for sure. There’s a lot of things that shouldn’t have worked.”

 

Particularly, he says, when Skillet began crossing into mainstream rock. There were doors they had repeatedly tried to push open and couldn’t. “I firmly believe those roadblocks can only be moved by the providential hand of God,” John says. “Because we tried before then to move those roadblocks. And it was impossible.” But even now, the past isn’t really the story. Because while we’re here to celebrate 30 years of Skillet and 20 years of Comatose, the band has arrived carrying fresh wounds. Some of them came from the last place they expected: the church. And those wounds have produced one of the most bruised records of Skillet’s career.

There was another choice John made during the band’s crossover years that, in retrospect, seems remarkably important. He decided he wasn’t going to pretend. When “Monster” began connecting with mainstream rock radio, John knew the questions were coming. Were they really Christians? Was this actually a Christian band? He had watched other artists navigate those waters in different ways and while he says he is not interested in criticizing anyone else’s decisions, he knew what he wanted from Skillet.

“As a Christian music fan, I know what I want to see a Christian artist say in that interview,” he recalls. So, he decided to answer before anyone could make the question embarrassing. “We absolutely are proud to be a Jesus freak.” He remembers an early mainstream interview where someone essentially asked if the rumors were true. Christians? Really? “Oh, absolutely, we’re Christians,” John responded. “Being a Christian is so much more important to me than being a rock star. I play music to express my love for God.”

The interviewer, John remembers, was stunned. John describes it as “smacking the bully” on the first day of school. It is a very John Cooper analogy. But Seth Morrison, who has now spent nearly 16 years beside him on guitar, sees something deeper. “People sense authenticity,” Seth tells me. “I think even people that maybe [are] atheists, they sense the authenticity of who we are, and I think they respect it.”

That word came up before the band ever walked into our studio. Before interviews like this, I will usually text a few people who know an artist. Producers. Friends. People who have worked with them. Not because I’m hunting dirt, but because 30 minutes before cameras roll is a bad time to discover some bizarre dynamic everyone else already knows about.

With Skillet, I kept getting essentially the same answer. They’re real. What you think you’re getting is what you’re getting. That becomes much easier to understand once all four of them are sitting together.

“Your first prayer should be who you get to do it with because that’s truly what’s life changing.”
– Seth Morrison

John may be the loudest and most recognizable voice of Skillet, but spend any meaningful time around the band and you quickly realize that Korey Cooper’s fingerprints are everywhere.

John offers a nautical explanation. “Imagine a ship where I am the captain without Korey being the rudder. Would anybody want to be on that ship?” Korey smiles. “It would be fun.”

Maybe briefly. Korey joined Skillet because the band needed a keyboard player and, conveniently, she was already there. Her attitude is and was “whatever we need to do to make this work.” That sentence may be the best description of her role in Skillet for the last three decades. As technology changed, she learned it. As the band’s production expanded, she expanded with it. Keyboards became programming. Programming became production. On their new EP, After the Storm, Korey produced half of the EP.

“I’m just kind of here to do whatever is necessary,” she says.

Jen Ledger has watched that up close since joining Skillet at 18.

She remembers Korey raising two young children on the road, homeschooling them during the day, producing music, playing a rock show and then coming back to read the Bible and pray with them at night.

Now in her 30s, Jen has enough perspective to realize how insane that was. Nearly two decades in, Jen can still find herself mentally transported back to the 18-year-old who climbed onto the Skillet bus unsure whether she belonged there at all.

“Sometimes I still feel like the 18-year-old that’s like, I can’t play drums and I can’t be in front of people,” she admits. The thing Jen was convinced she couldn’t do became the thing God asked her to keep doing. “The one thing I thought I couldn’t do is play drums in front of people,” she says. “Here I am.”

And here is no small thing. “It’s just amazing to see what God can do with a willing heart and someone who’s willing to obey,” she says, “and how His grace meets you in where you think you’re the weakest.”

“Being a Christian is so much more important to me than being a rock star. I play music to express my love for God.”
– John Cooper

Nearly two decades later, the shows can still leave her exhausted, but when she thinks about what Korey was carrying during those early years, her perspective changes quickly.

“I am so tired just playing the show,” she says, getting emotional. “I cannot wrap my head around the capacity that [Korey] had… Me and Seth aren’t the same because we joined Skillet,” she says, crediting John and Korey’s grounding in Scripture during confusing seasons of life and faith.

Seth goes even further. “Your first prayer should be who you get to do it with,” Seth says, “because that’s truly what’s life changing.” He pauses. “Our lives are forever different by being around the Coopers, truthfully. I’m a different father. I’m a different husband. Beyond a career.”

For a band with this much history, Skillet has rarely seemed interested in becoming a nostalgia act. The first five albums are not exactly dominating the modern set list. There has always been another door to push through. But Comatose is turning 20, and even Skillet has to admit this one deserves a look back.

The funny part is that one of the defining albums of the band’s career was made while the entire enterprise was hanging by a thread. In 2006, John and Korey’s children were very young. The band did not have enough money to stop touring while recording. They would drive to Chicago to work in the studio, then load out and play shows on the weekends.

John was still selling merchandise. Still packing the trailer. At one point, he had to learn to drive the bus himself. Then their label situation nearly imploded. Lava Records was effectively being dismantled. Almost every band was getting dropped. Skillet somehow survived.

Their A&R representative was one of the last survivors at the label and one of his only demands in his new position was to keep Skillet. John remembers thinking: Why? They weren’t selling much. There was a very real understanding that if the next record failed, this might be it.

“It usually is a silent scream. People that feel that I have nothing left to live for.”
– John Cooper

“I’ll be a youth minister,” John remembers thinking. They were already nearly broke, so they decided to go for broke. Even with an incredible belief in the material that would make up Comatose, that did not mean anybody would buy it. Jen wasn’t in Skillet when Comatose was recorded, but she remembers hearing “Rebirthing” for the first time back in Coventry, England.

