River Valley Worship is a collection of artists, musicians and songwriters who are an extension of the vibrant creative culture within River Valley Church.

The group talks about how the hope for their new live album Faith In Our Time was to immerse the listener in the room where these songs are sung, and subscribing to a path of faith rather than culture.

Tell us the technical process of capturing your new album, Faith In Our Time. As a listener, you feel like you’re sitting right in the River Valley congregation!

That's really kind of you to say because that was our goal since day one of this project. We constantly talked about the venue/room really being a prominent character on this record. So we had that creative goal early on and thankfully it carried through to the practical.

Our producer Aaron Robertson and our mix engineer Jack Nellis had a really clear plan on how to make this happen, right type of room mics, enough room pics placed in the right spots, and lots of pre-production time where the band was playing in the live recording venue.

We are all really thrilled about the capture and how it all turned out.

“East to West” and “Attention” feel like particularly special ones to us. Tell us about the backstory of these songs!

“East To West” was finished on a writing retreat in a cabin deep in the Minnesota woods :). We had a guest speaker at church who was talking about the finished work of Christ and he kept saying "sin said no but the cross said yes!"

We realized there was a song in there somewhere... so those "no/yes" statements became the anchor lines for each verse. Attention was always meant to stay compact in its production/ band support. Never fully releasing dynamically but letting the melody move the song along.

One of my favorite lyrics from the album is the opening line of the song:

Lord these eyes are held by time,
bound by what I see

such a great tension that gives way to a real lift of a chorus. I can say all of these things because I didn't write it :) . Monica's vocal approach is so vivid and vibrant on this track.

You all released “Thank You Lord” and “Straight To You” as singles ahead of the full project. Was there a particular sense of urgency in releasing these to the world first? Are there messages in these songs that you all felt like you wanted people to hear before the full album?

“Straight To You” has definitely been a favorite of ours for a long time and the demo version of this song has been sitting in our drop box since January of 2020.

It felt important to release this one because of the sonic statement that it makes.

Don't get me wrong, the lyric is important and is full of truth but the sonic landscape is something that we wanted to carry the right way.

“Thank You Lord” felt like the right doorway for the listener to walk through into the full project. It's been proven on a scientific/ medical level that gratitude has the ability to lift and transform the mind, the pathways of the brain can literally be shifted by a little thankfulness.

This song became such a quick staple in our church, we knew we wanted to take it to the rest of the world.

This album features a new version of “Sanctuary” - this time it's led by (Mollie) and rather than a stripped-down feel, it’s a full band, live one. Tell us about re-recording this song, and what it’s meant to you all as a church.

It's always a tough task to go back to something that already exists and attempt to bring new life to it. This is where Aaron Robertson showed another level of his brilliance, he took the version that already existed and quickly diagnosed a few things about the arrangement that could be lifted.

He thinks so clearly when it comes to harmonic structure, melody, counter melody, and intervals.... and you can hear all of that so clearly on “Sanctuary.”

Great chord changes, counter melodies, it became one of my favorite moments on the album.

What does the title Faith In Our Time mean to y’all as a worship collective, as a church?

The title is an intentional line in the sand, a flag jabbed into the top of a mountain-type cadence.

The way of the world is a bleak one... if we let culture lead us by the hand then pretty soon, we are hooked on a daily prescription of fear and anxiety.

We are called by Christ to be a "things unseen" type of people who take our cues from the gospel as its story plays out in scripture.

Fear makes our future appear dark and clouded.

If we subscribe to faith, the road ahead becomes one of hope, risk, adventure, and most of all, a path marked by devotion and consecration before the Lord.

River Valley Worship