Downloaded from YTS.BZ
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.BZ
A great source of my frustration with Luke
was him not really leaning in
and for better or for worse, I was all in.
My brother's a tough personality.
I don't have great fond memories of that time.
It got really complicated.
We played showcases
for all the major record labels in America
and got turned down by them all.
I remember riding back on the tour bus
crawling into the bunk.
Remember calling Moriah,
I don't know if she knew it on the call,
but I remember crying knowing that I really wanted to
marry this girl and just this feeling
of like what am I gonna do?
Like where do I go from here?
We did have the feeling of we're failures,
like we're failing right now.
Not only were we failing ourselves or each other,
but we were failing our family.
The combination of music and God was a lifeline
for all of us, it's all we've ever known
and it was all falling apart.
Is this the beginning of the end?
So where do we begin?
So, Joel, we'll start with the easy stuff.
- Mm. - Let's talk about
your earliest memories of the Opera House.
I can't wait for the hard stuff.
My earliest memories of the Sydney Opera House,
Dad was a concert promoter in Australia
and so he would bring artists
primarily over from the States.
I managed both Christian artists and pop bands
and also promoted Christian concerts all across Australia.
We were doing well.
We lived in one of the nicest suburbs in Sydney at Glenorie.
We did a lot of concerts over the years
and the kids would always come
so we would always be there together
and experience those moments together.
We would literally be put to bed backstage,
like we'd bring sleeping bags and pillows
and we'd go to sleep with the sounds of the rock band.
Dad, because he was the promoter,
he ended up being like the host of the night.
So before the band would come up
he was up on stage making the announcements.
And so I remember hugging dad's leg
and kind of looking out at the front row of people.
But we also did little things promotionally.
I remember distinctly putting flyers out
on like a car park full of vehicles
and then going to concerts, watching Stryper for instance.
Just eyes popping out of my head watching this band.
Going to shows with Dad and getting on his shoulders,
put my hands over my ears, 'cause it was just so loud
and I felt a lot of pride being there, being my dad's son.
For me, music was just always a natural part of my life
and our whole family's life.
We had a big barn out the back of the house
and we had a band, you know me, as a three, four year old
and pots and pans and the whole thing
and we would play music together.
Like we would sell merch at our shows for our parents.
I mean it was just so normal for us and so natural.
The Smallbone family is an amazing crazy one
and I love it.
So this is dad, David, our mom, Helen.
My oldest sister Rebecca, Daniel, the oldest boy
Ben, me, Joel, there's Luke, Josh
and Libby was not quite born yet
but she was well on her way.
I think the DNA of the Smallbone family is ingenuity,
character, pursuing excellence in all that you do,
taking what it is that you uniquely know
and putting that back into the family
I think is creativity, faith,
One of the things that drew myself
to the family is the ways in which they carried themselves.
They behaved also like Christians,
so we love Jesus together.
So there was this cultural overlap,
a kingdom cultural overlap that gave us this connection.
I always thought of their family
as being discipleship oriented.
Those people were a rock.
Helen is a spiritual powerhouse
and David is just singularly focused.
And my plan was to live a normal life.
Then on a really big tour, I'd budgeted for the same numbers
that this artist had toured with previously,
not realizing the economy was in a really bad place.
When you get on a tour, 20, 30, 40% down every night,
you realize the end is nigh,
we're down 10,000 people, $25 a ticket.
So, we lost a quarter of a million.
We'd invested probably 15 years
in the Australian Christian music scene.
Those two weeks probably toughest two weeks of my life.
This is what he was called to do.
This was his purpose in life.
This is what he knew how to do.
And when he lost everything he said,
"I don't know what I'm gonna do."
I just, I honestly didn't know
how I was gonna pay the mortgage.
I remember getting the calls from them, you know,
calling me up late at night, when you gonna pay for this,
we're about to foreclose, all that type of stuff.
I was really not in a good place.
Tried to still do concerts
but the industry kinda wanted me to go away
because I was being a bit of an embarrassment.
Australians, they're known to be great fighters.
I used to have a statement, if God closed the door,
David would've pulled open a window and we had no back door.
And I remember going to Helen and saying,
"Hey, Doll, what about we go to America?"
When it came to this announcement
that we were going to the States, I was, I felt really proud
of us like telling my friends as a six, seven year old,
like you know, I'm going over halfway around the world.
To all my friends, it was like the place
that Disneyland was, you know,
so you get to go to Disneyland, so cool.
Mom and Dad painted all of these things
as to be just a crazy adventure.
It made us feel secure as kids.
We didn't know what we were gonna do
and how it was all gonna pan out.
Young Australian family coming to America,
we were very intimidated.
When we entered the country
and we're going through customs, I remember thinking
that we might not actually get to come.
We saw so many people and so many bags.
And I'm five months pregnant so I'm pulling my tummy in
so they can't see that I'm pregnant.
They could have turned us away, but they didn't.
It was the fact that we were together,
the fact that there were eight of us
and we learned to really rely on each other.
It was kind of an adventure like those early years
for I think all of us kids we felt very safe
in Mom and Dad's love for us.
It was still such an adventure.
I didn't really know that anything was dramatically wrong,
but it was.
The plan when we first moved to Nashville
was for Dad to manage a Christian artist
and then probably grow that like management element.
So that was the plan.
Came over to work for somebody,
it was an artist that I toured
very successfully in Australia.
He let me go after two months
and so we were forced into living by faith.
The first six months or so, maybe the first year
were pretty tough for us all.
I shook in my boots every day, most weeks I didn't know
how we're gonna put food on the table.
Every day we would wake up and be like,
what's gonna happen today?
We've just about outta groceries, we've got no more food,
we've got no more money.
I remember making the ramen noodle soups with the four
we used to make four packets of ramen noodle soups,
which probably made the combination of $2.
There was no furniture
and we would wear our clothes through the day
and then we would kind of pile our clothes
amongst a few sheets at night
and we would sleep on these beds made outta clothes.