“What is this?” she remembers thinking. “This is one of the best things I’ve ever heard.”

She would stand in front of the mirror pretending she was playing drums in Skillet. Today, you can buy a ticket and watch her do it for real. But Jen thinks the album’s staying power goes deeper than its riffs.

“I feel like Skillet creates a home for all the people that don’t feel seen in the world,” she says. “They’re not the cool kids at school. They don’t feel like they have much to bring. It’s like they feel seen and understood and like they have a place where they belong.”

Comatose, she says, captured that particularly well. Korey calls the Skillet formula the “happy sads.” There can be hope in the lyrics and still a sadness underneath. That description also happens to be a pretty good bridge to 2026.

Twenty years later, Skillet found itself writing from a darker place again. This time, though, the wounds weren’t 20-year-old memories. They were fresh. “Not every single day is like you’re in a joy parade.” he says. Someone gets cancer. Someone loses a job. Depression shows up. Addiction shows up. A relationship collapses.

Or someone you trusted betrays you.

“This particular EP, because of what we’ve been through the last few years, is leaning towards, let’s just talk about the hard side,” John says. Not hopelessness. But not pretending either.

“I’m not okay. I know I will be okay, and I am reaching out to God saying, I need your help.”

While John, Korey, Jen, and Seth do not name names, they are clear about where at least some of the pain behind After the Storm came from. The church.

More specifically, leaders they trusted.

“Part of what we have been through are things I never thought I would see,” John says. “Church leadership, people that I’ve known for 30 years that I thought we were on the same page, end up treating people extremely abusively.”

He describes leaders unwilling to accept challenge, unwilling to answer questions of doctrine and, in his view, expecting people to simply fall in line. John Cooper is not exactly known for ambiguity about his beliefs. If you have followed him for five minutes, you know that.

Which is what made the next part of our conversation so striking.

Because rather than using his own experience to harden his posture toward Christians who have deconstructed their faith, it seems to have given him more sympathy for them.

“I think that gives a little bit of credibility to so many people we have seen completely deconstruct and leave the faith and say it’s the church’s fault,” he says.

John is quick to add that he does not want them to leave Christianity.

“I wish they didn’t leave the faith. I wish they didn’t deconstruct, and I pray they come back.”

But then he says something I think needs to be heard as clearly as he said it.

“Their suffering more than likely was real.”

He continues:

“They probably saw something that was so gross that they never expected to see a pastor do that. And they went, well, this isn’t real, then maybe nothing is real.”

For a band that has spent 30 years boldly proclaiming its faith, that is not a small acknowledgment.

John does not surrender his convictions to make it.

He just refuses to dismiss the wound.

“I do understand their suffering,” he says. “And that’s an important thing to say.”

Later, he puts the betrayal in even starker terms.

“My pagan friends wouldn’t do this to me.”

There it is.

The storm.

Not an abstract theological exercise. Not merely internet criticism. People they trusted did things they never imagined those people would do. And Skillet had to figure out what faith looked like afterward. After the Storm does not sound like a victory lap.

“I’m not okay. I know I will be okay, and I am reaching out to God saying, I need your help.”
– John Cooper

There are flashes that longtime listeners may recognize, including hints of the industrial textures older fans associate with eras like Alien Youth. But emotionally, these songs live somewhere darker.

Seth’s favorite is the title track.

He believes there is a generation of Skillet listeners hungry for the songs that say the thing rock music has always been particularly good at saying:

“I’m not okay.”

Comatose was filled with those kinds of moments.

So is this.

“I think that rock music should be vulnerable,” John says. “That’s how I like it anyway.”

Korey talks about Christianity’s “already, not yet” tension. The belief that God’s kingdom is real while suffering is also very much real.

“You can prosper in terrible suffering,” she says. She points to Daniel. God was with him. He was also still in the lion’s den. Skillet isn’t announcing that everything worked out exactly the way they hoped. It is the sound of learning that faithfulness and pain can occupy the same room.

That is why “Scream” makes sense as the song leading this era. Korey produced it, which John immediately makes sure everybody knows. “She really crushed it.”

The song touches social media, isolation, condemnation and the experience of being surrounded by noise while feeling completely alone.

John describes the scream at the center of it as something that may never actually make a sound.

“It usually is a silent scream,” he says. “People that feel that I have nothing left to live for.”

The song sits in that darkness, but it does not stay there. That has always been the trademark of Skillet. The riffs can be violent. The subject matter can be bleak. The feelings can get ugly.

But somewhere, even if it is only a pinhole, light gets in.

Somehow the graph still points up. But maybe After the Storm reveals something more important about why. Skillet’s story was never that the storm didn’t come. It’s that they kept going after it did.

John and Korey Cooper open up about two decades of Comatose, the pain and betrayal behind After the Storm, and why Skillet’s most compelling chapter may still be ahead.

Multi-platinum rock powerhouse Skillet takes center stage as the cover story for the September issue of CCM Magazine, with the complete cover experience to be unveiled on September 1.

Marking nearly 30 years since Skillet’s formation and 20 years since the release of the band’s landmark album Comatose, the deeply personal CCM cover conversation traces the group’s extraordinary journey while turning the focus toward what comes next.

John and Korey Cooper speak candidly with CCM’s Logan Sekulow about Skillet’s history, the enduring influence of Comatose and the difficult experiences that inspired the band’s forthcoming independent EP, After the Storm. The vulnerable conversation explores pain, betrayal, perseverance and the faith that carried the band through one of its most challenging seasons.

“We had a blast with Logan and his team at CCM,” said Skillet frontman John Cooper. “What a great interview and opportunity to discuss the new music, and talk about our history and how grateful we are to still be doing rock ’n roll. Excited for our fans to check this out.”

The September cover experience also includes an exclusive performance presented against a dramatic visual backdrop created to reflect the raw power and emotional weight of Skillet’s new chapter.

