The sound is different…that’s what I noticed first. I could hear certain familiar influences, and probably picked up on those immediately because I’m Southern. “Steady as a train, sharp as a razor.” That’s what they said about Johnny Cash, and it was all I could think about. The heartbeat in the drum, the rhythmic striking of the guitar cords, a beat almost clock-like…but then something else. Maybe the ghost of Johnny Cash had come back to jam with Metallica? That wasn’t exactly it either…
Let me make one thing clear. It was good. I felt like I was eating a foreign dish, trying to pick out the ingredients one by one, before realizing it couldn’t be done. It couldn’t be done because whatever they were individually had metamorphisized into something else when they met, and that’s what I was eating up. Jessica Donahue, CEO and Producer of cutting edge record label, Release the Rain Records, felt much the same way the first time she heard 3,000 Souls play.
“My partner and I just looked at eachother and nodded. We said, ‘yeah’, this is it,” she shakes her head and raises her eyebrows clearly still in awe.
I couldn’t wait to find the recipe. I’m a writer…I break things down, look at the parts, and put them back together to figure out what makes the things that make people just feel alive. 3,000 Souls was not just the typical Christian rock band. I could hear edge and pain in the same breath as joy and redemption. Sometimes it’s the first mentioned that draws the connection; a part so often omitted.
The only ingredient I had was guitarist, David Lovingood. I met him sometime in 1986 at approximately 1 hour old. My first memories of him are family Sunday dinners when I knew he’d arrived when the the nose of his guitar case ushered him through the tiny storm door. I know it had to have been winter some of those times, but I remember the smell of summer and Mamaw’s unairconditioned house sweating the music out of it’s 70 year old bricks. I remember my father and Uncle David (as you may have deduced) playing Free Bird every week, and Uncle David making his fingers fly and slide to finish that famous lick, at which some point Dad would get tripped up. I remember hair bands being on television, late seventies rock seeping out of the instruments, and occasionally, just occasionally my grandfather who played the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis, joining in before finding some reason to call the whole thing off. I had the Southern rock ingredient, but I wanted the others.
LLoyd Debarr. When I first met Lloyd I could smell rock n’ roll on him and had to fight the urge to check him for battle scars. This man had been places, and I knew it. I soon learned he’d come to North Carolina from the Seattle music scene, and had played with members from bands like Heart and Bad Company. He had stories…good, bad, and ugly. However, he’s a happy ending guy, and that was clear too. He’s the reason the music burns when breathed it in, but exhales smooth as honey. That’s who he is. He is unafraid of who he is, which is a place we can get to in life if we try…it happens. The better part though is he’s unafraid of who he was, which few people figure out how to do. He isn’t perfect, has probably been in every stereotypical rock-scene situation imaginable, but is jaded by nothing. His scars are healed, and that healing permeates the air in the best way. It doesn’t perfume the place up…it’s more like liking the smell of gasoline. It’s still raw as can be, just raw redemption. There’s an x-factor to it all, and Debarr says it’s simple, “big Jesus.”
The other half of the band is just as important as the first. Drummer, Collin Burgess is the youngest of the group. He has the face of a teenage hearthrob in spite of himself, but wears an authentic edginess to his hairstyle, and an unidentified expression on his face that lets me know somehow there’s an art about him…Then I no longer knew what to think after I watched him beat the drums to a bloody pulp on an unplanned musical ride he and the bass player, Brice Rowland went on with Lloyd. He treated the drums like he’d invented them, and it was impossible not to recognize a divine gift. Teenagers don’t play like that. He’s the only band member I didn’t get a chance to chat with, but I did see him responding to others with a quiet confidence, a politeness of sorts…I’d bet he chose the drums for a reason…they shout.
Brice Rowland plays bass, which I find interesting…The bass sets the tone, tempers harmonies, and drives the beat. It can be the constant of a song. When I met Rowland he seemed like the most unpretentious, easy-going guy I’d ever met. There was nothing strategized about him. None of his hairs seemed to have a home, and his outfit was earth tones of some sort. This is not to say he’s bland….just the opposite actually. He’s steady, natural, like the hum of a river. The river can rage or it can drift a little. It’s never completely stilled…and it’s a lifeline.
3,000 Souls is such a smogasborg of musical mastery. The band has it’s own alive, fresh yet gritty, human sound. It has all the emotions humans have mixed in, but with the redemption that can only be inhuman….something that sounds a little bit Seattle, a little bit Southern, a little bit like something brand new, and lot like an experience above all else…Something Inhuman none of these talented men brought, but was gifted to them. It isn’t the sound of a man, an era, a generation….it’s all of that and then some…the divine…that’s ingredient-x. That is 3,000 Souls.
