That the David Crowder Band is calling it quits is no surprise; they announced it on their website last May, saying that a fall tour, and an album to follow shortly thereafter, would be their last.

It's been 16 years Crowder, then a student at Baylor University, and his friend Chris Seay formed University Baptist Church in Waco—where Crowder was the worship leader and where DCB was eventually born. The band recorded a two indie CDs in the late '90s, and as their notoriety spread, they were signed by sixstepsrecords. They went on to make six more studio albums, culminating with the double-disc, 34-track finale, Give Us Rest (A Requiem Mass in C [The Happiest of All Keys]), which releases today.

Along the way, they have made some of the more creative modern worship music in a genre that often lacks inventiveness, while playing in front of hundreds of thousands of fans and worshipers. They have encountered joy and tragedy, piled up a lot of road stories and memories, and have thoroughly enjoyed the ride. Now each of them looks ahead to whatever comes next—and some told us that they really don't yet know.

We had a nice long conversation with Crowder recently, and we started at the beginning by asking him how the band came together in the first place. Crowder, 42, laughed as he recounted the story of quasi-auditions centered around, shall we say, "shaker tunes."

How did the band come together?

It seems like the door that everybody walked through was the shaker. Everybody started at some point on stage at the church playing a shaker, because it felt like it was a good way for me to find out if they had any rhythm at all. So it was like, "Hey, man, are you around this Sunday?" And they'd ...

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