“There are very few bands where you can celebrate 30 years and the most compelling part of the story is still what comes next,” said CCM Magazine’s Logan Sekulow. “It was an honor to lead Skillet through this journey, from 20 years of Comatose to the pain, betrayal and enduring faith behind After the Storm. They trusted us with an incredibly vulnerable conversation, and I’m proud CCM gets to celebrate where they’ve been while helping tell this very different new chapter.”

“Getting to help shape how we visually told this chapter of their story was incredibly special,” added CCM Magazine’s Amanda Sekulow. “We built the performance around this massive rock formation, almost like they were emerging from a cave, because I wanted it to feel raw, strong and a little otherworldly, while still letting Skillet be Skillet. To go from growing up with their music to now directing and styling a CCM cover and performance around them was genuinely an honor.”

The feature arrives as Skillet prepares to release the six-song After the Storm EP on October 9. Produced by David Cowell and Korey Cooper, the project returns the band to its heavier musical roots while delivering some of its most personal and hopeful work to date. The EP was introduced by “Scream,” followed by the powerful new single “Lift Me Up.”

With more than 23 million albums sold, an average of 12 million monthly Spotify listeners and a catalog that continues to reach new generations around the world, Skillet enters its fourth decade with its momentum—and its message—stronger than ever.

Skillet’s September cover story, exclusive interview and performance premiere September 1 at CCMmagazine.com and across CCM Magazine’s digital platforms.

ABOUT SKILLET

Skillet tap into the sound of surviving any adversity, dusting yourself off, and getting back up again for another round. Heavy guitars kick with the inspiration to keep going, while stadium-size hooks double as a reminder to never give up no matter what. The quartet—John Cooper [lead vocals, bass], Korey Cooper [guitar, keys, production], Jen Ledger [drums, vocals], and Seth Morrison [lead guitar]—have quietly, yet indisputably become one of the biggest global hard rock bands of the 21st century with total album over 23 million, an average of 12 million monthly Spotify listeners, and dozens of massive placements across sports, film, and television. Among a catalog highlighted by chart-topping albums and hits, the 6x-Platinum “Monster” has eclipsed 5 billion global streams, claimed a place in Spotify’s “Billions Club,” resounded as “one of the most-streamed rock songs of all time,” and the only Christian song in history to cross 1 billion Spotify streams. During 2025, their first-ever Christmas release “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” made a viral impact and captured #1 on five Billboardcharts. The band’s 2026 European tour brought them in front of their biggest international crowds yet—not only selling out shows across the continent, but breaking ticket sales records at venues like Zénith Paris. Awarded multiplatinum, platinum, or gold RIAA certifications for 12 singles and four full-length albums, the group have notably garnered two GRAMMY® Award nominations, earned a Billboard Music Award, and impressively delivered three Top 5 debuts on the Billboard 200. Widening the scope of this vision, Skillet launched the graphic novel series EDEN with Z2. Kicking off another chapter, Skillet decided to get heavier and punch harder on their 2026 independent EP, After The Storm, introduced by the single “Scream.”

Art Direction / Editor: Amanda Sekulow

Producer / Editor: Amanda Sekulow

Cover Photo: Alicia St Gelais

Director of Photography / Video: Patrick Johnson

Music Engineer: Mark Lee Townsend

 

Very few bands, Christian or otherwise, have the staying power to remain relevant for five decades. Petra is undoubtedly one of them.

Sure, the band has changed personnel and reinvented itself more than once along the way. But what has never changed is its talent, passion, and gift for creating driving, emotional, hands-in-the-air rock anthems rooted in faith and evangelism.

That’s why Petra has remained an iconic group for more than 50 years – breaking new ground and paving the way for countless artists who followed.

And as we’ve previously told you, Petra is breaking new ground once again.

This time, the band’s vast musical catalog has helped inspire a new feature film, Beyond Belief, now playing in theaters.

To be clear, Beyond Belief is not a biopic chronicling the highs and lows of this seminal Christian rock band. Instead, it’s an original story set in the 1980s and built around the music of Petra.

As the film’s official website explains:

Set in the 1980s, Beyond Belief follows Andy, a teenage rocker chasing his dream of making it big while struggling to cope with the loss of his father. When a mysterious voice urges him to “run,” Andy is drawn into an unexpected journey that challenges his ambitions, tests his faith, and forces him to decide what kind of life he’s truly meant to live.

Filled with heart, humor, and the iconic music of Petra, Beyond Belief is an inspiring story about hearing God’s voice, trusting His plan, and discovering that His dreams for our lives are often bigger than our own.

Directed by Johnny Meier, who co-wrote the film with Darren Scott Jacobs and Joe Sanders, Beyond Belief was filmed primarily in the suburbs of Chicago, including Woodstock, Illinois –famously used as the stand-in for Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, in the 1993 classic Groundhog Day.

The setting works particularly well in capturing the world of a teenage Christian rock fan in the 1980s.

 

According to Executive Producer Joe Sanders, the project has been 15 years in the making. That journey began with an idea and eventually led to a meeting with Petra legends John Schlitt and Bob Hartman – and, apparently, a steak dinner – to convince them to lend their music to the project and even appear in the film themselves. Spoiler alert: they may have gotten the biggest laugh in the flick!

After all these years and all they’ve accomplished, John and Bob admitted that it was a surreal experience watching 20-something actors portray them on screen.

And you can imagine it was no less intimidating for actors Oscar Mansky and Jeremy Burchard, who had the unusual opportunity to portray two legends while the real Schlitt and Hartman watched from behind the cameras.

John said it was important to him that the actors felt comfortable in the roles, but it’s still hard to imagine the pressure – and the honor – of stepping into the shoes of two such influential figures.

I first saw Petra live in 1991, only a couple of years after the film takes place. And I thought Oscar, Jeremy, and the rest of the cast did a great job capturing the energy and spirit of a Petra concert from that era.

