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A great source of my frustration with Luke

was him not really leaning in

and for better or for worse, I was all in.

My brother's a tough personality.

I don't have great fond memories of that time.

It got really complicated.

We played showcases

for all the major record labels in America

and got turned down by them all.

I remember riding back on the tour bus

crawling into the bunk.

Remember calling Moriah,

I don't know if she knew it on the call,

but I remember crying knowing that I really wanted to

marry this girl and just this feeling

of like what am I gonna do?

Like where do I go from here?

We did have the feeling of we're failures,

like we're failing right now.

Not only were we failing ourselves or each other,

but we were failing our family.

The combination of music and God was a lifeline

for all of us, it's all we've ever known

and it was all falling apart.

Is this the beginning of the end?

So where do we begin?

So, Joel, we'll start with the easy stuff.

- Mm. - Let's talk about

your earliest memories of the Opera House.

I can't wait for the hard stuff.

My earliest memories of the Sydney Opera House,

Dad was a concert promoter in Australia

and so he would bring artists

primarily over from the States.

I managed both Christian artists and pop bands

and also promoted Christian concerts all across Australia.

We were doing well.

We lived in one of the nicest suburbs in Sydney at Glenorie.

We did a lot of concerts over the years

and the kids would always come

so we would always be there together

and experience those moments together.

We would literally be put to bed backstage,

like we'd bring sleeping bags and pillows

and we'd go to sleep with the sounds of the rock band.

Dad, because he was the promoter,

he ended up being like the host of the night.

So before the band would come up

he was up on stage making the announcements.

And so I remember hugging dad's leg

and kind of looking out at the front row of people.

But we also did little things promotionally.

I remember distinctly putting flyers out

on like a car park full of vehicles

and then going to concerts, watching Stryper for instance.

Just eyes popping out of my head watching this band.

Going to shows with Dad and getting on his shoulders,

put my hands over my ears, 'cause it was just so loud

and I felt a lot of pride being there, being my dad's son.

For me, music was just always a natural part of my life

and our whole family's life.

We had a big barn out the back of the house

and we had a band, you know me, as a three, four year old

and pots and pans and the whole thing

and we would play music together.

Like we would sell merch at our shows for our parents.

I mean it was just so normal for us and so natural.

The Smallbone family is an amazing crazy one

and I love it.

So this is dad, David, our mom, Helen.

My oldest sister Rebecca, Daniel, the oldest boy

Ben, me, Joel, there's Luke, Josh

and Libby was not quite born yet

but she was well on her way.

I think the DNA of the Smallbone family is ingenuity,

character, pursuing excellence in all that you do,

taking what it is that you uniquely know

and putting that back into the family

I think is creativity, faith,

One of the things that drew myself

to the family is the ways in which they carried themselves.

They behaved also like Christians,

so we love Jesus together.

So there was this cultural overlap,

a kingdom cultural overlap that gave us this connection.

I always thought of their family

as being discipleship oriented.

Those people were a rock.

Helen is a spiritual powerhouse

and David is just singularly focused.

And my plan was to live a normal life.

Then on a really big tour, I'd budgeted for the same numbers

that this artist had toured with previously,

not realizing the economy was in a really bad place.

When you get on a tour, 20, 30, 40% down every night,

you realize the end is nigh,

we're down 10,000 people, $25 a ticket.

So, we lost a quarter of a million.

We'd invested probably 15 years

in the Australian Christian music scene.

Those two weeks probably toughest two weeks of my life.

This is what he was called to do.

This was his purpose in life.

This is what he knew how to do.

And when he lost everything he said,

"I don't know what I'm gonna do."

I just, I honestly didn't know

how I was gonna pay the mortgage.

I remember getting the calls from them, you know,

calling me up late at night, when you gonna pay for this,

we're about to foreclose, all that type of stuff.

I was really not in a good place.

Tried to still do concerts

but the industry kinda wanted me to go away

because I was being a bit of an embarrassment.

Australians, they're known to be great fighters.

I used to have a statement, if God closed the door,

David would've pulled open a window and we had no back door.

And I remember going to Helen and saying,

"Hey, Doll, what about we go to America?"

When it came to this announcement

that we were going to the States, I was, I felt really proud

of us like telling my friends as a six, seven year old,

like you know, I'm going over halfway around the world.

To all my friends, it was like the place

that Disneyland was, you know,

so you get to go to Disneyland, so cool.

Mom and Dad painted all of these things

as to be just a crazy adventure.

It made us feel secure as kids.

We didn't know what we were gonna do

and how it was all gonna pan out.

Young Australian family coming to America,

we were very intimidated.

When we entered the country

and we're going through customs, I remember thinking

that we might not actually get to come.

We saw so many people and so many bags.

And I'm five months pregnant so I'm pulling my tummy in

so they can't see that I'm pregnant.

They could have turned us away, but they didn't.

It was the fact that we were together,

the fact that there were eight of us

and we learned to really rely on each other.

It was kind of an adventure like those early years

for I think all of us kids we felt very safe

in Mom and Dad's love for us.

It was still such an adventure.

I didn't really know that anything was dramatically wrong,

but it was.

The plan when we first moved to Nashville

was for Dad to manage a Christian artist

and then probably grow that like management element.

So that was the plan.

Came over to work for somebody,

it was an artist that I toured

very successfully in Australia.

He let me go after two months

and so we were forced into living by faith.

The first six months or so, maybe the first year

were pretty tough for us all.

I shook in my boots every day, most weeks I didn't know

how we're gonna put food on the table.

Every day we would wake up and be like,

what's gonna happen today?

We've just about outta groceries, we've got no more food,

we've got no more money.

I remember making the ramen noodle soups with the four

we used to make four packets of ramen noodle soups,

which probably made the combination of $2.

There was no furniture

and we would wear our clothes through the day

and then we would kind of pile our clothes

amongst a few sheets at night

and we would sleep on these beds made outta clothes.

Like literally we'd tuck the sheets

around the clothes like our winter clothes

so that we had a bed to sleep on.

