Listening In: Philip Sandifer

WARREN SMITH: I’m Warren Smith, and today you’ll be listening in on my conversation with the singer, songwriter, producer, and worship leader Philip Sandifer.

MUSIC: Just Because You Are

SMITH: That was a little bit of Philip Sandifer’s No. 1 Christian music hit “Just Because You Are.” It was one of six No. 1 songs he had on the Christian music charts in the 1990s. And his career as a recording artist was only a small part of Philip Sandifer’s life. He has produced nearly 30 albums for himself and others, and Christian music aficionados remember Sandifer fondly for leading Urgent Records, a label that came and went quickly, but which is still remembered as an artist-friendly label that brought us music from Bob Bennett, Billy Crockett, Michelle Pillar, Fernando Ortega, and others. Sandifer has also founded radio stations, including a station that has become a legend in Texas, Sun Radio, a solar-powered Americana and Texas-roots radio station serving the Texas Hill Country. And he has a Grammy nomination for his participation in a children’s record, Disney’s A Bug’s Life Sing-a-Long. He has a new album out, Go On, which features his first new music in more than three years.  It has a different, edgier, more of an Americana sound than the Christian music he produced in the 1990s. We’ll hear some of that new music later in the program. Philip Sandifer spoke to me from Austin, Texas.

Philip Sandifer, welcome to the program. It’s great to have you on because I’ve known about your music, um, yeah, this probably tells how old both of us are when I say this, but I’ve known of your music for—golly, at least 30 years, maybe 35 years. And all the way going back to, you know, those days when songs like “Just Because You Are,” “When It’s All Said and Done,” were playing on Christian radio. And not just playing, but like at the top of the charts, No. 1 hits on Christian radio.

SANDIFER: Yeah. Long time ago. By the way, Happy Birthday.

SMITH: Well, yeah, we’re having this conversation on my birthday which is July 11th, 7/11. And I tell people that they can get a slurpee for free on my birthday because—yeah.

SANDIFER: That’s right.

SMITH: Well thank—no, thank you for that, I really appreciate that. And so I am curious though, I wanted to start way back then, if I could, Phillip, and just say—

SANDIFER: When you and I were eleven and twelve?

SMITH: Yeah, exactly right. Maybe you were; I’ve got to confess that I was a little older than that. And you had a good career going, you had a good thing going. I mean it went from the, you know, early, mid-80s until the early, mid-90s and a lot of hits. And yet you took a break from radio, at least music. Tell me about that era in your life. What was good about it and what was it about it that made you want to take a long break from it?

SANDIFER: Well, you know, I have always viewed myself kind of at the core of what I’m about as a songwriter, and I’m very attracted to just the construction of a song and can it communicate a particular thought or idea to someone else. And my music, what I’ve written has always been very reflective of kind of where I am at that point in time in my life. So that’s the part that I didn’t really take a hiatus from was the songwriting side of things. But the recording side of things, you know, back when I was recording pretty consistently up until about 1998 or so, and I was traveling a lot at that time too. And as my children were getting a little bit older, it was becoming apparent that the wise thing for me to do at that point was to not travel so much but rather be home and available for my wife and my children. And so that was probably the beginning of the—why I pulled back from recording was just to be more available to my family. And so I’d had an opportunity to become a worship pastor at a church locally here in Austin. And it was wonderful. One of my big, big beliefs is just the value of music in church settings and the value of the creative arts in general. And a friend of mine let me come and lead in that territory. And also I was involved with an opportunity to start some local radio stations here in Austin. And that was exciting because at the time, Austin didn’t really have any good Christian radio and so that was pretty much what began that process. And then, you know, a songwriter, if you really are writing and you want to have your things heard, eventually that’s gonna catch back up to you and you’re gonna be excited about getting that going again. And that’s really kind of what’s happened with me in the last, oh, the last four years or so.

SMITH: Well, Philip, you’ve said a bunch of things there that I want to drill down into. I almost don’t know where to—Well, no, it’s great. I almost don’t know where to start though. So I want to start with the radio stations, because as I was going into—sort of going into your biography, that was to me one of the most interesting things about it. Because these were not, at least originally, big blockbuster powerful radio stations. These were kind of community radio stations that under your leadership, though, did become pretty significant stations. Can you talk about how you got involved and what became of them?