In fact, I’ve now seen Beyond Belief twice. And as a Petra fan of nearly 40 years, I can say the movie’s Back to the Future-inspired marketing is actually pretty appropriate. For us Gen-X Petra fans, this film is like a time machine.

But the story itself is designed to reach beyond nostalgia, offering themes of faith, purpose, loss, and finding your way — all set to one of the most recognizable soundtracks a Christian music fan could ask for.

At one point during the screening, I looked around and watched fellow filmgoers pumping their fists, nodding their heads, and mouthing along to the songs.

And that may be the best way to experience Beyond Belief.

If you’re a Petra fan, this is one trip back to the 1980s you won’t want to miss.

Beyond Belief is now playing in theaters.

The earthly world has lost Dolly Parton as the legendary singer, songwriter, actress, philanthropist and woman of faith entered heaven today at the age of 80.

Her nephew and head of security, Bryan Seaver, shared the news on Dolly’s Instagram page with words that speak beautifully to the faith she carried throughout her life:

“Sadness lies with us. Not with Dolly. Dolly has lived in the light and is in the arms of Jesus, surely met by Carl, her parents, and countless others who have watched her and longed for her to meet them in the Heavens.”

For Tennessee, for Nashville, for country music and for millions of people around the world, it is difficult to imagine a world without Dolly Parton in it.

At CCM Magazine, we also mourn someone whose contributions to gospel and Christian music cannot be separated from the larger story of her extraordinary life. Because beneath the rhinestones, the one-liners and one of the greatest song catalogs in American music was a woman whose faith was formed in the mountains of East Tennessee and whose music never wandered very far from it.

Long before the world knew “Jolene,” “9 to 5” or “I Will Always Love You,” Dolly’s musical vocabulary was being formed by the church. She grew up in a deeply musical family in East Tennessee, singing gospel songs and hymns and performing in church as a child. Her grandfather was a preacher, and faith, family and music became intertwined early in her life.

Those roots remained audible throughout her career.

Her 1971 album Golden Streets of Glory put gospel music front and center, and she would return repeatedly to songs of faith throughout the decades that followed. Precious Memories found Dolly singing traditional hymns and gospel standards, while songs including “Hello God,” “He’s Alive” and countless others gave her opportunities to speak directly about belief, prayer and redemption. For decades, Dolly’s voice and songwriting bridged country and contemporary Christian audiences, offering hope, grace and simple truth wrapped in unforgettable melodies.

And unlike many artists who leave the sacred music of their childhood behind as their audience expands, Dolly seemed determined to bring it with her. She took gospel into country music, pop culture, television, movies and some of the biggest stages in the world. In recent years, a new generation of Christian music listeners discovered that side of Dolly when she joined Zach Williams for “There Was Jesus.”

The collaboration became a major Christian music hit and earned Dolly her first GMA Dove Award, winning Bluegrass/Country/Roots Recorded Song of the Year. The song also earned Dolly and Williams a GRAMMY Award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song.

For an artist already surrounded by almost every accolade imaginable, those honors represented something special: Dolly Parton was still making meaningful Christian music more than half a century into her career. 

It is difficult from today’s vantage point to fully appreciate how many doors Dolly Parton helped push open. She crossed from country to pop without abandoning country. She conquered television and movies without abandoning music. She became an entrepreneur without abandoning East Tennessee.

Dolly became one of the most recognizable people on Earth, yet she spent much of her life pointing people back toward the relatively small corner of Tennessee where her story began.

Dolly Parton’s Christian legacy isn’t found only on records. It can be found on children’s bookshelves around the world. Her compassion and servant heart were perhaps most visibly demonstrated through Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. The program launched in 1995 and grew into an international effort that has placed hundreds of millions of books into the hands of children. And the Imagination Library was hardly an isolated act and her generosity reached well beyond Tennessee.

Dolly’s beautiful spirit and unforgettable light touched the world because she seemed to understand something profoundly simple: if you have been given much, you have an opportunity to give much. Perhaps that is why the words announcing her passing feel so appropriate.

“Sadness lies with us. Not with Dolly.” After the death of Carl Dean, her husband of nearly 60 years, in 2025, she talked about believing she would see him again. “I am a person of faith, and I truly believe that I’m going to see him again someday,” Dolly said.

That doesn’t erase the sadness. Tennessee has lost one of its greatest ambassadors. Nashville has lost one of the people who helped make Music City known around the world. Country music has lost one of its greatest songwriters. Christian and gospel music have lost a voice that carried the music of a little mountain church to audiences that might never have otherwise heard it.

But Dolly Parton’s story doesn’t end today. Somewhere tonight, a child will open a book that arrived because Dolly decided children should have books. Somewhere, a family rebuilt after disaster with help she provided. Somewhere, a young woman is writing her first song because generations of women like Dolly Parton made it possible for her to believe she could.

And somewhere, someone will press play on an old gospel recording and hear that unmistakable mountain voice singing about Jesus, heaven, grace and home. For more than seven decades, Dolly Parton gave us a remarkable example of what can happen when faith is not merely something you sing about, but something you live.

Her beautiful spirit and unforgettable light touched the world.

Rest in peace, Dolly.

We will always love you.

Dolly Parton, 1946–2026.

Contributors: Amanda Sekulow, Ali Holston

Don’t be jealous, but we got a first listen to the new for KING + COUNTRY album, The Most Beautiful Colors, arriving September 18.

While its first five tracks have already been released, hearing them within the full album reveals what Joel and Luke Smallbone are actually building: something theatrical, ambitious and ultimately far more personal than its massive production initially suggests.
So, before we get into the songs, here’s the vibe check.

The Most Beautiful Colors is a big record about surprisingly ordinary things. Love. Marriage. Divorce. Death. Aging parents. Family legacy. Even just the daily goals surrounding being a good husband, father, son or brother when life refuses to cooperate with the version you pictured when you were younger.