Like literally we'd tuck the sheets
around the clothes like our winter clothes
so that we had a bed to sleep on.
Like not even mattresses.
We would have our parents ringing up
and saying, you know, it's too hard, it's not working.
Come home. I knew innately there was nothing to go home to.
There was no retreat, there was no alternative.
We had to make this work.
Moving to the other side of the world,
working for an artist and then having that fall through
your only source of income.
Cannot imagine the vulnerability of that as a parent.
At that time my dad had passed away.
A wound that my dad carries to this day
is not being able to say goodbye to him
because he was stuck over here
and couldn't get back because of visa issues.
That was a hard time for me, I.
Now, there was one day when my dad
couldn't get out of bed, he was so down about it,
which is highly unusual for him.
He's like positive almost to a fault.
When I came to grips with things
turning from maybe severe to more severe
was we didn't have any food and we didn't have a car.
Rebecca and Dad and Daniel walked to a convenience shop
easily three or four miles.
And I remember at sunset waiting just outside for ages,
waiting for them to come back.
We need a car, money, food, to survive We're gonna pray
and we're just gonna trust God for this.
And a lot of us remember Joel specifically actually praying,
"God we pray for a car."
I knew and I had a feeling it was probably
just the peace of God
that I knew that God would see us out.
That's when I started seeing the miraculous.
There was a family
that ended up becoming really iconic in our family's life
and that was the Mohr family.
My introduction to the Smallbone clan
was in the early 90s and we were having
a Thanksgiving dinner at our house
and some of the people in the group said,
"Hey, there's a new family in town from Australia,
should we ask them?"
We said, "Yeah, that'd be awesome."
We showed up at this family's home
just seeing the enormous amounts of food.
I remember Joel sitting at that thing
and he couldn't touch it.
He had to wait and all the kids are excited
and you know, it was like probably 30 of us there.
It was interesting because you know,
they didn't have a vehicle, they were just getting
around who knows how?
And at this point I am eight months pregnant
and I got pretty tired and I was like, you know,
"Can you take us home?"
My wife went to the back, into the bedroom to do something
and I walked back there and I said,
"Luanne, I know this is crazy," but I said,
"I feel like we're supposed to give them our van."
And it's then that he pulled the keys out
of his his pocket and said, "You can drive yourself home."
It's just crazy.
I remember getting in it that night
and the sense of provision I felt in that moment.
When you're sitting there and Mom and Dad are saying,
yeah, we have these needs as a family and then hey,
somebody has dropped groceries off on the doorstep
or Dad just went to the the mail
and somehow he got a check for $1,000 and we can pay rent.
That makes you feel less lonely.
It makes you feel like somebody is looking out for you.
Many, many, many years ago I was a traveling artist
in the early days of Christian music.
♪ Rock solid ♪
We were a fledgling rock band and we would tour Australia
and we'd always heard that there was this kind of
big time promoter over there
and he never would work with us.
We never hit it big enough for him.
His name was David Smallbone.
♪ Rock solid ♪
The next time I saw David Smallbone
was one day in Franklin, Tennessee
when there was a knock on my door
and this fellow with a heavy Australian accent,
he said they had opened a business mowing people's lawns.
Almost immediately with Dad losing his job,
we became a family unit and force financially.
People would give us odd jobs.
We were working together.
It became kind of creative.
Grocery stores, you know you have the trolleys,
they have the rack underneath and I was at that point still
small enough to contort my body into the underneath rack
and I could look under the aisles
while we were grocery shopping
and see if there were any kind of miscellaneous things.
And I found, I think it was a 10 or $20 bill one day
under there and that was my triumph.
Rebecca started babysitting
and then another family gave us a mower
and then we started mowing people's lawns.
I don't think any of us really thought too much ever
about, well this money's mine, I've worked for it.
There was a family need, we were doing this together,
we're on this adventure together.
I don't think that most people realize
when they were getting like this family to come
and rake leaves or mow their lawns
I don't think they genuinely thought the entire family,
you know, down to five years old we're actually gonna come.
One of my distinct memories during that
is being really frustrated at Luke.
Luke was always kind of the,
what we called the PR guy of the family.
I remember one day we were raking leaves
and he was sitting on the John Deere with his legs
kind of propped up on the steering wheel
and just talking to the owner for a couple hours.
- Luke. - It's a pain in the butt.
I've always found it pretty easy to talk to people
and I felt like if they were to talk
to a 6-year-old about raking leaves
that there was a very good
chance that we were gonna be back.
And the the answer is, was it a little lazy?
He knew he was a smart kid,
he knew exactly what he was doing.
Kay, why don't you just start
by telling me about your history with the Smallbone family.
All right, it started in about 1993, got a little flyer,
said that there was a family from Australia
that had moved to America and the dad's work fell through.
And so the first thing I thought was, oh my goodness,
what can I do to help this family?
I figured I can minister to this family with food.
And the mom greeted me at the door
and she was just this radiant, beautiful person.
She's got a baby in her arms
and she's got all these children
I couldn't even count them all.
I walked through the house and they didn't have anything.
I thought all along, why aren't these people sad?
But they were not sad.
They had so much joy and were so thankful
for anything and everything that God gave them.
That day I went to be a blessing to the Smallbones
and they ended up being a blessing to me.
This is snow.
Christmas came and I said to David, I said,
"What are we gonna do about Christmas?
Because we got no money."
And I'll never forget they were telling the children
that Santa had lost their address, and.
What I remember was Mom saying,
if he does find us, he's not gonna be able to bring us much.
It's probably just gonna be things from the dollar shop.
I think we were all like, no,
Santa doesn't care that we're poor, you know,
there's no way that we're not gonna get presents.
Santa is not dictated to by our financial situation.
He's gonna find us.
And again, just this like this undying childlike
literally faith that he was gonna show up.
A first grade class, found out that we didn't have any way
to buy gifts for one another.
Someone had brought it to the class
and so the class room, that first grade class sponsored us
that year and they went to Mom and they said,
"Hey, we wanna be kind of partner with Santa."
