Dave Barnes is fascinated by my phone. It’s tiny and red and looks very much like someDave Barnes type of voice recorder, and when I tell him it’s really a phone, he exclaims that it’s the coolest thing he’s ever seen. He’s also impressed with my new Canon L-series lens…not necessarily because he knows what it is in terms of luxury lenses, but because it’s big and weighty and in his estimation could probably spot Jen (Anniston) and John (Mayer) in LA from where we sit on the other side of the country. We are sitting at an outdoor picnic table underneath the main deck of the Windjammer in Isle of Palms, SC. Barnes is sharing the stage with Matt Wertz at the Windjammer later in the evening.

For everyone who wondered if they had seen the beginning of the end for Third Day, the band answers back with its best CD to date. From the opening track they proclaim "This is Who I Am."

"I’m the son of a good man, I’m the child of an angel," read the lyrics. "I’m the brother of a wild one, and I’m looking for direction, I’m the lover a beauty, I’m father of blessings, I’m the singer of a love song, but is that all I’m good for? This is who I am!"

As odd as it might seem for a pop/rock artist with such a formidable singing voice, Dave Pettigrew didn't spend his teen years before a full-length mirror learning to emulate powerhouse vocalists like Robert Plant, Luther Vandross or even Steve Perry. On the contrary, it was at the tender young age of five that Pettigrew's unlikely musical education began in earnest as he stationed himself in front of the family TV each week to catch a glimpse of Lennie Baker playing saxophone for doo wop revivalists Sha Na Na on the group's musically-based late `70s sitcom. Sufficiently impressed, he not only took up the instrument but continued playing it all the way up to the time of his entrance into the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. In fact, it wasn't until after he'd already been accepted to Berklee that Pettigrew first discovered, and subsequently decided to hone, his latent vocal talent.

It’s hard to believe that a quarter century has passed since Geoff Moore first decided to leave the secure confines of a steady-paying job at the family-owned foundry (Moore Iron Works in Michigan, for the curious), pack up his worldly belongings and head south to Tennessee to carve out a niche in the then still nascent Christian rock music scene. Difficult though it may be, it was indeed 1983 when a newly-married, 22-year-old Moore stepped into a Nashville studio to put together his first demo recording under the watchful eye of Whiteheart guitarist and songwriter, Billy Smiley. And the rest – sixteen albums, nine Number 1 singles, thousands of concert appearances and a house full of kids – is, as they say, history.

I first encountered the band Delirious? ten years ago, shortly after the release of their single “Deeper.” I fell in love with the song on the first listen. I remember being one of a small percentage who had heard of Delirious? when they played an early slot on the opening night of Creation East that year. Soon we heard tracks like “I Could Sing of Your Love Forever” and “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble” not only being sung by Delirious? but by church worship teams and other CCM bands. I scarfed up all those early discs that Sparrow put out after D? made such a buzz over here.

Reinvention can be a tricky thing. Just ask any of the seemingly countless artists who have recorded albums that went contrary to their established musical style only to find those albums consigned to the cutout bins and used CD stores before the supporting tour was half finished. While one record certainly does not a characteristic sound make, On a Search in America, the freshman undertaking from the lads of Dizmas, certainly offered its share of incentive to produce an identical-sounding follow-up, thanks to the mostly favorable reviews that were heaped upon it at the time of its arrival in mid-2005. Rather than taking the safe route and simply tossing out America Vol. 2, though, frontman Zach Zegan and his cohorts have returned from the proverbial drawing board with a release that departs almost entirely from the barreling, garage-friendly rock ‘n roll that propelled its forerunner.

Time was, it seemed almost a given that any act signed to a major Christian label would put out at least one praise and worship album at some point during their tenure. A close cousin, perhaps, to the aforementioned trend which carried the lion’s share of those in the CHR Top 40 along in its wake during the second half of the 1990s, Christian artists in the post-O Brother, Where Art Thou era are lining up to record the songs their parents and grandparents sang on Sunday mornings.

To say that the four men of High Flight Society have a longstanding association with both Christian music and each other would be something of an understatement. In fact, Scotty Lockridge's musical career got off to a rousing start at the tender young age of six when he pulled down the unlikely job of drummer at the local Church of God in Cedartown, Georgia, a small 10,000-resident town about 70 miles northwest of Atlanta. After honing his percussive proficiency for roughly a decade, Lockridge took the next logical step and entered his high school talent show with classmate Michael Packer, who taught himself the guitar just for the occasion. Not to be outdone, John Packer set about mastering the bass guitar and joined up with Lockridge and his elder sibling in the church worship band.

A quick glance at the liner notes to most Christian artists' debut albums usually reveals the customary roundup of church pastors, voice instructors and gear sponsors in the "thanks to" section. It is a rare band indeed, though, that can claim a debt of gratitude to the KGB for the recording of its freshman project. Such is the case, though, for Scottie, Bogdan, Roman and Vlad Bellos, whose grandfather, Joseph, first became interested in Christian matters after reading a Bible he'd confiscated from an elderly woman during a KGB literature raid in the former Soviet Union. It was Joseph's eventual conversion to Christianity that led his wife and children, and ultimately his grandchildren, to pursue the Christian faith as well.

There are those both inside and outside the Third Day fan camp who, if they're being honest, would label the group's first five years together as their rock period and the years that have transpired since that time as... well... their not-quite-so-rocking period. While any such hard-and-fast view is true only up to a point, those who bought the Chronology Volume One album, which traced the Atlanta-based outfit's musical arc from the 1996 self-titled debut to the Offerings live worship project in 2000, found more than a little evidence to support such a claim. From the swaggering, Skynyrd-tinged strains of "Forever" to the lumbering, grunge-inflected "Consuming Fire" and majestic power balladry of "Love Song," one couldn't help but marvel at the band's seemingly effortless fluency with the rock and roll idiom.