Collide Magazine

Derek Webb: The Full Interview

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Thursday, May 8, 2008 -

COLLIDE: Your last album, Mockingbird, was stripped down. What inspired the rock-and-roll sound on The Ringing Bell?

Derek Webb: Probably just restlessness, you know. I feel like I’m the pendulum that is always swinging, but not necessarily back and forth. I don’t like to repeat stuff very much in terms of style or content. I like to kind of keep moving all the time. Because the Mockingbird record, like you said, was pretty stripped down—it was more acoustic and the tour that followed it was pretty stripped down, acoustic, and mellow—and so my first instinct was to want to make a lot of noise.

You know what I mean? And so that actually affected the way the songs were getting written, which is what ultimately dictated the sound of the record. It made me want to write songs that were more based on guitar riffs guitar chord progressions. That’s folk music; it’s more a series of progressions.

The tunes that were getting written for Ringing Bell were naturally coming out as more riff-based tunes, which clearly dictated the trajectory of the record.

COLLIDE: Speaking of the record, there aren’t a lot of “Christian artists” who write about the US torture policy and making out.

Webb: [Laughter]

COLLIDE: You won’t find that on a lot of records. Not that other artists don’t think about those kinds of things, but you’re one of the few that are talking about it. Why do you think that is?

Webb: I think it’s a combination of a lot of reasons. And I think among the primary ones is that I feel like it’s part of my job to tell you the truth. I mean, just as much as “singer” and “songwriter,” I think “agitator” is as much a part of what I do as anything. The job of any artist is to look at the world and tell you what they see. So when I look at the world, I tend to gravitate toward the things that I feel like are being avoided or played down [bringing them] up tends to agitate people.

It tends to kind of be disruptive. It’s just easier to avoid. I tend to gravitate towards those things. Most people are looking at the world and making editorial choices in terms of songwriting, in terms of content, and immediately move away from certain things and gravitate one way. I’m literally doing the opposite. I’m literally thinking, “Well, this is all well-covered territory. Everybody’s talking about this stuff, and nobody needs more songs about it. We already have way too much material about all this stuff. But this stuff over here, on the other hand … “

I’m kind of wired up that way. I’ve always had a certain kind of rebellious streak, even when I was a kid. But the difference now in the adult part of my life so far is that rather than rebelling for no good reason, which is what I spent all my adolescence doing—any kind of authority I could find, anything I could rebel against, I would—now it’s more of a process of discovering the right things to rebel against. Because I think there are right things to rebel against. It’s instinctive for me.

In addition to that, a combination of two things; one being that I have the luxury as a solo artist of having been in a band that had a moderate amount of success in the whole Christian market. And so I got a little bit of a glimpse of that. And honestly, it just isn’t something I’m interested in repeating. It wasn’t all that interested to me.

That level of success in that market just doesn’t mean anything to me. I don’t really care about being a big figure in the Christian music world. In fact, I’d really rather not.

Because I don’t really believe in the category. I just don’t believe in it, and so it doesn’t mean anything to me. And so from the very get-go I’ve felt empowered because there was a certain remnant of Caedmon’s fans that followed me into this whole solo career and I felt really supported from day one. So I felt llike it wasn’t your typical solo artist coming out with their first record.

My first record was a really unlikely debut record. It was complicated. It didn’t make things too easy for me at first. There were more than a handful of stores that wouldn’t carry the record and it stirred up a fair amount of controversy, which was not my intention.

Because I don’t think in terms of the whole Christian music category, I wasn’t thinking, “Where am I crossing the line? Where am I not?” It’s just not part of how I’m processing, because it doesn’t mean anything to me. So I don’t know when I’m crossing the line anymore. I’m just trying to be as honest as I can.

And then I just put [the album] out and wait to get some of the reviews in the press back and see how I’ve pissed people off this time. Because I can’t even anticipate it anymore. Because I’m not in that world enough. Me, personally, I don’t listen to any Christian music. I’m not part of Christian music organically.

