After 12 years together, the David Crowder Band is calling it quits. The Waco, Texas, group, one of the more inventive acts in modern worship music, will play its final shows in early January, days before releasing its last album. For frontman David Crowder, the ending doubles as a personal departure. He is also stepping down as a music leader at University Baptist Church in Waco, the church where the band took root.
“You’d think I’d be scared,” Crowder, 39, said from his Waco-area home. “But I’ve always felt like there’s enough light for the next step. And that’s what I’m doing, one step at a time.”
Before the finale, the band stops Saturday at The Orbit Room in Grand Rapids, a sold-out date with Gungor, Chris August, and John Mark McMillan also on the bill.
Why the David Crowder Band Is Ending
The decision was deliberate rather than dramatic. Crowder describes a band that simply reached the end of a plan.
“After our first three albums, we sat down and talked and decided to sign up for another three,” he recalled. “And, now, we talked it over again, and we’re ready for everybody to do other things.”
That sense of completion gave the farewell tour its name, “7,” a number the band treats as a marker of wholeness and a bridge into its final recording.
A Requiem Mass for the Final Album
The last album is an ambitious one, a double disc titled “Give Us Rest: A Requiem Mass in C, the Happiest of All Keys.” The choice of form is pointed.
“It’s a form of music that’s existed in liturgical worship longer than any other form in the Christian church,” Crowder said of the requiem.
The band did not treat the form as untouchable. “We had versions of requiems to guide us, but, at the same time, we tried to colloquialize a lot of it and present it in words that are specific to church culture yet more common,” he said.
It is a fitting last gesture from a group that has spent a decade refusing to sit still, moving from bluegrass to Eastern hymns and folding rock and electronics into congregational song. The band recently released a Christmas record, “Oh For Joy,” before turning to the requiem.
Lite-Brite Videos and the Passion Years
The Crowder Band’s restlessness has shown up in its visuals as much as its music. Its most recent Dove Award went to the video for “SMS (Shine),” a stop-action project built from roughly 700,000 Lite-Brite pegs across 1,200 frames that mixed live action with light-board images.
The work was as painstaking as it was low-tech. “For each of those frames, it took us about an hour to put all the pegs in,” Crowder said. “I think we bought all of the Lite-Brite pegs we could find on eBay four times.”
The band has also been a steady presence in the Passion movement, contributing to more than a half-dozen “Passion” albums and playing the conferences that helped define a generation of worship music. Its last appearance will come at a Passion gathering in Atlanta in January, the same month as its final shows.
What Comes Next for David Crowder
Crowder is noncommittal about the future, though he expects to stay near music. He floated the idea of a retrospective.
“Maybe there’ll be some kind of greatest hits album,” he speculated. “Those are some of my favorite records.”
Beyond that, he is not promising much. “I am so utilitarian in purpose that I can’t see myself not continuing to write songs for churches to sing,” he said. “I’m sure that will come back to light. But, right now, I’ll just breathe in and out for a while.”
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