Like not even mattresses.

We would have our parents ringing up

and saying, you know, it's too hard, it's not working.

Come home. I knew innately there was nothing to go home to.

There was no retreat, there was no alternative.

We had to make this work.

Moving to the other side of the world,

working for an artist and then having that fall through

your only source of income.

Cannot imagine the vulnerability of that as a parent.

At that time my dad had passed away.

A wound that my dad carries to this day

is not being able to say goodbye to him

because he was stuck over here

and couldn't get back because of visa issues.

That was a hard time for me, I.

Now, there was one day when my dad

couldn't get out of bed, he was so down about it,

which is highly unusual for him.

He's like positive almost to a fault.

When I came to grips with things

turning from maybe severe to more severe

was we didn't have any food and we didn't have a car.

Rebecca and Dad and Daniel walked to a convenience shop

easily three or four miles.

And I remember at sunset waiting just outside for ages,

waiting for them to come back.

We need a car, money, food, to survive We're gonna pray

and we're just gonna trust God for this.

And a lot of us remember Joel specifically actually praying,

"God we pray for a car."

I knew and I had a feeling it was probably

just the peace of God

that I knew that God would see us out.

That's when I started seeing the miraculous.

There was a family

that ended up becoming really iconic in our family's life

and that was the Mohr family.

My introduction to the Smallbone clan

was in the early 90s and we were having

a Thanksgiving dinner at our house

and some of the people in the group said,

"Hey, there's a new family in town from Australia,

should we ask them?"

We said, "Yeah, that'd be awesome."

We showed up at this family's home

just seeing the enormous amounts of food.

I remember Joel sitting at that thing

and he couldn't touch it.

He had to wait and all the kids are excited

and you know, it was like probably 30 of us there.

It was interesting because you know,

they didn't have a vehicle, they were just getting

around who knows how?

And at this point I am eight months pregnant

and I got pretty tired and I was like, you know,

"Can you take us home?"

My wife went to the back, into the bedroom to do something

and I walked back there and I said,

"Luanne, I know this is crazy," but I said,

"I feel like we're supposed to give them our van."

And it's then that he pulled the keys out

of his his pocket and said, "You can drive yourself home."

It's just crazy.

I remember getting in it that night

and the sense of provision I felt in that moment.

When you're sitting there and Mom and Dad are saying,

yeah, we have these needs as a family and then hey,

somebody has dropped groceries off on the doorstep

or Dad just went to the the mail

and somehow he got a check for $1,000 and we can pay rent.

That makes you feel less lonely.

It makes you feel like somebody is looking out for you.

Many, many, many years ago I was a traveling artist

in the early days of Christian music.

♪ Rock solid ♪

We were a fledgling rock band and we would tour Australia

and we'd always heard that there was this kind of

big time promoter over there

and he never would work with us.

We never hit it big enough for him.

His name was David Smallbone.

♪ Rock solid ♪

The next time I saw David Smallbone

was one day in Franklin, Tennessee

when there was a knock on my door

and this fellow with a heavy Australian accent,

he said they had opened a business mowing people's lawns.

Almost immediately with Dad losing his job,

we became a family unit and force financially.

People would give us odd jobs.

We were working together.

It became kind of creative.

Grocery stores, you know you have the trolleys,

they have the rack underneath and I was at that point still

small enough to contort my body into the underneath rack

and I could look under the aisles

while we were grocery shopping

and see if there were any kind of miscellaneous things.

And I found, I think it was a 10 or $20 bill one day

under there and that was my triumph.

Rebecca started babysitting

and then another family gave us a mower

and then we started mowing people's lawns.

I don't think any of us really thought too much ever

about, well this money's mine, I've worked for it.

There was a family need, we were doing this together,

we're on this adventure together.

I don't think that most people realize

when they were getting like this family to come

and rake leaves or mow their lawns

I don't think they genuinely thought the entire family,

you know, down to five years old we're actually gonna come.

One of my distinct memories during that

is being really frustrated at Luke.

Luke was always kind of the,

what we called the PR guy of the family.

I remember one day we were raking leaves

and he was sitting on the John Deere with his legs

kind of propped up on the steering wheel

and just talking to the owner for a couple hours.

- Luke. - It's a pain in the butt.

I've always found it pretty easy to talk to people

and I felt like if they were to talk

to a 6-year-old about raking leaves

that there was a very good

chance that we were gonna be back.

And the the answer is, was it a little lazy?

He knew he was a smart kid,

he knew exactly what he was doing.

Kay, why don't you just start

by telling me about your history with the Smallbone family.

All right, it started in about 1993, got a little flyer,

said that there was a family from Australia

that had moved to America and the dad's work fell through.

And so the first thing I thought was, oh my goodness,

what can I do to help this family?

I figured I can minister to this family with food.

And the mom greeted me at the door

and she was just this radiant, beautiful person.

She's got a baby in her arms

and she's got all these children

I couldn't even count them all.

I walked through the house and they didn't have anything.

I thought all along, why aren't these people sad?

But they were not sad.

They had so much joy and were so thankful

for anything and everything that God gave them.

That day I went to be a blessing to the Smallbones

and they ended up being a blessing to me.

This is snow.

Christmas came and I said to David, I said,

"What are we gonna do about Christmas?

Because we got no money."

And I'll never forget they were telling the children

that Santa had lost their address, and.

What I remember was Mom saying,

if he does find us, he's not gonna be able to bring us much.

It's probably just gonna be things from the dollar shop.

I think we were all like, no,

Santa doesn't care that we're poor, you know,

there's no way that we're not gonna get presents.

Santa is not dictated to by our financial situation.

He's gonna find us.

And again, just this like this undying childlike

literally faith that he was gonna show up.

A first grade class, found out that we didn't have any way

to buy gifts for one another.

Someone had brought it to the class

and so the class room, that first grade class sponsored us

that year and they went to Mom and they said,

"Hey, we wanna be kind of partner with Santa."