So it was a combination of feeling really supported, but also the fact that I just don’t sell that many records. So, it’s not like I feel like I’m really stirring up anything, because I’m not. I don’t sell that many records. If I sold a ton more records, then what I’m doing would be a lot more provocative, because a lot more people would be paying attention. But as it stands, I’ve got my faithful, hardcore people who I can depend on to go out and buy records. Whether we spend $10,000 or $100,000 on marketing, I know that those people are going to go buy it, and I know I can make a living. I know those people support me. They’re not waiting to hear it to go buy it. They’re really supportive that way.

But beyond those people, I just don’t sell that much. So there’s no pressure on me commercially, like from my label or anybody else, to go and do something extraordinary commercially. But if you look at the process of my career and the decisions I’ve made, you’d almost think I’m in some sort of state of self-sabotage. Like I’m trying to sell fewer records; like I’m trying to alienate more people.

And I’m really not. I’m just trying to do what’s instinctive and leave the art making to me and the art selling to somebody else. And most artists’ problem—any artist, not just Christian artists—they overly concern themselves with the selling of the art. So they start to actually manipulate the art on the creative side to make it easier to sell, to make it more marketable. I just don’t have that instinct. I’m not thinking about any of that stuff. I don’t know how I’m making it difficult for my label to market me and sell my records. I don’t even know because I don’t care.

Just like [people from the label] stay out of the studio, I stay out of the boardroom. That’s our agreement, so to some extent I feel like I can say certain things and go after certain issues because I know it’s not going to be that big a deal. It’s not like I’m Michael W. Smith. It’s not like I’m huge and it’s going to cause this giant disruption in the space-time continuum because I’m talking about making out with my future wife.

I don’t feel like I’m necessarily influencing that many people. If I was, it would be a bigger deal. People would be more bent out of shape about it. But as it stands, people kind of leave me alone.

COLLIDE: I’m sure there are people who think, “Caedmon’s Call ties, Derek Webb, recognizable name … if he would just make this kind of record we could sell this many copies.”

Webb: That’s probably true. I’ve lived in Nashville long enough to know the compromises that I could make to sell more records. They’re right before me all the time. I know how to do it. I’ve done it before and it worked. Everybody knows how to do it.

Don Miller, who’s a good friend of mine, once told me—and I plagiarized him on my last record with this quote— “You can’t build God’s kingdom with the devil’s tools.” You just can’t do it. So I’m just not in any way interested in making compromises to the art I’m making in order to sell more. Because what’s the point?

I don’t feel like it’s my job to sell a bunch of records. That’s not in my job description. My job is to make really honest and instinctive art. That’s my job. Thinking about how it will sell, or where it will sell, or who will buy it, complicates my job. So I don’t think about those things, and so far it’s all worked out. I still have a job. People still buy the records, and so far it’s been OK, me ignoring all that.

I could definitely sell more records, but I guess my feeling is, what would be the point? I was in a band, and I’ve seen other bands (much more so than the band I was in) who made a whole career out of building this great platform that they never ascended. And I don’t have any interest in that.

There are bands who say, “Let’s make this compromise and let’s do this kind of record and let’s put this song on it so we can get it on the radio so we can get to these people so we can do this.” And they make these series of compromises.

After a while they find that they have a whole career made of compromises. The more you do that, and the further it takes you, and the higher that platform gets, the less likely you are to ever ascend it and say anything that might potentially get you knocked off of it.

COLLIDE: Yeah, the more you have to lose.

Webb: You have a lot more to lose. And so I figure I’ll just stay on the ground. Who cares about building a platform? I’ll just come out guns a-blazin’ from record one and set a precedent that this is how I’m going to do it. And if it alienates certain people, and if it’s not certain people’s preference, then my music’s just not for them. And that’s okay with me. And it’s okay with my label.

I’m not trying to make mass-appeal music. I don’t really believe in mass-appeal music. I believe in a thousand niches. I think there’s an audience out there for every kind of music and not everybody likes mine. And that’s fine with me.

If you hear my records and they’re offensive to you and you’re not the kind of person that puts a little more energy into deciphering it, or coming up with the story behind it, or getting the context for certain lyrics, don’t listen to my music! That’s totally fine with me. There’s probably other music that you’d enjoy more, and that’s OK.

COLLIDE: So you have a “take it or leave it, it is what it is” approach.

Webb: Kind of. In terms of the art, like, I don’t want to be dismissive or stubborn about that, because I do care. I don’t mind being disliked, but I do mind being misunderstood. I don’t mind if people don’t like me. I just want to make sure that they’re not liking me for the right reasons.