For all its enormous drums, global rhythms, synths and arena-sized choruses, this may actually be one of for KING + COUNTRY’s most mature records. Many of us in our early 40s are discovering that life’s biggest adventures no longer look like the ones we imagined as teenagers. The stakes are still high, but they are more grounded. Dreams coexist with mortgages. Parents get older. Kids grow up. Marriages require work. People disappoint you. You disappoint yourself.

If there is a larger theme, it is figuring out what it means to live well when nobody’s life turns out perfectly. It also occupies an increasingly valuable space between Christian radio and congregational worship. This is clearly faith-informed music, but it rarely sounds constructed for a Sunday-morning setlist. In that sense, The Most Beautiful Colors feels more Proverbs than Psalms. Its faith tends to emerge through practical stories about the lives we are actually living.

Of course, for KING + COUNTRY has apparently decided the best way to explore their “middle ages” is enough production to fill an arena…but is it enough to fill up 8 shows a week at the St. James Theatre times a week (pun intended). That’s right, a few songs in, I found myself asking a serious question: Is this a soundtrack to a new Broadway musical?

Considering the brothers’ filmmaking ambitions and the onstage spectacles they have become impresarios of, it would not surprise me. This is an album built for the stage.

At first, it almost presents itself as a concept record. Strangely, though, the longer it plays, the more it reminds me of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Not because it sounds anything like the Beatles, but because it establishes a world early on and then decides that world can contain basically whatever its creators want to put inside it. Global rhythms. Boy-band synths. Musical theater. Acoustic reflection. An ’80s keyboard solo. Jessica Simpson…. You read that right.

The record kicks off with what almost feels like a classic at this point. It is hard to judge “World on Fire” as a new song when it has been with us for nearly a year, but it remains a tremendous opening statement. It immediately establishes the album’s global scale and world-music influence. If this album isn’t eventually going to the stage, somebody at least needs to start developing a “World on Fire” Vacation Bible School theme and accompanying mission-trip curriculum.

Paul Simon found his way to world music and allowed it to reshape his sound. Likewise, for KING + COUNTRY has evolved its percussion-heavy approach here, trading some of the digital sheen for a more organic, goatskin beat. The progression feels natural in every sense, but that diversion doesn’t last long.

“Miracle” begins the slow rise of the band’s unmistakable synth sounds back into the record. There is a Greatest Showman quality to its scale and unapologetic optimism. Then, just when you think you understand what it is doing, the song delivers something resembling an ’80s Michael W. Smith keyboard solo. I mean that entirely as a compliment.

“What If I Told You” explodes with heavier melodic textures and unmistakable 2000s boy-band energy. There are moments that feel like they could have landed on an early TobyMac record, filtered through the maximalism that has become uniquely for KING + COUNTRY. While we were given a full first listen, there are some secrets I’m sworn to keep until we get closer to release day.

Without giving away every turn, the rest of The Most Beautiful Colors expands considerably beyond the youth-group-anthem energy of its opening stretch.
Steven Curtis Chapman is smiling somewhere because there is an actual love song on a contemporary Christian record. “Ever and ever before” has ‘first dance at the wedding’ written all over it, and the inclusion of two sets of Smallbones makes the moment even more personal. It is sentimental and sappy, it’s what you want.

And don’t worry, fellow millennial dads. There is a song where the GUITAR is the main instrument. “A Good Man” trades enormous production for acoustic reflection. If “Ever and Ever” owns the wedding-video market, this one is giving milestone birthday or, if we want to get a little morbid, family funeral. And that is really where the album’s larger theme starts making sense. These aren’t abstract life lessons. The Smallbones are increasingly writing about the people sitting around their own dinner tables.

The guests reinforce that approach. We live in an era where mainstream artists appearing on Christian records has become fairly common, but “My Mosaic,” featuring Jessica Simpson, still comes completely out of nowhere and it works. Amid the celebrity and tabloid history surrounding Simpson, it can be easy to forget that her vocal power was, and remains, entirely legitimate. Here she gets more than a novelty cameo. “My Mosaic” gives her room for a genuinely autobiographical performance, and her voice fits remarkably well alongside the  Smallbones.

There are more songs and surprises to talk about when the album arrives, but one thing becomes increasingly clear as it progresses: for KING + COUNTRY is interested in pure audience connection. The lyrics are intentional and direct. They aren’t hiding behind layers of ambiguity. A love song is a love song. A song about their dad is about their dad. A song with Jessica Simpson? Yeah, it starts with talking about being married on reality television.
This is relational music, and it wears its heart on its sleeve.

As always, these songs also appear to have been created with for KING + COUNTRY’s live show already somewhere in the back of their minds. This is a band of spectacle: costumes, theatrical staging and arena-rock drama delivered to a civilized audience. Like many of my favorite arena-sized bands, you cannot completely understand their music until you see it take shape in front of a crowd.

The record is the blueprint. The concert is where the building appears. Although this time, that stage may eventually need to be on Broadway.

The Most Beautiful Colors arrives September 18.

PRE-SAVE NOW

There are some voices that simply belong to Christian music history. Sandi Patty’s is one of them. And last week, CCM Magazine’s Logan and Amanda Sekulow were invited to an intimate, invite-only premiere celebrating a voice that is far from finished.

The special event, which was also live-streamed for fans, marked the premiere of “The Voice I Have Now,” Patty’s first newly recorded song in more than a decade. But it quickly became clear this wasn’t simply a celebration of one new song. It was the beginning of something much bigger.

At 70, the five-time GRAMMY winner and 40-time Dove Award recipient is entering a new chapter that feels remarkably full circle. Patty has returned to the Gaither Music Group, reconnecting with a musical family deeply intertwined with her career and legacy, and she’s bringing new music with her.

“The privilege of turning 70 is that I have more years to look back and see God’s faithfulness,” Patty shares. “And the best predictor of God’s future faithfulness is to recount His faithfulness in the past. That is one of the most beautiful things that comes with age. I have so much for which to recount.”

