Sanctus Real

We just got back from our first ever trip to Australia.  We played at a festival called Easterfest in the town of Toowoomba, Queensland.  It took 20 hours of flying to get there and 20 hours back (I watched 8 movies and read 2 books), yet the trip as a whole was entirely too quick.  We were only there for a day and a half.

Australia is super cool.  It’s cool in a lot of ways.  Obviously they have kangaroos (animals with pouches are cool).  Crocodile Hunter was cool.  Crocodile Dundee was cool.  Even cooler was the Australian movie, The Castle.

Vegemite is still not cool.

Like my Grandma Dorothy used to say, “there’s no place like home,” and in many ways, it felt like just that.  The people were amazingly nice and relaxed.  The city was clean and when we went on a quest to find a kangaroo, “the bush” was lush and green.  They’re also green in the environmental sense…nearly every house was equipped with a cistern for collecting rain water and solar water heaters on their roofs.  I thought that was especially cool.

Some things I noticed on our trip that were very different however; Toowoomba, “The Garden City,” has their Carnival of Flowers to celebrate the beginning of Spring…which is in September.  Everything is reversed because they’re in the Southern Hemisphere.  If you wanted to go snow skiing, you’d have to drive south in July or August to find any snow.  Sounds weird right?  They also drive on the opposite side of the road.  Every time I crossed the street, I looked the wrong direction for oncoming traffic.  Could’ve been bad news koala bears had there been anything coming.

Easterfest itself was especially great and we were blown away by the response.  Here’s a photo that Coach, our road manager, took with his phone.

One other interesting difference we noticed as a band was the type of questions we were asked in interviews.  In the States, we’re asked questions like,

“What does your band name mean?”

or

“Tell us the heart behind the song …”

or

“What’s the craziest thing that has ever happened on the road?”

In Australia, questions were set up and asked completely different:

“In your new song, ‘Forgiven,’ you discuss the truth that Christ has already forgiven our sin.  How difficult do you find it, in your daily life, to go about forgiving someone who has done wrong against you? How do you know you have truly forgiven them?”

or

“It used to be that people would listen to Christian music because there was an emphasis on answers and direction.  That emphasis has since shifted more to the idea that we’re all, band and audience, figuring life out together.  How do your listeners respond to this shift?”

or

“The term ‘Christian music’ is unique in that it’s the only musical ‘genre’ classified by lyrical content rather than musical style.  It’s just been in recent times that we’ve started to hear a commonality to the sound of Christian music…I don’t even know what my question was…  Where do you see the future of Christian music headed?”

or

“Dan, what’s the most challenging thing you’ve ever lived through?”

We were never once asked what our band names means.

PS…

Sanctus = Latin for “Holy.”  “Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus” is a hymn sang at the end of the Eucharistic liturgy.  We’re not Catholic, but we thought the idea of our music as a hymn of praise was something good.

Real = We’re not rock stars.  We’re just real, normal guys trying to make heads and tails of life like everyone else.

Anyway, if you ever have the chance, you must go.  We can’t wait to go back some day and do some more exploring.  Hopefully we’ll see an actual kangaroo and not just a sign.  Although, they did feed us some, so I guess technically we did see one…?

Crocodile Rock