And sure enough, Christmas morning comes

and still to this day, I've never had the amount of presents

that I had on that morning.

To see the kids being blessed

it was an another element of God that I didn't expect

where it wasn't just our needs, food on the table,

but He went and above and beyond and loved on them

because it was important to me, that was very special.

It was great because we were able

to go back to Mom and Dad and be like, see, you know,

Santa doesn't care that we're poor.

You know, Santa takes care of the good kids.

Why'd you ever doubt Santa?

Of course he was gonna come, Santa was gonna come through

and she kind of smiled knowingly.

Gotta bring Elizabeth,

She's been doing Whitney Houston impersonations.

- Come on, go for it. - Whitney Houston.

Show them the training that I've been doing.

I saw that on video today.

Pretty soon after we moved

Dad had more time on his hands so it very naturally

just kind of moved over to working with me.

And I remember Dad doing rehearsals with Rebecca

who was 15 maybe with a wooden spoon, you know,

very glamorous situation.

You should be presenting it.

But I was outvoted by everybody in this room.

Dad was taking Rebecca

to all these different record labels.

Some of them, you know, Dad and her twice.

And man, the resilience and the thick skin,

like just from what I understand

kind of turned down left and right.

David mentioned to me

after a few months of mowing our lawn

that you know, Rebecca was a singer,

I didn't even know that.

I was looking for a young girl artist

that would want to sing to her peers.

And she was doing a few songs at their church

and asked me if I would take a listen.

It's a thousand seat room,

there's four people in the room.

And I remember watching this as you know

a boy, young man, my big sister, what a superhero.

Like her confidence and her charisma to kind of stand

in the most awkward unflattering situation

in an empty room and just sing these songs

was incredibly courageous.

She's a courageous woman.

When it came time

that Rebecca started to do tours,

we couldn't bear the thought of being separated.

We'd already become that family unit,

like we were already doing school together.

So the natural next step was basically

to become the Australian version of the von Trapp family.

We're in a 15 seater passenger van

with all of us and sibling squabbles and you know,

I was a bossy big sister for sure.

The first time I met the Smallbone was 1996.

The van pulling up and the entire Smallbone clan

comes out just kinda like another one and another one

and another one, you know, I was like,

how many kids do you guys have?

Dad needed a cheap road crew, so we became the guys.

Initially we didn't have massive responsibilities

like we had this tiny little backdrop that we propped up

and had a couple par cans

and we had these two moving lights called track spots

that we just thought were the most amazing thing.

We were in a pattern of continually trying

to get better, you know, to try to get better at our craft,

we were put out there

and failure wasn't an option and you just figured it out.

We all kind of did merch at some point.

I've absolutely sold many a T-shirts in my time.

Joel probably didn't get the merch job

because he didn't know how to add and subtract very well.

I became the merch guy for maybe a night or two

and I basically built a castle out of cassette tapes.

And I was so proud of myself.

Yes, I was fired.

But I don't think any of us thought of it that way.

There was such a shuffle at that point.

Looking back now again, hindsight 2020,

you could see dad being kind of the ultimate

like orchestrator in that moment kind of going, okay,

well that didn't really suit him

and so he should probably go and do this.

And we all ended up finding these sweet spots.

They needed someone to be able to sing harmonies.

And I hadn't hit puberty yet and so I could fly score

and high above my sister and that's when I started singing.

And so I used to sing.

I never got, they wouldn't allow me to get up on stage.

I would sing from the boards.

I eventually got promoted to being the lighting director

and I used to at one point try and sing background vocals

while I was running lights

that didn't last for very long.

Maybe we should just mute the drums

for that section, 'cause it's the drums

that are throwing me off.

♪ You are my savior and You are my God ♪

♪ You are my love You are my life ♪

I remember the moment the second record was done

and we went by to pick up the, like that was the thing then

you picked up the CDs and we pulled it out

and saw this really unique, interesting cover.

Even as a youngster, you could feel the kind of bubbling

of energy of like this, we've got something

really special and everything changed.

She very quickly graduated to having a band backing her up.

The 15 passenger van went to two RVs that we actually bought

and one housed the band and the other housed the family

and even grew beyond that.

Even in that first record to like two RVs

and a bus, a touring bus.

One time David said, "Hey, do you wanna come on set?"

We were playing at like, I think Kingdom Bound

together with Rebecca.

He said, "Do you wanna come on stage

and sing "God," with Rebecca?"

I was like, "Of course I wanna, come on.

And I love that song, "God.""

Here's Rebecca St. James.

This years Grammy winner

with record Sales in the millions.

Rebecca is a Grammy award winning singer.

Featuring one of Christian music's biggest stars.

It was the launching pad of Rebecca's career

and ultimately kind of us being able

to sustainably be in the States.

The stage production grew

from this little kind of rinky-dink backdrop

to all these moving lights.

And it became much more elaborate.

And it was perfect,

because we as boys were really able to like sink our teeth

into programming and design in a much deeper way.

You kind of knew that even if I don't know how to do this,

if if we're in this together, we are gonna figure it out.

That breeds an amazing trust.

Within all the family there were trades and skills

that were developed while supporting her.

The whole family grew in that season.

Do this, do that, order this, order that,

follow my directions.

I think I know everything in the world, follow me.

Joel, at a very young age, 12 I believe

had an eye for stages and at that point we were doing

a lot of church staging and he got an expert

at building stages and being stage manager

and loading in and being in charge of people.

As the crews got bigger and bigger locally, you know,

he's calling all the shots of where everything goes on stage

and telling these men

that are like at least three times his age, what to do.

And they look at him initially and go,

"This guy is gonna be telling me what to do?"

And by, you know, like 30 minutes in,

they were like, "Okay, yeah he knows what he's doing."

Up until probably 11 or 12,

my relationship with the stage was very frightful.

Even checking a vocal in a room

where there was maybe a dozen people in the room

was equally frightful for me.

During Rebecca's first record, she had a song

that she wanted to do a duet with me

and we rehearsed, I mean it's probably a two minute piece.