Being disliked doesn’t bother me at all. It really doesn’t concern me. I don’t have that people-pleasing instinct that some of my friends have. I have other terrible patterns, people-pleasing just isn’t one of them.

But I want to make sure that people at least understand. I want to at least explain myself and I want to make sure that people understand why I felt compelled to make certain decisions or say certain things a particular way. At that point, if we’re at an impasse then that’s OK with me.

We’re diverse members of one body in the Church, so it would be, I believe, sinful if everybody reached the exact same conclusions to the questions that are before us in culture. I don’t think that would have us all thinking individually and applying our particular set of gifts and resources and perspectives to the problems before us if we all reached the same conclusions.

That ‘s why I expect there will be a lot of people who just won’t like or get my music. That doesn’t make the people who do more socially or spiritually enlightened. It doesn’t make them cooler. None of that means anything to me. I’m just trying to find the people who resonate with the story I’m telling and invest in them. We can support each other and we can all be part of the collective building of the Kingdom. Outside of that, the rest of it just isn’t my concern.

COLLIDE: We took question submissions from some of our readers, and Jesse Phillips wants to know what you would say are two of the greatest challenges facing the Church right now and how you think we might address them.

Webb: Interesting. I think I can come up with two, and they might relate. Just off the top of my head, and my answer might change tomorrow, one would be the mixed message that the Church seems to be sending to culture in that they claim to follow Jesus and yet project the values of the arrogant church leadership that Jesus reserved his harshest language for.

That’s such a crazy, mixed message. And the result of it is all this weird obsession with moral issues over the context of the two greatest commandments, which are to love God and love our neighbors. That is the context under which we do everything else we do.

There’s this confusion with all of the judgmental-ism—the reaction of the Church being to distance itself from anything that seems in any way impure or sinful when, if that were the case, we would have to distance ourselves from us.

Even our own hearts are divided. The flesh does not reform, not in this life. And so there’s not one of us who isn’t full of sin. I mean, not one of us. And yet we have made this little culture of distance and alienation and lobbing critiques over this fictional wall we’ve built between sacred and secular.

How confusing that must be for people who hear something true about the person of Jesus and then they hear about these people who claim to follow him, yet seem to be walking the total other direction. You know what I mean? How confusing that must be!

David Kinnaman wrote this book, UnChristian, that actually goes through Barna research, and he does a really good job of saying, “Here’s what most people think about Christians when they hear about Christianity. So, let’s juxtapose that with the person and the work of Jesus, and let’s see if there’s a contrast there.”

And that’s rhetorical, because there certainly is [a contrast]. That’s a big problem. I mean, a group of people claiming to follow a man who they’re not following. That’s a problem. That’s one.

Two is that same group’s total misunderstanding of the Great Commission, which has resulted in bristling at any sort of working toward social justice. That’s a big problem because there are so many things in our culture right now that need to be made right, that need to hear the hope of a day coming where all things will be made right.

There are a lot of things in our culture that need to be made right. One is the prolific wars that we seem to be in, in our world, in our communities, in our families. There’s constant warfare because that’s our instinct. It’s totally counterintuitive to love people who love us, let alone people who hate us. It’s counterintuitive.

Another thing is the tremendous contrast between the wealth of the American Church and the unbelievable poverty of the nations. There are so many great opportunities to see the contrast of the upside-down Kingdom that Jesus has inaugurated and will one day bring fully to pass. And yet this is the culture that we have to live in and speak into and there are so many great opportunities, but rather than seizing those opportunities, any among us who try to peak into social issues, issues of justice, they get the finger pointed at them from the rest and get called a liberal.

I don’t understand how it’s become an issue of political posture to be on the side of the poor. I don’t understand how that makes you either liberal or conservative. How is it a liberal or a conservative idea to be on the side of the poor? Jesus was certainly on the side of the poor. He focused so much on it. In fact, when speaking about the very day of judgment, the example he used of the natural outworking of a heart that has been compelled towards him and changed is to be compelled to loving the hardest and most difficult people in our culture to love. I mean, he says, “In as far as you have done it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me. In as far as you clothed the naked and healed the sick and visited those in prison and cared for the widow and the orphan, you’ve done it unto me.”

