The Crist Family was recently in the studio, cutting vocals for their upcoming CD, Oasis. During a break, Rich was able to spare a few minutes to talk about the project.

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Daniel: So you’ve been in the studio, working on a new project. Can you tell us a little about your upcoming release?

Rich: Yeah. We’re actually here at Crossroads right now. We ‘re so excited about this project—there’s some great songs on it. There’s a couple of group members who are being featured on leads who have not yet been featured as lead vocalist on a Crist Family CD to this date.

One of them is my daughter, Briana. She’s actually singing a song called “Oasis,” which I think at this point we’ve pretty much settled on as far as a title for the project. It’s a great song; it’s an easy song, in terms of how it feels. It’s just a warm, kind of cozy song. Breana sings the leads on that. We’ve got orchestration being put on that; we’re having live orchestration put on this project on several of the songs, by Jason Webb. So he’s involved with this project for the first time on a Crist family recording.

We’ve also got a song featuring Lisa, my wife, which is her first lead. It’s a song called “Until He Comes (May He Find Me Faithful).” It’s just a super-tender alto ballad that Lisa’s just doing a great job on. In fact, she just recorded a vocal on that today.

Daniel: I heard that – it was sounding great!

Rich: Yeah. We’re excited about that one. She’s just got such a tender alto voice. It’s really soft. She should sing children’s lullabies, or something like that! Anyway, it’s a great song.

We’re trying something a little different on this project, as well. There’s a song called “Move to the Rhythm of Grace” that was written by Rebecca Peck and Buddy Mullins. Because of the lyric of the song (“Move to the Rhythm of Grace”) and the feel of the song, it just seemed right to me that we put in an African male choir—singing the lyric “Move to the Rhythm of Grace” in Swahili! Let me see if I can say this right: Twasonga Kwamwendo Wanema is “Move to the Rhythm of Grace” in Swahili. So we’ve got an African male choir starting out the song, kind of like Lion King feel—we’ve got 26 tracks of drums and shakers and that kind of stuff starting out, and we’ve got these African guys singing Twasonga Kwamwendo Wanema in this rhythm in parts—in fifths—and a layered hum in fifths, and it’s just very cool! I would not say that it would be a traditional Southern Gospel song!

The Crist Family has always had a very wide style; that’s kind of who we are. Of course, we would never in a million years want to abandon some of the traditional stuff—we love it just as well—but we have members that are forty years apart in age. Forty years separates our oldest member to our youngest member, so I suppose we’re gonna always have something for everybody in terms of our styles of music.

So anyway, those are a few of the songs that are real exciting on there. Eleven songs altogether, from African choir to full orchestrated music. Jim Brady of the Booth Brothers wrote a song for us called “There is a Fountain”—an absolutely amazing, amazing big ballad song that is full live orchestration. Jason Webb is the one that did the arrangement for that.

So that’s what we’re doing right now. We’re on our second day of vocal tracking, and we’re gonna have three more days next week. The album is scheduled to release in September, right at convention time. That’ll be a perfect time to release the project. Oasis—be looking for it!

We’re excited about it, and I know you’re gonna love it. If you liked Declaration, you’re gonna love Oasis!