We rehearsed it for a month.

I don't think he had any idea what the next step was.

He just was enjoying it, whatever.

And then this one night David came and said,

"You're ready, you can sing tonight."

And he's like, "What?"

"You can sing on the stage?" "No, no, I don't want to."

He cried, he just said, "Oh you can't make me."

So I went to our family dog Kimba,

who traveled with us on the road and I cried to Kimba

but I ended up doing it that night.

And the tide kind of turned.

He fell in love with the stage

and from then on he kept going.

♪ I can't explain any other way, 'cause it's God ♪

I just, the tour that we're gonna do in August,

we're now gonna do in November, do a week

of start rehearsing the Christmas material,

then go up to Canada for two weeks,

then come back and do another rehearse.

I think probably some people

have a idealized understanding of what life

might have been like being on the road.

It's just an unreal world, you know, it really is

it breeds dysfunction.

You're out and there's all these people

that are just applauding you and telling you

you're good at what you're doing, it's not real life.

Rebecca's time was very hard.

She had the weight of creativity all on her shoulders.

Joel and Luke can share it.

Is this even making a difference?

Sometimes you have that feeling like, does it even matter?

I know people say the music helps,

but I don't know these people, it's really difficult.

Being on the road is an incredibly grueling,

lonely experience, you don't have your friends around you.

She was alone in so many ways.

She was alone on the road

because it was pretty much all men.

I became the middle person, I became a friend,

but I'm a mom and I've got six other kids.

What am I gonna do?

You are a young girl,

yet you are the primary income for an entire family

that's struggling to get by.

So with that comes so many layers of complexity

that add to that the expectations of the Christian industry,

which a lot of times, I think,

can be more harsh and more intense than mainstream.

If the boys walk outta their bus

pretty much in their pajamas and bed hair,

which Luke does, people will be like,

"Oh look, it's so cute, they've just woken up.

They're just coming in."

Rebecca walks out in sweats and bed hair it's like,

"Oh, oh gosh, she doesn't look like her pictures."

My heart would go out to her to see the pain,

to see the demands.

I would hit the wall, just exhaustion

and being really young doing what I was doing

with a lot of responsibility.

And I did feel that I needed to keep going at certain points

where I was pretty overwhelmed or depleted internally

because there was a lot of people

that I loved, relying on me.

I think I squelched, you know,

my own internal like voice of reason or self-protection,

probably a lot just out of desire to do the right thing

or to serve and I felt so called to it and so passionate.

But you can also be internally grieving

some of the losses that go along with that.

Rebecca always wanted to be married

and this idea of like having seven to 10 kids.

At every turn, there was a hope for love

since I can remember.

That was one of the great difficulties of her adulthood

and something very hard for me to watch.

You know, she's 26, 27, 28 going into her 30s.

Over a decade she started feeling her dreams and hopes

and desires being shifted

and it became a very frightful thing to step on stage.

Really, I had had such a dream to get married

and have a family and like there was times

where I'd be crying before a tour

because I just didn't feel like I had enough to give.

I knew the weight that she was under

and I knew the cost that she was giving to everything.

The one thing that I feel so very thankful to God,

she never lost her faith

through the hard, the hurts, the difficulties.

She has always had a beautiful faith

and I so respect her for that because it was hard.

Hey, we have hearts full of love that God has given us

and God really calls us to love the unloved, you know?

To see the way that God has used Rebecca,

she impacted a generation of girls who are now moms

and the boys are impacting their kids, is just staggering.

We are in many ways a legacy band of Rebecca St. James.

The training ground and the ability to fail

kind of quietly in the background

and to fall in love with music.

Because of our experience with Rebecca

I've had the privilege of seeing someone go before

and I really have always valued and cherished that.

I've said it a fair amount over the last few years.

And I believe with everything in me that if it weren't

for Rebecca, there would be no For King & Country.

It's funny 'cause I've kind of

envied an element of what Joel and Luke have

in For King & Country and that is each other.

I've cried about the fact that I didn't have a Luke

to do it with me, would've been different for me.

But I'm glad for them. I'm glad they have each other.

And they don't have to do it alone

'cause it's hard, it's a hard thing to do alone.

I'm thankful for the support that they have

that has grieved me that I didn't have that.

Just pause a sec.

Yeah, let's break that for (indistinct).

Before For King & Country there was Joel and Luke

before Joel and Luke, there was just Joel, there was just me

and it was the days of NSYNC and Backstreet Boys

And I was not a closet fan, I was an overt advocate.

He was doing like backup singing for Rebecca

and he was starting to have his own like persona.

You know, he had like his own suit on

and he was doing like his own moves.

I remember thinking,

"Oh, okay, Joel's got, he's got some flair."

We would play these really terrible music videos

of Backstreet Boys and we were kind of the stars

of our youth group.

At about 16 he came to David and he said,

"I wanna perform, I feel like God's calling me to do music."

David said, "Okay, yeah, write some songs,

get together, I'll set up some writing appointments,

let's make some music."

I created my own little EP called "JoeL,"

and I always loved the symmetry

because the J and the L were like really balanced.

Something about music really impacted him.

He was entranced by it all.

And I just thought, well that's that,

you know, here comes Superstardom.

♪ No, you've gotta let her go ♪

So I took the demo around a lot of people in town.

No one's interested.

Just crickets.

David actually had the very unenviable job of being a dad

and going to Joel and say, "It's just not good enough."

And so I went to him and I said,

"Ah, I don't think the solo thing's gonna work too well,

Joel, going by early response.

I think you gotta consider something else.

What about experimenting with your brother?"

And Joel did not wish to hear that.

He wanted to do it on his own.

The idea of Joel and I working together

Dad had been saying it for years.

Luke and I didn't get along, at all.

We kind of annoyed each other, pushed each other's buttons

and he grew taller than me,

which was very frustrating as an older brother.

He was a better vocalist than me.

I loved to beat my brother

that was something that I enjoyed.