And sure enough, Christmas morning comes
and still to this day, I've never had the amount of presents
that I had on that morning.
To see the kids being blessed
it was an another element of God that I didn't expect
where it wasn't just our needs, food on the table,
but He went and above and beyond and loved on them
because it was important to me, that was very special.
It was great because we were able
to go back to Mom and Dad and be like, see, you know,
Santa doesn't care that we're poor.
You know, Santa takes care of the good kids.
Why'd you ever doubt Santa?
Of course he was gonna come, Santa was gonna come through
and she kind of smiled knowingly.
Gotta bring Elizabeth,
She's been doing Whitney Houston impersonations.
- Come on, go for it. - Whitney Houston.
Show them the training that I've been doing.
I saw that on video today.
Pretty soon after we moved
Dad had more time on his hands so it very naturally
just kind of moved over to working with me.
And I remember Dad doing rehearsals with Rebecca
who was 15 maybe with a wooden spoon, you know,
very glamorous situation.
You should be presenting it.
But I was outvoted by everybody in this room.
Dad was taking Rebecca
to all these different record labels.
Some of them, you know, Dad and her twice.
And man, the resilience and the thick skin,
like just from what I understand
kind of turned down left and right.
David mentioned to me
after a few months of mowing our lawn
that you know, Rebecca was a singer,
I didn't even know that.
I was looking for a young girl artist
that would want to sing to her peers.
And she was doing a few songs at their church
and asked me if I would take a listen.
It's a thousand seat room,
there's four people in the room.
And I remember watching this as you know
a boy, young man, my big sister, what a superhero.
Like her confidence and her charisma to kind of stand
in the most awkward unflattering situation
in an empty room and just sing these songs
was incredibly courageous.
She's a courageous woman.
When it came time
that Rebecca started to do tours,
we couldn't bear the thought of being separated.
We'd already become that family unit,
like we were already doing school together.
So the natural next step was basically
to become the Australian version of the von Trapp family.
We're in a 15 seater passenger van
with all of us and sibling squabbles and you know,
I was a bossy big sister for sure.
The first time I met the Smallbone was 1996.
The van pulling up and the entire Smallbone clan
comes out just kinda like another one and another one
and another one, you know, I was like,
how many kids do you guys have?
Dad needed a cheap road crew, so we became the guys.
Initially we didn't have massive responsibilities
like we had this tiny little backdrop that we propped up
and had a couple par cans
and we had these two moving lights called track spots
that we just thought were the most amazing thing.
We were in a pattern of continually trying
to get better, you know, to try to get better at our craft,
we were put out there
and failure wasn't an option and you just figured it out.
We all kind of did merch at some point.
I've absolutely sold many a T-shirts in my time.
Joel probably didn't get the merch job
because he didn't know how to add and subtract very well.
I became the merch guy for maybe a night or two
and I basically built a castle out of cassette tapes.
And I was so proud of myself.
Yes, I was fired.
But I don't think any of us thought of it that way.
There was such a shuffle at that point.
Looking back now again, hindsight 2020,
you could see dad being kind of the ultimate
like orchestrator in that moment kind of going, okay,
well that didn't really suit him
and so he should probably go and do this.
And we all ended up finding these sweet spots.
They needed someone to be able to sing harmonies.
And I hadn't hit puberty yet and so I could fly score
and high above my sister and that's when I started singing.
And so I used to sing.
I never got, they wouldn't allow me to get up on stage.
I would sing from the boards.
I eventually got promoted to being the lighting director
and I used to at one point try and sing background vocals
while I was running lights
that didn't last for very long.
Maybe we should just mute the drums
for that section, 'cause it's the drums
that are throwing me off.
♪ You are my savior and You are my God ♪
♪ You are my love You are my life ♪
I remember the moment the second record was done
and we went by to pick up the, like that was the thing then
you picked up the CDs and we pulled it out
and saw this really unique, interesting cover.
Even as a youngster, you could feel the kind of bubbling
of energy of like this, we've got something
really special and everything changed.
She very quickly graduated to having a band backing her up.
The 15 passenger van went to two RVs that we actually bought
and one housed the band and the other housed the family
and even grew beyond that.
Even in that first record to like two RVs
and a bus, a touring bus.
One time David said, "Hey, do you wanna come on set?"
We were playing at like, I think Kingdom Bound
together with Rebecca.
He said, "Do you wanna come on stage
and sing "God," with Rebecca?"
I was like, "Of course I wanna, come on.
And I love that song, "God.""
Here's Rebecca St. James.
This years Grammy winner
with record Sales in the millions.
Rebecca is a Grammy award winning singer.
Featuring one of Christian music's biggest stars.
It was the launching pad of Rebecca's career
and ultimately kind of us being able
to sustainably be in the States.
The stage production grew
from this little kind of rinky-dink backdrop
to all these moving lights.
And it became much more elaborate.
And it was perfect,
because we as boys were really able to like sink our teeth
into programming and design in a much deeper way.
You kind of knew that even if I don't know how to do this,
if if we're in this together, we are gonna figure it out.
That breeds an amazing trust.
Within all the family there were trades and skills
that were developed while supporting her.
The whole family grew in that season.
Do this, do that, order this, order that,
follow my directions.
I think I know everything in the world, follow me.
Joel, at a very young age, 12 I believe
had an eye for stages and at that point we were doing
a lot of church staging and he got an expert
at building stages and being stage manager
and loading in and being in charge of people.
As the crews got bigger and bigger locally, you know,
he's calling all the shots of where everything goes on stage
and telling these men
that are like at least three times his age, what to do.
And they look at him initially and go,
"This guy is gonna be telling me what to do?"
And by, you know, like 30 minutes in,
they were like, "Okay, yeah he knows what he's doing."
Up until probably 11 or 12,
my relationship with the stage was very frightful.
Even checking a vocal in a room
where there was maybe a dozen people in the room
was equally frightful for me.
During Rebecca's first record, she had a song
that she wanted to do a duet with me
and we rehearsed, I mean it's probably a two minute piece.