SANDIFER: Yeah, you know, really interesting. I was in Nashville doing an interview with my brother, In fact. My brother and I were interviewing for our project Santa Fe and, and a radio professional, Dick Marsh—you may know Dick from radio circles and stuff—and he was just saying, hey, why doesn’t somebody get something going in Austin in terms of Christian radio? And I said, well gosh, I mean I wouldn’t even know the first clue as to how to do that. And he said, well, you know, there’s some software you can get, and, you know, that can identify frequencies and this and that. And I ended up coming home, actually found some software, and I’ve got a little bit of an engineering brain in some ways, and was able to just identify and through—I’ll try to make a long story short, but we filed for some local frequencies that we were able to obtain. And then ultimately, over the course of a number of years, and ins and outs of the way this particular project went, they ended up finding their way into, I think K-LOVE has a couple of the licenses that we filed, and Houston Christian Broadcasters, another broadcasting company. And so they took these frequencies and it was a neat thing that the Lord did and just allowed those frequencies to kind of be dispersed to people who actually knew what they were doing. And because—I was doing it more out of a passion for seeing Christian radio be more visible. And in the process of that, I started a radio station in my hometown, which is Dripping Springs, which is right outside of Austin. And that station was intended to be a purely local station playing eclectic music, Christian music as well as everything else under the sun. And when we moved, we moved from Austin to Kansas City, Overland Park, back in 2000…what year was that? 2005. And when we left we were able to—there was a gentleman here in the Austin area who was also a real radio guy, unlike me, and he took that station and it became—it was called KDRP, K Drip for Dripping Springs, and he basically parlayed that into what’s now called Sun Radio in the Austin Metro area, now has coverage over all of Austin and it’s just a great, great station. I would even encourage people to download the app because it’s just a great, super eclectic mix of music. So yeah. So that’s how I got involved in radio.

SMITH: And are you still an owner in these stations?

SANDIFER: I’m not, because, you know, they were nonprofit stations, noncommercial stations and so we basically, you know, gave—I don’t know, I’m not sure if ‘giving’ is the right word, but kind of were able to negotiate them into the hands of others and then they formed their boards, or already had boards already formed and then they basically took them and ran with them. Yeah.

SMITH: Well, that’s a remarkable story. And again, if I could pivot again on you Phillip, because that to me was an interesting part of your history. Another part of your history was what you said about moving into church work and worship and arts leadership. Because, you know, I got to say I have—I’m of an age and I know a lot—you know, have been a Christian music fan for a long time. And it’s always, if I may be frank, interesting to me to talk to a guy who’s been in Christian radio for 30 or 40 years and then gets out of it because, was there a crisis of faith? Was there a moral failure? Was there, you know, disillusionment, or whatever it might be? In your case, you dove more deeply into theology and into ministry and into worship and you end up even getting a couple of advanced degrees in—seminary degrees.

SANDIFER: Yeah. I really feel blessed in that respect and that the Lord—and I’ll have to say a lot of it comes through the wisdom of my wife Renee—and just in our looking at our family and what’s best for our family and, you know, what the Lord wants us to do. Both of us came from a ministry background. We were, in fact, we met on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ when we were young, and we’re always asking where is the best place for us to be used at this time in our lives. And so, you know, I was extended the opportunity to be involved as a worship pastor in a church and found that I really—really that the skill of leading people. And you know, when we’re recording artists, we’re always in this process where we’re working with producers and engineers and musicians to try to create the best thing we can create. The same is true in a church environment where, you know, you’re coaching people up and you’re working collaboratively with the to, you know, hopefully be used to create a quality worship service on Sundays. And so I found that it was a pretty natural step. And I really enjoyed it. And the time working on church staff has afforded me the opportunity to advance my education. The churches that I’ve worked for have been nice enough to really believe in people continuing to put their brain at work, learning and pursuing theology. And so I just, yeah, I honestly think it’s just the blessing of other people more so than it was, you know, of any kind of ambition on my part.

SMITH: Yeah. And you ended up getting an advanced degree, a Masters from Gordon Conwell Seminary, if I’m remembering right, and also a doctorate from Covenant Seminary? Is that—yep. Yeah. Which is a PCA seminary, a Presbyterian Church of America seminary. Are you involved in a PCA church today or not?