I, at a pretty young age, could beat him at most sports,

which, you know, in our family didn't go over very well

'cause it was kind of like,

"You're older than him, you lost to Luke?"

You know, it was always that type of stuff.

The only thing I had be apart from him

was just raw like will and tenacity, that was my gift.

And so dad said,

"Joel, I think you should partner with Luke."

And I said, "No."

Luke was playing basketball and he was really set on it.

I'd done all the training camps

and everything my junior year

and it came to the first game I was playing great.

And I went up for a rebound and came down and (indistinct).

That was a big pivotal moment for me and my life.

It had changed the course of kind of everything.

I had gone to mom and I said, "Mom, you know,

everybody in the family kind of has their thing.

You know, sports was my thing.

I don't have my thing anymore.

And you know, what do I do?

Once again, dad has sort of tried to wear me down.

Like, you just do a song with Luke, like poor fella.

Look at him and maybe out of sympathy, who knows?

I was like, all right, well let's just, we'll write a song.

We actually played the song live

with Rebecca St. James on one of her later tours.

Joel was dragging his brother along

and resenting it in lots of ways.

Didn't have a great relationship with him,

didn't really respect him.

He had no experience writing a song,

really performing, singing behind a microphone.

After that, Luke and I, for about five years,

just wrote awful music.

We wanted to play a snippet for you.

Let us know what you think.

- It's wrong chord, right? - What would be amazing

is if we could that our verse

and then find a even better chorus.

Nobody wanted to have anything to do with us.

You know, we were not successful at all.

It was so bad.

He was working at a call center

I was living in Mom and Dad's basement.

I had a 1987 Oldsmobile that I named Old Betsy.

I put Chrome hub caps on it

and illegal tints that I had to take off.

It was a strange time.

Those years were difficult, I remember one month

that I had like $10 left in my bank account

and that was just the way it was.

We signed a development deal with the only guy in town

that really saw anything in us

a guy named Shaun Shankel.

Okay, so Shaun our producer,

just showed up with the keyboard player

and we're gonna go and we're gonna go and say hi.

And the whole idea was that we were going to sign

to Sean doing some production development-

- For six months. - For six months.

That was that we were gonna have a record deal

in six months.

There is no such thing as a overnight success.

If there indeed is something or someone

that can be considered an overnight success,

then their success is probably gonna be about that long too.

The way that we saw things going

and what actually happened, I mean was just

so far from reality.

I remember meeting David Smallbone.

He brought me The Deep was the name of it

and that was Joel and Luke's first band name iteration.

And it was an EP of four songs and I didn't like any of it.

Except for the first verse of the first song.

I remember thinking,

I think there's something special hidden inside of this.

We became his pet project

and the amount of hours he poured in and time and resource,

you couldn't put a price tag on it.

And it was everything development should have been.

It was awful. It was rewarding.

Sean was good and bad for me.

He was good for me because he pushed me to be better.

But he could be pretty tough and I kind of needed that.

I remember him going into the studio saying,

"Hey, you should try singing differently."

Which was hard for me to hear.

He taught me how to write songs.

He taught me how to sing in front of a mic.

They would write and write and produce and produce.

No, no, no, not there, not there, not there.

But they just kept at it. You know, they don't stop.

There were times during that where my wife would look at me

and say, why are you doing this?

This is going nowhere.

There was every chance that Joel and Luke

were investing in something that was a pipe dream.

There was every chance that Luke

was just gonna keep working at this call center

and Joel was just gonna keep road managing

and that was kind of gonna be it.

Hello, Luke is a little concerned.

They just, what felt at the time, they lacked authenticity.

You have to really find where the struggle is,

because I believe that that is

what people connect with in artists.

I felt if they could get to that real honest center,

that they could make an impact on the world around them.

I remember sitting down with Joel saying,

"Okay, we've been doing all this work

and I think we've got some songs we can start to,

you know, show, but you're gonna have to perform."

I remember him saying, "Don't worry about that, we got that.

We grew up our whole lives doing that."

And I felt nervous.

Thank you very much. Well good evening everybody.

I'm Joel from Joel and Luke.

Luke, from Joel & Luke together. - Yeah, I like it.

I do remember that show very, very well.

It was friends and family

and about every string we could pull

to give off the perception that yeah,

there's something really happening here.

Like this is really impressive and I think it works kind of.

We have like an intermission and Shaun came in the back

and he, we felt like it'd gone pretty well-

And we felt like it would gone very well.

And he looked at me and he goes,

"Hey, so guys, Luke, well can you hear yourself?"

And I thought, this is mediocre at best.

You're trying to say this to the people

that you'd been working on music for years.

Like this hasn't been in vain.

It did have the feeling of we're failures,

like we're failing right now.

And so then that started the next journey.

What instruments can we play?

And at first it was what instruments can we fake?

We kind of actually started looking at the things

that we could do and I was like,

well I can kind of play a little bit of drums

and that's when we actually started using

a lot of drums on stage

'cause it was one of the only things that I could do.

We fought a lot over this.

It was like, I wanted Luke to take guitar lessons,

learn how to play the guitar.

Joel could play the piano and he was getting better at it

and he would practice

and then he would get mad at Luke for not doing anything.

- Did you hear something? - I did.

It's Luke, we got him locked in the vocal booth.

- Oh. - Can't believe.

And it's 2:00 AM.

- 45 days. - 45 days.

I remember having a conversation with Luke

and saying to him, you need to decide if you're in or out

because you are not contributing enough.

You're not pulling your weight.

It doesn't feel like your heart is in this.

A great source of my frustration with Luke was him not

really leaning in and for better or for worse I was all in.

Joel as sharp as his jawline, okay,

is his commitment to all of the things

that make For King & Country go.

Luke, his hair is a representation of his personality.

It's free, it's in the wind,

he's kind of going with the flow.

I think you could say

I was maybe a little wishy-washy.

Luke's proclivity is, if he doesn't go all in,

then he doesn't really quite fail.