We rehearsed it for a month.
I don't think he had any idea what the next step was.
He just was enjoying it, whatever.
And then this one night David came and said,
"You're ready, you can sing tonight."
And he's like, "What?"
"You can sing on the stage?" "No, no, I don't want to."
He cried, he just said, "Oh you can't make me."
So I went to our family dog Kimba,
who traveled with us on the road and I cried to Kimba
but I ended up doing it that night.
And the tide kind of turned.
He fell in love with the stage
and from then on he kept going.
♪ I can't explain any other way, 'cause it's God ♪
I just, the tour that we're gonna do in August,
we're now gonna do in November, do a week
of start rehearsing the Christmas material,
then go up to Canada for two weeks,
then come back and do another rehearse.
I think probably some people
have a idealized understanding of what life
might have been like being on the road.
It's just an unreal world, you know, it really is
it breeds dysfunction.
You're out and there's all these people
that are just applauding you and telling you
you're good at what you're doing, it's not real life.
Rebecca's time was very hard.
She had the weight of creativity all on her shoulders.
Joel and Luke can share it.
Is this even making a difference?
Sometimes you have that feeling like, does it even matter?
I know people say the music helps,
but I don't know these people, it's really difficult.
Being on the road is an incredibly grueling,
lonely experience, you don't have your friends around you.
She was alone in so many ways.
She was alone on the road
because it was pretty much all men.
I became the middle person, I became a friend,
but I'm a mom and I've got six other kids.
What am I gonna do?
You are a young girl,
yet you are the primary income for an entire family
that's struggling to get by.
So with that comes so many layers of complexity
that add to that the expectations of the Christian industry,
which a lot of times, I think,
can be more harsh and more intense than mainstream.
If the boys walk outta their bus
pretty much in their pajamas and bed hair,
which Luke does, people will be like,
"Oh look, it's so cute, they've just woken up.
They're just coming in."
Rebecca walks out in sweats and bed hair it's like,
"Oh, oh gosh, she doesn't look like her pictures."
My heart would go out to her to see the pain,
to see the demands.
I would hit the wall, just exhaustion
and being really young doing what I was doing
with a lot of responsibility.
And I did feel that I needed to keep going at certain points
where I was pretty overwhelmed or depleted internally
because there was a lot of people
that I loved, relying on me.
I think I squelched, you know,
my own internal like voice of reason or self-protection,
probably a lot just out of desire to do the right thing
or to serve and I felt so called to it and so passionate.
But you can also be internally grieving
some of the losses that go along with that.
Rebecca always wanted to be married
and this idea of like having seven to 10 kids.
At every turn, there was a hope for love
since I can remember.
That was one of the great difficulties of her adulthood
and something very hard for me to watch.
You know, she's 26, 27, 28 going into her 30s.
Over a decade she started feeling her dreams and hopes
and desires being shifted
and it became a very frightful thing to step on stage.
Really, I had had such a dream to get married
and have a family and like there was times
where I'd be crying before a tour
because I just didn't feel like I had enough to give.
I knew the weight that she was under
and I knew the cost that she was giving to everything.
The one thing that I feel so very thankful to God,
she never lost her faith
through the hard, the hurts, the difficulties.
She has always had a beautiful faith
and I so respect her for that because it was hard.
Hey, we have hearts full of love that God has given us
and God really calls us to love the unloved, you know?
To see the way that God has used Rebecca,
she impacted a generation of girls who are now moms
and the boys are impacting their kids, is just staggering.
We are in many ways a legacy band of Rebecca St. James.
The training ground and the ability to fail
kind of quietly in the background
and to fall in love with music.
Because of our experience with Rebecca
I've had the privilege of seeing someone go before
and I really have always valued and cherished that.
I've said it a fair amount over the last few years.
And I believe with everything in me that if it weren't
for Rebecca, there would be no For King & Country.
It's funny 'cause I've kind of
envied an element of what Joel and Luke have
in For King & Country and that is each other.
I've cried about the fact that I didn't have a Luke
to do it with me, would've been different for me.
But I'm glad for them. I'm glad they have each other.
And they don't have to do it alone
'cause it's hard, it's a hard thing to do alone.
I'm thankful for the support that they have
that has grieved me that I didn't have that.
Just pause a sec.
Yeah, let's break that for (indistinct).
Before For King & Country there was Joel and Luke
before Joel and Luke, there was just Joel, there was just me
and it was the days of NSYNC and Backstreet Boys
And I was not a closet fan, I was an overt advocate.
He was doing like backup singing for Rebecca
and he was starting to have his own like persona.
You know, he had like his own suit on
and he was doing like his own moves.
I remember thinking,
"Oh, okay, Joel's got, he's got some flair."
We would play these really terrible music videos
of Backstreet Boys and we were kind of the stars
of our youth group.
At about 16 he came to David and he said,
"I wanna perform, I feel like God's calling me to do music."
David said, "Okay, yeah, write some songs,
get together, I'll set up some writing appointments,
let's make some music."
I created my own little EP called "JoeL,"
and I always loved the symmetry
because the J and the L were like really balanced.
Something about music really impacted him.
He was entranced by it all.
And I just thought, well that's that,
you know, here comes Superstardom.
♪ No, you've gotta let her go ♪
So I took the demo around a lot of people in town.
No one's interested.
Just crickets.
David actually had the very unenviable job of being a dad
and going to Joel and say, "It's just not good enough."
And so I went to him and I said,
"Ah, I don't think the solo thing's gonna work too well,
Joel, going by early response.
I think you gotta consider something else.
What about experimenting with your brother?"
And Joel did not wish to hear that.
He wanted to do it on his own.
The idea of Joel and I working together
Dad had been saying it for years.
Luke and I didn't get along, at all.
We kind of annoyed each other, pushed each other's buttons
and he grew taller than me,
which was very frustrating as an older brother.
He was a better vocalist than me.
I loved to beat my brother
that was something that I enjoyed.
