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Kansas native Mark Schultz has created quite a buzz with his incredible self-titled debut. Drawing on the relationships he's fostered as a youth director, Mark's album offers story-songs about life's experiences and the God who is in control.

FamilyChristian.com: You have had an amazing year: a hit album, seven Dove Award nominations, #1 songs. What has God taught you during this last year?

Mark: In this last year, it's hard to come from being a youth guy full time into a music guy full time. Being a youth guy is a full time job and being a music guy is a full time job and I'm trying to do both of them. I'm not doing either of them very well, because it's trying to do too much at once. In the fall when the record came out, I went from radio station to radio station on a promo tour. It was supposed to be six weeks long and it ended up being six months long because it was going well with the radio guys and I just loved hanging out with them. Then I would go to cities at random and stop by stores and sell my CDs. I would just grab people and take them over to the CD machine and put the earphones on them and almost always they would buy [the album]. I would sell 30 [albums] in a visit. I believed in the songs and what they were about. And then I did my own tour for two months with Lincoln Brewster, who is great. That was fun [but] it was tiring.

I came off the road after that and needed time to repair and hang out with kids and just be a youth guy again. In this thing, you've got to have your seasons and it can't all be on the road. That can't be one season. You've got to have four seasons: a traveling season, a writing season, a hanging out with kids and etc.

We heard a speaker tonight—Tony Evans—and I really liked what he said about how Christians get this idea that they've got to be busy all the time. You look at Jesus' life [and] just when it started to get busy for Him, He'd say, "Let's go up in the mountains and hang out by ourselves for a while."

My youth minister, the guy I work under, Mark DeVries, came to my management meeting as my advisor. He has nothing to do with any music stuff; he's just a guy that I trust. [My management company] said, "Things are going well; we're going to cut another record in three weeks and we're going to have you back on the road for another four or five months." Mark raised his hand and said, "Hey, can I cry uncle? UNCLE. I've seen Schultz when he's tired, and he's not a lot of fun to be around. Right now he's tired. You can have two Schultzes out on the road. We can have one who is Christ-centered and is singing what he believes and what he's living, or we can have a shell of a guy who's just worn out and doesn't know where he's at or what he's doing. We're heading towards the second one. I think we'd all agree we'd like the first one." He looked around and said, "I'm about the only guy not making any money off of him, so I feel like I can say whatever I want to." So instead of three weeks, he got me three and a half months off just to hang out with kids. I remember sitting at the end of the table and crying. He just stood up and knocked it out of the park.

FamilyChristian.com: If your kids are what inspire you then you must need to be around them.

Mark: That is the truth. What makes [writing songs for the new] record hard is that I wasn't around them for most of the year. I could really be happy with touring just three months and hanging out with kids for nine months. That would be a dream. I'm a ways away from that right now.

FamilyChristian.com: What do you find most challenging about what you do?

Mark: The challenge with the music industry is that you've got a business manager, you've got a management company, you've got a booking agent and a record company who all draw their income off of what you do. I would love to spend as much time as I can [with kids], but all these other factors keep pulling me into stuff and saying, "You need to be here and there", because that's how they make a living. That's hard and that's a sacrifice. Steven Curtis Chapman has done it for ten years and he can say he's taking four or five months off to hang out with his kids and all that kind of stuff. I've been in [the music industry] for a year now. I don't have a whole lot of say in what I do. I'm not there yet and I won't be there for a long time.

FamilyChristian.com: You've got a good sense of the industry.

Mark: It's been a crash course. You [need to] have somebody from the outside who knows nothing about the music industry, who is just looking after you not in a financial way but in a spiritual guidance way. I'm a people pleaser. I would go through a wall if somebody said, "Gosh, we really need you to go through that wall." That works well for some things, but in other ways, you're really setting yourself up for a ragged life if you do that. So it's good to have somebody who has totally no incentive whatsoever except to see you live a God-centered Christian lifestyle who will stand up and say, "This what I think needs to happen." [It's] like a cloud of witnesses. It's so important. Here I sing a song about it and it comes to true fruition right in front of my eyes. Here's a guy [like Mark DeVries] who's living out the deal. Very few people stand up for what is right in a Christian sense and say, "You need a rest. God calls you to have some rest and get focused on what you need to do and then go out and do it and then rest again."

FamilyChristian.com: "Remember Me" is one of the songs that was inspired by your work in youth ministry. How did that song come about?

Mark: I think it was on one of those trips where [Mark DeVries and I] visited college students who had gone through our youth program. We were driving down the highway in the middle of I don't know where, ten hours from anywhere [and] I came up with this melody. By the end of the trip, I had the song written and he said that it was a co-write, because he put in words like "the" and "and." It was about the youth group and about kids we got to see and visit. We visited 150 in a week and drove 8000 miles.

FamilyChristian.com: On the other hand, "When You Come Home" is a song that wasn't inspired by the kids in your youth group.

Mark: I wrote that about my mom. I always make fun of that song at the very end, because my mom passes away at the very end and goes home. I always say at the end of [performing] the song, "My mom's fine, but I was reading a book on how to write a hit song and it said you had to have a clincher at the end to get everybody's emotions going." It made more sense to say that mom's in heaven than saying my mom's at home right now knitting a big blanket with my dad. It doesn't have the same emotions.

[I thought about] what it's like to go into heaven and see God and what it feels like to fall into His arms at the end of the journey compared to how it feels to fall into your mom's arms when you walk through the door just knowing she'll be there-those two correlated [images] is what that song is about.

FamilyChristian.com: You wrote that song because you forgot to send her a Mother's Day card?

Mark Schultz by Mark Schultz

Mark: Yeah. I forgot Mother's Day and I was writing this song. I thought maybe if I finished it, I could sing it to her over the phone for Mother's Day. She didn't say anything after I was done and I thought, "She hated my song. I forgot Mother's Day and she hates my song. I killed her off in the song and she hates it." She was really just taken back by it and really loved it. When I did my first concert at the church about 1000 people came and she was there. After I sang it I went and gave her a hug in the audience and the place just went crazy.

FamilyChristian.com: You're establishing a reputation as the guy who makes people cry!

Mark: This record was a culmination of four or five years of youth ministry and you just see things that move you. I wrote [songs about those [experiences] and they all ended up on the same record. Maybe the next record won't be a crying record. This one has its fair share of tearjerkers on it. Life is not all happy all the time and so it's good to have that balance on your record.

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