Recently the David Crowder Band won the MSN Music’s 2006 Artist of the Year award, getting more votes than Prince, INXS, Christina Aguilera and Kenny Chesney. “They’ve single-handedly redefined what contemporary Christian music should sound like,” the MSN Music Web site stated. The alternative worship sound of the band is extremely popular in both emergent and traditional churches, with songs such as “Here Is Our King,” “Our Love Is Loud” and “O Praise Him” being sung every week in churches nationwide. David Crowder, the dynamic singer-songwriter who has led the band to multiple Dove Awards, started the group as a worship leader in the 1990s while struggling to find songs for the campus-based church he helped found at Baylor University, according to the group’s Web site. Now in the studio working on the band’s eleventh album, Crowder’s success also spawned two books. His latest, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die (2006, Relevant Books), is co-authored with bandmate Mike Hogan. The band's main thrust is “to be a relevant force in our culture, to give hope to those who have left the church and those who have come back.”