I, at a pretty young age, could beat him at most sports,
which, you know, in our family didn't go over very well
'cause it was kind of like,
"You're older than him, you lost to Luke?"
You know, it was always that type of stuff.
The only thing I had be apart from him
was just raw like will and tenacity, that was my gift.
And so dad said,
"Joel, I think you should partner with Luke."
And I said, "No."
Luke was playing basketball and he was really set on it.
I'd done all the training camps
and everything my junior year
and it came to the first game I was playing great.
And I went up for a rebound and came down and (indistinct).
That was a big pivotal moment for me and my life.
It had changed the course of kind of everything.
I had gone to mom and I said, "Mom, you know,
everybody in the family kind of has their thing.
You know, sports was my thing.
I don't have my thing anymore.
And you know, what do I do?
Once again, dad has sort of tried to wear me down.
Like, you just do a song with Luke, like poor fella.
Look at him and maybe out of sympathy, who knows?
I was like, all right, well let's just, we'll write a song.
We actually played the song live
with Rebecca St. James on one of her later tours.
Joel was dragging his brother along
and resenting it in lots of ways.
Didn't have a great relationship with him,
didn't really respect him.
He had no experience writing a song,
really performing, singing behind a microphone.
After that, Luke and I, for about five years,
just wrote awful music.
We wanted to play a snippet for you.
Let us know what you think.
- It's wrong chord, right? - What would be amazing
is if we could that our verse
and then find a even better chorus.
Nobody wanted to have anything to do with us.
You know, we were not successful at all.
It was so bad.
He was working at a call center
I was living in Mom and Dad's basement.
I had a 1987 Oldsmobile that I named Old Betsy.
I put Chrome hub caps on it
and illegal tints that I had to take off.
It was a strange time.
Those years were difficult, I remember one month
that I had like $10 left in my bank account
and that was just the way it was.
We signed a development deal with the only guy in town
that really saw anything in us
a guy named Shaun Shankel.
Okay, so Shaun our producer,
just showed up with the keyboard player
and we're gonna go and we're gonna go and say hi.
And the whole idea was that we were going to sign
to Sean doing some production development-
- For six months. - For six months.
That was that we were gonna have a record deal
in six months.
There is no such thing as a overnight success.
If there indeed is something or someone
that can be considered an overnight success,
then their success is probably gonna be about that long too.
The way that we saw things going
and what actually happened, I mean was just
so far from reality.
I remember meeting David Smallbone.
He brought me The Deep was the name of it
and that was Joel and Luke's first band name iteration.
And it was an EP of four songs and I didn't like any of it.
Except for the first verse of the first song.
I remember thinking,
I think there's something special hidden inside of this.
We became his pet project
and the amount of hours he poured in and time and resource,
you couldn't put a price tag on it.
And it was everything development should have been.
It was awful. It was rewarding.
Sean was good and bad for me.
He was good for me because he pushed me to be better.
But he could be pretty tough and I kind of needed that.
I remember him going into the studio saying,
"Hey, you should try singing differently."
Which was hard for me to hear.
He taught me how to write songs.
He taught me how to sing in front of a mic.
They would write and write and produce and produce.
No, no, no, not there, not there, not there.
But they just kept at it. You know, they don't stop.
There were times during that where my wife would look at me
and say, why are you doing this?
This is going nowhere.
There was every chance that Joel and Luke
were investing in something that was a pipe dream.
There was every chance that Luke
was just gonna keep working at this call center
and Joel was just gonna keep road managing
and that was kind of gonna be it.
Hello, Luke is a little concerned.
They just, what felt at the time, they lacked authenticity.
You have to really find where the struggle is,
because I believe that that is
what people connect with in artists.
I felt if they could get to that real honest center,
that they could make an impact on the world around them.
I remember sitting down with Joel saying,
"Okay, we've been doing all this work
and I think we've got some songs we can start to,
you know, show, but you're gonna have to perform."
I remember him saying, "Don't worry about that, we got that.
We grew up our whole lives doing that."
And I felt nervous.
Thank you very much. Well good evening everybody.
I'm Joel from Joel and Luke.
Luke, from Joel & Luke together. - Yeah, I like it.
I do remember that show very, very well.
It was friends and family
and about every string we could pull
to give off the perception that yeah,
there's something really happening here.
Like this is really impressive and I think it works kind of.
We have like an intermission and Shaun came in the back
and he, we felt like it'd gone pretty well-
And we felt like it would gone very well.
And he looked at me and he goes,
"Hey, so guys, Luke, well can you hear yourself?"
And I thought, this is mediocre at best.
You're trying to say this to the people
that you'd been working on music for years.
Like this hasn't been in vain.
It did have the feeling of we're failures,
like we're failing right now.
And so then that started the next journey.
What instruments can we play?
And at first it was what instruments can we fake?
We kind of actually started looking at the things
that we could do and I was like,
well I can kind of play a little bit of drums
and that's when we actually started using
a lot of drums on stage
'cause it was one of the only things that I could do.
We fought a lot over this.
It was like, I wanted Luke to take guitar lessons,
learn how to play the guitar.
Joel could play the piano and he was getting better at it
and he would practice
and then he would get mad at Luke for not doing anything.
- Did you hear something? - I did.
It's Luke, we got him locked in the vocal booth.
- Oh. - Can't believe.
And it's 2:00 AM.
- 45 days. - 45 days.
I remember having a conversation with Luke
and saying to him, you need to decide if you're in or out
because you are not contributing enough.
You're not pulling your weight.
It doesn't feel like your heart is in this.
A great source of my frustration with Luke was him not
really leaning in and for better or for worse I was all in.
Joel as sharp as his jawline, okay,
is his commitment to all of the things
that make For King & Country go.
Luke, his hair is a representation of his personality.
It's free, it's in the wind,
he's kind of going with the flow.
I think you could say
I was maybe a little wishy-washy.
Luke's proclivity is, if he doesn't go all in,
then he doesn't really quite fail.
