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Tell us a bit about the heart behind the song “On The Way Up”
It was actually a love song, but it started out as an ode to our wives. We wrote it thinking “this won’t necessarily probably work for Christian radio, but we’re going to write it cause we’re inspired and really loving what we were doing, kind of caught up in the moment. It’s actually about our wives. We (Jordan & his wife) are really fortunate to be married for 10 years and Adam for 7-8 years. We have really challenging careers with a lot of ups and downs and our wives have been just a rock of support. The older we get, the more grateful we are for them being in our lives and being so supportive, gracious, patient and just really awesome people in our lives. That’s the lens we wrote the song through. But then like most things, it’s funny how when
you write about love and there’s this horizontal message, there’s often times the same vertical connection. So we felt like there was definitely this vertical connection with the lyrics, that very much applied to our faith. So we’re okay with people knowing either story, it’s not like there’s a secret. The essence of love you experience in marriage with your spouse, that is the love from the Father, it’s the same thing. So seeing and being grateful of a loving
spouse, that comes from the same place that of the marriage with have in Christ. It’s kind of hard actually, as you become a creative with this lifestyle. It’s hard not to see the world through that filter and not see the essence of the Lord in everything. So we’ve kind of learnt to lean into that a little bit and it’s been really cool to see that. We have another song on our record called ‘DNA’, which is the exact same situation. It’s a song that we wrote when we both discovered we were going to become parents for the first time. Jordan has a 7 month old little girl and I (Aaron) have a 3 month old little boy. We wrote the song when both of our wives were pregnant and it was the same thing, “what would we sing to our child?” but then we think “What would God sing to you”?
Can you tell us about your personal faith journeys?
Jordan: I became a believer at a pretty young age. But there still comes a point where you, for me it was my young adult life, where you actively step into being a believer and committing your life to the Lord. So I did that as teenager. I didn’t grow up listening to a lot of Christian music, oddly enough. God definitely brought us over the course of the past 10 years, to this space in the Christian music world and the truth is we are really grateful.
In a lot of ways, God has been preparing our hearts for this for a really long time.
Even though we didn’t play through our 20s. We were Christian guys playing in a Rock ‘n’ Roll band. And rock n roll music often takes you to bars and clubs. We had a lot of fans that were Christians and a lot who were not. And that was okay with us, and that’s still okay with us obviously. But we just didn’t necessarily write music that was in the Christian realm. It wasn’t till this band (Apollo LTD) that God really started moving us in this direction. So it’s been quite a journey. Looking at how we were raised and then watching how music intercepted with our lives. Now we’re in this period where it’s really compounding out faith and our music careers, they’re really intertwined and that’s a really beautiful thing, that we’re really grateful for.
Adam: It’s actually very much the same, grew up in a Christian home. Definitely knew Jesus from a very young age. It’s a similar narrative. You grow up in a Christian church and you do the ‘church thing’. But then when you go off to college and you start to become a young adult, you’re on your own path of discovery. And you begin questioning things in a very good and challenging way, that only builds you up. That was kind of my experience. For the longest
time, I would listen to people give their testimony about how they came to Christ. You hear all these amazing, radical stories. And I always felt inadequate for some reason that my testimony wasn’t that radical, I was like “man I just don’t have that awesome, powerful, crazy testimony. But I grew to learn that my testimony was very much a testimony of God’s mercy. From a super young age, he kept me and protected me from things, things that he may have stumbled into, had I not know Him at an early adult age. As I grew older, I grew more confident and comfortable in my faith. Overall a similar narrative to Jordan.
A big thank you Apollo LTD for taking time to catch up! We pray God continues to bless your music!
