Crowder brings his Neon Porch to Winter Jam

David Crowder is no stranger to the Winter Jam tour, though his band is new to the event.

The Texan who sported a hipster beard before it was hip was familiar to Christian music fans as the frontman of The David Crowder Band, an act that brought erudite songwriting and a distinct sonic profile to the party. In 2011 and ’12, the band went through a planned farewell, and its namesake acknowledges he did not know what was next.

“I’ve always tried to put one foot in front of the other and prayed for enough light for the next step,” says Crowder, whose DCB hits include O Praise Him (All This for a King), Wholly Yours and Everything Glorious. “I couldn’t be more excited about how things have gone on this new piece of the journey.”

The new piece is Crowder, his band which comes to Rupp Arena Saturday with annual Winter Jam Christian music tour, headlined this year by For King and Country and Matthew West.

Unlike his popular initial act, Crowder says this group is mostly made up of musicians he met in recent years, pieced together to create a sound that has always been uniquely his. Part of that sound comes from this part of the country.

“It turns out the Crowders, that’s where we come from,” says Crowder, a well-known Texan. “I got on this Ancestry.com kick, and it took me about four days, but I traced my family history up from Texas, through Tennessee into Kentucky and finally over to Virginia. The stint of the family members that I have heard of from our group in Texarkana are all from Kentucky.”

And maybe that explains why the first musician he recruited was a banjo player. But this is far from a traditional bluegrass sound Crowder brings to Rupp Arena.

“We’ve got the banjo up against blips and bleeps and 808 kick drums, and that’s as much a part of my story as the Southern thing,” Crowder says. “I spent too much time in front of the Nintendo and Atari to get away from it. That 8-bit stuff resonates just as much as a fiddle to my soul, so I had to have those two things sitting next to each other to present the truest understanding of my soul.”

Those elements had been present in the band’s music before. This was the group that would sing through a I Am T-Pain auto-tuning app in concert but then at Winter Jam a few years ago served up a rendition of I Saw the Light that would make Bill Monroe proud.

But really marrying those seemingly disparate elements was the big challenge for Crowder in forming his new act’s sound.

“I thought it was going to be simple,” Crowder says. “As simple as it is for me to resonate with both, I thought it ought to be as simple as putting them in the same room and seeing what happened.

“Oh, my word, we had to ‘rassle’ that. It took a while to get to what felt real. We’d record for a few days as a full band, just with live instruments. Then I would take the thing and try to reinterpret the song sitting at the computer a few days. And to find the marriage between what kept the heart beating and what would crush it — just one or two things could squeeze the life out of it — and that was hard. Once I found the lane that things felt right in, then we were off and running.”

Crowder’s debut album is Neon Steeple and the marriage of sensibilities is exemplified in live performances by his stage set, the Neon Porch. While we might assume that the elaborate stage would have been left behind for the tour that shuttles 10 bands across the stage every night, Crowder says, “I’m sure the production crew would have appreciated that, but we’ve got the cracker barrel in tow.

“It’s amazing to see them get that thing on and off an arena stage every night.”

This story was originally published February 18, 2016 at 1:26 PM with the headline "Crowder brings his Neon Porch to Winter Jam."