At the live event she was joined by songwriter Joel Lindsey for the performance of “The Voice I Have Now.” It isn’t a song about trying to recreate the Sandi Patty of another era. It’s about appreciating everything that brought her here and discovering there is still plenty ahead.

One lyric makes that especially clear: “I’m not ready for the final bow.”

Turns out, she really isn’t! Patty revealed that a brand-new album is coming in February 2027, her first new album in years. For an artist whose career has stretched across nearly five decades, more than 30 albums and some of the defining songs of contemporary Christian music, there’s something beautifully fitting about watching the story circle back around while still moving forward.

And CCM Magazine will be there for the next chapter. How so? Stay tuned!

Sandi Patty will return to CCM Magazine in 2027.

Stream “The Voice I Have Now”:

 

If you grew up with country radio in the late ’90s and early 2000s, there’s a pretty good chance Mark Wills provided part of the soundtrack.

“Wish You Were Here.” “I Do (Cherish You).” “Don’t Laugh at Me.” And, of course, the six-week No. 1 “19 Somethin’,” a song that somehow managed to turn an entire generation’s childhood memories into four minutes of country radio perfection.

Now, some 19 Somethin’ years later (ok, more like 24), Wills is looking all the way back to the music that came way before the 1980s.

On November 6, the Grand Ole Opry member will release Grand Ole Revival through Gaither Music Group, a new live collection of country gospel classics recorded where a project like this probably should be recorded: standing inside the historic Grand Ole Opry Circle.

And Wills brought a few friends along.

Cody Johnson. Trisha Yearwood. Vince Gill. Ricky Skaggs. Rhonda Vincent. Jamey Johnson. Travis Tritt. The Oak Ridge Boys. The Isaacs. Charlie McCoy. Gaither Vocal Band. Bill Anderson. Mae Estes. Rebecca Lynn Howard. Leona Williams. The Sound. Jim and Melissa Brady.

The album was recorded live on the Opry House stage and is only the second live audio album recorded inside the Grand Ole Opry House since 1970… somethin’.

There are plenty of albums that attempt to recreate the warmth of old country gospel records. Grand Ole Revival doesn’t have to manufacture much of anything. These are songs deeply connected to the roots of country music, performed by artists who have carried that tradition forward, recorded on one of the most important stages in the history of the genre.

For Wills, though, the connection goes back even further.

“Ever since I was a little kid, the very first music that came into my life was hymns, so it means a lot to me to be able to sing some of the songs I’ve loved my whole life,” Wills says. “In more than 30 years of making music, I’ve never experienced a tracking session like this one.”

Recording those songs inside the Circle only added another layer.

“Recording them live in the Grand Ole Opry circle made this project even more special since that has rarely occurred in its 100-year history,” Wills continues. “I think this project reflects that time-honored history and tradition that makes The Opry such an important part of country music.”

The first taste of the project is available now with “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor,” featuring Jamey Johnson, Charlie McCoy and Gaither Vocal Band.

It’s a fitting introduction to an album built around the place where country and gospel have always intersected: great songs, great stories and the idea that redemption is worth singing about.

Grand Ole Revival Track List

1. “The Lily of the Valley” — feat. Cody Johnson
2. “I’ll Fly Away” — feat. Ricky Skaggs & Rhonda Vincent
3. “How Great Thou Art” — feat. Trisha Yearwood
4. “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” — feat. Jamey Johnson, Charlie McCoy & Gaither Vocal Band
5. “Because He Lives” — feat. Vince Gill & Rebecca Lynn Howard
6. “Victory in Jesus” — feat. The Isaacs
7. “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” — feat. Mae Estes & Ben Isaacs
8. “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” — feat. Leona Williams, The Isaacs, Jim Brady & Melissa Brady
9. “I Saw the Light” — feat. Travis Tritt & The Oak Ridge Boys
10. “Mansion Just Over the Hilltop” — feat. The Sound
11. “Look for Me for I Will Be There Too”
12. “Grand Ole Revival” — feat. The Isaacs

“The Baptism of Jesse Taylor” is available now, with Grand Ole Revival arriving November 6 through Gaither Music Group.

And Gary LeVox Has Found “Paradise”

Wills isn’t the only familiar country voice showing up on the Gaither roster.

Gary LeVox , the unmistakable voice behind Rascal Flatts, has also released a new song through Gaither Music Group, “Paradise.”

Written by Rudy Perez and Chaz Bosarge and produced by Perez, “Paradise” leans into the intersection of country and inspirational music that has increasingly become part of LeVox’s solo career.

“At our best, we’re a nation that comes together through hope, compassion, and faith,” LeVox says. “That’s the spirit I wanted ‘Paradise’ to capture.”

For CCM readers, LeVox’s presence here shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Following two decades and 17 No. 1 singles as the frontman of Rascal Flatts, his solo career has repeatedly explored music rooted explicitly in faith, including his Christian project ONE ON ONE.

And after reuniting with Rascal Flatts for the Life Is A Highway Tour in 2025, LeVox continues to balance that enormous country catalog with new music of his own.

“Paradise” is available now on digital streaming platforms.

There are plenty of ways for a Christian metal band to celebrate a Dove Award nomination.

The award may be “Golden,” but Demon Hunter isn’t exactly glowing. What sounds more like a hardcore band that still celebrates its church upbringing than suing one of the world’s most beloved children’s franchises?

Somewhere, the ghost of the great ’90s Disney boycott just sat straight up in bed.

But here’s the thing:

Demon Hunter’s complaint isn’t quite as ridiculous as the headline makes it sound.

First, why, and who, is Demon Hunter actually suing?

The lawsuit was filed by Hyde Lane, the corporation associated with Demon Hunter, against Netflix, Netflix Studios and AEG Presents. It alleges trademark infringement, unfair competition and false designation of origin involving the KPop Demon Hunters name. NME

Demon Hunter’s basic argument is pretty straightforward.