In his mind I think he was going,
I'll do this and I'll kind of lean in
and I'll see what happens, but it's kind of Joel's thing
and if it doesn't work then I don't really care that much
because I'm not really like, I'm not really (indistinct).
The source of frustration got so deep for me along the way
that there were certainly moments I go, "What am I doing?"
Like this has been fun and good
and I like having him as kind of a little sidekick.
But I remember even specifically
when it started getting more serious,
going to people and being like, "Hey, Luke shouldn't get
equal percentage in this band, right?"
He came to me and said,
"Hey, so we're gonna work on this thing together.
See, I've done this a little bit longer than you.
I've worked a little bit harder than you on this.
What about we do 60/40?"
And I was like, "What?" I can't do that.
My brother's a tough personality.
He and I fought a lot in those early days.
And it was usually over ego
and there was a lot of frustration and lot of arguments.
We fought a lot.
Fast forward probably about four or five years
though, I got out of the music business right
after around that first record came, Joel drove me out.
I don't have great fond memories of that time.
It got really complicated.
There was this sense of, well, who's gonna call it?
When's the penny gonna drop?
I think if Joel had to come
to me at one point and said, I'm out.
There may have been pushed back, but I may have gone okay.
I mean, you know, I kind of get it, you know,
it's been pretty hard and we haven't really,
we haven't really done anything.
Because I don't think at that time
Luke saw it as his lifelong job.
There was something in him I think,
that believed that his presence didn't matter.
And he would say to me a lot,
if you think this is not the right path for me,
or like, who are we kidding?
Like, tell me like almost tell me to be done.
We had to break through that as a writer
and really find his voice.
First song I ever wrote that I was proud of
was a song called "Crave."
And it was a song that I just wrote with Shaun.
It came out of a direct exercise that I had him do
to try to get into some pain and into some compassion
and into some empathy.
And we'd been studying lyrics
and I was looking at a U2 song and I was like, man,
at the end of the day, like we all crave hope.
Like look at these lyrics.
And immediately it was like, that's a song I'll do.
That's what we were always trying to find.
It was like, Luke is turning a corner
and becoming an artist.
♪ Hope is what we crave ♪
♪ And that will never change ♪
♪ So I stand and wait ♪
I kind of came to the conclusion I wasn't gonna do this
one foot in one foot out, where I was like,
I gotta give it everything to find out
what this actually looks like.
As a result, with him showing up
his voice has been a really important
and crucial part of For King & Country,
really the heart in some ways.
♪ It's written on my soul ♪
♪ Hope's what we crave ♪
♪ Ooh ♪
♪ It's written on my soul ♪
♪ Hope's what we crave ♪
And we had spent that first year and a half, two years
working on their songs and we were getting there.
So then what we needed to do
was just start booking our first showcases.
We would fly out to LA and Nashville
and perform for different labels.
We played showcases
for all the major record labels in America.
You know, showcase after showcase,
Warner Brothers, Universal, we did one for Sony.
They sort of saw some of the interest,
they saw some of the uniqueness,
but didn't see what they felt like
was really gonna connect with people.
They're always looking for something quite narrow
and you kind of gotta be right in that lane.
Joel and Luke are so artsy.
I just wasn't sure that was gonna happen.
But we had this shining beacon of hope.
We had gotten this call from Atlantic Records in New York
that we were gonna have the opportunity to play showcase
for their president and a few of their A&R folks.
Going up there with this like, we're gonna go
and conquer the world in one of the great cities in America.
We thought we'd made it,
we rented a bus, we were on a tour bus
and we had rented a club and we brought our brother, Daniel
did our lighting like we had stacked the deck.
We were like, man, we're good to go.
They walked in, we were so nervous.
All I remember afterwards was the evacuation.
It was like, these people are out like hardcore out.
They don't give a rip.
It was a low moment.
I remember riding back on the tour bus
crawling into the bunk and the sinking feeling of like,
is this the beginning of the end?
I remember calling Moriah, knowing that I really wanted
to marry this girl and just this feeling of like,
what am I gonna do?
Like where do I go from here?
I don't know if she knew it on the call,
but I remember crying.
I think that was one of the first times I remember
seeing this man that I thought was very indestructible
and just a force.
I saw a crack, I saw rejection and pain.
Wondering if everything he had just invested in
and believed in was all for nothing.
I think from the beginning I had maybe more belief in him
than he had in himself.
He would ask me, how can you be
confident that this will work?
I just think it will something special is developing
and this is what you're supposed to do.
I just felt like it was important for him to know
that no matter what the circumstances looked like,
he was gonna make it, that something was gonna click
and it was just about the right timing
and the right opportunity.
♪ She believes in me ♪
I've just always believed,
I just knew it was gonna happen.
♪ She believes in me ♪
Without Moriah's belief in me, Courtney's in Luke
it just wouldn't have happened.
There was no going back at that point.
It was such a vulnerable time
because everything was hanging in the balance.
We were really able to rally.
It was thick or thin, we were gonna make it through.
And so we get back the dust kind of settles
and just go right back at music,
writing songs and trying again.
There were these moments
when we'd think this is gonna work.
And at first they were few and far between,
but then they started getting closer together slowly.
And then Mark Bright took over Word.
One day where the studio
and a guy named Mark Bright called
and said, "I've heard some of your music, I wanna sign you."
I was just, you know,
completely floored by the music.
I really decided in that moment
that I'm gonna sign this band.
I don't care who has passed on it,
I don't care about anything. I love it.
I said, okay, I want need to meet the manager.
And David was like a lion in the protective aspect of it,
making sure that this thing would succeed
and that they would get the right deal,
the right situation, be around the right people.
I think that there's this feeling
from a lot of young bands that if you can get
the record deal that you've arrived.
I think because of our experience with Rebecca, we knew
that when you get the record deal,
that's just the beginning.
We had to figure out a band name
'cause nobody liked Joel and Luke
who wanted to go with Joel and Luke?
For days we were just running through,
they would come with these big lists of band names.
I mean every road sign, every newspaper article,
every word I would see would become a potential band name.
