Copious Notes

Sterling talks to the crowd at the main stage before Disciple's set Thursday. Photos by Rich Copley | LexGo.com.

When Sterling became an on-air personality at Air1 last year, she got a pass to some of the biggest Christian music festivals in the United States.

“I did Rock the Desert, The Rage in Phoenix, Creation and Spirit West Coast,” she said, naming a few of a half dozen she hit last year. “And they’re all wonderful festivals.

Sterling gets her picture taken with Delirious' Martin Smith after an on-air interview.

“But there’s something about the heart of this festival and the people that put it together with the communion and the worship that is so incredible,” she said, sitting on the porch swing at the cabin in the middle of the camp ground at the Ichthus Festival. “It’s so much more than just the bands. It’s so much more than all the stages and the youth tent and the cool stuff that they give away. It’s all about Jesus and bringing people back to that relationship and growing that. That’s what’s so incredible.”

Her first trip to Ichthus was last year, and she liked it so much, she told her Air1 bosses it was the only festival she absolutely wanted to return to this year.

At the fest, she split her time between introducing bands on the main stage and wandering around the other stages trying to catch new bands — Esterlyn was a favorite this year.

Pretty good gig for a woman whose career started at age 17, when she choked attempting to do a news report at a rural Iowa station.

“I just froze,” she said. “I thought, ‘That’s the beginning of my radio career. I’m never going to make it.”

Now, as a national radio personality, she loves the opportunity to come to events where she can actually meet fans. Left without a golf-cart ride from the cabin in the camp ground back to back stage, she had no qualms about hoofing it back and talking to listeners along the way.

“Yesterday, I got to sign a girl’s leg, and she had 147 signatures covering her legs,” Sterling said. “It was incredible.”

And even national radio personalities can get star struck. She gets a bit giggly greeting Delirious frontman Martin Smith, and marvels at Skillet’s performances.

“It’s an honor to introduce these bands, because they are so amazing,” Sterling said. “I’ll be here every year, God willing.”

The last chance to see Delirious live in Kentucky will be Saturday night at the Ichthus Festival.

Click the play button to hear our interview with Martin Smith of Delirious:

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

When Delirious first played the Ichthus Festival in 2001, then- festival director Rick LaDue put the booking in historical terms.

“We’re the oldest Christian music festival in the country,” LaDue said. “Delirious is a band that is part of Christian music history. We needed to meet.”

The history that Delirious made was integrating praise-and-worship music with rock ‘n’ roll.

Until the late 1990s, there was Christian pop and rock that you heard on the radio, and contemporary praise-and-worship music that some churches used in their services. But it was not often — maybe the occasional chorus, like Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith’s Thy Word — that you heard a Christian top 40 song used in worship services.

Then, Delirious started playing youth events in England, pumping up the praise with songs like Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble.

Now, just eight years later, Delirious returns to Ichthus for its last festival appearance in Kentucky, at 10:20 p.m. Saturday.

Later this year, on Nov. 29, the band will play a farewell concert in London, then the members will go their separate ways.

“We’re happy at what God’s done over the years but sad because it’s going to end,” frontman Martin Smith said in a phone interview. “It’s a good time to do that. It’s not a breakup in that we’ve fallen out or anything. We’re still fantastic mates, and in the future we may play again. But for now, it’s time to pursue other things.”

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Israel Houghton's new album is a solo effort.

Review: Israel Houghton, The Power of One

Few Christian pop artists have as many styles at their disposal as Israel Houghton. His music usually comes in a modern gospel style, but he also has funk, hip hop, ballads, a world sound and even a punky side to work with.

Houghton has usually used this palette for worship music, but his latest effort, The Power of One, is more of a straight pop effort, and one of the best listens in quite a while for the genre.

There is a lot on this effort that stands alone: the worshipful I Receive, gospel basic Everywhere That I Go, soulful Sing (Redemption’s Song) with Delirious’ Martin Smith,   overpowering You Found Me with Tobymac and the conscience prodding The Power of One (Change the World).

That last track is probably most illustrative of this disc’s headline: Israel Houghton’s solo album. With songs such as the social justice rallying cry of the title track, this is more of a personal than universal statement, which is what we are used to hearing from Israel Houghton and New Breed. There is also the greater flexibility of an artist who does not need to check his vision with anyone else. So we get moments like Houghton swinging out of Sing into the brassy soul of Better to Believe, or the album gearing down to the groove of U R Loved.

On full display is the universal appeal of Houghton’s music. You may not like everthing he does, but most listeners should be able to find something. Still it all comes across as uniquely Houghton. He’s been called a chamelon, but you always recognize his form.

Other new releases: After several months of fairly tepid Tuesdays, this week gave us new tunes not only from Mr. Houghton, but also Mandisa’s Freedom — which we will review next week — and a new farewell concert effort from Delirious, My Soul Sings, which reminds us why we’ll miss these guys.

Delirious frontman Martin Smith in India in January. A visit to India inspired the CompassionArt project.

Click play to hear our interview with Martin Smith, in which he talks about CompassionArt, India and the end of Delirious.

Copious Notes podcasts are available on iTunes.

Over its last couple of albums, Delirious has become increasingly vocal about poverty and disease around the world.

One of the British band’s most recent worship anthems, Our God Reigns, pricked listeners and singers consciousnesses with the idea that the cost of an order of Chinese take-out food could cover the cost of medicine for an impoverished victim of AIDS.

“I remember going to India for the first time and being completely shocked, like being hit over the head with a baseball bat,” says Martin Smith, the group’s leader singer and songwriter. “I realized that people lived on the same planet as me with completely nothing. That set a massive thing off in me, feeling like I couldn’t just get on a plane and do nothing. I had to make a personal response.

“That was the beginning of Delirious trying to find new things to say, and react to what was going on inside of us.”

That reaction has come to fruition on a much larger scale, in a new multi-artist project called CompassionArt.

The new album, released Jan. 27, features 14 songs by 19 of the biggest names in contemporary Christian music, including Michael W. Smith, Amy Grant, Stephen Curtis Chapman, Israel Houghton and Tobymac.

All of the artists involved waived all of their fees, including songwriting and royalties, so the proceeds from the album and its companion book will all go to CompassionArt and the 16 international charities it has selected.

“All of the people involved in the project had been talking for the past few years about how it is not enough for us to just do our thing and write songs and that sort of stuff,” Smith says. “We started to see it as our responsibility to be a voice.

“We thought, what would happen if all of us got into a room and started writing songs together, and that’s what happened in January ‘07 in Scotland.”

Smith says getting all the songwriters together was far easier than he expected.

“Now the challenge is sustaining it,” Smith says.

The singer says the measure of success for this project will be a bit different than, “selling loads of records. It would be when we see lives changed on the ground. When we see people that haven’t got water, suddenly have clean water, when we see people that enough food and become part of a sustainable community and have anti-retroviral drugs and malaria meds. That would be an incredible thing to happen from this project. That would be extraordinary.”

Smith will be making CompassionArt the focus of his attention, as Delirious is splitting up after final shows this year, ending in November.

“It’s a sad time, but also happy in looking forward to new opportunities,” Smith says. And CompassionArt is, “The thing we wake up thinking about every morning.”

Our Idol lands a deal: American Idol season six artist Phil Stacey, who has been writing the American Idol blog for LexGo.com, has landed a recording deal with Provident/Reunion Records. Stacey was born in Richmond and was raised in Fairfield, Ohio. He released his first album on Lyric Street Records in 2008. He is now working with producer Brown Bannister on his Provident debut, which is slated for late Summer 2009 release.