In his mind I think he was going,

I'll do this and I'll kind of lean in

and I'll see what happens, but it's kind of Joel's thing

and if it doesn't work then I don't really care that much

because I'm not really like, I'm not really (indistinct).

The source of frustration got so deep for me along the way

that there were certainly moments I go, "What am I doing?"

Like this has been fun and good

and I like having him as kind of a little sidekick.

But I remember even specifically

when it started getting more serious,

going to people and being like, "Hey, Luke shouldn't get

equal percentage in this band, right?"

He came to me and said,

"Hey, so we're gonna work on this thing together.

See, I've done this a little bit longer than you.

I've worked a little bit harder than you on this.

What about we do 60/40?"

And I was like, "What?" I can't do that.

My brother's a tough personality.

He and I fought a lot in those early days.

And it was usually over ego

and there was a lot of frustration and lot of arguments.

We fought a lot.

Fast forward probably about four or five years

though, I got out of the music business right

after around that first record came, Joel drove me out.

I don't have great fond memories of that time.

It got really complicated.

There was this sense of, well, who's gonna call it?

When's the penny gonna drop?

I think if Joel had to come

to me at one point and said, I'm out.

There may have been pushed back, but I may have gone okay.

I mean, you know, I kind of get it, you know,

it's been pretty hard and we haven't really,

we haven't really done anything.

Because I don't think at that time

Luke saw it as his lifelong job.

There was something in him I think,

that believed that his presence didn't matter.

And he would say to me a lot,

if you think this is not the right path for me,

or like, who are we kidding?

Like, tell me like almost tell me to be done.

We had to break through that as a writer

and really find his voice.

First song I ever wrote that I was proud of

was a song called "Crave."

And it was a song that I just wrote with Shaun.

It came out of a direct exercise that I had him do

to try to get into some pain and into some compassion

and into some empathy.

And we'd been studying lyrics

and I was looking at a U2 song and I was like, man,

at the end of the day, like we all crave hope.

Like look at these lyrics.

And immediately it was like, that's a song I'll do.

That's what we were always trying to find.

It was like, Luke is turning a corner

and becoming an artist.

♪ Hope is what we crave ♪

♪ And that will never change ♪

♪ So I stand and wait ♪

I kind of came to the conclusion I wasn't gonna do this

one foot in one foot out, where I was like,

I gotta give it everything to find out

what this actually looks like.

As a result, with him showing up

his voice has been a really important

and crucial part of For King & Country,

really the heart in some ways.

♪ It's written on my soul ♪

♪ Hope's what we crave ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

♪ It's written on my soul ♪

♪ Hope's what we crave ♪

And we had spent that first year and a half, two years

working on their songs and we were getting there.

So then what we needed to do

was just start booking our first showcases.

We would fly out to LA and Nashville

and perform for different labels.

We played showcases

for all the major record labels in America.

You know, showcase after showcase,

Warner Brothers, Universal, we did one for Sony.

They sort of saw some of the interest,

they saw some of the uniqueness,

but didn't see what they felt like

was really gonna connect with people.

They're always looking for something quite narrow

and you kind of gotta be right in that lane.

Joel and Luke are so artsy.

I just wasn't sure that was gonna happen.

But we had this shining beacon of hope.

We had gotten this call from Atlantic Records in New York

that we were gonna have the opportunity to play showcase

for their president and a few of their A&R folks.

Going up there with this like, we're gonna go

and conquer the world in one of the great cities in America.

We thought we'd made it,

we rented a bus, we were on a tour bus

and we had rented a club and we brought our brother, Daniel

did our lighting like we had stacked the deck.

We were like, man, we're good to go.

They walked in, we were so nervous.

All I remember afterwards was the evacuation.

It was like, these people are out like hardcore out.

They don't give a rip.

It was a low moment.

I remember riding back on the tour bus

crawling into the bunk and the sinking feeling of like,

is this the beginning of the end?

I remember calling Moriah, knowing that I really wanted

to marry this girl and just this feeling of like,

what am I gonna do?

Like where do I go from here?

I don't know if she knew it on the call,

but I remember crying.

I think that was one of the first times I remember

seeing this man that I thought was very indestructible

and just a force.

I saw a crack, I saw rejection and pain.

Wondering if everything he had just invested in

and believed in was all for nothing.

I think from the beginning I had maybe more belief in him

than he had in himself.

He would ask me, how can you be

confident that this will work?

I just think it will something special is developing

and this is what you're supposed to do.

I just felt like it was important for him to know

that no matter what the circumstances looked like,

he was gonna make it, that something was gonna click

and it was just about the right timing

and the right opportunity.

♪ She believes in me ♪

I've just always believed,

I just knew it was gonna happen.

♪ She believes in me ♪

Without Moriah's belief in me, Courtney's in Luke

it just wouldn't have happened.

There was no going back at that point.

It was such a vulnerable time

because everything was hanging in the balance.

We were really able to rally.

It was thick or thin, we were gonna make it through.

And so we get back the dust kind of settles

and just go right back at music,

writing songs and trying again.

There were these moments

when we'd think this is gonna work.

And at first they were few and far between,

but then they started getting closer together slowly.

And then Mark Bright took over Word.

One day where the studio

and a guy named Mark Bright called

and said, "I've heard some of your music, I wanna sign you."

I was just, you know,

completely floored by the music.

I really decided in that moment

that I'm gonna sign this band.

I don't care who has passed on it,

I don't care about anything. I love it.

I said, okay, I want need to meet the manager.

And David was like a lion in the protective aspect of it,

making sure that this thing would succeed

and that they would get the right deal,

the right situation, be around the right people.

I think that there's this feeling

from a lot of young bands that if you can get

the record deal that you've arrived.

I think because of our experience with Rebecca, we knew

that when you get the record deal,

that's just the beginning.

We had to figure out a band name

'cause nobody liked Joel and Luke

who wanted to go with Joel and Luke?

For days we were just running through,

they would come with these big lists of band names.

I mean every road sign, every newspaper article,

every word I would see would become a potential band name.

Originally, when Luke and I started working together

or writing together, people would call us the boys

and we had a bit of a problem with it.