3,000 Souls
“So then those who had received his word were baptized; and on that day there were added about 3,000 souls.” -Acts 2:41
The album comes out in September! For an autographed copy visit http://wwww.releasetherainrecords.com and order before release!
I was nervous, and that couldn’t be denied. The thought of standing in a wicker basket while a man I’ve never met before shoots fire into a flammable object doesn’t tend to be on my repertoire of relaxation exercises. I’m also not terribly good at being out of control, which is pretty laughable at 4,000 feet above sea level. 
I was going to do it though, if for no other reason, than to check it off my bucket list. The small community of Candler, NC has always embraced the hot air balloons. If one landed in your yard, it was an honor. The colorful aircraft have been decorating the morning skies on weather-friendly days for twenty-some-odd years. As a child I would run outside to get a glimpse, and I knew I’d have to experience it one day, just to see what the ado was about. It went to the bucket list. That’s exactly what I thought it would be too, just a flight, like being in an outdoor plane…something to say I made it through and put a check beside. I went through the motions, signed the waivers, and talked to the pilots (who were more than experts, and extremely helpful by the way), before heading out to the launch site in a Candler resident’s front yard. At this point, I was anxious, and all business. 
As I climbed into the basket that sported smiley faces for footholds, I felt my heartbeat quicken. I told myself to breathe, this was just for the bucket list. It would be something I would make it through…and, maybe those first thirtish seconds were. Those were the seconds before I entered the dreamland. They were the seconds when the mind races the same way it does just before rapid eye movement sets in on a Tuesday midnight. All the things in the world there are to think about get thought about. All of the things to get nervous about, were gotten nervous about. I could see the ground getting further away, and could feel the intense heat from the primitive force that began removing the basket and its cargo from the Earth. I don’t remember noting the noise though…to me, all was silent as the balloon invaded the morning mist…when everything changed.  It wasn’t a breath-taking moment. Those can sometimes be described in a realistic way. I’ve seen “amazing” before. This was something different. To fully grasp it, it must be done, but I’ll do my very best. Think back…there’s that one fairytale unlike the others…that magical one that even in adulthood still makes us feel warm and fuzzy and think maybe mermaids do live in the ocean after all. For me, it’s Peter Pan. I’m convinced I may find Neverland yet, and almost did Saturday morning in that balloon. 
First of all, the air was perfect. I could have been comfortable in a tank top or a sweater either one, and the blinding sunrise was somehow easily to fixate upon. It was such a curious setting, and nothing like flying in a plane. It was gentle, while daring; peaceful, while exhilarating. My senses seemed different, and I secretly wondered if this balloon was the new way to Narnia. The tops of the mountains I’d grown up in, with my summertime swimming holes visible from the air, somehow seemed more regal. They were reigning over this place, and presenting their freshly grown leaves with the cockiness of the poppies from Wizard of Oz. Maybe it was the time of day, the time of year, or the altitude, but the colors I saw aren’t available below 500 feet. 
At one point I saw everyone looking to the left, and oohing and ahhing…one of the only things I remember actively hearing. It was a shadow of our vessel in a cloud, encircled by a rainbow halo, a phenomenon the pilot says happens almost every morning. With this on one side, and a half-misted Blue Ridge dawn on the other, I realized this wasn’t something to mark off on a bucket list, but to feel more alive about forever. Forget the fears. Though our pilot, Danny Smith, told me they had a perfect safety record pre-flight, I’d still been frightened until I became part of it all. Somehow I realized the magic in it, and realized the experience gives far more than it could take. I was in another place, floating up and down to the dew-dropped tree tops and back to the clouds. I wasn’t on a ride, but a journey…a journey that has to be felt, smelled, seen, heard, and tasted. 
When I got home, I crawled back under the covers to nap after my daybreak voyage. I drifted off to sleep quickly, and don’t think I dreamed. The dream already occurred, and felt somehow far away from me when I awoke, as if the balloon existed in a realm almost like Earth, but not quite. The flight was truly that remarkable, and I longed for it. It was so supernatural that I wondered for a minute if it had happened at all. Then for some reason, a quote from a Shakespeare play I read more than a decade ago came to mind, “…you have but slumbered here/while these visions did appear.”
