Grammy winners For King & Country headline Fish Fest

Joel and Luke Smallbone, who make up the Christian rock super-duo For King & Country, have called Nashville, Tennessee, home for so long — their family moved there in 1991, the year Joel was 7 and Luke was 5 — that they’re not surprised when fans meeting them for the first time ask if the name “Smallbone” is Native American. It isn’t.

“It’s actually English,” Luke explained last week, calling from Nashville, just home after a 60-city arena tour. The Smallbone family came to Nashville from Australia, where their English forebears had arrived several generations previously — as “free settlers,” he added, and not in one of the shipments of transported criminals that provided most of Australia’s early English-speaking population.

“Sometimes when someone says, ‘All you guys were convicts in Australia,’ we’ll tell them the name is Aboriginal,” Luke said, jokingly. “We’re just messing with them, obviously, although it does sound native to some land.”

FOR KING & Country comes to Honolulu for the first time tomorrow, headlining Fish Fest at Blaisdell Arena. The duo will share the stage with two other international Christian hitmakers: multi-faceted singer-songwriter Jordan Feliz and Puerto Rico-born singer Blanca, reborn as a solo star after she left the Christian hip-hop act Group 1 Crew in 2013.

The Smallbone brothers broke out in 2011 with the release of “For King & Country: The EP” and a single, “Busted Heart (Hold On To Me),” which reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Christian Songs chart.

Their first full-length album, “Crave,” released early in 2012, not only reached No. 4 on Billboard’s Christian Albums chart but reached a very respectable No. 128 on the Billboard’s mainstream 200 Album chart which includes albums of all genres. Two singles from the album — “Fix My Eyes” and “The Proof of Your Love” — reached Recording Institute Association of America gold status, with sales of more than 500,000 copies.

For King & Country’s second album, “Run Wild. Live Free. Love Wild,” did even better. It debuted at No. 1 on iTunes in 2014, was certified gold, topped out at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 album chart, and won two Grammy Awards for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album and Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song.

The duo’s long-awaited third album, “Burn the Boats,” will be officially released on Oct. 5. Their record label announced on June 29 that the first single from the new album, “joy,” has been streamed more than 4 million times since it was released on May 18.

Luke Smallbone says new album’s title refers to the act of deliberately removing any option of retreat, leaving yourself with only the option of moving forward.

“That’s the concept of the album, and we put a lot into it,” he said.

He and his brother have been moving forward together for more than a decade. They began performing as Joel & Luke in 2007 and later took the name Austoville; after being signed by Warner Music Group in 2009, the brothers became For King & Country.

The phrase was originally an English battle cry referring to the king of England, but for Luke and his brother, the “king” is God and “the country” is people in general.

“Any time that you say ‘my country’ usually you’re just talking about your brethren or your people, and ‘our people’ at this point are the people on earth,” he explained. “So, the reason we do music is that we do music for ‘King’ — for God — and for ‘Country’ — for people.

As for their current single, “joy”: “If you watch the news, it’s pretty hard to be happy,” Smallbone said, explaining the message he and Joel are sharing with the song. “(joy) is what everybody desires.

“When I see people, and I know their back-story and the experiences they’re living with, and yet they’re still joyful — those are people that I want to be around. There’s a lot of tough stuff going on in the world and that’s why I think you have to make a decision to choose joy. That’s what I think the joyful people are doing.”

SMALLBONE AND his brother grew up early, he said.

“We came to America with nothing — my dad, when he was a concert promoter in Australia, lost all the money on a tour event — so we started raking leaves and mowing lawns. That was just a way for us to try to figure out a way to survive.”

That was only the beginning. Their older sister, soon to find fame and fortune as Rebecca St. James, had done some concert work and recorded an album in Australia. Her career took off in the United States, and Joel and Luke — not yet in their teens — became part of her road crew.

“At 9 years old I was a spotlight operator, and at about 14 or 15 I was a lighting director,” Luke said. “I’d be at home hanging out with my high school friends listening to what they were talking about doing, and than I’d say, ‘I have to go to Europe tomorrow because I have these shows I have to do and be the lighting director for.’ So, by the time I was in a my late twenties I had lived, seemingly, a lot of life.”

At 31, married and a father, and counting down the days to the release of what’s expected to be For King & Country’s biggest album, Luke volunteered that he’d prefer not being defined too strictly by some members of the public.

“I find it very strange that we classify things in boxes the way we do,” he said. “Ultimately for me as an artist, I love Jesus, I believe in who Jesus is and it impacts my writing, but that’s not the only thing that I have going on in my writing. If they put you in a Christian music category, then you should only write those things — well that’s not the way I feel.”

“Whether I’m writing a love song about my wife, or a song inspired by something my child said, or a message I heard at church, or whatever it might be, I find it my job to write honestly, and about the things that are going on in my soul,” he said.

“If that happens to be about faith, it happens to be about faith. If it happens to be about my love for my wife, it happens to be that as well. When faith intersects your life you start to see life from that perspective.”