Phil Joel was the very talented bass player, co-singer and co-songwriter for the Newsboys.
He’s also one of the nicest people you’d ever meet (I did, once, for a half-minute before a concert … he told me in his great New Zealander accent of his love, like me, for “Fendah,” or Fender, basses).
It was the next-to-last day of 2006 that Joel announced he would leave one of Christian music’s most popular bands, and that spring he did.
And now, Joel this week is releasing his fifth solo work, with the great working title of “The New Normal.”
Joel isn’t gathering wool … he has earned his first Dove Award nomination for his “deliberateKids” CD.
He has a passion for crafting lyrics that hit home with people, you can tell, and brings with him a slightly tenor-sounding, easy-to-take voice.
His passion and winning personality also always come through. Though he had little experience on bass, the Newsboys offered him the spot in the band back in 1995.
He calls the new CD “a call to examine the status quo in life, and also establish a ‘new normal’ in our own lives,” he says.
“And normal needs to be defined by The Word, and not by going along with what society establishes as acceptable.”
The expression “the new normal” is known to many of us as a description of new security measures in the post-9/11 world.
Joel also is devoting time to deliberatePeople, the ministry he and his Kansas-born wife Heather started in 2005, a few years after their pastor encouraged them to use a one-year Bible-reading schedule to spend daily time alone with God.
For more information on Joel, deliberatePeople and “The New Normal,” visit www.philjoel.com.