Friday, June 12th

Long-time no blog. I'll get better. And this is a great way to kick off the "new and improved" Matt blogging -- or something like that. As I mentioned on Metro Sports' site with this article, this Sunday at Kauffman Stadium, the Royals will be hosting Faith & Family Day after the game against Cincinnati. The wildly popular Christian group MercyMe, who had the hit song “I Can Only Imagine,” is scheduled to perform. Jim Bryson, who helped start MercyMe and is the group’s piano/keyboard player, grew up in Missouri and now makes his home near Dallas. On Thursday, I spoke with Bryson. Due to size limitations, I had to edit and cut some of the interview to make it work for Metro Sports. It was such a fun and interesting interview, though, that I wanted to post it in its entirety here. (As you can guess quickly, the questions are in bold and Jim's answers are in the same font as this.)

Are you guys having a good time touring this summer?

We’ve been having a really good time. We’ve been up around the East Coast a lot. We just got back from shows in Virginia and North Carolina. We’ve done some California shows. And the central part of the U.S. this next week. The crowds have been great and the weather has been cooperative, for the most part, and hopefully it’ll be that way Sunday.

Do you personally have a favorite stop?

Well, believe it or not — and I’m not saying this — I grew up in Clinton, Mo., and I have so many family and friends in Kansas City and Springfield that any time we play near one of those, I love it because a bunch of us always get together and reminisce. Second to that would be the New York City area. Then, some of the quirky places like Oklahoma City, because it has Leo’s Barbecue, which is some of the best barbecue I’ve ever had in my life.

Really?

Yeah, it’s amazing. Any time I’m there, I buy four or five bottles of their sauce to bring home.

And this is coming from a Kansas City area guy who now lives in Texas!

Exactly! Who would’ve thought that? But it’s so good.

You mention Clinton. Even though we think of you guys of MercyMe as this wildly popular Christian music group, you and band mate Nathan Cochran are Midwestern, Missouri-born guys.

Plus we have Robby (Shaffer), who grew up in Guthrie, Mo., which is outside Columbia. Nathan grew up in Columbia, and I was born in Joplin but grew up in Clinton. So, any time we play around Missouri, they have a lot of family join us. It’s fun. It’s like going home.

Were you a Royals fan?

I was a huge Royals fan. George Brett, Freddie Patek, Hal McRae, on and on. Those were our guys. The I-70 Series! I grew up in the day.

Did you come up here for games?

We used to go a few times a year. My dad was the pastor at First Baptist Church in Clinton, and at least three or four times a year they’d take a church bus up for a game. Then, I usually went with our baseball team.

It’s going to be fun coming back. And I haven’t been there since they renovated everything. I’ve heard a lot about it. We sang the National Anthem on opening day about four or five years ago, and I got a chance to meet George Brett then and got his autograph. It was really cool. I enjoyed that a lot.

Was that experience of performing the National Anthem extra special for you, plus the anticipation of Sunday?

I joke to my friends who grew up around Clinton with me how we’ve played Worlds of Fun, Kauffman Stadium, Arrowhead Stadium — with the Billy Graham Crusade, that all I have left is Silver Dollar City. It’s really cool coming back. 

Worlds of Fun?

We played there about two years ago. The time previous to that that I had been there, the Orient Express was the big thing out there. Now the Zambezi Zinger is not there anymore, and the Orient Express is gone.

And the Zinger was my favorite ride out there.

I loved that ride. You always thought you were going to hit your head on the tunnel every time. So, it’s really neat to come back and play those types of places. I’m really excited to see the new renovations at Kauffman. I’ve heard tons about it from friends. As long as they kept the fountains, and stuff like that, they’re good.

I was skeptical going into it, because it was our stadium. But I think they did an outstanding job.

That’s good to hear. We’ve probably played at eight to 10 different games like this, plus when we’re off in a city, we’ll go to a baseball game. We’ve been in probably 25 parks. As used to people are of Kauffman Stadium, it was one of the most unique stadiums out there. It needed some updating, but I was so glad to hear they didn’t take the fountains out.

Do you still follow the Royals at all? 

I do some, but living in the Dallas area, all they talk about down here is the Rangers. I’ve become friends or gotten to know a bunch of players on different teams, so I root for different teams because of those guys. But I’m still a Royals guy at heart. If there’s a questionnaire that asks for my favorite baseball team, I put the Royals, even though I don’t get to watch them all the time. I still have the blue and white in my blood.