And the context of it is literally judgment. He is saying, “This is the difference between those who follow me and whose hearts are changed, even though this fruit that I’m talking about isn’t the thing that saved these people. It doesn’t make God love them, but ultimately it’s the fruit that comes out of a changed heart. If this change has happened in your heart, you will be naturally compelled to these kinds of people and this kind of work.”

He is saying, “This is what it looks like and this is what I’m looking for. This is the grid through which I’m looking to find my people and the people who are not mine.” He’s talking about judgment. It’s a heavy area of Scripture and it’s important, and that’s just one of literally thousands of examples [from Scripture] of God’s concern for the poor.

The way we’ve gotten here is we have taken the spreading of the gospel, the Good News, the Great Commission—to go and tell the world the redemptive story—and we have simplified it, arrogant as we are, to only being about the individual salvation of men and women. This is the Good News. This is God’s redemptive story breaking in the culture. Ultimately, all it is about is the salvation of individual men and women.

Now, certainly the redemptive story does have that in it, and that’s a big part of it. Jesus came to keep the law on behalf of those who had no power to keep it on their own and to give his very righteousness to those people, that God would love them forever in glory.

That’s certainly a huge part of that story, there’s no doubt about it. But that’s not the whole story. The gospel, the Good News, the thing that we’re to proclaim to our culture and our world is a new Kingdom coming, breaking into the world with this new set of values, in which all things will be made right.

Certainly included in “all things” is the individual salvation of men and women, but not just that. Everything that God has made, including men and women, will be restored, redeemed and returned. We are working to bring that to pass, to pray that day coming into today, knowing that day is coming, giving us hope to want to work and put our hands to the being made right of all things. This is the work of both proclaiming the Good News to culture and to following Jesus. This is the work we’re to be doing.

So, it includes telling our stories to people in order to, in every way, respond to the working of the Holy Spirit in terms of the salvation of individual men and women, absolutely. But it doesn’t stop there. It’s much, much, much, much bigger and more all-encompassing than that. It includes everything God created.

It has everything to do with our caring for the environment. It has everything to do with our caring for our neighbor. It has everything to do with caring for the poor. How do you proclaim the Kingdom coming where there will be no more hunger to this culture? You put food in people’s mouths. How do you proclaim the Kingdom coming where there’ll be no more war? You preemptively sow the seeds of peace.

Ecclesiastes talks about how in the world where we live there’s a time for weeping and a time to celebrate. There’s a time to build and a time to tear down. There’s a time for peace and a time for war. There’s a time for all these things.

But the Good News,the thing that we’re to proclaim to culture—more than just the four spiritual laws, more than just the individual salvation of men and women—is that there is a day coming that we look to and we pray for, the day that we put our hands to bringing about today, when there will simply be no more time. There will simply be no more time for hunger. There will be no more time for thirst and for poverty and for disease and for death and for weeping. There won’t be any more time for war. There’ll be no more time for it. We’ll simply run out of time for all that stuff and there will only be time for the other.

That is the day that is coming. That is the day that we hope for and that is the day we proclaim. Anything less than that is just not the gospel. It’s not. So, my compulsion toward what looks like social activism is not for its own sake. I’m not a social activist. I’m a follower of Jesus. It should be easier to confuse the two because there shouldn’t be any difference other than my motivation. My compulsion toward it is not for its own sake but rather because I believe in a day coming when it will be completed, when it will all be made right.

That’s the work I have to do today. That includes the salvation of people, but it also includes caring for all these other aspects of creation. That’s a big frustration and I think that it goes to the heart of what the gospel is, what the Good News is, that I would certainly say a huge remnant of the church pointing a finger at a small minority and calling them “liberals” because they try to go and be a part of this change is certainly among the most important problems the Church has right now.

COLLIDE: I think it’s Brian McLaren who says the Good News should be Good News for everyone. It’s Good News for your neighbor because you love your neighbor. It’s Good News for the poor because you give to the poor.

Webb: Uh huh, and because the Good News affects everything God created. It’s the restoration and redemption of all things, and we’re a part of what God created. We’re part of all things, so it does include us. We’re certainly a huge part of that story because we’re the greatest of all God created. That’s what Genesis says, so certainly the fact that Jesus came as a human, and lived and suffered and came back gives humanity a crowning role in the story of redemption.

