Creating In Community: The Sing Team’s Brian Eichelberger

Mars Hill Church is a fertile community for songwriters, musicians and others artists. In the past I’ve interviewed worship pastors Joe Day and Joel Brown as part of the My Song In The Night interview series. Now, meet Brian Eichelberger of The Sing Team, who lead worship at Mars Hill’s Ballard campus and have recorded a new EP called Oh! Great Is Our God!

And The Sing Team is literally a community group (what churches like Mars Hill and Sojourn call small groups that meet in homes during the week). Their formation is as innovative as their sound. Learn about it here, as well as Brian’s thoughts on songwriting. We’ll also introduce you to some of the songs you can find on Oh! Great Is Our God!

Bobby Gilles: So The Sing Team is your community group? How much time did you spend building community and worshiping together before beginning to arrange songs and record?

Brian Eichelberger: We started meeting in September of 2009, and spent every Tuesday evening together for the first two months just studying the Psalms.  We began working on some music that November to lead worship for the first time together at Christmas.  We didn’t record any music together until the next Fall, when we did our Christmas! EP, then started on Oh! Great is our God! a year after that.

Bobby Gilles: One of the first things I read about The Sing Team said “influences ranging from Motown to the Muppets.”  How did you develop the sound of the group? Was this mostly an organic melding of influences or “what happened when we hit record,” or did you have this concept in mind all along?

Meet the Sing Team from The Resurgence on Vimeo.

Brian Eichelberger: Our sound came together as a mashup of our individual influences.  The group-singing vibe came out of all of us just singing the main vocal melody together (I think that’s probably the Muppets end of things), I have been on a 80s-90s yacht rock kick, Luke learned bass listening to James Jamerson shred on most of Motown’s albums, and Spencer had some jazz band chops on electric guitar.  However it happened, I really like where we’ve ended up, and I hope we can keep it fresh.

Bobby Gilles: Were there any particular difficulties in becoming a worship band while remaining a community group? Did you learn anything in the process?

Brian Eichelberger: Yes. Tons of difficulties. Whenever we get together, we want to do a dozen different things – rehearse old songs, arrange new ones, spend time in scripture, pray together, eat a meal, watch YouTube videos – and everyone’s time is valuable, so balancing those things has been tough.  The thing we’ve failed at the most is figuring out how to invite new people into community.  Since we have shifted our focus and mission to a very specific area of service in our church, we weren’t able to function as an ordinary community group – growing and replicating.  But I think the main idea of focusing on being disciples before we lead the church has very much stayed intact.

Bobby Gilles: Do you have trouble deciding on arrangements, given that the group is so large?

Brian Eichelberger: Yes.  We’ve had many failed collaborative arrangement sessions.  It has worked best for one of us to come with a main song idea, structure and a starting place for parts, then everyone sort of embellishes their part as we continue to develop the song.  The thing that has worked for us is just keeping it super simple and keeping the vocal the most important piece of the arrangement.  That way we don’t step on each others’ toes and we remember that our main goal is to lead our church in singing, not coming up with fancy arrangements.

Bobby Gilles: How often do you lead worship at Mars Hill Ballard? Is it the full group every time, or do you all rotate? Is there a “group within the group”?

Brian Eichelberger: We lead worship once every 3-4 weeks at Mars Hill Ballard.  The group is usually the same, but some of us have had to take seasons off with new kids and other changes in life.

Bobby Gilles: “Satisfied In You” contains such colorful imagery, including imagery from Psalm 42 like “deer pants for water” and some very original word-pictures like “It’s an inbred feedback loop that drags me down.” Do you spend a lot of time honing and thinking of images and ways to express them, or is it more like a brainstorming session where everything spills out?

Brian Eichelberger: When I write images and metaphors, it’s usually a quick brain dump, followed by a good amount of honing, but I try not to sit on it too long.  If I over analyze what I write, it usually gets watered down and loses the gut-reaction feeling that most of my writing comes from.

Bobby Gilles: I also loved the way you used water as a controlling metaphor throughout the song: flood of tears, the thirst of the soul, and then the drowning at sea while breakers and waves crash on the singer. When you’re writing a song, do you think in terms of story or scene-painting?

Brian Eichelberger: Huh, I’m not sure that I was very conscious of the water theme in that song until you mentioned it!  Maybe it was intentional, I forget.  Scene-painting comes much more naturally than storytelling for me.  I’ve always been a big fan of story songs, but I have a hard time writing a narrative in a compelling way.

Bobby Gilles: Of course that song draws from Psalm 42, and “As Long As I Live” is an adaptation of Psalm 63. What advice would you give to someone who wants to arrange or adapt psalms for contemporary worship?

Brian Eichelberger: The songs that I’ve written based on psalms have usually started with trying to sing it in my own words, but usually evolves into my response to the text.  The Psalms are a great starting place for songs of personal or corporate worship; they are biblical responses to our situations and to God’s character written poetically and have stood the test of time.  I think the important thing to remember is that they are primarily about God, not about you.

Bobby Gilles: How often do you write songs? Do you quickly bounce song drafts off others in the group or do you “live” with them for awhile?

Brian Eichelberger: I would like to take more time for songwriting than I do, but I usually end up writing 3-4 songs a year.  I usually try to completely finish a new song before sharing it with the band, then get some feedback on which lyrics work or don’t work and try to tweak it a little bit.

Bobby Gilles: Your songs are theologically strong, but the lyrics are very simple and accessible, like on “Because Jesus Christ Is Alive:”

We get tired, we can’t win/ We were dead in our sin
But there’s a hope, a new life/ The pressure’s off, cause Jesus Christ’s alive