Third Day

Appears on

• Top 6 Christian Rock Artists of All Time

  Currently #5 · score 0

Reviews

Log in to leave a review.

Barks

Log in to bark.

Similar places

• MercyMe

  MercyMe's 2001 song "I Can Only Imagine," written by frontman Bart Millard about imagining what heaven might be like following his father's death, became the best-selling Christian single of all time and crossed over onto mainstream secular radio charts, an unusual achievement for a song with explicitly religious lyrical content. The song's massive commercial success helped demonstrate contemporary Christian music's genuine mainstream commercial viability beyond its traditional Christian-market-only audience, and its themes of grief and reunion with a deceased parent gave it broad emotional resonance well beyond listeners specifically seeking religious content. The 2018 biographical film I Can Only Imagine, dramatizing Millard's difficult relationship with his abusive father and the song's creation, became a surprise box-office success, further extending the song's cultural reach decades after its original release. MercyMe's sustained commercial success across more than two decades, including numerous additional Christian radio hits beyond their signature song, has made them one of the most commercially significant contemporary Christian rock bands in the genre's history.

  BattleCompare
• Casting Crowns

  Casting Crowns formed as a youth ministry worship band at a Georgia church before signing a major Christian music label deal, and the group's continued involvement in youth and church ministry alongside their recording career reflects an institutional connection to congregational worship less common among more purely commercial Christian rock acts. Their songs frequently address direct theological and pastoral themes intended for congregational reflection, and Casting Crowns has become one of the most consistently chart-topping acts in contemporary Christian radio history, with numerous number-one singles across Christian airplay charts. The band's continued base at their originating church congregation, rather than relocating to a major music industry hub, reflects their sustained self-identification primarily as a ministry rather than a conventional touring rock band, even as their commercial success has grown substantially. Casting Crowns's combination of sustained Christian radio chart dominance and their continued grounding in direct church ministry work has made them one of the most institutionally distinctive and commercially successful acts in contemporary Christian music.

  BattleCompare
• Skillet

  Skillet has built one of the heaviest, most rock-oriented sounds within contemporary Christian music, blending hard rock and industrial metal influences in a way that's let the band cross over successfully onto mainstream rock radio alongside their core Christian music audience. Their 2009 album Awake became one of the best-selling Christian rock albums of the decade, and the band's willingness to embrace a harder-edged sound distinguished them from softer, more radio-friendly contemporary Christian acts, giving Skillet crossover appeal with mainstream hard rock and metal listeners. The band's elaborate stage production, including pyrotechnics and theatrical staging more typical of major secular arena rock tours, reflected Skillet's ambition to compete directly with mainstream rock acts' production values rather than operating within a more modest Christian-music-specific touring circuit. Skillet's combination of a genuinely heavy rock sound and their sustained mainstream rock radio crossover success has made them one of the most commercially significant hard rock acts within contemporary Christian music, bridging Christian and secular rock audiences more successfully than most peer artists in the genre.

  BattleCompare
• Switchfoot

  Switchfoot's 2003 album The Beautiful Letdown, featuring the single "Meant to Live," became a major mainstream commercial crossover success, reaching multi-platinum sales status and establishing the band as one of the few contemporary Christian rock acts to achieve genuine mainstream alternative rock radio airplay. The band's lyrical approach, addressing spiritual and existential questions with a more oblique, less explicitly doctrinal style than many peer Christian rock acts, gave Switchfoot's music broader crossover appeal to listeners who might not identify as specifically Christian. Frontman Jon Foreman's continued solo work and the band's involvement in surfing and ocean conservation causes, including founding the Switchfoot Bro-Am surf contest and music festival benefiting homeless youth, reflected the band's broader engagement with causes beyond strictly religious themes. Switchfoot's combination of genuine mainstream alternative rock crossover success and their less explicitly doctrinal lyrical approach has made them one of the most commercially significant Christian rock acts to achieve substantial recognition beyond the dedicated Christian music market specifically.

  BattleCompare
• DC Talk

  DC Talk, formed at Liberty University in the late 1980s, blended contemporary Christian music with hip-hop and rock influences, and the trio's genre-crossing sound helped introduce rap-influenced production into mainstream Christian music at a time when hip-hop remained largely absent from the genre. Their 1995 album Jesus Freak marked a deliberate pivot toward a harder rock sound, and the album's title track and its accompanying embrace of the "Jesus Freak" label, previously used somewhat pejoratively, became an anthem for young evangelical Christian identity during the mid-1990s. The group's members — Toby McKeehan, Michael Tait, and Kevin Max — each pursued significant individual careers following DC Talk's extended hiatus, including McKeehan's continued influential Christian music production work and Tait's later role as lead vocalist for the rock band Newsboys. DC Talk's combination of genre-blending musical innovation, incorporating hip-hop into mainstream Christian music years before it became more broadly accepted in the genre, and their significant cultural impact on evangelical youth culture during the 1990s has made them one of the most historically influential acts in contemporary Christian music.

  BattleCompare

More in Music

• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.