Plus it’s been harder the last decade or so.

It really has been. I couldn’t even tell you half the players on the team anymore. But I also couldn’t tell you half the players on the Rangers. When the kids came along, things changed. I’ll TiVo something now but not watch it until three weeks later at 11 at night.

Do you enjoy playing events like this Sunday, where you’re playing in a baseball stadium, after a baseball game?

It’s a lot of fun. You have to cut some corners because they’re trying to get the stage set up in a hurry, so you don’t have the elaborate lights and things you’d normally have in a regular venue, but it’s so much fun seeing those two things mixed together and seeing how the team personnel — players, management and people working at the stadium — get excited for the event. They really embrace the idea. We were the first band to perform at these things at five or six stadiums, and they flipped out afterwards. It wasn’t because of us, but they flipped out at the response of the crowd.

Being based just outside Dallas, we perform after the Rangers game every year for this sort of thing. Last year, they weren’t averaging many people, but when Faith Night came, they had almost 40,000 people. The sports-talk radio guys were talking about it, not because of us, but because it was a place for fellow believers to come and how it impacts so many people. It’s been a really neat thing for us.

You might appreciate this, and a lot of people probably didn’t realize it, but in the early days of Kauffman Stadium, they used to host rock concerts when the team was out of town. Herk Robinson told me a few weeks ago how management was concerned if the stadium would even be standing the next day.

I’m sure it’s a little easier on the personnel.

In addition to touring this summer, you guys have a new album out — although I guess people call them CDs now — called “10,” which is somewhat of a greatest hits compilation. Tell me about it.

Hey, I still call them albums, too. [Laughs.] We had not done a greatest hits album, and we said that if we ever did have one titled “Best of” or “Greatest Hits,” it might signify that the band was on its downturn. We were not going to do that. So, we called this one “10,” which is a play off the song “I Can Only Imagine.” That was written 10 years ago and came out originally in 1999 on one of our independent projects, and then when we signed a record deal, it was released again in 2001. We have all of our biggest hits on there, along with some unreleased songs, several songs that might’ve been a store exclusive or whatever, and then there’s a DVD that has a 45-minute program that the Gospel Music Channel did on us. It’s on the history of MercyMe with interviews and behind-the-scenes footage. It’s been received really well.

It was good timing because we were starting to run out on the length of our last album, but we haven’t had time to go into the studio because we’ve been so busy. We’re going to be writing this summer and then go in in the fall to start recording. We’re still trying to figure out all of that. We sometimes book engagements six, nine, even 12 months in advance, but it’s tough to book studio time because you might be in the middle of a run or might have a one-night show all the way across the country but we have to get back to the studio the next day.

I haven’t heard the whole song yet, but you have what seems to be a cool recording of your hit “I Can Only Imagine” on this CD with the London Symphony Orchestra, don’t you?

It’s a new version of the song. We’ve gone to Abbey Road Studios three different times and done our strings on the last albums. It’s weird, but in the U.S., if there’s a strings player in the union, when they play on an album, you have to pay certain percentages to the union as you sell the album. So it’s an ongoing percentage point which kills you over time. It’s hard enough selling albums now plus you’re taking part of that to pay different people. The last few years, we’ve gone to London because you pay a one-time flat fee there. But it’s pretty incredible walking into Abbey Road Studios and you have the London Symphony there. There are posters on the wall from “Lord of the Rings” and “Star Wars” and these types of John Williams-composed movies they’ve performed on. Then you get done and take a break, and you walk across the hall to Studio B, and there’s the piano that Paul McCartney played “Lady Madonna” on and another piano from “Day in the Life.” That’s incredible, especially for me because I’m a huge Beatles nut.

So we did this version of “I Can Only Imagine” with only Bart singing with the London Symphony. Unfortunately, none of the rest of us went over there for that because we had so much going on and plane tickets were so expensive. I think Amy Grant was there doing some stuff, and her producer, Brown Bannister, is also our producer. He called and suggested Bart go over. It turned out really neat. It’s kind of movie soundtrack-ish. It’s cool.

Could you have imagined — and not to play on words — that “I Can Only Imagine” would become the incredible mainstream hit it became?

