Brandon:  So you brought wives, everybody. This wasn’t just four guys. This was families, replanting. How has it been as far as the reception in front of the U.S. crowd? Has it been better or worse?

Dave:  Honestly, it’s been better. … In Australia, people are—even Christian people—have a reserved mentality. And there aren’t many Christian folk in Australia, so a lot of audiences would be hostile to what we have to say. So it’s pretty hard; we did a lot of school ministry. We would go into schools. [There are] different laws here. Like [in] public school, you have to be really careful about your faith, don’t you, sharing what you believe. In Australia, it’s weird because there’s this carryover from imperial England where you’re supposed to share your faith in school. So they have these seminars every two weeks where pastors and chaplains at schools can book us to play. So playing in front of a Third Day audience was easy compared to 1,000 kids where two to three percent would call themselves Christians. So we tried to break down barriers and just rock and have fun and then share our testimonies. … So playing in front of an audience like we will be tonight is pretty easy.

Brandon:  In Jonesboro, Ark.

Dave:  Big show tonight!

Brandon:  I think 5,000.

Dave:  Bring it on!

Brandon:  Well, you said earlier you wrote 50 songs. What was the process like, as far as working with Mac? And I know that Mac produced the record. … So how was it narrowing down the songs to 12? Tell me about that process.

Dave:  It’s not easy. You know, I think we as a band, we feel like we need someone producing. Some bands do it themselves. We all write. So as soon as we finish a song, we kind of give it up and give it to the band. We’re all pretty equal in what we share in the band. So it’s great to have an outside voice going, “This is cool; this isn’t. This group of songs is the direction the album should take.” It’s hard. They’re your babies. You love them even if they’re ugly. Whittling them down is not easy, but we enjoy the songwriting process and the studio process as well. It’s good having someone like Mac who can just [be] honest. And it took him a while, ‘cause we were friends first; and so we just needed to say, “Dude, be honest, we can take it. And if the song is terrible, we need to know. We don’t want to put it on the record.”

Brandon:  It takes a lot of trust and honesty.

Dave:  And I think you can tell the quality of a record by the quality on the cutting room floor. I feel like we had 20 to 25 really good songs. And by getting rid of half of them, hopefully that means the record is even stronger.