For the better part of two decades, Derek Webb has been a figure in Christian music either as a member of the GMA Dove award-winning group Caedmon’s Call or a solo artist. In recent years his solo career has been the point of interest for many because the indicative nature and expletive lyrics. In the fall of 2009, he released his fifth albumStockholm Syndrome, which explores politics, gay rights and captivity while ruffling the feathers of critics and conservative evangelicals.

Shortly before Stockholm Syndrome’s release, Webb played an impromptu show at Taft Street Coffee, in Houston, Texas. Here he announced, “I am in cahoots with some friends here in Houston and it looks like we’re going to release a new Caedmon’s Call.”

Through the fall, he embarked on a full band tour with Josh Moore, who produced Stockholm Syndrome, and Chris Kimmerer, a session drummer from Nashville. On the “Black Eye Tour” performances we’re well received and reinterpreted a heavily electronic record on stage.  The tour featured special guests Sandra McCracken and Marc Scibilia.

On Jan. 8, 2010 he played an acoustic set at the Gay Christian Network Conference, in Nashville, Tenn. Also after the new year he started to release a cover song per month as a part of project called Democracy Vol. 1. He continued on with his tour joined by supporting acts Amy Courts and Jennifer Knapp, who is celebrating her return to music after several long years break.

I (Charles Peters) caught up with Derek on the second leg of his tour on March 6 in Manheim, Pa. He was in generally good spirits. The night before he played at the City Winery in New York City and was complement by indie rock legend, Joseph Arthur, for his performance.

During the show he explained the origins of his controversial song “What Matters More”. He explained that he had been driving through Nashville listening to an interview by the Rev. Dr. Jerry Falwell who had declared his moral framework was concentrated around the Golden Rule and later in the interview made unfavorable comments about the gay community. Also that 93% of people identify Christians as a people who hate gays.

Webb and I discussed, amongst many things, his last album and his new projects with Caedmon’s Call.

On Stockholm Syndrome:

When a lot of us got Stockholm Syndrome, we were all a bit perplexed and put off slightly. There is such a distance between that records sound and something like 40 Acres or even I See Things Upside Down, which is known for being your experimental record. Why the abrupt change of pace?

Honestly every record, to me has been totally different from the previous. They’ve all been a progression. They’ve all been really different. This has been the first really big jump stylistically. Like Mockingbird is nothing like The Ringing Bell and neither are anything like She Must and Shall Go Free and neither of those are nothing like I See Things Upside Down.

They’re all really different and I’ve always felt at liberty to style change whenever I want to because I get bored easily. I am super bored of acoustic music. I don’t listen to any acoustic music. I don’t really like much acoustic music. It doesn’t really do anything for me. Now unfortunately, when I play live shows that’s just what I do and I have to reinterpret everything on an acoustic guitar because I can’t afford to have a band out with me all the time. Sometimes I can and when I can, I do. But I would probably be bored to tears at my concert. But I have to appreciate that there some people who do like acoustic music and hopefully that’s who’s coming or people who are interested enough in the songs that can put up with acoustic versions if that’s all I can pull off live at this point.

But what I like is the opposite. I love synthetic. I love inorganic. I love programmed and electronic music. That’s what I’ve been into for so long. It was just time for me to bring up to speed my particular preferences and personality with the actual work I was doing. It was just time and there were a lot of other reasons but boredom and restlessness is high up there.

Can you explain the title a bit more? Why Stockholm Syndrome?

I don’t know, in my job I’m careful to pay attention to things that seem to crop up on my radar time and time again. When The Ringing Bell was done and we were touring that, be it in reading various things or conversations with friends, the concept kept coming up. It kept getting mentioned to me. It was like “Man, I just read another article that referred to Stockholm syndrome.” And what a fascinating concept that is of people falling in love with or being infatuated with the forces that oppress them and ultimately want to kill and destroy them. It’s the fascinating, twisted, weird idea.

When that started to pattern itself, I just started to take notice and started to use that as the grid through which I was approaching the subject matter I was writing about. At first it was just a writing exercise and it wound up being this fascinating topical approach.

On the Gay Christian Network

What is your stance on the Gay Christian Network in Nashville, Tenn. and the work they’re doing?

Yea, I played an acoustic show as apart of their conference in Nashville. I’ll tell you the truth as an organization, I really like the idea. First of all the GCN wouldn’t have to exist if churches were doing their jobs. If Christ followers were actually following Jesus, then an organization like that wouldn’t have to exist where gay people who are on a spiritual journey, a uniquely Christian spiritual journey, would have to band together because there is no other safe place for them to go and worship and learn and study. So now it’s unfortunate that it should have to exist, and it shouldn’t. That said I like the fact that in their official documentation they leave it very open for people in their community to have very, very different opinions about the particular morality of the issue. I like that they weren’t setting themselves up to say “here’s what we are.” Instead they’re a catch-all for any disenfranchised Christians or people who are spiritually curious, who have been alienated because of their sexuality. That I was really encouraged by and being there with them I was really encouraged by that.

On Caedmon’s Call:

Does this new record have a name yet?

No we’re still sorta kicking things around, it’s too soon to call.

So you’re back into the Caedmon’s Call groove. You’ve said over and over “don’t count this band out yet folks”. What tricks do you have up your sleeve this time?

I have the band themselves, which you don’t get on every Caedmon’s record, it’s a hard group of people to motivate, because they all do other things. Everyone in the band has primary things in their life that they do. Now I’ve got my career, Cliff Young runs the media department for a huge church in Texas. Everyone just has something else they do. So it’s a hard group of  people, it’s like herding cats. It’s a hard group of people to wrangle and get excited about something. But what I have is their excitement. Everybody really feels that there’s something special about the moment we’re in and the most significant thing is the songs. That is the only thing that can make a record great, is the songs. Hype and energy doesn’t make a great record. Songs make a great record. Sometimes you have both and in this case we do and that is a result of me and my wife [Sandra McCracken] both kind of seeing a moment where this band needed to be pushed a little bit.