They’ve been Demon Hunter for roughly a quarter-century. They’ve released records, toured the world and sold merchandise under that name. In the lawsuit, they argue that they’re the senior user of the Demon Hunter trademark and have spent decades building its value.

If Netflix had simply released an animated movie about demon-hunting K-pop stars, perhaps we’re not writing this story.

The problem, according to the lawsuit, is what happened next.

KPop Demon Hunters became enormous. The name moved beyond the movie and into music, soundtracks and merchandise. These are areas increasingly close to Demon Hunter’s own business. Then Netflix partnered with AEG Presents for a KPop Demon Hunters global concert tour reportedly planned for 150 cities.

That’s where Demon Hunter argues the two worlds have gotten uncomfortably close.

According to the complaint, Netflix and its partners have moved into “almost complete overlap” with goods and services offered under the Demon Hunter mark. The band alleges Netflix’s vastly larger footprint is overwhelming an identity Demon Hunter spent decades establishing. NME

In other words:

The HUNTR/X girls may have defeated the Saja Boys (SPOILER), but Christian metalcore boys from the Pacific Northwest are a different challenge.

According to the band, there really has been confusion. This is where the story gets both considerably funnier and considerably more sympathetic to Demon Hunter.

According to reporting on material included in the filing, someone bought about $500 worth of top-tier tickets to a Demon Hunter concert in Albany, New York, believing they were purchasing tickets to take their 5- and 6-year-old daughters to KPop Demon Hunters.

They subsequently contacted the band looking for a refund so they could buy tickets to the actual KPop Demon Hunters show. NME

Now…

There is a tiny part of us that desperately wants to know what would have happened had nobody caught the mistake.

The lights go down.

Mom says, “Here they come!”

Ryan Clark appears and screams, “The Honmoon can no longer protect you!”

But that example also gets to the heart of what Demon Hunter is arguing: the confusion they feared isn’t entirely hypothetical anymore. The band alleges that consumers have already believed the two properties were affiliated, and that the move into live touring makes that concern more significant.

You don’t have to know how a court will ultimately rule to understand why that would be frustrating. Demon Hunter is reportedly seeking an injunction, damages, profits associated with the allegedly infringing branding, attorneys’ fees and a jury trial. The complaint also alleges the band has suffered commercial and reputational harm as a much larger entertainment company expands into its marketplace. NME

Whether a court ultimately agrees with those arguments is another matter entirely.

But after looking beyond the admittedly hilarious headline, it’s hard not to have some sympathy for the band’s position.

Demon Hunter didn’t name itself last year. And now one of the largest entertainment companies on Earth has a massively successful music property with an extremely similar name, merchandise and a live concert business.

If you’re Demon Hunter, at what point do you have to say something?

That’s ultimately where the jokes should end.

Because we love the absurdity of this story. It’s almost impossible not to.

It’s Demon Hunter vs. KPop Demon Hunters.

This story was written for us.

But Demon Hunter has also spent a lifetime earning the right to care about the name on the front of its records. For a band that has survived changing labels, changing musical trends and an industry that looks very different from when it started, watching a massive entertainment property suddenly occupy essentially the same Google-search real estate has to be surreal — and probably pretty maddening.

Unfortunately, if Demon Hunter ultimately comes out on top, their drummer Yogi Watts may want to lawyer up, too. There is an unforeseen consequence of Demon Hunter establishing this aggressive new era of trademark enforcement.

Because somewhere in the Hanna-Barbera legal department, a smarter-than-the-average bear has just been alerted to this situation and, as we know… he’s hungry.

Editor’s note & sources: This article is based on allegations contained in or reported from Demon Hunter’s federal lawsuit against Netflix, Netflix Studios and AEG Presents, as well as media coverage of the complaint by NME, TheWrap and Complex. TheWrap and Complex report having reviewed the filed complaint. The case remains pending, and the allegations described have not been adjudicated.

The Killers frontman debuts to “father’s” country-western music for a deeply personal album filled with rhinestones, sawdust, biblical imagery and an unforgettable encounter with the King of Rock and Roll.

Every so often, an album arrives that feels tailor-made for me. When that happens, I’m reminded that so many of us think we grew up uniquely, but in reality we share the same childhoods. Rock and roll theatricality and country storytelling weren’t competing forces, they were often times just a different part of the same cassette tape collection. Those lines were always blurry and they remain so on Thrasher, the new Nashville-inspired and Nashville-recorded solo album from Brandon Flowers.

Flowers has spent more than two decades fronting The Killers, one of the most consistent creative forces in modern rock. From the groundbreaking Hot Fuss forward, there really hasn’t been a miss. The scale, sound and ambition may change from record to record, but The Killers always seemed to be searching for heaven somewhere beyond the glow of the Las Vegas Strip.

With Thrasher, Flowers turns his attention to what he calls his “father’s music.” This isn’t a rock star putting on a cowboy hat because country happens to be fashionable. It feels like an intentional return to the music he inherited.

He came here to Nashville to find that sound, recording at the historic RCA Studio A. The sessions brought together an extraordinary group of Music City musicians that played together live in the room, an approach Flowers hadn’t taken with a band since he recorded Sam’s Town. You can hear that immediacy throughout the album. Thrasher doesn’t sound cleaned up and tweaked. It feels refreshing and jarring to the modern listener who is used to studio perfection.

It’s no surprise that Flowers shines with the attention of a live band of seasoned professionals. If you’ve experienced The Killers, you know it’s a purely joyous concert experience. Flowers spends much of the night smiling from ear to ear while an audience of millennials, now often joined by their children, singing along at full volume to an evening of stadium sized hits. Against the glittering backdrop of a Las Vegas-sized rock show, he frequently begins the evening like a maître d’ welcoming everyone into his establishment, and for the next two hours, the audience is invited into their world: a universe populated by dreamers, gamblers, heroes, villains, runaways and, more often than not, Jesus himself.

