Audio Adrenaline—known as Audio A—is back, but in a new form. Kevin Max is now leading from the front where Mark Stuart was before he suffered a vocal setback. Fair Trade Services releases the album Kings & Queens (7-36211-60489-7, $11.99, Provident Distribution) on March 12. Felicia Abraham visited with band members to talk about the new project.

Your last concert was about five years ago, so what brought the band together again?

 Will McGinniss: Mark, my partner in crime, and I, we’ve been in a band for a long time. … He had some trouble with his voice, and so as a band, we made the decision together to come off the road. That was 2007. We wanted to just give him time to see if his voice could come back or what God was going to do with him, and then we also just thought maybe God was just taking us each individually to some different things. And so we kind of stepped out of the Audio Adrenaline touring world and just plugged into our local church again. We were digging into our families. We’d been on the road for 15, 17 years straight and just were seeking God’s will for our lives. Mark and I specifically plugged into an orphan work in Haiti called Hands and Feet Project. … Just recently some friends of ours in Nashville who we’ve known for years—they’ve managed the Newsboys and other bands and artists in Nashville—they’re just really impressed with the way Audio Adrenaline kind of carried themselves and our work and our ministry and the brand of Audio A, and they came to us with the idea of getting Audio back out there.

How does your new album tie in with the Hands and Feet Project?

McGinniss: The new single is called “Kings & Queens,” and really it was written for the kids of Haiti at our orphanages. We don’t really like orphanage, that term is kind of a negative term. We call our place down there a village. … We have two locations down there. There’s 100 kids we’re caring for. … It’s really why we got back on the road, why I would go to my family and say, “Hey, I really think I need to be back out there using this platform for something larger than just music or playing my bass or whatever.“ It was these kids. … Thematically the new one is about the least of these and all of the things that we stood for back before we came off the road. We were about the underdog, the person who didn’t think that they could do great things. 

Max: There’s a redemption story here with us and with me, and putting this thing together. God has obviously orchestrated it. … On the record, there’s a lot of different themes. … There’s themes of redemption about listening and being patient and letting God work through you. It’s definitely kind of an underdog record, but it’s hopefully going to be a contender. 

Stuart: Net proceeds from the record are going to build more orphanages. 

For more information about the work, see www.handsandfeetproject.org.

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