Never in a million years; certainly not in the mainstream. When the song was written, we knew it was something special because of how it affected us and other people. When we wrote the song, it was the last song we recorded for one of our independent projects. We were set up in a Sunday school classroom at the church in Greenville, Texas, where we live. We borrowed stuff and made our own little studio in there to record it. We thought it was a neat song, but not necessarily something we would play all the time. We didn’t play it for the first six months or so. Finally, a youth minister at a camp in Windermere, Mo., asked if we’d play that song for the invitation. We stammered around because we hadn’t played it since we recorded it. While he was speaking to the group, we went in the back room and fumbled around with it. I don’t think we’ve played one show since then when we haven’t played it.

When the Christian thing took off, it didn’t surprise us a ton because we saw people’s reaction to it for the year-and-a-half we’d been playing it. We thought if the right people got behind it and backed it, it could be big. But the mainstream stuff, never in a million years did we see any of that coming. It was kind of a fluke the way it happened. There was a station in Dallas that used to be called WILD-FM. They had a thing once a day or once a week where they’d take calls from people daring them to play something on the air. It was meant to be risqué or whatever. Someone dared them to play “I Can Only Imagine.” They said it wasn’t really what they did for that segment, but they said they’d do it. Ironically, one of the station’s producers had the CD in his car. They played the song. Before it was done, they had so many people call that it shut down their phone lines. So people started driving to the radio station to see who was playing that song. At that time, we didn’t know about that stuff happening. But a friend of ours called and said our song was on WILD-FM. We thought he was crazy or had the wrong frequency. We flipped over to the station in time to hear them say, “OK, quit calling and quit coming up here. We’ll play the song again.” Which they did. Later on that week, they put it in a battle of the songs contest. It was up against J-Lo and I think Eminem. It won that day and stayed number one there for six months.

Our record label had a representative in this area, and he heard about it and called our label. They went through the process of working with Curb Records. They decided to test-market the song in about 20 markets. It went number-one in all of them. So, they sent it out to the stations and told them to start playing it. Some of them did and started freaking out because the song went to number-one at those stations. But some of them were hesitant because they didn’t think their listeners wanted that type of music. The promoters would finally say, “If you play the song at a decent hour when people will hear it, and you don’t get a response that’s positive, we’ll never call you again.” The stations would do it to get the label off their backs, but they’d inevitably call back and say, “You’re right; this is incredible.” It made it up to number-four on the mainstream charts at the time. We’ve been told that if it had been released to all of the markets at the same time as normal records are, then it probably would’ve been No. 1 on the charts for a couple months. We were blown away by the impact it had. Some stations even called back later and said that because of the song, they realized they had a different listening audience than what they’d been catering to, and they’d gone more family-oriented instead of raunchy. That was very humbling and mind-blowing to hear these stories. I totally know it was a God thing; it had nothing to do with us by any means.

A song you guys have out now that’s getting a lot of play is “Finally Home.” It seems to be touching people from military to dads to believers in a similar way to “I Can Only Imagine.”

Bart wrote it. In the studio we were messing around with some lyrics. He had been toying with the idea of writing some lyrics putting a closure, so to speak, on “I Can Only Imagine.” That was written about him losing his father when he was 19. We did (“Finally Home”) in the studio and the producer started crying. So we brought up his wife. She heard it and started crying. Then other people came in and cried. We knew that it was hitting a chord with people. Again, Bart wrote it from the perspective of seeing his dad in heaven and putting his arms around his neck and telling him he missed him. But we started getting all of these e-mails from military families saying that was their theme song of when their husband or father or whoever would come back from service overseas. So, someone made us a video of military footage to go with it.* We edited it a little to make it work, and we actually use it in concert now. It’s gotten a lot of response. It went to the mainstream side and now it’s in the top-20 (No. 17 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart). Who knows how far it’ll go up or whatever, but it’s cool that it can minister to people in a different way than we ever intended.

(*Here is a link to that video on MM's website.)

In my final song question, not that anyone — including you — will care, but one song that has spoken to me since the album came out, is “3:42 A.M.” As a writer, I can’t tell you how many times that’s been me.

