Chesterton has this great quote about the difference between mathematicians and poets. There were a lot of true experiences with God as a part of that, and I think it’s hard for people not to throw it all away. There’s a lot of crap there, but I also can’t leave what was real, you know? I don’t want to just abandon what was real about that. Having worked for something like that, that’s why Kings Kaleidoscope started. I think a lot of people have experiences where they are part of a big church organization that really hurts them. Oh gosh, there’s probably tons and tons and tons of reasons. Why do you feel like in contemporary Christian culture it’s so easy for people to get away from that idea? Believing Jesus is who He says He is and that He loves us is the whole point of the album. It’s the same thing I hope for myself and the band and everyone on the tour: I want us to be able to trust in the goodness of Jesus and have that be enough for all the questions we won’t ever have answered, for all the doubts we’ll continue to fight for the rest of our lives. When people who are in that deconstruction period listen to this album, what do you hope their takeaways might be? Maybe God’s actually tugging at our hearts and saying, ‘Don’t you miss this? Don’t you miss trusting?’ What are the experiences we had growing up we would look at now and rip apart and go, ‘Maybe that’s just nostalgia’ or ‘Maybe we’re just looking back with rose-colored glasses?’ Is that really how we want to think of our lives here? We could also say it’s not nostalgia, maybe it’s the Holy Spirit, maybe it’s real. One of the things we would talk about a lot during this album was childlike faith. I have a sample my mom sang when she was seven or eight years old in her church, and that’s one of the last songs on the record, her singing alongside an orchestra we recorded from Budapest. The album takes an arc where in the beginning the character is feeling lost and unsatisfied and the ending is back to the simplest Sunday school song you can sing, which is “Jesus Loves Me.” We actually began to think of zeal as a character, and I started writing from the perspective of a person who’s rediscovering his or her identity as someone with zeal. So when you’re approaching that from the perspective of a songwriter, how do you move from analyzing that head space to raw zeal?Ī lot of it is just honesty and story. So we wrote an album in order to move back to our first experiences with childlike faith and the simplicity of belief.Ī lot of people become stuck in deconstructionism, and they never move onto the next phase. This was much more about my own apathy and what I would describe as residual bitterness, trying to write something in order to go somewhere and feel something. Usually I write in response to something that’s happened in my life and it’s an outpouring of that. What was the inspiration for Zeal ? Did you always want the album to have a common thread? RELEVANT caught up with Kings Kaleidoscope frontman Chad Gardner to discuss the experiences behind the album, his writing process and how the group’s music seeks to respond to modern church culture. Given its subject matter and the group who created it, it’s no surprise Zeal covers intense, intimate emotional ground. This April saw Kings Kaleidoscope release their fifth studio album, Zeal, a concept album of sorts about the stages of faith past the deconstruction process, the maturation that comes with rediscovering who Jesus is and what He means for your life.
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