New album, maturing outlook

It’s risky telling someone his music sometimes reminds you of another’s. But Tree63’s John Ellis doesn’t mind people telling him they hear echoes of U2 in his songs. “I’m a big U2 fan,” he volunteers.

He’s also a big fan of the Waterboys, Midnight Oil, and the Police. Amid such influences, Tree63’s sound was born. “I loved the authenticity of a drum-bass-and-guitar approach with Jesus-centered lyrics,” Ellis says. “I felt like there was something unique there that hadn’t really been pursued. That was Tree63’s mission for a long time.”

Tree63, by the way, is as authentic a drums-bass-guitar trio with Jesus-centered lyrics as has ever emerged from South Africa—or anywhere else for that matter. And it has a strong new album, its first in 11 years, called Voyage. Bursting with energy, hooks, insights, and subtle yet vibrant combinations of all of the above, it finds the band in full rejuvenation mode, partly because the new drummer Angus Warden and the new bassist Deion Knipe are, as Ellis puts it, “younger guys than me” with a “slightly younger take on what’s happening,” and partly because Ellis has finally gotten his head around what God was trying to teach him during his band’s initial run.

The first Tree63 lineup came together in 1996, shortly after Ellis became a Christian. Four years and one lineup change later, the trio was recording for Inpop, the label with which it would make its best-known albums and its best-known single, a cover of Matt Redman’s “Blessed Be Your Name.” But presiding over Inpop was the Newsboys’ manager Wes Campbell, the same Wes Campbell who in the wake of the Newsboys-derailing Michael Tait scandal has come in for heavy criticism. “[Inpop] pushed on us this sense of American Christian music as a place where you can thrive financially,” Ellis remembers. “That was their focus. But the gospel is you lose your life to gain it. And this thing we were involved in was ‘Gain your life.’ I tried to buy into it, but it exhausted me.”

With the benefit of hindsight, Ellis boils down part of what God was trying to teach him during his band’s initial run thus: “It’s one thing to have an experience of God in a corporate environment at a young age. It’s wonderful and it changes your life. But what’s it like to be a follower 10, 20, 30 years later? What’s it like to be someone who’s still walking behind Jesus at age 50, 60, 70, not yet in the New Jerusalem but trusting it’s up ahead?

“That adult approach to our faith gets neglected in the glamour of worship services for young people and the excitement of what Tree63 used to be part of. What did Eugene Peterson call it? ‘A long obedience in one direction’? That long obedience is the voyage.”