Riverbend 2015 online
Visit timesfreepress.com/news/riverbend to get complete coverage of the 2015 Riverbend Festival.
Sweet Tea Night — or Tuesday, if you’re not a fan of nicknames — is a slower-paced twist to the Riverbend formula with a distinctly family-friendly bent.
One of the most refreshing changes during the festival’s celebration of Christian music, however, is that every stage becomes a kind of pulpit, and there’s an undercurrent of testimony to the artists’ banter. In Christian music, musicians’ stories of God’s role in their lives are incredibly important, representing a bond between them and their fans and helping the music to resonate all the more strongly.
Riverbend has done a great job in recent years of booking headliners for Sweet Tea Night who are not only hugely successful within the Christian community, but whose performances come with all the energy and trappings you usually associate with a mainline Coke Stage act.
Matthew West is no exception. When he takes the Coke Stage tonight, expect a gripping audio/visual spectacle mixed with a good deal of evangelism, musical and otherwise.
He’ll probably talk about the calling he felt from Jesus that drew him to the stage in the late ’90s or how a crippling injury to his arm threatened to sideline his career a decade ago before he miraculously recovered the full use of the limb.
Over the course of an almost 20-year career, however, he’s made big waves as a Christian artist. Many of his songs were inspired by the submissions he received from fans during a campaign that asked how faith changes people’s lives. These have earned him numerous accolades, including multiple Grammy nominations and two selections as the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers’ Christian Music Songwriter-Artist of the Year.
At the 2014 Billboard Music Awards, West was in the running for Top Christian Artist and won Best Christian Song for the single “Hello, My Name Is,” which spent a record-setting 17 weeks on the No. 1 spot on the National Christian Audience chart.
West embodies many of the personal and musical qualities that Sweet Tea Night is designed to honor, and tonight, he’ll be representing them from the center of a pretty enormous spotlight. If you’re there tonight, be sure to save yourself a seat because I think you’ll want to hear what he has to say.
Contact Casey Phillips at cphillips@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6205. Follow him on Twitter at @PhillipsCTFP.