Watermark: Interview with Rocketown artist Watermark

We recently had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting with Watermark and learning more about them....

MQ: What kind of music background do you guys come from? Could you fill us in a little on that?

Nathan: We both kind of grew up going to church with our parents. Christy's dad was actually pastor of a church so Christy grew up singing, you know, for the offering or ...helping with the music at church. That was really our background growing up. Then myself too, as far as playing the piano...I would play at my church with the band there, so that kind of got our heads in the game as far as playing. And then Songwriting too, we got started at a very early age, just on our own....in our rooms, just growing up. It was kind of something that was just always 'in us' to do. I was terrible at baseball and football and soccer...I was horrible, but ...I would always go to my room and play my keyboard or whatever and write these silly little songs.

MQ: Did you listen to any particular styles of music growing up?

Nathan: Yeah...you know what's funny is....my parents...growing up, they were really into this one church we were going to and the felt like that music that wasn't Christian music was bad music and they would never let us listen to, you know, just classic, great music...Beatles...or anything like that. It's funny though, when I got into High School, I think my mom kind of in hindsight thought, 'I've really sheltered him from a lot of good music' and she went out and she bought me every Beatles record, all the Beach Boys records...all this music she felt like she withheld from me growing up. So she was like 'Honey, I'm sorry...here let me give this to you' because she knew I was kind of getting into music production and all that.

MQ: How did you get started in music, was this something that you thought you'd be doing?

Christy: I think we always knew we would do ministry, we both felt called to the ministry side of ...of anything, we hoped it would include music. Nathan was already in a ministry but his side of that was very technical, and musical. I think we just began really in our church. We met in '93, married in '95 and began going to a church there with Charlie Hall who is one of the Passion worship leaders and has been a friend of Nathan's since the 8th grade. We began leading worship with Charlie at the church. So we started working with the worship team and getting experience. Then we got together some money from people that lent us some money to make an independent record and we made that with Charlie and it's called 'Sons and Daughters.' That circulated in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas - we're from Oklahoma - so it was like a tri-state thing and we would travel a little bit. Eventually Charlie married and kept writing and we kind of parted ways because he really felt like he was supposed to stay and minister at that church and we felt like we were supposed to travel. So we went to Houston in '97 and started singing and put together a band at Metro Bible Study at First Baptist Houston that was for singles and young adults. We had like 3000 singles going through there every Monday night and it was just an incredible, kind of a launch pad really for us to have an ongoing base, I guess, and then to travel on the weekends. Rocketown records heard about Metro Bible Study, and that's how it all kind of came together. Chris Rice came through and sang at Metro Bible Study, and we just kind of built a relationship with them. That's kind of how it happened.

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