SANDIFER: I’m not, actually. I’m at a non-denominational church, but the fun thing about Covenant at the time is their doctorate was in Christian Worship. And at the time I was in Kansas City. And so it was just a three and a half to four hour drive from where I was to the seminary. And so it was really, really great. Just, you know, the opportunity to be among not only worship pastors but pastors in our cohort just really fueled the ability—and from different traditions, you know, we would have some non-denominational folks, some Bible Church folks, some people who were from Presbyterian backgrounds, and it was a great opportunity to just come together. And I felt like it was a—gosh, I don’t know how to describe it. More so than the academic pursuit, it was just this rewarding, fulfilling, encouraging pursuit for me to just be around people who did what I did in other settings.

SMITH: Phillip, you know, we’ve been talking about sort of this retrospective of your career. I sense a theme, I don’t know if you do or not, that there’s a—you’ve been kind of in and out of entrepreneurship and ministry, if I could put it that way, with the, you know, the radio stations. And I think any recording artist, especially a touring recording artist is in, at some level has to be a bit of an entrepreneur. But you took a more, I guess you could say, more of a deeper dive into entrepreneurship with Urgent Records. And can you talk a little bit about that experience?

SANDIFER: Yeah. You know, I found myself—this was pretty early in my career—I found myself, as a solo, as a single artist with a small label called Urgent Records, distributed at the time through Sparrow Records. And this was actually back when Sparrow was back in southern California. And I just, one day I had—like you, I’m a lover of certain artists and I just fell in love with the music of Bob Bennett. And I bet—it was just this sort of accidental thing where I said, well, we’ve got this label and I’m the only artist on it, but that doesn’t really make any sense. I mean, we should figure out if anybody else you know needs to have some distribution in this field. And we had moved at that point from, from Sparrow to Benson. People that follow Christian music will remember Benson. I think it probably evolved into what’s today Provident Music. And so we basically just had distribution which was kind of a helpful thing, and through, you know, running into other artists, we were able to put some—a couple of Bob’s records together, and one for Billy Crocket, and Rob Frazier, and just a number of artists. But, you know, truthfully, I didn’t know anything about what I was doing. I really didn’t know how to run a record company and it just kinda did whatever it did. But we really never were able to build it. I mean, I think for a period of time it became a, you know, a very artist-oriented label. And I think some neat music came out of it, and we really—I learned a whole lot during that era. But I don’t know that anybody would look back and go, wow, that guy really knew how to run a record label. So it would probably be on the low accomplishment side of an entrepreneur venture, if you will.

SMITH: Well, I will let you be the judge of how well it ended up performing from a business point of view. But I will say that something that you said there deeply resonated with me, and that is that it was an artist-centric label. You mentioned a couple of artists like Bob Bennett for example, who I think is one of the great Christian songwriters of the last 20 or 30 years. And Billy Crocket as well, who I guess still lives in sort of your part of Texas, right?

SANDIFER: Yeah, just south. Yeah.

SMITH: Yeah. And I will also say that both of those guys, if I might put it this way, and you can agree or disagree with me as you see fit, both of those guys were at stages in their careers where if it weren’t for Urgent, they would have had a tough place finding a home in Christian radio at that time. I mean, Bob Bennett, for example, had just gone through a divorce when Songs From Bright Avenue came out, which I think is one of the great albums in Christian music, but it’s probably not an album that would have come out on another label.

SANDIFER: Well, you know, yeah, and that record in particular has a sweet spot for me, because we were—so we had done Lord of the Past, which was an accumulation of his previous songs, or some of these better known previous songs, plus—

SMITH: Greatest hits, yeah.

SANDIFER: Greatest hits, plus four new songs. And Lord of the Past was on there, which is a song that even today continues to minister to me. And so we were doing the follow-up record of Songs from Bright Avenue, and smack dab in the middle of recording the record was when things kind of hit the fan with Bob and his divorce. And we really went through, “okay, what do we do here” kind of moment. And we basically said, you know—we finished the record and we finished writing the record because Bob, it really matters what’s on your heart in this moment, because it may very well be that a great deal of ministry comes out of you kind of, you know, lyrically exposing what someone may go through in this situation. And so we ended up doing the record. And it did not do very well financially, but from a ministry standpoint, I still get emails from time to time from people that say, “Hey, you know, thank you for putting that record out because you know that song ‘Hope Like a Stranger,’ for instance, just really, really ministered to me and it related to me.” And I think that’s the real dilemma of Christian music in that it’s very difficult to find that place where you write something so painfully authentic that, you know there will be people that will relate to it, but marketing it through conventional mediums can be very difficult from a, you know, return-on-investment standpoint. You know, it’s just kinda that dilemma.

