The Bus Album at 30, Part 2

Thinking back on the Bus record after all this time, I landed on two separate but related topics: 1) making the record and everything that was going on during that season; and 2) What those songs sound like in 2026.

I tackled the first topic in my last post. Today I’m going to attempt the second. I gave myself a little assignment. Put the record on in the background and write whatever comes to mind. If you want to play along at home, put the Bus record on as you read this post.

OK, here we go:

“Nothing at All” – In hindsight I love the feedback at the top. I guess we knew that song was going to be first so we added it? I honestly can’t remember.

Slightly unusual how the chorus is on the 5 chord but it really opens up after just vamping on the 1 chord all through the verses. (In layman’s terms: the chord on the choruses is a little different but it works.)

Honestly what I’m listening to the whole time is how Mac, Tai, Brad, and me are all dancing around the 1 chord in our own way but it doesn’t clash. It’s really the Third Day sound in a nutshell.

Hearing the middle section where Mac reads the passage from James – this was a big debate with the record company, and we ended up removing it when we released it to mainstream radio but a lot of the stations ended up liking the sound of the album version better so played that version anyway.

I also remember hearing the radio mix for the first time and hating it. This was right around the time when Oasis and other bands pioneered the whole “compress everything and make it all really loud” philosophy and I did NOT like it on our song. In hindsight it sounds great. My ears just weren’t used to it.

“Forever” – If you love Conspiracy No. 5, blame this song. This was a lot of people’s first exposure to the band because it was our first nationwide single and because it was on a little cassette sampler that we sent out to college students. A lot of people, reviewers included, heard this song and called us “the Christian Hootie.” Rather than saying “Cool! They’re comparing us to something else that they like!” (or at least that sold a bunch of records) we spent the next couple of years trying to prove that we didn’t sound like Hootie and the Blowfish. That might have been a slight overreaction but hey—we wrote some pretty cool songs during that time, and Conspiracy No. 5 is a lot of people’s favorite album, so I’ll take it.

“Mama” – I mentioned this in the last post, but during the first 5 years or so of the band, before we had a big enough catalog to be selective about which songs we played live, new songs were a big deal. Every time we had a new song it completely energized the band. I remember when Mac got his guitar out of a case and played this for me in a local church parking lot after soundcheck. This was a huge song for us during the Strand days.

It’s interesting to note that we changed the key of this song when we recorded it. It used to be in G but we changed it to E to make it more of a rock key. That acoustic part still sounds so much cooler in G to my ears.

“Love Song” – I mentioned in the other post how we recorded this album while I was crazy busy with school and work and everything else, and how I “quit” the band for a few months during this time. When we were at the end of the recording process, I got a call from somebody (David maybe?) that they wanted to go in and record a couple of acoustic songs to make it a full album. I couldn’t make the sessions so they brought in a singer-songwriter friend to play on “Love Song” and “Take My Life.” I wasn’t mad at the news—maybe just slightly put out. As soon as I heard these tracks, I knew it was the right call. There’s no way that 20-year-old Mark Lee would have been able to come up with parts like that, let alone play them. Learning “Love Song” on guitar so I could play it live became a big part of me cutting my teeth on guitar, and greatly affected the way I approached the instrument after. I’m still a little miffed they recorded those songs without me LOL.

“Blackbird” – If there’s a recording on the Bus record that I don’t love, this would be the one. I LOVE “Blackbird”—it was a HUGE song for us at the time. But even at the time we recorded it, I just didn’t think it sounded very big. Later we would figure out how to layer the rhythm parts during recording to make them sound like a wall of guitars. Listening to it now, it’s better than I remember it being. It kind of sounds like a cool demo or stripped-down version of the song.

I also always kind of liked that we had a song called “Blackbird.” Only a young band would have the audacity to write a song with the same title as a Beatles classic.

“Thief” – Oh wait, there are two recordings I don’t like from this album. I remember Mac playing this song for me early on—probably early ’92—and knowing that we weren’t a good enough band to play that one yet. For years he would just play it acoustically. The Bus record version is fine, but we were still trying to figure out how to incorporate piano and strings and other elements and still sound like us. We rerecorded it for Chronology and it got a lot better. The live version we’ve been doing as of late is the best—I consider that the “official” version these days. Fun fact—the guy who played keys went on to be a very successful live audio engineer in Christian music.

“Consuming Fire” – If I had to pick one song from this era that defined our sound, this would be it. Like “Blackbird,” I kind of wish we had known how to rock a little more at the time, but then we would have sounded like everybody else. Instead we sound like an acoustic band getting their rock on. The electrics, as huge as they sound, are part of the texture instead of being the whole thing.

I remember hanging out with Mac listening to music at his family’s cabin in Alabama, talking about how cool it would be to have a rock song in 6/8 time, and then a few days later he played me this.

Love Brad’s solos on this. The chord progression on “Consuming Fire” is weird, and the temptation would be to just play E minor over it, but Brad “wrote” a solo that followed the chords. I finally made myself learn it note for note on the Reunion tour, and I think about how cool it is every time I play it.

I feel like when people request this song live, what they really want to hear is Mac counting to 6.

“Did You Mean It” – I’m not sure if this song or “Livin’ for Jesus” came first, but those two represent the oldest Third Day songs that made it onto an official release. It was a live staple for the first 5 years or so of our existence, then we put it down. To the best of my memory I don’t think we’ve played it live since about ’98.

It was fun to watch this one evolve from an acoustic strummer to a shimmery alternative rock kind of thing. The solo on “Did You Mean It” is probably the thing I was most proud of on this album. Tai had let me borrow his delay pedal and I used it to come up with that solo. It was the first time I played something in the studio that the engineer and producer were genuinely impressed by.

“Holy Spirit” – If you want to know what early Third Day sounded like, before we got signed, this is probably as close as it gets. Before “Consuming Fire,” before “Mama,” before “Blackbird,” this was our “rock” song. While we will probably never play this song live again, I still think it sounds pretty cool. And even though we pivoted away from that acoustic rock thing from the early, early days, I think we were onto something.

“Livin’ for Jesus” – This one makes me smile. I remember playing this in churches in about ’92 and working out the guitar solo little by little every time we played. The mandolin and dobro were played by Kenny Hutson, who went on to play with Vigilantes of Love.

“Take My Life” – One little trick Mac and I used to do when playing for youth groups during the early days was playing a new song without any setup. Just act like it’s somebody else’s song and see how people react. The funny thing is—I don’t really remember anybody saying anything about it one way or the other.

This was the other song our friend Bob Lehman played acoustic on. I still love it.

“Praise Song” – The story of us bringing Rich Mullins to play on this one has been told enough, so I’ll skip that. Instead I’ll talk about the first time I saw Mac pull a song out of the air. We were at Billy’s house rehearsing one night, lamenting the fact that we didn’t have a microphone stand. As Billy and I figured out how to suspend a microphone by a mic cable from the rafters of Billy’s work shed where we were rehearsing, Mac was messing around with some chords on his guitar. By the time we got him set up with a microphone, he just started singing the first verse of what became “Praise Song.”