We didn't really like it.

So we sat down at this meeting and we thought

we're gonna come up with some band names.

I came up with the idea of calling us

All The King's Men like the Humpty Dumpty,

all the king's horses and all the king's men

didn't really have the right tone to it,

so our producer said-

No, it's For King & Country.

You are for King for God, for country for people.

It is you.

So from this time out we're gonna be called-

For King & Country.

The live show has always been

one of our favorite things to do.

It's been one of our strengths.

And so it was always labels, always like,

if we can get you in front of people,

if we can get you in front of people.

Well, Winter Jam was that ticket.

So the first thing

that I ever heard was them on Winter Jam

what I thought they did so brilliantly was they gave you

no reasons to not love their show.

Something special happened

when For King & Country got on stage.

Even if they weren't headlining,

everybody walked away from the show

like they probably should have though (laughing).

They had all the drums and all the drama

and all the King Arthur of Camelot stuff.

There is no reason not to love this. It's just so exciting.

Winter Jam is a sort of plug and play show.

You do the same show every night for three months.

It wasn't like that for them.

And every night was a new group of people

where can we tweak this just if it's a percent more

to be better than it was last night.

And I watched them do that consistently.

Okay, we're practicing about to go out

and visit the people waiting in line

with the Winter Jam experience.

This is "Busted Heart."

And so from about

like 3:00 PM till almost midnight,

we were doing some kind of show like thing for Winter Jam.

We really celebrated that moment

because it felt like the belief and the hope

and the investment that everyone made,

is becoming something.

There were all hands on deck in that season.

I was pregnant with our first child, Jude.

We had two 15 passenger seat vans.

One had a hole in it, so that was exciting.

There is a certain drive you have to have,

or you more than likely are never gonna make it.

You're gonna have to get in the van

and you're gonna have to drive the van yourself

all night long and then you're gonna have to show

over that radio station and you don't even hardly

have a voice, but you are there to do whatever you can do

because you don't think you deserve it.

Nobody could ever say that For King & Country

was not willing to put the blood, sweat and tears in.

And even if they were, their dad wouldn't have let 'em.

You get out there boys, Dave's not messing around none.

I remember it was raining.

And so we put all their show flyers and Ziploc baggies

and put them on car windshields in parking lots

and tried to get people to come out to the show

and like people actually showed up.

We had released a song, it was our first single ever

and it was a song called "Busted Heart."

We were in New Mexico and people were singing it.

A little song that I wrote in a tiny little room.

It had gotten to New Mexico and it meant something to them.

The first moment I had ever seen a group of people

that wasn't like my family sing my songs.

I just want to hear this band on the radio

because if people were gonna get it,

they're really gonna get it.

And you know, they did. People got it.

♪ Hold on to me ♪

So we released the first record

and kind of charged into the music world

and at that point it had been, you know, seven years

of development and there was so much kind of triumph.

♪ Hold on to me ♪

This was the result of many years of faithfulness,

hard work, strategy and execution

that even preceded For King & Country.

♪ Hold on to me ♪

♪ Winters come back again ♪

♪ Soon this season will end ♪

♪ I'll surrender tonight ♪

♪ You'll meet me right where I am ♪

It was a great tour. It was a lot of stress for Luke.

Midway through that tour, he started feeling ill.

He started losing weight.

We were doing a lot of crazy hours

of like driving till three in the morning,

napping in a hotel for two hours, getting back in,

you know, the food's not great at gas stations,

but it kept getting progressively worse.

I think I tried to pretend as if it wasn't real, you know,

I was kinda like, I've seen some symptoms of,

my body's not quite right, but I just was like, man,

you just tough it out and you just keep going.

I had my wedding day and he was skin and bones.

And this contrast of that, I found my life partner

and I'm so happy to be married to her.

And then my, you know, my brother

and my vocational partner is not wanting

to steal anything but is just deeply unwell.

And we'd fought through so much at this point

and it was finally clicking, you know,

I was like, I'm getting married and you're married

and you just have your new child and you're really ill.

Joel was still on a honeymoon and Luke's wife calls us

and says, "I don't know what to do, Luke won't eat."

Technically I still have a disease

called ulcerative colitis.

So sick, I got down to about 125 pounds

and I stopped weighing myself after that

'cause it was so depressing.

My hair was falling out

because it just was that malnourished.

The doctor was frightened when he saw him

and said, you get so weak,

your muscles get so weak at that point that your heart,

you go into cardiac arrest.

His heart was just going crazy all the time.

I would just be in bed and pray,

"Lord, cover his heart tonight.

Like let everything keep working."

And I stayed with them for three weeks

just cooking meals and supporting in whatever way I could.

And that held us through that very scary time.

We went to Luke and Courtney's house.

Luke weighing less than me at that time,

he was just so, so fragile.

Jude started crying

and Luke wanted to comfort his own son,

but he was too weak to pick him up.

Kind of drag him across the bed and really struggle to just

get his baby into his arm so he could hold him.

He was bedridden

and couldn't even go on walks outside the home.

There was family members that were having dreams

about him dying.

I mean, it was just extremely sobering, extremely sobering.

He was really death warmed up

and we didn't know what the future was.

For the first time in raising our family,

both David and I actually had to contemplate

that this may be a terminal illness, that we might lose him

and it's not a place any parents should visit.

It's a hard place.

But it was an intense few months

of just around the clock care and around the clock worrying.

You know, you never quite plan for a moment

when the person that you love the most

says to you, you know, just don't leave me.

And you know, you say the things that you can say,

and that is, you know, it's gonna be okay,

I'm gonna be fine.

And I didn't know if it was gonna be okay.

♪ I don't want to live without you ♪

♪ I'm not ready to live without you ♪

♪ So let's dance a little, laugh a little ♪

♪ And hope a little more ♪

♪ Yes let's dance a little, laugh a little ♪

♪ And hope a little more ♪

♪ Cause I don't want to live without you, without you ♪

So I flew to a performance where we played

for the first time ever without my brother.