SMITH: Flannery O’Connor used to say that the south was not Christ-centered, but Christ-haunted. It was a Christ-haunted country. In some ways I would say that your album Go On is a faith-infused album rather than one that is really faith-centric. Is that a fair assessment?

SANDIFER: Oh yeah. I think that sounds right. Yeah. One of the things that had always—you know, I’ll just—self confession. You know, when I was younger and I did my first record, it was all a song—all songs of just what I was going through at the time. And it was just—I didn’t know there was a Christian music industry. I didn’t know that there was a thing called format or any of that stuff. And somehow that record found its way to distribution. And then I followed that up with a record that was pretty much the same, for the most part, but at the time I had actually been paying more attention to Christian radio. And about three records in, I realized that I was really writing a lot for the medium, as opposed to expressing what’s truly and authentically on my heart at this moment and for what value that may or may not carry to someone else in terms of relating to where they might be on their journey. And that was part of what led to when Renee and I kind of had our discussion in the late 90s. It was like, yeah, you know, there may be a more rewarding place to be putting my energies right now. And I think that that was part of the pullback from recording. And then I found my enthusiasm again in that medium because it wasn’t what I—at that point, it wasn’t what I then came to depend on for what I did full time. And so then I just, I basically had been able to return to my roots and write about whatever comes to mind in this moment that I feel like is worth writing about, all the while maintaining a Christian worldview. So, I think what she was speaking about in that quote is that yeah, there is a worldview, but that doesn’t mean that everything has to be said this way. And that’s pretty much what this project is about.

SMITH: Yeah. Well, there are a couple of songs on this new project, Phillip, that I want to ask you about. One is a song that as you and I were talking offline, you said might be most representative of the album or perhaps at least a song that you think sort of captures most closely where you are right now, and that is “The Trouble with Guitars.”

MUSIC: The Trouble With Guitars

SANDIFER: You know I started that song with—Renee and I had—we’d had an afternoon where there were—I can’t remember what it was, but we just weren’t seeing eye-to-eye on something. And I had a home studio and I went out and I just picked up my guitar and started playing it. And the first line that came out was “We’d fought all afternoon.” What was it? “We fought all afternoon…” But I can’t remember exactly the next one. That’s pretty beautiful when you can’t remember your own lyric. But basically the song talks about the fact that I always work out many dilemmas through music, through just the putting down of a thought. And it occurred to me that that’s not an unusual situation for me to pick up that guitar in the corner and just start writing and working out whatever issues that I had to work out. And so I just went down the road of the trouble with guitars is it’s always there, it’s staring me in the face and yeah, I do need to work through this because I need to go back in and my wife and I need to reconcile whatever argument this is that we’re having. And that’s a good thing. That’s not a bad thing, but I find myself sometimes being reminded that it’s the authenticity of what I’m trying to do, not necessarily the rhyme scheme working out really well that I’m, that I’m after. Even though I love song craft, that’s not necessarily the reason I should be pursuing the music.

SMITH: Well, in some ways I, as I listened to that song, it was both a good thing and a bad thing in a way, right? It was a “both and.” In other words, I mean that the trouble with guitars is that—I mean it is such a beautiful way to find out what’s on your mind and what’s on your heart, but if it becomes a substitute for going back and working it out with your wife, then that becomes—then that is a problem.

SANDIFER: Exactly right.

SMITH: So yeah. Well, there’s another song on the album that I wanted to get you to talk about, Philip, and then I’m going to ask you a little bit about—a little more about your songwriting process. And that song is “Looking for a War.” And the reason that song was interesting to me, a couple of reasons. One is that on the current album, Go On, it’s a really great song. It just has a, it has a really great sort of vibe and feel to it, and it just was one that I found interesting; worked on a number of different levels. There was a little bit of, I don’t know, I don’t want to say cynicism or sarcasm, but there was a, there was a sadness to it, I guess you could say. And then—but the other reason it was interesting to me is that you and your brother, who you mentioned a few moments ago, are in a band together called Santa Fe. And y’all had recorded a version of that song on one of Santa Fe’s albums Moon Circles, and it was a real different version, at least it seems to me.

