Grammy-winning pop act supports No. 1 album with 3 California shows

Luke Smallbone clearly remembers his Steph Curry moment.

It came right after he and his brother Joel — collectively known as the pop duo For King & Country — had sung the national anthem before a game between Curry’s Golden State Warriors and the Minnesota Timberwolves in Minneapolis.

As he was walking off the court, Smallbone — a huge Warriors fan — happened to cross paths with the future Basketball Hall of Famer.

“We walked by him and (Curry) kind of motioned like ‘Hey, good job’ or whatever. And I just looked at him and said, “Sup, man” and kept on walking,” said Smallbone, realizing that had blown his chance at looking cool in front of his sports hero. “That was my terrible Steph Curry story.”

“Luke had never said ‘Sup, man’ before,” Joel Smallbone adds for emphasis.

Bay Area fans will have the chance to say “Sup, men” to the brothers Smallbone when For King & Country performs June 8 at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga. Showtime is 7:30 p.m. and tickets are $36-$206, mountainwinery.com.

The multi-Grammy-winning act also headlines two major Christian music events — Spirit West Coast at the Stockton Arena on June 9 and Fishfest at FivePoint Amphitheatre in Irvine on Jun 10 — with CeCe Winans, Pat Barrett and other acts also on the bills. (See transparentproductions.com for information on both of those shows.)

I recently had the chance to chat via Zoom with For King & Country about the band’s latest No. 1 album, “What Are We Waiting For?” We also spoke about the Nashville duo’s upcoming film, “Unsung Hero,” which follows the Smallbone family — which also includes Grammy-winning vocalist Rebecca St. James — from their home in Australia to the U.S. and, eventually, the top of charts. (Visit unsungheromovie.com for details).

Q: Promoters have lined up a lot of talent for this year’s Spirit West Coast and Fishfest. It must be fun to play those types of festivals.

Luke: Anytime you get to do these events and you get to see all these genres of music, that obviously come with a similar message — you’ve got gospel with CeCe, you’ve got Pat Barrett with the worship side of things — that’s always a special thing. You get to hear all these different flavors.

Q: I’ve been to Spirit West Coast before and it was great.

Luke: To be honest, California is probably one of our favorite states to play in America. It always seems like it’s California, Texas and Florida where the crowds — and just the enthusiasm and passion — are amazing. So, I we look forward to making those new memories with Californians.

Q: Danny Gokey once told me that those festivals are basically the only times when the artists get to catch up with each other – even though everyone lives right down the road from each other in Nashville.

Joel: To a level, at least, there is that strange moment where you are like over in Norway and you haven’t seen one another in like four years, and yet you do live three miles from one other. And this is what it took for us to actually have an audience with each other.

But you’d be surprised, Jim, Nashville — even with all its development — is still a remarkably sort of big small town.

Where I live there’s a community — a lot of artists are in there — and there’s a little coffee shop. And you’ll have Brad Paisley walk through or Cody Carnes or Kari Jobe, who is just down the road, or Carrie Underwood.

Q: And people just go about their business.

Joel: Luke has it harder than me because he’s taller and he’s got super recognizable hair that he hasn’t changed in 20 years. So, people notice him more than they notice me.

But there’s a sweetness still to the low-key nature of being home and having your home be Nashville, Tennessee.

Q: I still have to think that Carrie Underwood stops the crowd when she walks in to get her nonfat mochaccino.

Joel: No. Carrie is actually pretty good because she puts a hat on, and she is with a couple of girlfriends, and is pretty low key.

Q: Did you know what type of album you wanted to make with “What Are We Fighting For?” when you first went into the studio? Or did its overriding themes – of unity, peace, working together — sort of crystallize along the way?

Luke: We wrote and recorded it during the pandemic. And we didn’t necessarily want to write pandemic songs. But I do think we wanted to write lessons that we had learned from the pandemic, because I think they were lessons that you could apply at any time.

Q: And they are ones worth remembering, for sure.

Luke: I think life became fragile for people. And I think they starred in a little bit of a mirror and some people realized they have these stored-up dormant dreams that they haven’t gotten to live out. And in some cases, those things might be their very callings and yet they have just sort of gone through the motions.

I think there was a litany of lessons that came from that period of time.

Q: Some of those lessons can certainly be found on the album’s lead single, “Relate,” which is such an uplifting cry for trying to understand one another.

Joel: I wish artistry happened in this way that you are like, “I have this vision. This is what it is going to be” and then you put pen to paper and it’s actually what you think.

But there are all these twists and turns and you have to stay more subject to the creativity then the creativity is subject to you.

With that in mind, “Relate” was actually one of the last songs we wrote. We wrote it and, within a day, we called everyone and were like, “Hey, this is actually what we’ve been trying to get at this whole time.”

It’s one of the songs that we feel was really given to us to steward.

Q: Tell me about the “Unsung Hero” film.

Luke: Our family’s story, coming from Australia to America, is one that we have told from stage for a lot of years. We had a lot of people come up and kind of mention writing a book. At the end of the day, it kind of started to hit me that where we find ourselves culturally — families need some encouragement these days — I think that telling a story about a family that remains together under enormous stress and a lot of very strange circumstances is worth telling.

Q: The “Unsung Hero” in the film is your mom. Why was it important for people to know about her story?

Luke: I think people are looking for heroes to look up. In some cases, it’s the things that people do behind closed doors that actually change the trajectory of people’s lives — that change history. And I think of our mother when it comes to that. So, we are pretty thrilled to be able to tell this story.

Hopefully, (the film) will be out sometime February or March. We are working for Lionsgate to bring it to theaters.

There is a lot of be thankful for and a lot of work to do and a lot to be excited about.

Q: I know you are familiar with my buddy Scott Smith from the “Scott & Kelli” show on K-LOVE radio. When I knew I was interviewing you two, I texted him for advice on what to ask you. He told me to ask Joel what it was like to play the role of his own father in the movie.

Joel: I’ve dubbed it, Jim, a very expensive therapy session. But I will say this, in all honestly, it’s a great exercise. One thing you do in counseling and therapy is you often go back to the moment of either trauma and life experience and you kind of look at the environment, you look at the people associated with it, and that’s where you find healing and forgiveness and empathy.

And while this genuinely wasn’t a traumatic experience for either of us — in fact, it was a really great adventure in many ways as young kids — going back and living out their trauma, particularly our dad’s trauma, and understanding the weight of moving continents with six kids and one on the way just put so much of their story and his journey as a man into perspective.

Q: Scott also suggested that I ask Luke whether or not he thought Joel nailed the role.

Luke: I think Joel did a really good job of doing a lot of the things that made dad dad, but also making him a much more approachable figure in the sense of understanding the internal struggles that our father had in the early ‘90s.