Joel and Luke Smallbone set off two weeks ago on the most ambitious tour of their seven-year Christian pop careers.
It did not start well.
Four days in as they were making their way to a hometown show in Nashville, their bus broke down in the middle of nowhere.
They had to wait on the side of the road for a tow truck, U-Haul and a 15-passenger van to get their band, For King & Country, to Nashville — five hours away.
They made it home with a couple hours to spare before going on stage at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater, Luke Smallbone said during a phone call a couple days after that concert.
“It’s been a little bit of a wild circus, but we survived the first weekend,” he said with a chuckle, his native Australian accent softened after spending most of his 32 years living in the United States.
For King & Country’s “Burn Down the Ships” Tour, which pulls into Tucson Arena on Sunday, Oct. 20, is the first time the brothers have performed outside of megachurches, including a pair of shows in spring 2015 with Calvary Chapel Tucson. The 36-date tour will take them around the country throughout the fall to promote their year-old album “Burn the Ships.”
“It’s a very personal album so to be able to see people kind of embracing this as ‘hey there’s stuff taking place in my past and I need to burn the ships and move on and kind of discover what my future could be,’ to see that actually taking place … I think that’s kind of the reason you get into music,” said Smallbone, whose family moved to Nashville from Australia in the early 1990s. “You hope for that, and to see that actually taking place is encouraging for us.”
The Smallbone brothers have been involved in Christian pop music since their teens, working in production for their older sister, Grammy-winning Christian pop star Rebecca St. James.
But none of those shows had as much production as “Burn the Ships,” Smallbone said, including LED walls and a stage design that will remind you of a ship’s bow.
“We have had other tours that had a lot of production, but nothing quite like this tour,” he said. “This is kind of like our biggest undertaking.”
Stage bells and whistles aside, Sunday’s audience, which could nearly fill Tucson Arena, will be more focused on the message from “Burn the Ships,” an album whose theme and title song Smallbone said was inspired by a dark time in his life.
A couple years ago, Smallbone’s wife Courtney phoned him from a concert stop in Austin, Texas, and insisted he come home. She told him she was becoming addicted to medication prescribed to her to combat nausea.
Courtney Smallbone underwent intensive therapy and rehab. When she was stronger, she took the rest of the mediation and flushed it down the toilet. Smallbone said it reminded him of a story he’d heard about a ship arriving on a foreign shore. When the ship’s captain suggested that his crew go out and explore this new land, the crew refused. So the captain forced their hand by burning the ship — “Leave the past, burn the ships and don’t look back.”
The brothers wrote all of the album’s songs including “God Only Knows,” inspired by their fans’ stories about everyday difficulties in life, from making ends meet to facing death and their demons.
Smallbone said he and his brother always imagined the song with a female voice, but they came up empty when they were recording it for the album.
When it came time to release “God Only Knows” as a single, they reached out to Dolly Parton with no expectations that she would actually agree to re-record the song with them.
“What we didn’t know was two days before we called, she had went to her managers and said ‘I want to get back to writing the spiritual songs I grew up on’,” Smallbone said.
The Parton version of “God Only Knows” was released last month and already has sold gold — 500,000 copies — and has become one of the most anticipated moments of For King & Country’s 2 1/2-hour concerts.
“There’s a different weight to it when you have a female sing those lyrics — ‘God only knows what you’ve been through’,” he said. “I remember thinking to myself yeah, that’s going to be cool having Dolly on it. And then when I heard her sing it, you can almost hear her history in music come out with those lyrics. There is something about those words coming out of her mouth that is really powerful.”
No, he was quick to add, Parton will not be at Sunday’s concert when the brothers perform the song.
But that doesn’t mean she won’t be part of the song, he teased.
