Rock worship hitmakers the David Crowder Band to call it a day after US tour

IN A SURPRISE move, America's hitmaking worship aggregation the David Crowder Band have announced they will be calling it a day. The band will be finishing after The 7 Tour of the US which they will be undertaking with Gungor, John Mark McMillan and Chris August. Read a statement, "The David Crowder Band was formed in the year 2000; it was the dawn of a millennium, Y2K was upon us, and out of this chaos was born the DCB. That sounds way more epic than we intend it, but it is fact. We signed a three album deal with our friends at sixstepsrecords who are part of the EMI/CMG family. We didn't want to be presumptuous, presuming there would be more than those first three albums, but we hoped. And so we began discussions about building a six album set, the second three, if we were ever to have the great privilege of recording them, would be loosely associated with the first three, you know, sort of like how in the creation story day one is related to day four, as in, first there is light, then on the fourth day the sun and moon and stars appear. We do these things because we are quite nerdy and also because we hope to inject meaning wherever and whenever we are able. We also like structure, and this seemed a pretty nifty structure to work within, since, well, it is one of the greatest stories ever. And sure enough, we have had the happy fortune to record five full-length albums and are hard at work on the sixth right now.

"The problem, or the beauty, is that we've never been able to see past album six. In the meantime, a lot of life has happened. It is now 2011 (this is for anyone who may not have been paying attention) and in 11 years there have been many twists and turns. Each of us has gotten married. New humans have arrived as a result of these marriages, five to be exact. We have also lost some really good friends to death along the way and have gotten to celebrate together that death is not the end of things. It's really crazy to think that we have lived over a decade of life together. And, in the middle of all this life, we have gotten to make music that was a reflection of what was happening among us. We have attempted, to the best of our ability, to insert all of these twists and turns into our music, hoping that our responses to God in the midst of these moments would be an aid to others.

"At the first of this year we began discussing what was next. For a long while we have had a good idea what we were going to do for album number six; we were going to record a Mass. Ambitious, maybe, but we had been working out the details of how it would connect to 'A Collision', you know, the one with the boy and the atom on the cover. Mass happens to be a term used in physics, and this was exciting to us. But we also began conversations about what was to follow this sixth album. Some of us discussed maybe going back to school. Some of us talked about how great it might feel to be home with family more. Some mentioned maybe writing for a living, or at least getting to give more attention to it. Some talked about more music to be made and who they might enjoy making it with and how great it would be to have more diverse options open to them and the excitement they felt when thinking about those options (as in, if this was to be the period at the end of a sentence, they couldn't wait to read the next paragraph!) And, out of these discussions, the decision was reached that this sixth album would be our last. None of us is sure what's next, but we're not afraid. We're, in fact, really, really excited! And we're sure that music will play a role in the future for most, if not all, of us, since, well, we wouldn't know how to not have it a part of our lives. To what extent that will be, none of us is sure. We are hopeful and expecting, and praying that what is ahead of us deepens our need and experience of redemption and multiplies our ability and effectiveness in expressing the story of God in light of the call he has on each of our lives."