It was funny because Bart puts himself under pressure. He does 99 percent of our lyrics. On that particular album, “Coming Up To Breathe,” he hadn’t written anything before we went in studio. He was at a block mentally. We made everything from complete songs to chorus to a verse kind of feel, and given him snippets. He was trying to put lyrics to it and figure out song ideas and themes. It was literally 3:41 in the morning and he looked at the clock it changed to 3:42. So, that’s what he wrote. It went from there and sang, basically encompass of the song, is that he could never say enough and never have the right words to say what he’s feeling all the time. It was a fun song. We did it for about a year in concert. People really get into it. It was a fun, quirky, little song that we never thought would end up on the album. We liked it so well that we put it on there.

Getting back to sports, is it true you used to race cars?

[Laughs] How did you hear that? And are you talking legally or otherwise? [Laughs.] Well, being a pastor’s kid in Clinton, I was a little on the ornery side. I used to do anything with cars back in Clinton. There were these railroad tracks called Fourth Street, and my father had this little yellow Nissan pickup and I’d hit those tracks about 70 miles an hour, literally, and you’d go about four feet in the air. When you hit, the shock towers would leap you out, and you’d bounce on the pavement and get air again. I don’t know how we didn’t die. I was always doing something like that.

Well, when I moved to Oklahoma City, I bought my first real car, which was a 1989 Ford Mustang 5.0. I put all sorts of things on that and raced SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) events in it. I loved racing. That is my sport. I love baseball, but if there’s racing across the parking lot, I’m going to the racing. I even have a collectible room in my house for racing stuff. In the early 1990s I got into NASCAR and Indy cars, and now we’re friends with a lot of the drivers and personnel in NASCAR and IRL, so several drivers have given me stuff. Bobby Labonte gave me a helmet one time that he and his wife had the entire Sprint Cup drivers sign. I have various pieces of sheet metal and other things off cars, and limited-edition prints that people have given me. It’s pretty cool. I’m really into it. Since the kids came along, the racing’s stopped. I barely have time to mow the lawn now. Eventually I want to get back into it.

My wife treated me really great for my 40th birthday. We were in Charlotte, N.C., where most of the NASCAR teams are based. She called Bobby Labonte and Kyle Petty and asked if they would come to a surprise birthday party that they were going to have at one of these inside tracks. This is one of the tracks where you’re in a real car and you’re going 40-50 miles an hour on a track indoors. All these people were going to be there, including NBC announcer Marty Snider. She worked it out without me even knowing it. A week before the party, NASCAR called Bobby and Kyle and told them to go to a NASCAR event in Nashville. We still did it. They told me that we had an in-store, which means a signing at a bookstore, on a Sunday afternoon. We pulled up and the door opened, and in walked a bunch of my friends. They were coming to the concert so I didn’t think anything about it, just that it was really cool they’d come to the in-store. I had no idea. We walked in and I saw racing pictures on the wall. We spent about three hours in there, racing, banging, and laughing our heads off. It was so much fun. They were seriously determined to whip me. I’m not bragging, but I’m so competitive that if we’re doing something that has to do with racing, I usually win. We did practice and I was more than 4 seconds faster than anybody. So, they put me in a car that literally had chord showing on the front tires to qualify. Well, I got on the pole by more than a second with that car. So they put me in another car and they reversed the starting order. They put me in the back of the pack! But after 12 laps, I passed everyone and won by 4 seconds. They were so mad. [Laughs.] I still whipped them all. Marty Snider even races at that track in a series on the weekdays. I’d never seen the track but I still won. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that I have the whopping body mass of a fly at about 155 pounds.

But, yeah, if you bring up racing, you better be ready to talk.

I got introduced to racing when I was living in Nashville in the early ‘90s, but now I’m hooked on MarioKart on the Wii.

I haven’t gotten that yet because when I’ve checked at stores, it’s out of stock. But I tell my wife that if I get it, the yard’s going to grow high and things will pile up. That’ll be all she wrote.

Well, in that case, maybe we can settle for the Kansas Speedway to invite you guys to sing the National Anthem before a NASCAR event.

That would be really cool. I’ve yet to make it to that track. Of course, they built it after I left the area, and any time I’m back for a show, we’re just in town for a day. I look forward to seeing it, though.

Jim, it’s been great talking with you. We look forward to hearing MercyMe Sunday at Kauffman Stadium.

Sounds great. Thanks, Matt.