The story of Portland-based rock band Family Worship Center goes back to Nashville, but begins and ends with a love of authenticity and musicality.
In the late 2010s, Andy Krissberg lived in music hub Tennessee and spent much of his time recording one musician after another’s music directly to vinyl – a long-forgotten practice.
In 2018, while searching for relics of the past in record and thrift stores, he came across a “biblical” informational pamphlet called “Family Worship Center.” The old pamphlet, which talked about group faith, resonated with Krissberg, and it was around this time that he began gathering top studio musicians in Nashville to start his own project as a musician. Thus, Family Worship Center – the band – was born.
After recording his first record, Krissberg moved to Seattle and continued recording artists directly to vinyl, making a living until COVID-19 struck in 2020.
With his business faltering, he took the time to focus on his own music and gathered another group of talented musicians to re-establish Family Worship Center in the Northwest. Many of these musicians followed Krissberg in his final move to Portland, where the band is now not only based but continues to thrive on the scene and on a wider scale.
During the downtime that the pandemic brought for many musicians, the group began working on an album and refining their sound.
You wouldn’t assume the band’s current Oregon foundations are based on the old-school southern rock sound of 2023’s Kicked Out Of The Garden. The record features gritty lead vocals, choir-like harmonies, jazzy horn runs and raucous guitar breaks. With each listen, it seems like there’s a new element to discover within the layers. There are about 30 musicians on the album.
“I wanted it to be a record with a really big sound,” Krissberg said. “Brass, strings, standards like guitar… It was pretty difficult to pull that off because it was so big.”
Whether it’s rock or soul, Krissberg isn’t too concerned with the labels that genre labels can put on a group. He also wants the music to sound fresh and new alongside the “throwback” sound.
“We’re trying to make something we’d like to listen to, and that’s what it comes down to,” Krissberg said. “Respecting our influences was very important to us, but we also wanted to make it a little more dangerous and modern.”
As frontman and lead singer (along with pianist), Krissberg writes much of the group’s material and is heavily involved in shaping the direction of the music. His inspirations range from material relatively similar to their sound to more unusual areas like Japanese music. Lyrically, “a lot of the songwriting comes from the idea of, ‘Hey, this life is hard, but we’re in this together and let’s support each other,'” Krissberg said.
Now the band is embarking on a West Coast tour that will take them from Los Angeles to Phoenix to Vegas to Salt Lake City, ending Saturday at the Chameleon in Spokane. Live shows like the stops on this tour truly embody what Family Worship Center is all about.
The group’s “aesthetic inspiration” goes back to the original brochure that Krissberg found years ago – a cult-like, colorful, psychedelic atmosphere that immediately catches the eye and arouses curiosity.
“When you go to shows, there’s always this fine line between bands that take themselves way too seriously and bands that don’t take themselves seriously at all, and I feel like we’re kind of in the middle with the outfits and stuff,” Krissberg said. “When people go to our shows, I want them to think, ‘Okay, what the hell is going on here? I don’t understand this, but I’m glad to be a part of it.'”
Family Worship Center is also already working on their next LP and will go into the studio after this tour with a relatively concrete idea of what they want in mind.
“I’m really excited about the new record and it’s going to be a little bit different,” said Krissberg. “Stylistically it’s going to stay a little bit the same, but the sound is also going in a little bit of a different direction… hopefully it’ll be as chaotic as the last one, but also a little more restrained.”