Originally, when Luke and I started working together
or writing together, people would call us the boys
and we had a bit of a problem with it.
We didn't really like it.
So we sat down at this meeting and we thought
we're gonna come up with some band names.
I came up with the idea of calling us
All The King's Men like the Humpty Dumpty,
all the king's horses and all the king's men
didn't really have the right tone to it,
so our producer said-
No, it's For King & Country.
You are for King for God, for country for people.
It is you.
So from this time out we're gonna be called-
For King & Country.
The live show has always been
one of our favorite things to do.
It's been one of our strengths.
And so it was always labels, always like,
if we can get you in front of people,
if we can get you in front of people.
Well, Winter Jam was that ticket.
So the first thing
that I ever heard was them on Winter Jam
what I thought they did so brilliantly was they gave you
no reasons to not love their show.
Something special happened
when For King & Country got on stage.
Even if they weren't headlining,
everybody walked away from the show
like they probably should have though (laughing).
They had all the drums and all the drama
and all the King Arthur of Camelot stuff.
There is no reason not to love this. It's just so exciting.
Winter Jam is a sort of plug and play show.
You do the same show every night for three months.
It wasn't like that for them.
And every night was a new group of people
where can we tweak this just if it's a percent more
to be better than it was last night.
And I watched them do that consistently.
Okay, we're practicing about to go out
and visit the people waiting in line
with the Winter Jam experience.
This is "Busted Heart."
And so from about
like 3:00 PM till almost midnight,
we were doing some kind of show like thing for Winter Jam.
We really celebrated that moment
because it felt like the belief and the hope
and the investment that everyone made,
is becoming something.
There were all hands on deck in that season.
I was pregnant with our first child, Jude.
We had two 15 passenger seat vans.
One had a hole in it, so that was exciting.
There is a certain drive you have to have,
or you more than likely are never gonna make it.
You're gonna have to get in the van
and you're gonna have to drive the van yourself
all night long and then you're gonna have to show
over that radio station and you don't even hardly
have a voice, but you are there to do whatever you can do
because you don't think you deserve it.
Nobody could ever say that For King & Country
was not willing to put the blood, sweat and tears in.
And even if they were, their dad wouldn't have let 'em.
You get out there boys, Dave's not messing around none.
I remember it was raining.
And so we put all their show flyers and Ziploc baggies
and put them on car windshields in parking lots
and tried to get people to come out to the show
and like people actually showed up.
We had released a song, it was our first single ever
and it was a song called "Busted Heart."
We were in New Mexico and people were singing it.
A little song that I wrote in a tiny little room.
It had gotten to New Mexico and it meant something to them.
The first moment I had ever seen a group of people
that wasn't like my family sing my songs.
I just want to hear this band on the radio
because if people were gonna get it,
they're really gonna get it.
And you know, they did. People got it.
♪ Hold on to me ♪
So we released the first record
and kind of charged into the music world
and at that point it had been, you know, seven years
of development and there was so much kind of triumph.
♪ Hold on to me ♪
This was the result of many years of faithfulness,
hard work, strategy and execution
that even preceded For King & Country.
♪ Hold on to me ♪
♪ Winters come back again ♪
♪ Soon this season will end ♪
♪ I'll surrender tonight ♪
♪ You'll meet me right where I am ♪
It was a great tour. It was a lot of stress for Luke.
Midway through that tour, he started feeling ill.
He started losing weight.
We were doing a lot of crazy hours
of like driving till three in the morning,
napping in a hotel for two hours, getting back in,
you know, the food's not great at gas stations,
but it kept getting progressively worse.
I think I tried to pretend as if it wasn't real, you know,
I was kinda like, I've seen some symptoms of,
my body's not quite right, but I just was like, man,
you just tough it out and you just keep going.
I had my wedding day and he was skin and bones.
And this contrast of that, I found my life partner
and I'm so happy to be married to her.
And then my, you know, my brother
and my vocational partner is not wanting
to steal anything but is just deeply unwell.
And we'd fought through so much at this point
and it was finally clicking, you know,
I was like, I'm getting married and you're married
and you just have your new child and you're really ill.
Joel was still on a honeymoon and Luke's wife calls us
and says, "I don't know what to do, Luke won't eat."
Technically I still have a disease
called ulcerative colitis.
So sick, I got down to about 125 pounds
and I stopped weighing myself after that
'cause it was so depressing.
My hair was falling out
because it just was that malnourished.
The doctor was frightened when he saw him
and said, you get so weak,
your muscles get so weak at that point that your heart,
you go into cardiac arrest.
His heart was just going crazy all the time.
I would just be in bed and pray,
"Lord, cover his heart tonight.
Like let everything keep working."
And I stayed with them for three weeks
just cooking meals and supporting in whatever way I could.
And that held us through that very scary time.
We went to Luke and Courtney's house.
Luke weighing less than me at that time,
he was just so, so fragile.
Jude started crying
and Luke wanted to comfort his own son,
but he was too weak to pick him up.
Kind of drag him across the bed and really struggle to just
get his baby into his arm so he could hold him.
He was bedridden
and couldn't even go on walks outside the home.
There was family members that were having dreams
about him dying.
I mean, it was just extremely sobering, extremely sobering.
He was really death warmed up
and we didn't know what the future was.
For the first time in raising our family,
both David and I actually had to contemplate
that this may be a terminal illness, that we might lose him
and it's not a place any parents should visit.
It's a hard place.
But it was an intense few months
of just around the clock care and around the clock worrying.
You know, you never quite plan for a moment
when the person that you love the most
says to you, you know, just don't leave me.
And you know, you say the things that you can say,
and that is, you know, it's gonna be okay,
I'm gonna be fine.
And I didn't know if it was gonna be okay.
♪ I don't want to live without you ♪
♪ I'm not ready to live without you ♪
♪ So let's dance a little, laugh a little ♪
♪ And hope a little more ♪
♪ Yes let's dance a little, laugh a little ♪
♪ And hope a little more ♪
♪ Cause I don't want to live without you, without you ♪
So I flew to a performance where we played
for the first time ever without my brother.