But Lord knows it’s just not the whole story. It’s an important part of the story, but it’s a tiny part. We just need that perspective and it should compel us to tell the government to get in line behind us to go and take care of the people in Africa who are dying—8,000 every day. The Twin Towers fall two-and-a-half times every day in Africa because of a lack of clean drinking water.

Christians should be at the front lines of pushing the effects of the Fall back in that particular area, but we’re not. We relegate it to the government; we relegate it to these liberal social organizations that do that kind of work. This is our work. If it’s not our work, then what is our work? Somebody tell me what is it you believe we’re supposed to be doing if it’s not this. Because this is what it is to follow Jesus. So if it’s really Him we’re concerned with following, then this is where we must go.

If you’re finding Jesus easy to follow, you might examine whether or not it’s really him you’re following, because he was a difficult guy to follow. Especially when he starts talking about loving your neighbor, loving your enemy, taking care of the poor—these are hard things.

COLLIDE: I saw something about NoiseTrade.com and I wanted to ask you about that. It sounds very cool.

Webb: I’m so glad you found it. We are working tirelessly on that as we speak. We’ll be launching the site in June and we’ll be beta testing in May, that’s the trajectory we’re on right now. It has evolved a little bit from where it was when we first started talking about it, but we certainly have arrived at, we believe, the most effective model for this particular thing we’re trying to do.

For people who don’t know what it is, NoiseTrade.com has a little explanation. It’s a little abstract because we didn’t know what we were going to build when we were [first] talking about it. Now we know and we’re building it.

It was born moments after the initial idea, which was me trying to find a way to get a little broader audience for my Mockingbird record, which I was really proud of. I felt like it hadn’t found its way to the people who I felt like could resonate with it.

It wasn’t like I had a big ambition to sell a million records or anything. I just felt like there were more people who I thought would appreciate or understand that record that I knew hadn’t found it yet. So I wanted to do everything I could to help because we were out of marketing money at the label. There was nothing else we could do, so the label let me try a little experiment a few years ago: we gave [Mockingbird] away for free online for three months.

But it wasn’t that simple. We actually did it in a way that captured the information of the people who were downloading it and also allowed them the opportunity to jump on the marketing team. We required that they told some of their friends about the record with email addresses so that we could then send out a little invitation to them to come and check out the record.

It was this great trade-off where we give them the record for free if they would tell us who they were, how to get back in touch with them, and tell a few of their friends about the record. “I’ve got something you want, if you want some free music, and you’ve got something I want, which is to know who you are and for you to tell some of your friends who’ve never heard about me and the record.

It was a good model. It worked like crazy because I think I’d sold maybe 20,000 copies of the record up to that point. It had come out that year and in three months’ time we gave away almost 85,000 copies. For every one of those we captured an email address and zip code, so now we know where we have fans and we know we can go tour there and we can invite them all to the concerts. We can filter the zip codes by area and we can say, “OK, everybody within 20 miles of 77057, which is downtown Houston, there are 1,500 people who downloaded the record,” and we can invite them all to come out to the show and get their money at the door.

There are a lot of different ways to make your living being creative. You can just apply the same creativity that you’re pouring into your records into how to connect your records to people. So that’s what we try to do.

Moments later I thought, “Man! I’ve got so many friends who do this for a living who’d be more than willing to give up a little music for free if it meant making these kind of really significant connections with their fans and equipping their fans to jump on the marketing team a little bit and help out.

The NoiseTrade idea hatched almost immediately. We’ve been trying to figure out the best way to implement that. We brought in some other elements we think will make it even more relevant to what’s happening right now in the whole music/technology conversation, and we’re super excited about it. We’re working hard on it—it’s going to be ready in a few months. People can go check out NoiseTrade.com and jump on the email list that’s there. As soon as we’re ready to unveil what it is specifically that we’re going to do, we’ll be able to let people know.

I’m probably more excited about that right now than I am about anything. It’ll be one of those “Hair Club for Men” deals where I will not only be the owner, but also a client. As soon as it goes online, I’ll be the first to give away some more free music.

Visit derekwebb.com and noisetrade.com for more information about what Derek is up to.