Two years ago, the dudes of Tenth Avenue North were sitting in their van at a strip mall in Florida listening to one of their songs. But for the first time ever, the song wasn’t playing off a CD.
It was on Z88.3 out of Orlando.
They hopped out of the van and started dancing.
“Have you seen that movie ‘That Thing You Do!’?” asked 29-year-old lead singer Mike Donehey. “It was kind of like that. … That was a pretty surreal experience — the first time we heard ourselves on the radio.”
The feeling quickly wore off.
The song, “Love Is Here,” reached No. 1 on R&R’s AC Indicator chart and became Christian hit radio’s 12th most played song of 2008.
The band has shared stages with Christian heavyweights Sanctus Real, The David Crowder Band and MercyMe. And thanks to being named New Artist of the Year at the 40th Annual Gospel Music Association Dove Awards last April, it is currently one of the featured acts of Winter Jam, Christian music’s largest annual tour.
Its success, however, has been far from meteoric, at least in the grand scheme of things.
Seemingly the newest kids on the worship rock block, Tenth Avenue North got their start as a college ministry praise band “all the way back in the spring of 2000,” Donehey said.
“I had a lot of time on my hands [in college], and I had just started leading worship for kids at school,” he recalled.
“And somehow or another, I just started encountering God, you know, and I wanted to keep doing it.”
Donehey said the band never really “got discovered.”
It spent three years as an independent band and kept playing and saying yes, and “it just felt like God opened doors as we went along,” he said.
For those unfamiliar with Christian music, Donehey describes his band’s sound as the love child of Sting and James Taylor. For Christian music fans, he boils it down to Jars of Clay mixed with Switchfoot.
Donehey credits Caedmon’s Call, former champions of the Christian coffeehouse, with helping him develop into the Christian musician he always wanted to be.
“Caedmon’s Call taught me that it’s OK to ask questions,” Donehey said, noting the purpose of Tenth Avenue North is to not be afraid to ask questions and not only to entertain people but also help them understand some of the truths they sing about.
“We want them to know that our songs are written out of the collision between God’s truth and our hearts and not to expect it to be a really clean process ’cause it’s usually messy,” he said.
Also messy are the semantics that plague any Christian rockers worth their philosophical salt: Christian band or band of Christians?
“I have to choose one or the other?” Donehey said with a laugh. “People are Christians — little Christs, right? A band as an entity can’t be a little Christ. I would say ‘Christian’ is bad as an adjective. It’s a better noun. I would say we’re a band of Christians. People are Christians, not music or posters or stores.”
He said all this while walking through a LifeWay Christian Store in Virginia, seeing his band’s video for the first time splayed across the store’s television screens and doing a phone interview about being an up-and-coming Christian band.
Messy semantics indeed.
“Oh man, this is a really surreal experience. I’m going to find my wife. Hey, Kelly, you just missed it … .”
For more information, visit www.tenthavenuenorth.com/home.
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