Oregon's Sixteen Cities ready self-titled debut

PORTLAND, Oregon-based modern rock band Sixteen Cities have signed with Centricity Music and are scheduled to release their self-titled debut in April. The project was produced by Jason Ingram (Meredith Andrews, Tenth Avenue North), Rusty Varenkamp (Bebo Norman, Rush Of Fools) and Steve Wilson (Hawk Nelson, Leeland). Said the band's lead vocalist and keyboardist, Josiah Warneking, "In high school, we started out by leading our peers in worship on Wednesday mornings and we fell in love with it. As soon as we graduated, we all prayed and sought God's true heart and will. We felt called to full-time music ministry, but knew nothing about the music industry. A week or two later we got a phone call from a guy with a ministry called Common Ground, which is basically a huge production with concerts, games and a Gospel presentation in a public school. So here we were thinking we'd have no chance to continue singing to students after having just graduated, and we wound up in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of teenagers in gymnasiums singing about Jesus."