While Flowers’ solo career has always stood on its own, Thrasher feels as more like a complete solo reboot as it does a follow-up to Flamingo and The Desired Effect. The spiritual and emotional vocabulary remains unmistakably his and there are remnants of The Killers here, of course. Occasional synthesizer undertones shimmer behind the country arrangements, while several songs return us to the dusty childhood small-town world of Nephi, Utah, explored on Pressure Machine.

The opening track, “Does It Ever Cross Your Mind?,” arrives with the easy swing of a song you might hear at the Grand Ole Opry, performed by an aging legend who somehow convinces you to think “Oh, I know this song.” That immediate familiarity runs throughout Thrasher, but the lives Flowers depicts are often more complicated than the comfortable arrangements initially suggest.

“Paradise” is an absolute blast, exploding out of the speakers as Flowers embodies the life of an aging Las Vegas casino valet. Then there is “Miss America,” one of the album’s most heart-wrenching moments. Inspired by Flowers’ sister, the song confronts a cycle of abuse with a directness that can be difficult to hear. My wife and I sat in near silence as the track played. You may experience this once and that may be enough. Against that darkness, Flowers imagines the possibility of a different kind of life for his sister, where a “Mormon boy” might finally treat his sister like a queen.

With so many direct references to faith, you may ask yourself, “Is Brandon Flowers making Christian music?”

Flowers has never shied away from his identity as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even when that identity made him an outsider within rock culture. In a recent interview with Craig McLean, Flowers acknowledged that his relationship with the faith of his childhood required an adult decision. “Well, I have discovered you can be Mormon and cool. But it’s been a real journey. I was so young when we started. I was indoctrinated into this church, I understand that. But at some point, you’ve got to decide if it’s going to be your faith or not. That’s where the rubber meets the road. And I deepened my faith once I really committed to that road. I don’t find it nearly as difficult now to decide what choices I’m going to make.” The Observer

Speaking with Will Hodgkinson, Flowers was even more direct: “I really believe it. Faith has been a profound part of my life, and I’m drawn to Jesus Christ.” He also spoke about his father’s conversion when Flowers was six, remembering how the disappearance of “Budweiser and the cigarettes” from their home coincided with his father becoming “a better guy.” The Times

CCM readers will recognize that our theological traditions differ in significant ways. Those differences shouldn’t be ignored or casually flattened. Thrasher should not be presented or categorized as coming from a standard evangelical point of view. CCM’s interest in this album is not an attempt to erase those distinctions or imply a theological endorsement. It is an acknowledgment that Flowers’ faith meaningfully shapes his art and that the biblical language, spiritual questions and shared moral themes within these songs give our audience a legitimate reason to engage with them thoughtfully and discerningly.

That being said marketed “Christian” artists should take note, that Thrasher and the catalogue of Flowers/The Killers contain more direct references to Christ, heaven and biblical principles than you will find on many releases marketed specifically to Christian audiences outside of Worship music. This is the same songwriter who warned about a devil who doesn’t resemble Jesus in When You Were Young, celebrated the sustaining power and rarity of a loving marriage in Dying Breed, and retold the emotional arc of the prodigal son in Fire in Bone. Flowers has never treated faith like a decorative accessory. It is part of the architecture of his songwriting.

I can’t discuss Thrasher without discussing its final track, “An American Dream,” even if I’m reluctant to reveal too much about it.

It feels strange to place a spoiler warning on a song, but this is one worth experiencing without knowing exactly where it is headed. This psychedelic song imagines a dream that Flowers has where is reaching the end of his life. What follows includes a Tesla and an unexpected interaction with the King of Rock and Roll. I have great reverence for Elvis Presley, and I appreciate that he isn’t used here as a pop-culture punchline. The King becomes something closer to a spiritual predecessor: another larger-than-life performer raised in church, caught between the sacred and the spectacular, now passing something down to the artist who followed him.

The record reaches its destination in a great collision of “Gold and Silver, God and Glitter.” That phrase could almost serve as a mission statement for Brandon Flowers’ Thrasher. Faith and fame, eternity and entertainment, heaven and hell, Las Vegas and Utah. It all finally makes sense when Elvis is there to throw him the keys as he offers one final word to his protégé: “put it on Jesus.”

Thrasher is available on 8/21.

A Content Note for CCM Families

This album contains a few mild profanities, along with direct references to violence, abuse and sexual content. These elements are not presented in a celebratory fashion, but as essential parts of the stories being told. Several songs confront abuse and trauma with a directness that children will not be prepared to process.

Expanding the CCM Conversation

CCM Magazine is beginning something that may feel new to some readers: thoughtfully covering select mainstream releases that we believe are worthy of our audience’s attention.

This isn’t about chasing every major release or diluting what CCM has represented for nearly 50 years. It is an opportunity to broaden the conversation around music, faith and culture and to recognize that spiritually meaningful art has never existed exclusively within the boundaries of the Christian music industry. We can engage seriously with the art, celebrate what it accomplishes and honestly identify content Christian audiences may find objectionable. Covering an album does not require endorsing every lyric or aspect of an artist’s worldview. It means helping our readers approach the music with curiosity and discernment.

More importantly, this isn’t a reinvention of CCM’s mission as much as a return to its history.

Before making this decision, I spoke with CCM founder John Styll about how the magazine approached these questions in its earliest years. His answer was refreshingly clear: “We did not make a distinction between mainstream releases and Christian-market releases. We only reviewed mainstream albums when we thought there was a reason our audience would be—or should be—interested.”

That philosophy provides the framework for what we are doing now.

We will remain selective. We are acknowledging that our readers listen widely, that faith sometimes appears in unexpected places and that CCM Magazine can add something valuable to the larger cultural conversation.

Our role should be more than identifying which industry category an album occupies. It should be recognizing music worth hearing, exploring the ideas within it and helping our audience decide whether it belongs in their lives. In that sense, covering Thrasher isn’t CCM stepping outside its history. It is CCM continuing it.