Glory Revival is playing at the Leawood Student Center this Saturday at 7 pm. The concert is free and there will also be popular local food trucks outside the East Building before the event. We talked with Justin Huey and Matt Bisel to preview the concert.
How did Glory Revival get its start?
Justin: I moved to Kansas City around a year ago to lead worship here at Resurrection Downtown. Matt was the previous worship director at RezDowntown and we kept in contact by sharing songs back and forth. We, along with some of our friends, wondered what worship would look like if the goal wasn’t acquiring a record deal, but rather to focus on being a group of people loving each other well and seeking after the Lord. We wanted to see what songs could be birthed out of that process. Glory Revival isn’t so much a band but a greater idea of what we want to build in Kansas City. We want to foster a really creative group of artists and musicians all focused on the same thing: building community with each other in a real way.
At Resurrection Downtown you have people from all socioeconomic levels. How does being in that environment reflect in your music?
Matt: A lot of what I write comes from my experience in the community and the people there. That’s how people are going to identify with it. It’s tangible. It’s us.
Justin: I would say that’s an ongoing theme in this entire collection of songs. We are a community that houses a lot of broken people. There are tons of people in recovery and a lot of folks who have been through some horrible life situations. I feel like it is easy to say “God is good” but what does that mean? When your faith is tested is when you show your fruit. What does it mean to praise the Lord when things aren’t going well? We can still come together. God is still good and still working. I don’t know if we intentionally wrote around that idea but that is a theme throughout the record, ending with the song “Oh we praise you” which is this proclamation of what Christ truly is.
Matt: You start talking about a change in the heart. I see downtown Kansas City as the heart of the nation. What happens if we ask God to change our hearts and we then change the heart of a city. That resonates in my mind all the time. If God changed the heart of Kansas City what would happen to the rest of the nation?
How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before:
Justin: It is very orchestrated worship music in a non-traditional sense of the word I would say. The songs come out of deep personal experiences in all of our lives. The music has a lot of feeling and heart to it and I believe a lot of that translates to the actual sonic landscape of sound.
You can also check them out at www.gloryrevivalmusic.com. Watch Glory Revival's music video: "Overwhelmed By You"