I got my wish, like I was in the stadium
doing the show without him.
I was tuned in live watching that performance.
I remember that feeling very, very clearly.
The road does provide some sort of like band
of brothers mentality.
You know, you're meant to be there and I couldn't be.
It was a strange night performing without him
knowing that he was actually watching.
It is brilliant to be here with you tonight.
It's a bit of a sad day for us, as some of you might know
our little brother Luke, who makes up the other part
of For King & Country, is absent this evening.
He is ill. We ask for your prayers and your support.
I actually turned away from the TV and kind of wept.
As a younger brother,
you still want your older brother's approval.
And so I could see that I meant something to him
and I could see a void on stage.
And it was the great solidifier of our partnership
because it was like, I don't want this.
All those years of, I didn't choose this, I didn't want this
to this place of going, not only do I want him here,
but I need him here.
Set everything aside, set family of origin aside,
set our history aside.
Let's choose each other. And we did that night.
Not only, I think relationally was that moment in 2013
the great solidifier for Luke and I.
But I actually think it was a great solidifier as artists
because, you know, pain will find us all in life.
Suffering will find us all.
But for us, in our dynamic of childhood and growing up,
we had not been the front runner of pain and suffering.
That was Mom and Dad.
And I think in many ways it gave us a song to sing.
We locked in as partners and as brothers.
We started to see who each other was individually.
It was the beginning of this deep well
gushing forth in their music.
That was it. That was when it started to blossom.
It was shocking to see it go so quickly.
It just almost never happens.
The Lord used all of that hard work and gave them
a much larger platform.
Please welcome For King & Country.
Knowing that I'm very excited about it-
- Dolly Parton's on the phone. - And I'm looking forward,
this song just came through my office
and they started playing it and I went,
"Oh, oh, I can't believe that."
I thought it was one of the best songs I'd ever heard.
For King & Country has reached
number one on both billboard and Christian charts.
For King & Country have exceeded their wildest dreams.
With a chance to take home two Grammys on Sunday.
The Grammy goes to "God Only Knows."
No matter how hard those trials you might face might be,
there is always hope.
And that's the reason why we do music.
Joel and Luke Smallbone
are one of the biggest duos
in the music business.
Two-time Grammy award-winning rock group
For King & Country. - For King & Country.
- Let's go.
It's just a sweet triumph for everyone, for their family,
for the band, for fans who believe.
For King and Country, have amassed millions of fans
that've scored four Grammys. - Oh.
♪ We're comin' clean, we're born again ♪
♪ Our hopeful lungs can breathe again ♪
♪ Step into a new day ♪
♪ We can rise up from the dust and walk away ♪
♪ We can dance upon the heartache, yeah ♪
♪ So light a match, leave the past, burn the ships ♪
♪ And don't you look back ♪
Make no mistake,
this is not just a story about Luke or me
or the band that we're a part of.
Not a story about record sales, tours, accolades, or awards.
It's a human story about the people
that persevered through struggle.
Well, decades later,
I saw the boys in one of their concerts.
As I was watching them,
Joel said there was a lady named Kay, that helped them.
And I was just sitting there and I just thought,
look what God has done, look what God has done.
It's record label executives
and publishers who gave us a chance when no one else would.
It's a story of faith that guided and provided
during those dark nights and really long days.
If there's a legacy for Helen's
and my life is that we as a family
have encouraged people to take Jesus seriously.
It's a story about those who believed in us
and our friends who showed up at our performances
and encouraged us to keep pressing forward
You're like my hero.
It's a story about our siblings, these sisters
and brothers who rolled up their sleeves
and rallied to give their gifts and talents
and hard work to partner with us
for something greater than themselves.
It's a story about our wives, Courtney, a mother, writer,
speaker, and my darling wife Moriah, an actor,
producer, Latin country artist.
These great women who stood for us
when we could not stand for ourselves.
I never dreamed that we would be able
to be involved in impacting people's lives
as a family like we have.
It's only God who can do that stuff.
This is not a story about the band we're a part of
it's a great story of a father who never gave up.
I saw him as a boy getting out of bed every morning
when he'd been rejected by everyone in this town.
To him believing in his daughter and then believing in us.
It's a story about a powerful mom who stood
by her husband when it made absolutely no sense.
It's a story about our eldest sister
who cared for her family and allowed
these two ragamuffin brothers a place behind her on stage
to find their own voices.
It's a story about her finding love
and a fulfilled dream of family.
Using her voice now stronger and brighter than ever
alongside her partner, both in life
and yes, on the stage as well.
And lastly, it is also a story about a pair of brothers
who honestly didn't quite get along growing up,
but chose through injury, illness, failure,
and desperation to not only set aside their differences,
but to find a common voice in music to band together
with no plan B and no turning back.
♪ I used to be a beggar ♪
♪ Down on calloused knees ♪
♪ Till I got an invitation ♪
♪ Into the courts of the King ♪
♪ I'm moving on, I'm moving on ♪
♪ I'm moving on, keep moving ♪
♪ I'm moving on, I'm moving on ♪
♪ I'm moving on ♪
♪ You gave me my freedom ♪
♪ Now I'm free indeed ♪
♪ I'm marching out of the doubt into trust ♪
♪ Out of the me into us ♪
♪ No turning back, no turning back, ♪
♪ I'm falling head over heels into love ♪
♪ Leaving regret in the dust ♪
♪ No turning back, no turning back, no turning back ♪
♪ No ♪
♪ And If I'm caught in the crossfire ♪
♪ I will stand my ground ♪
♪ And even if I were to lose my life ♪
♪ Your arms are where I'll be found ♪
♪ I'm marching out of the doubt into trust ♪
♪ Out of the me into us ♪
♪ No turning back, no turning back ♪
♪ I'm falling head over heels into love ♪
♪ Leaving regret in the dust ♪
♪ No turning back, no turning back ♪
♪ No turning back, oh, oh no ♪
♪ Turning back, oh, oh no ♪