June 10

We’ve all heard it said that music is the universal language, and it’s so true. No other vehicle more powerfully captures our collective hopes and fears or more poignantly celebrates our dreams and triumphs. With one listen to the music of Tenth Avenue North, it becomes obvious that songwriter Mike Donehey and his bandmates have a gift for expressing truth in a way that simultaneously educates, enlightens and entertains. “Most of the themes in our songs are about truth and about the struggle to believe it,” Donehey says of the music on the band’s debut disc Over and Underneath. “I think we have to represent both sides of that coin. Jesus said, ‘True worshipers will worship in spirit and in truth.’ When we sit down to write a song, essentially we are dealing with two things: Truth and the struggle to accept that truth. Emotion without truth is just sentimental and truth without emotion becomes cruel. Hopefully in our music, we are talking about the truth of God, but marrying that with the struggle that is within every person to believe. I think it’s a struggle that will last for our whole lives.”

As the band looked to take their music to a national audience, Donehey says Provident was the perfect label home. He recalls Hemmings sharing a comment at dinner one night that really struck a chord with the group. “Terry was just talking about the mindset of this label and he shared with us something that Mark Hall from Casting Crowns had told him. He said, ‘We believe that music is important, but the word of God is the food. It’s the meal that we’re serving and the music is the plate we’re serving it on.’ As soon as we heard that, we said
‘This is the label that we want to be a part of.’” Tenth Avenue North has nothing to prove, but so much to share, and they do it with songs that echo the heart of the human condition and the hope of the risen Savior. “Simply, our mission as a band is to know Christ and to make him known,” says Donehey. “It’s a grand adventure.”