On the Third Day of Christmas Singer with Christian band confesses that singing carols can be tricky By JOEY GUERRA

Third Day vocalist Macintosh Cecil Frank Powell is having a tough clip with vacation music. One Christmastide carol in peculiar consistently endangers to trip him up onstage during the Christian-rock band's Christmas Offerings Tour.

"The 1 that's giving me a difficult clip is Angels We Have Heard on High. It have four verses, and they're all very similar," states Powell, calling from his place in Marietta, Ga. The set executes with Jars of Clay in a sold-out concert Friday at Family of The Woodlands.

"I acquire confused: 'Which poetry am I on?' Was it the angels that came first or the shepherds?"

Luckily for him, the regular crowd singalongs cover up any mistakes. Cecil Frank Powell also have an onstage monitor, "so I acquire to beat every once in a while, too."

"Doing Christmastide songs is a batch harder than you would think," he says, "words that I never sing in a normal song, like 'joyous strains prolonged.' It's hard to memorise some of this stuff."

Powell's not being a Grinch. In fact, he was born on Christmastide Day and states digging deep into the traditional vacation catalogue have given him a new grasp for the music.

"When you begin getting into the second, 3rd and 4th poetries of some songs, you begin realizing, 'Wow, this is more than than just a cunning small children Christmastide song,' " Cecil Frank Powell says. "There are some really powerful words in these things."

The Grammy-winning band have spent considerable clip with seasonal tunes. In 2006 it released Christmastide Offerings, which earned inaugural Christmastide record album of the twelvemonth awards at the 38th yearly Gospels Music Association Dove Awards. (Jars of Clay also released its ain Christmastide record album this year.)

Third Day's phonograph record characteristics classic Christmas carols project in an earnest stone framework. Even the more than serious melodies (Do You Hear What I Hear?, Type O Holy Place Night) wouldn't sound out of topographic point on Top 40 or state radio.

"We just sort of approached it just like a normal record," Cecil Frank Powell says. "We thought, 'It's Christmas, so it's going to be very acoustical and laid-back,' but it actually ended up being a pretty rockin' record.

"It's a balance you seek to happen of keeping it the song that people desire to hear and the tune that they can sing along with — but at the same time, somehow, putting something fresh into it."

That balance, Cecil Frank Powell says, have defined Third Day's sound since its origin more than a decennary ago. The set hit a commercial extremum with 2005's Wherever You Are, which debuted in the Top 10 of the all-genre Billboard 200 record album chart.

A new "much more than rock" studio record is owed adjacent twelvemonth and is being produced by current Grammy campaigner Leslie Howard Benson (POD and Daughtry).

This twelvemonth saw the release of Chronology Volume One and Volume Two, exuberant sets that include hits, unrecorded recordings and picture takes. Both phonograph records nicely document the group's Ascension amid the contemporary-Christian ranks and its steadily increasing visibleness among mainstream music fans.

"It's kind of a eldritch state of affairs being in a Christian set in the sense that, in a way, you desire to seek to delight everybody," Cecil Frank Powell says. "You desire to do music for the Christian industry that's very blazing and very clear. There's a ground why people who listen to Christian music listen to it. They desire to hear those things.

"But at the same time, (we're) trying as Christians to acquire that message outside of the Christian church and into ... mundane people's lives that aren't necessarily Christian-music listeners.

"It's not always merriment to seek to calculate out how to make that. But it's something that we experience like we should do. I believe we're continually trying to happen that balance."