This week, Mars Hill band King’s Kaleidoscope released their first studio recording, Asaph’s Arrows . We sat down with the band’s leader, Deacon Chad Gardner, to talk about what went into this EP, songs that fly to the heart, and screaming at hipsters with their hands in their pockets.

MH: So what does the title Asaph’s Arrows mean?

CG: Asaph was an awesome musician who King David appointed to lead worship. David was a musician himself so he probably had a really good musical ear and heart for good poetry. It’s likely that Asaph had an amazing catalog of songs that always flew straight to the heart and did a great job of engaging people.

And that’s what these songs are. They’re staples of our catalog. The arrangements are tested and have always proven effective at getting people’s attention focused on the living God. These songs fly straight to the heart, which is what you hope an arrow does.

MH: How do you know when a song has flown straight to someone’s heart?

CG: It’s impossible to completely discern that, but a song that has a lot of gospel content and music that aids, comes alongside, and emotionally pushes along the lyrics is going to be powerful.

We’re always rotating through songs, always shifting because there are different songs for different seasons. You have to have a full catalog because you can only put so much theology in each song, so you have to have songs that have a range of theology for all the different characteristics of God. So we have 35 songs right now and we’re continually adding to them. Musically, you try to express different characteristics of God or different things about God or different emotions that you have that come from being in a relationship with him.

MH: What is each of the songs on the EP about?

CG: “All Creatures [of Our God and King]” — This is a song about all of creation worshiping God together—the sun and the moon and the stars—and about how God has created everything to glorify and worship him. It talks about how he is a King over all so he is in complete authority. And because God is holy all of creation is excited to worship him.

“Come Thou Fount” — This song has a lot of different ways to interpret it, but we play it usually with the mindset that it’s a prayer, specifically that first line [Tune my heart to sing thy grace]. We’re actually unable to worship God (because of sin) outside of his grace, and so we’re opening our mouths to sing to him and tuning our hearts to long for and worship him. So we sing that song to get to the place where we’re excited to worship God. It’s a song that talks about God’s grace and mercy to us while we’re sinners. We’re asking God to continually tune our hearts towards him in worship, so we can experience his grace and mercy—and we know he’ll answer that prayer.

“In Christ Alone” — This is straight-up explicit gospel. It goes through pretty much the whole story of the gospel. The way I sing that song on the record, if I had a friend who I loved who didn’t know anything about Jesus, didn’t know that God had died for him, that in Christ sin is put to death and we have freedom and joy this is exactly what I would tell him in a song.

“Jesus Paid It All” — This is like a B-side track. I recorded it with just a few mics, really sparse because we wanted it to highlight a sort of honest emotion. We didn’t want any compression on it, so no fancy production, just piano and strings. We did an earlier live recording [of this song] on Sin that had like 65 tracks mixed down, two drum kits, four guitar players etc., and we just wanted to give the song a different perspective on Asaph’s Arrows. Both interpretations of the song are true. With a huge band like we have, big interpretations express a lot of power in Jesus saving us and paying our debt.

With the interpretation on this EP being so simple, it expresses something a lot more personal and humble. It’s an emphasis thing. In this version, it’s the humility, and the joy in that humility of standing before Jesus and saying “Jesus paid it, all to him I owe.”

MH: Why is having different interpretations of one song important?

CG: We have to have dynamics musically, lyrically, you have to balance both of those things. God says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” There are times when I can’t express and maybe we shouldn’t try to express God’s grandeur and instead need to just listen to the Spirit. And sometimes there are times when God is calling us to shout, so that’s what we do. They’re totally different, but both of them are totally done in worship.

MH: Why does worship have to involve singing?

CG: Because conversation can only express so much emotion. There are certain things that can only be expressed through music and so God created singing. That’s why angels sing and that’s why God sings himself. He could have just not had angels sing when he was born but he did because they’re expressing joy that can’t be expressed by just talking about it. The degree of emotion is handicapped. Emotion can only be taken so far through words. There’s something that happens with melody and rhythm that is a universal language. And one of the points of worshiping together in church is that we’re unified.

But lots of people in Seattle have a hard time buying into that. The hipster’s excuse is, “Oh, I just worship differently, I worship at home, while I’m by myself, while I’m walking in the woods.” Well so do I, but you don’t only have one way to worship—you have all of them. Every minute of every day you are pouring yourself out to something or someone. On Sundays when you’re with your church family, you join your brothers and sisters and pour yourself out to God! Visibly! Audibly! Some of the people are stubborn and have hard hearts, and some of them just don’t know how to express themselves, or have been burned by bad experiences, but if you’re just thinking about yourself it will always be a struggle to respond to God in freedom.

We need to be humble and learn how to express ourselves, and it’s OK to be uncomfortable and it’s OK to learn.

Everybody in our generation in Seattle, they pay a lot of money to see Radiohead and then they just stand there, because culturally that’s how we worship, and that’s OK, but then people come to church and they try to do the same thing it doesn’t fly. 

God demands the full array of human responses. He says, “Get over your pathetic fear and pride and worship me! Did I not die for your sins? Am I not the Alpha and Omega? The King of kings?” And that’s sort of my job, to scream and yell at them and get them to see the glory of Jesus and how worthy he is to be praised. When the hipsters’ hands are in their pockets, my job is to yell.

Sometimes a part of it is, culturally, they actually don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to express themselves. They don’t know how to express emotion by singing or dancing in any way, and sometimes they’re legitimately uncomfortable because they haven’t ever done that. But I think they’re gonna be shocked when we get to heaven and the worship is all gospel music.

We need to learn that with worship, it’s like, “Hey, it’s biblical and it’s time to just do it. God commands us to raise our hands and sing, so what if we actually did that?” We need to be humble and learn how to express ourselves, and it’s OK to be uncomfortable and it’s OK to learn. If you’re like a stone because of fear or pride, that’s sin. In 50 years, my kids might have something crazy at church, like DDR worship, it might be like corporate worship dance party, but as long as the truth and the gospel is there, I’ll try my hardest to dance with my cane.

MH: What does “corporate worship” mean?

CG: It’s just the way that we can worship God together. We could all chant the same words together, but singing is so much easier and it’s the way God designed it and the way it’s been done forever.

In a way, too, we witness to each other—it happens to me all the time, when I’m playing from the stage and I see someone who’s experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit, I’m totally witnessed to and I’m encouraged to see how powerful God is and what he’s doing. Anytime that one of us raises our voice to God in worship, it’s a testimony to everybody around us that we’re choosing to worship God, and so everybody’s encouraged by each other. 

MH: How does King’s Kaleidoscope approach the whole music-making process?

CG: Musically, the biggest thing for King’s Kaleidoscope has been to do whatever we want, and that might sound proud, but God has put us in a situation where we have a lot of freedom and, as long as it’s biblical lyrically and it’s helpful to the congregation (they can participate), everything else is completely on the table. We can try anything.

That’s been really freeing because it’s allowed us to create our own sound and just express ourselves freely. And then because we’re expressing ourselves freely, whatever God put in us to come out does come out, and it allows us to perform songs with a lot more conviction, than if we were just copying someone else.

And people follow conviction like nothing else. If somebody on stage believes it and they are pouring their heart out and it’s totally just the raw, natural way that they would express themselves, you’re going to want to follow that person’s lead as they point you to Jesus. Because they’re setting out not wanting to create something for you, but wanting to express their devotion and love for God.

You can catch King’s Kaleidoscope leading worship at
Mars Hill Church Ballard on Sundays, with services at 9 and 11:15 a.m. and 5 and 7:15 p.m.