MUSIC: Looking for a War

SANDIFER: Yeah, Michael has—my brother has this really great voice, just has this clean, cool voice. And so yeah, the production on the Santa Fe project is oftentimes us singing in unison and there’s this weird tonal thing that happens when Michael and I sing together. He has—I have kind of an edge to my voice, and he kind of has a smoothness to his. And so a lot of the songs on there found this kind of neat tone. And that was when that song that got recorded. A local—a songwriter friend of mine, Chris Martin, and I wrote that song about just, you know, that thing that we always talk about: people that come home from the war, somebody that we may have known has been in a war that’s come home. We always look at them as, you know, scarred from their travels, which of course many of them have been. I mean, they, they are us in many ways.

SMITH: Phillip, since we’ve talked about a couple of your songs, maybe more than a couple at this point, I want to sort of step back from individual songs and ask you a little about your songwriting process. If you were—and I’ll start by asking it this way—if you had sort of the ideal songwriting day where, you know, you, your job, your wife, whatever the forces that are in your life that sometimes it would take you away from songwriting, went away for 24 hours, what would the ideal day look like for you? Would you be in a room with a guitar? Would you be walking? Do you compose at the piano, or some other way? Walk me through that process to the extent that you even can know what it is yourself.

SANDIFER: Definitely finding a, you know, a place that’s quiet, and I’m not—you know, my phone is, if with me, it’s out of sight in the corner someplace, you know, like all of us that are carrying cell phones around and stuff. And really just—I tend to be one who still, even now, gravitates back towards, you know, a pad and pencil. And I find myself working out lyrics better by erasing something and writing something again rather than typing on a computer. And then when I get to the stage where I feel like I’ve got some good lyrics, then I’ll transfer it from a legal pad over to the computer. But yeah, just time to work out. You know, I bounce stuff off a lot of people so what will happen for me is, I’ll really—and I tend to be stronger on maybe the point of the song, what the song is tending to say, and not as strong on some of the things that maybe set that up. So you know, people like Bob Bennett, and I’ll just hearken back to Bob, he is just so wonderful at painting a picture of where things are going long before you get to the chorus. So people call it the furniture of the song. I wish—you know, that’s kind of been one of my pursuits, to try to get better at the furniture of the song. And where I tend to start and land mostly is in maybe the chorus of the song. And so I’ll work for hours to just work out the first verse and then second verse and the chorus will come pretty easily for me. So, yeah, that’s kind of how I do it. Just don’t need a lot of electronic gear and stuff like that. Just to pad and pencil and acoustic guitar and some space.

SMITH: Philip, I want to push a little bit harder on the songwriting process.

SANDIFER: Yeah.

SMITH: It sounds like the chorus comes first, or at least comes easy for you, easier for you, and then you work on the verses that might come a little more slowly. So even before you sit down with that legal pad, do you have a line or, or maybe an idea for that chorus floating around and then you decide to sit down and write it down and build a song around it? Is that what it looks like?

SANDIFER: Yeah, sometimes, I do. I would say probably 70 percent of the time I do. What I do use on my phone is the little pad function where I’ll be—I get a lot of ideas just driving in the car or you know, on a plane. So I’ll pull it out and I’ll capture the thought. It may be a two-line chorus or something that will lead me to the chorus. I tend to keep a pretty good inventory of ideas.

SMITH: And so you will fill out those lyrics. Do you do it with a guitar in hand or do you write the song first and then try to find music that fits the tone or the mood of the song? Or is that a simultaneous process?

SANDIFER: Sometimes. I mean sometimes it will come very simultaneously, if I’m in a studio and I’ve got time and I’ve got an idea and it just kind of starts happening. But honestly, one of the coolest things that I would encourage songwriters out there to do is don’t be completely attached to your instrument because sometimes you’ll come up with melodies in your head that you don’t know how to play on your instrument. And so this happens to me quite a bit, that I’ll have a melody that I’ve, you know, I’ve just been singing it, and you know, I’ve just, I’ve got this lyric and I’m singing this melody. And I then have to go work it out on the guitar and I find myself going through chord structures that are not the chord structures that I would typically go through if I just sat down and played the guitar. And so it makes me a better guitar player by searching for that melody and figuring it out. And that’s actually my favorite way to write, is if I can come, you know, come across a melody that I have or my—I do this with my daughter a lot because she doesn’t play an instrument, but she’s a fabulous writer. And so she will send me, she’ll like text me a melody and I’ll just go and figure it out on the guitar and then we’ll figure it out together. It’s really fun.