So we started to push them to write. Now I have written the majority of [songs]; like I wrote about half the band’s songs and Aaron Tate wrote half the band’s songs, that’s the majority of the band’s catalog. The other members of the band have just never written songs. When Aaron and I had left, which happened in the same year, there were no writers left in the band. So they started to farm it out to friends and people in their community. And that was fine but it didn’t really make for any great Caedmon’s records in my opinion other than maybe Share the Well, which was a really special thing, it was a great moment.

Regardless, the moment we’re in right now, we have members of the band, who have never written any songs writing all the songs. Danielle [Young], for instance, has written half the record. She carrying the majority of the weight of the writing on the record. Now I’m helping facilitate. I’m writing with her, my wife is writing with her. I’ve written a few songs with Cliff. Sandra and I wrote a song with Todd [Bragg] the band’s drummer. Jeff Miller is the band’s bass player and he wrote a song. I told this band I want something uniquely Caedmon’s Call; I don’t want anyone else writing all the songs and I don’t wanna write all the songs either. And they are freakishly talented. I mean who would’ve thought the best writers in the band had never written a song up until the eleventh hour that we’re in now. None of these guys had written any of the songs before, and I feel like they’re best Caedmon’s songs on any Caedmon’s album, ever. I think it’s positioned to be the best record the band has ever made.

So the trick I have up my sleeve is, I have the band’s full attention.

Now Aaron Tate, who wrote some the more memorable songs “Not Enough” “This World” “There You Go”, hasn’t contributed to an album for Caedmon’s Call in seven years, and then you stopped recording with the band (until 2007). Were the two departures linked?

No, not really, coincidently maybe. On the surface it may have appeared so but Aaron was at the end of a season of songwriting. He just didn’t want to write songs anymore. It was something that had gone from something he couldn’t keep from doing, just something coming out of him naturally, these songs, to something that had just stopped and dried up. It became a burden for him to have to write when a new season came along, a new cycle or a time start another record. It started to become a stress on him to write songs when it wasn’t coming naturally and he just didn’t want to do it anymore. So that occurred simultaneous with a few things for me and it just kind of happen and wasn’t anything too calculated.

It appears that way but he had actually written what he declared to be his last batch of songs. He felt that they wrapped up whatever songwriting statements he wanted to make. He felt like he said everything he wanted to say with this conclusion of six or eight songs; and the band wound up not recording any of those songs. But I felt there were some really great songs. So I spent my first couple of records mining those demos of songs he wrote before. But he had written those songs for Caedmon’s Call. They just never recorded them and I just thought they were great songs and wanted people to hear them. I dropped them onto records so people would have a chance.

And since that time do you think, without your hand in the work and creative process, they adapted well? 

I absolutely do. It was a great thing for them to get Andrew Osenga in the band, who actually I recommend because Andy’s a great friend and we toured with the Normals which was his band before for years and they were one of my favorite bands. Andy is such a great performer, such a great songwriter, he was more than qualified. So I tried to set them up so he could come in and take my place.

We orchestrated Back Home to be the be the last record I would be on. I was working on my first record while were working on Back Home at the same time. So intention we didn’t have me write or sing much for that record because I knew I wouldn’t be with them when they toured it. They did to and we wanted them to have a whole bunch of new material they could play without me.

I think it was a great move. Andy came in initially as a hired gun to come in to play guitar and sing background vocals to help them through the transition. They eventually made him a member of the band and had him writing and singing and really contributing and I thought that was a good move because it was a great season of music that came out of that partnership.

But ultimately I didn’t feel that there was a certain cohesiveness that I didn’t see happening, because the songs were coming from every direction. It wasn’t the songs weren’t great. It’s not that the songs weren’t great. It’s just when you put it all together it just wasn’t a cohesive statement, to me. I love all the individual songs. When the band plays those live I think they’re great songs. But when you put them in the context of a piece of one state of 13 or 14 songs. I just don’t feel like it fit together as much as some of those earlier records did.

That’s one man’s opinion thought too and I’m a big Caedmon’s Call fan. I loved a lot of stuff the band did after I left. I thought Share the Well was their best record and it was the first one they did after I left. I paid attention with much interest….It’s a beautiful, stunning record. I wept the first time I heard Share the Well. I got an earlier copy of it and I listened to it on a plane when I was going somewhere. One of the band members floated it to me and I hadn’t heard anything. I just put it on and didn’t know what to expect and it was just beautiful, stunning record.

What elements do you think have changed between this project and Overdressed?

I feel like the band has taken the band back a little bit. A lot of the way the band has worked before has been in neutral and having others push them from one place to another. That can be a good thing it just depends on who’s pushing. You know, I feel like the band hasn’t been super invested in the process and it’s just a hard thing when you have so little time and the time you do have is all disconnected. We used to go in and make records all at once and spend a month or two months making it and doing it. As you get caught up it take on it’s own energy. When you’re making records like Caedmon’s has had to over the last few years you don’t have that advantage of that energy building up. So overall they were good efforts but a little lifeless and some of that was my fault too. The camaraderie was different. Again I don’t think they were bad records, I just don’t fell like they were as great as they could’ve been and I feel like this record is going to be. Maybe because they’re writing the songs people are so much more invested. There’s so much energy coming out on the project because people are excited to be working on it because they love it. They’ve never been so involved before and even at are best they were still sing the songs someone else wrote. So for Danielle to be singing songs she wrote, she is so connected, she performs them differently than she would that if Aaron or I wrote for her. It’s a totally different process, it’s really magical, it’s a great moment.

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