I got my wish, like I was in the stadium

doing the show without him.

I was tuned in live watching that performance.

I remember that feeling very, very clearly.

The road does provide some sort of like band

of brothers mentality.

You know, you're meant to be there and I couldn't be.

It was a strange night performing without him

knowing that he was actually watching.

It is brilliant to be here with you tonight.

It's a bit of a sad day for us, as some of you might know

our little brother Luke, who makes up the other part

of For King & Country, is absent this evening.

He is ill. We ask for your prayers and your support.

I actually turned away from the TV and kind of wept.

As a younger brother,

you still want your older brother's approval.

And so I could see that I meant something to him

and I could see a void on stage.

And it was the great solidifier of our partnership

because it was like, I don't want this.

All those years of, I didn't choose this, I didn't want this

to this place of going, not only do I want him here,

but I need him here.

Set everything aside, set family of origin aside,

set our history aside.

Let's choose each other. And we did that night.

Not only, I think relationally was that moment in 2013

the great solidifier for Luke and I.

But I actually think it was a great solidifier as artists

because, you know, pain will find us all in life.

Suffering will find us all.

But for us, in our dynamic of childhood and growing up,

we had not been the front runner of pain and suffering.

That was Mom and Dad.

And I think in many ways it gave us a song to sing.

We locked in as partners and as brothers.

We started to see who each other was individually.

It was the beginning of this deep well

gushing forth in their music.

That was it. That was when it started to blossom.

It was shocking to see it go so quickly.

It just almost never happens.

The Lord used all of that hard work and gave them

a much larger platform.

Please welcome For King & Country.

Knowing that I'm very excited about it-

- Dolly Parton's on the phone. - And I'm looking forward,

this song just came through my office

and they started playing it and I went,

"Oh, oh, I can't believe that."

I thought it was one of the best songs I'd ever heard.

For King & Country has reached

number one on both billboard and Christian charts.

For King & Country have exceeded their wildest dreams.

With a chance to take home two Grammys on Sunday.

The Grammy goes to "God Only Knows."

No matter how hard those trials you might face might be,

there is always hope.

And that's the reason why we do music.

Joel and Luke Smallbone

are one of the biggest duos

in the music business.

Two-time Grammy award-winning rock group

For King & Country. - For King & Country.

- For King & Country. - Let's go.

It's just a sweet triumph for everyone, for their family,

for the band, for fans who believe.

For King and Country, have amassed millions of fans

that've scored four Grammys. - Oh.

♪ We're comin' clean, we're born again ♪

♪ Our hopeful lungs can breathe again ♪

♪ Step into a new day ♪

♪ We can rise up from the dust and walk away ♪

♪ We can dance upon the heartache, yeah ♪

♪ So light a match, leave the past, burn the ships ♪

♪ And don't you look back ♪

Make no mistake,

this is not just a story about Luke or me

or the band that we're a part of.

Not a story about record sales, tours, accolades, or awards.

It's a human story about the people

that persevered through struggle.

Well, decades later,

I saw the boys in one of their concerts.

As I was watching them,

Joel said there was a lady named Kay, that helped them.

And I was just sitting there and I just thought,

look what God has done, look what God has done.

It's record label executives

and publishers who gave us a chance when no one else would.

It's a story of faith that guided and provided

during those dark nights and really long days.

If there's a legacy for Helen's

and my life is that we as a family

have encouraged people to take Jesus seriously.

It's a story about those who believed in us

and our friends who showed up at our performances

and encouraged us to keep pressing forward

You're like my hero.

It's a story about our siblings, these sisters

and brothers who rolled up their sleeves

and rallied to give their gifts and talents

and hard work to partner with us

for something greater than themselves.

It's a story about our wives, Courtney, a mother, writer,

speaker, and my darling wife Moriah, an actor,

producer, Latin country artist.

These great women who stood for us

when we could not stand for ourselves.

I never dreamed that we would be able

to be involved in impacting people's lives

as a family like we have.

It's only God who can do that stuff.

This is not a story about the band we're a part of

it's a great story of a father who never gave up.

I saw him as a boy getting out of bed every morning

when he'd been rejected by everyone in this town.

To him believing in his daughter and then believing in us.

It's a story about a powerful mom who stood

by her husband when it made absolutely no sense.

It's a story about our eldest sister

who cared for her family and allowed

these two ragamuffin brothers a place behind her on stage

to find their own voices.

It's a story about her finding love

and a fulfilled dream of family.

Using her voice now stronger and brighter than ever

alongside her partner, both in life

and yes, on the stage as well.

And lastly, it is also a story about a pair of brothers

who honestly didn't quite get along growing up,

but chose through injury, illness, failure,

and desperation to not only set aside their differences,

but to find a common voice in music to band together

with no plan B and no turning back.

♪ I used to be a beggar ♪

♪ Down on calloused knees ♪

♪ Till I got an invitation ♪

♪ Into the courts of the King ♪

♪ I'm moving on, I'm moving on ♪

♪ I'm moving on, keep moving ♪

♪ I'm moving on, I'm moving on ♪

♪ I'm moving on ♪

♪ You gave me my freedom ♪

♪ Now I'm free indeed ♪

♪ I'm marching out of the doubt into trust ♪

♪ Out of the me into us ♪

♪ No turning back, no turning back, ♪

♪ I'm falling head over heels into love ♪

♪ Leaving regret in the dust ♪

♪ No turning back, no turning back, no turning back ♪

♪ No ♪

♪ And If I'm caught in the crossfire ♪

♪ I will stand my ground ♪

♪ And even if I were to lose my life ♪

♪ Your arms are where I'll be found ♪

♪ I'm marching out of the doubt into trust ♪

♪ Out of the me into us ♪

♪ No turning back, no turning back ♪

♪ I'm falling head over heels into love ♪

♪ Leaving regret in the dust ♪

♪ No turning back, no turning back ♪

♪ No turning back, oh, oh no ♪

♪ Turning back, oh, oh no ♪