SMITH: Once you get a finished song or a mostly finished song, where do you go from there? Do you put—do you try to put together some sort of a demo, or, you know, turn on a recorder and get it down, or not?

SANDIFER: Yeah, usually I will. At least a guitar vocal, you know, where I want to make sure I’ve got something that I can listen to—that I can listen back to and go, okay, well, is this song finished or is this—you know, one of the things that happens in our family is when I do get a song finished—in fact the song, when it’s all been said and done, I actually—it’s the only song in my catalog that I have written that I wrote with my wife Renee. And we were dating, we were engaged at the time and we were in southern California and I was writing that song. I had the idea of the song, but I kept really stumbling. I would play it for her. And she would say things like, well, I know what you’re trying to say, but I don’t think that people broadly will understand what you’re trying to say. And I would go, I would go back and revisit it and I would write it in a different way. And then finally get to a place where she goes, yeah, I think, I think people will grasp that, you know. And that is kind of how I write. I have to have somebody that I can—so I have this, you know, this track, but I might play it for somebody and they go, yeah, you kind of lost me in the second verse, or you know. And so I’ll go back and I’ll work it and work it and work it and work it, until I’m fairly confident that somebody other than myself understands what that song is saying. And, and then of course, you know, we’re lucky that we have digital technology now and we can continue to just put that down. Back in the old days, we worked with cassette tapes and we’d just have to “oh, where’d I put that cassette tape? I can’t remember.” You know, we’ve got them on our computers now, on our phones, and so it’s so much easier to call them up and listen to them and work on them as you go.

MUSIC:  When It’s All Said And Done

SMITH: Well, Phillip, I can’t resist asking you this question because of, kind of your unique posture. You’re a guy that is, you know, that cares about the church, that still cares about the faith after, you know, 40 years in. You’re a guy that’s been in and out of the Christian music industry. From Phillip Sandifer’s perch, here in the Year of Our Lord 2018, what’s the state of the music industry right now? Especially the Christian music industry. Do you find it—do you long for the good old days, or do you look back on those days and say, well, they weren’t so great and things are pretty great today? Or somewhere in between?

SANDIFER: I think it’s a marvelous place these days where music is. I sure wish, I just wish I was 20 years younger, because I think the ability to make music is—there’s never been, because of technology, there’s never been the ability to make high-quality music for, you know, I mean back in the day, it cost so much money. Everybody had to use 2-inch tapes and certain types of studios, and it was quite costly to make quality projects. And these days with technology, we have every opportunity to make really, really outstanding records for not anywhere near as much money. And I know what’s come along with that is, well how does—what exactly is the business model, you know, in music these days and how does someone turn a profit and that sort of thing. So there’s that, that goes with it. But just as far as the ability to make music and get it distributed into at least certain places where people can hear it, I don’t think there’s any question that for someone who loves to write and loves to record, and loves to have a thought out there for people to chew on, I think today is just marvelous. And I’m not one that just longs for the good old days, because I think, especially if you don’t live in a music city where a lot of—I mean we make records these days by throwing sub-mixes around, and somebody in Nashville will lay a base part down and he’ll send it back to me in Austin. And then I’ll put up a, you know, I’ll do a favor for a friend and put a background vocal on a project that he’s working on in Los Angeles. I mean just the ability to collaborate and make music is just so wonderful today. And so as a songwriter who writes largely what I believe in, I can get that, I can get that thought or idea out there fairly quickly and at a reasonably high quality, more so than I could back in the day.

SMITH: That brings to a close my conversation with Phillip Sandifer. His new album is Go On. Philip spoke to me from his studio in Austin, Texas. My conversation with Philip Sandifer is the latest in a series I’ve done with musicians over the years, to talk about how they integrate their faith and their work, and about their creative process. Recent interviews with musicians have included Andrew Osenga, Larnelle Harris, Randy Stonehill, Christine Dente, Steve Taylor, and Andrew Peterson. To hear these interviews just go to the WORLD News Group website and type the name of the artist you want to hear from in the search engine. That’s wng.org and type your favorite artist’s name into the search engine.

Listening In is brought to you by World News Group, and this podcast is just one of the many benefits of WORLD membership. To find out more about becoming a member of WORLD, go to GetWorldNow.com. The technical producer for today’s program is Rich Rozsel. He gets strong assistance from Alan Brooks. Our executive producer is Nick Eicher. I’m your host Warren Smith. And you’ve been Listening In.

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