From Josh:
The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things: The last and longest song on the record is a story set up in several chapters. The story describes someone raised with a flimsy understanding of faith, God and the bible. Eventually this person grows older and begins to struggle with the ideas they once took for granted and then frustration and anger both set in.When this person takes their misgivings to the religious community, they're condemned for asking the questions in the first place and they decide to separate themselves completely from that world. Years go by and there's this lingering unanswered question and presence being felt and this person finds that they've come to the end of the road, no longer content to have no answers. They reexamine their ideas of Jesus for the first time in a completely different way, separated completely from the religious world and met on a personal level they finally begin to uncover the beginnings of real truth. It was important that, musically, the song appropriately takes the listener through each chapter in this individual's life and when we finally begin to climax to that epiphany we resist the urge to just open it up into an outright worship song, because that person isn't there yet. They've only just begun to grasp the truth: their own worth in the eyes of Jesus, and that, in and of itself, is a beautiful thing.
From Josh: The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things: The last and longest song on the record is a story set up in several chapters. The story describes someone raised with a flimsy understanding of faith, God and the bible. Eventually this person grows older and begins to struggle with the ideas they once took for granted and then frustration and anger both set in.When this person takes their misgivings to the religious community, they're condemned for asking the questions in the first place and they decide to separate themselves completely from that world. Years go by and there's this lingering unanswered question and presence being felt and this person finds that they've come to the end of the road, no longer content to have no answers. They reexamine their ideas of Jesus for the first time in a completely different way, separated completely from the religious world and met on a personal level they finally begin to uncover the beginnings of real truth. It was important that, musically, the song appropriately takes the listener through each chapter in this individual's life and when we finally begin to climax to that epiphany we resist the urge to just open it up into an outright worship song, because that person isn't there yet. They've only just begun to grasp the truth: their own worth in the eyes of Jesus, and that, in and of itself, is a beautiful thing.