Needtobreathe Have Got a Story to Tell

When the band Needtobreathe was first approached about creating a song for the Amazon streaming series House of David, they didn’t have especially high hopes. The popular rock group from Seneca, South Carolina began their career two decades ago largely playing to Christian audiences, so it wasn’t the show’s biblical themes that gave them pause. […]

Mar 26, 2025 - 15:21

When the band Needtobreathe was first approached about creating a song for the Amazon streaming series House of David, they didn’t have especially high hopes. The popular rock group from Seneca, South Carolina began their career two decades ago largely playing to Christian audiences, so it wasn’t the show’s biblical themes that gave them pause. It was movies in general.

“I’ll be truthful: I did not think that I was gonna like it,” singer-guitarist Bear Rinehart says of the series, which recounts the Old Testament legend of a shepherd boy who slays a giant and becomes king of ancient Israel. “I love the story, but I went into it a little bit skeptical. Every time we’ve done this and had a song in a film, you go to watch it, you’re like, ‘Oh, wow, this actually is terrible.’ We had a song in a movie called Employee of the Month years ago when we first started. It was Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson, and it was a horrible movie.”

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By contrast, after watching three episodes of House of David, he says, “I’ve been kind of blown away by it.”

The song that came out of Needtobreathe’s collaboration with the series is the single “I’ve Got A Story,” a rousing, gospel-flavored duet between Rinehart and Tori Kelly. It was sketched out back in 2020 during the COVID pandemic, when the music industry was stuck in limbo, and Rinehart was determined to write every day with no specific project in mind.

The lyrics explore the idea that “everybody in an audience has a story,” he says. “That’s obviously true in all of society—you’re walking by people all the time [with] crazy things they’re going through that you’re unaware of.”

The final song, which appears on the album House of David: Season One (Music inspired by the Prime Video Original Series), is a modern collision of rock and gospel, with echoes of inspiration from the Black Crowes and Ray Charles. While the band recorded in Nashville, Rinehart’s vocals are from the original track he recorded as a demo under lockdown, which had a raw, spontaneous passion that he couldn’t improve on. He begins with the words: “I was standing at the bottom/Piled up ash and broken bone/It was only then I realized/What I needed all along.”

In the music video for “I’ve Got A Story,” Rinehart and Kelly sing the duet with the band and a soaring gospel choir. Kelly is in a black motorcycle jacket, and Rinehart wails beneath a signature flat-brimmed hat, before the song closes with a delicate piano melody from Josh Lovelace. Also on camera are the rest of Needtobreathe: guitarist Tyler Burkum, bassist Seth Bolt, and drummer Randall Harris.

As the tune unfolds, Rinehart sings the opening verse, and Kelly sings the second, before their voices come together in the rousing bridge and closing section.

“I told the choir when we were singing this song, it’s not as much celebration as it is pride in the sense of like, ‘Man, I earned this story,’” explains Rinehart, who drew on personal experiences. “It’s not been a pretty picture, but I’m still here. And that’s the way I approached the song when I was writing it. It was tough to do, but we were able to keep that sentiment throughout.”

Kelly’s vocals for the single were recorded separately at her home. Needtobreathe finally performed it with her for the video. “To hear her sing in person was kind of crazy,” says Lovelace. “We all were taken aback, like, this is a next-level singer and one of the best we’ve been around. We felt really tight with her and close with her from right when we walked in the room. It’s not always like that.”

Rinehart and Lovelace are discussing the song on a video call from their personal home studios—rooms Rinehart calls the “new-era man cave.” The singer is in Franklin, Tennessee, and Lovelace is a three-hour drive away in Knoxville. Both keep busy even outside of Needtobreathe, with Rinehart regularly releasing music under the name Wilder Woods, while keyboardist Lovelace released a solo album, Shelters, in October.

Rinehart doesn’t even keep a TV in his studio, but Lovelace has set aside an entire room just steps away that is filled wall-to-wall with hundreds of old VHS tapes of movies, ancient video games, and an old tube TV. “I say it’s for my kids, so when I come here to work, they have something to do, but it’s honestly for me,” Lovelace admits. “I like the nostalgia thing. I like going back in time, and if I’m going to watch a movie that I’ve never seen—if it came out before 2005—I like to watch it on VHS.”

While Lovelace sometimes refers to Needtobreathe as a “Southern rock band,” he’s talking about region, not a particular sound. “I mean, we love Black Crowes, we love Lynyrd Skynyrd, we love all that stuff, but we also like Coldplay or we like Perfume Genius or whatever,” the keyboardist says. “There’s broad places that we’re pulling from, but saying ‘rock and roll,’ that always feels right to us.”

The label that has stuck with the band the most is Christian rock, which Rinehart says was mostly about a marketing choice the band made early on. He is the son of a South Carolina preacher, and was raised as a Christian, and spiritual themes remain important to him. But the band stretched beyond that core following with meaningful crossover success and arena tours through the years. In 2014, their album Rivers in the Wasteland not only topped the Billboard chart for Christian albums, but for rock albums and reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200, which suggested a much larger audience out in the world for Needtobreathe than the faith-based audience.

Many acts generally seen as secular rock and pop have included spiritual songs on their albums without being labeled Christian rock. Back in 1983, U2 included “40” on their War album, basing the track on the Bible’s Psalm 40, a song that also opens the same House of David album in a cover version by For King & Country.

“When it becomes, ‘Oh, I’m marketing to this thing and now all the songs need to be about that’—that hasn’t felt like art to me. That’s felt like business,” Rinehart says. “That’s how we would separate ourselves from that, whether people label us that or not.

“My relationship with God is probably different than Josh’s and the rest of the guys in the band, but for me as a songwriter, and in this band, it’s by far the most important thing in my life,” he adds. “What I always hated was, because I said that, now it means that I make this truthfully crappy Christian music for an audience that doesn’t care about what the band sounds like or how the song is crafted or what it feels like. … I’m gonna keep writing songs about God for sure, because it’s important to me. At the same time, I’m not gonna make them all for that market or whatever group of people that want to have it all be about a thing and they want it to be safe.”

While Rinehart and Lovelace are excited about the new single, they say the next Needtobreathe album will be very different from “I’ve Got A Story” and their last album, 2023’s Caves. That album was an experiment in going big, but the next project will have the musicians convening in Lovelace’s studio in April to begin a return to a more stripped-down version of their music.

“We’re about to make our tenth album and we’re treating it like it’s our last, even though it might not be,” says Rinehart. “One of the forced limitations we’re gonna put on it is, I told our guitar players ’No nice gear.’

Adds Lovelace, “That’s why we’re coming to my house, because I got a bunch of shitty gear.”

The keyboardist explains that while the band spends a lot of time on the road together, between tours they live spread apart, so the days when band members could casually wander over to another’s place and work for weeks at a time on songs are behind them. The next album aims to recapture that. “It is exciting though, because it’s hard to be in a band for as long as we’ve been in a band for sure. You get older and you start having kids and your lives change,” Lovelace says.

Rinehart is betting that the music can get back to that early feeling regardless. “Man, the early records we made, we were so intentional about making them homegrown and feel like a band in a small room and those kinds of things,” he says. “There’s a real magic to what Needtobreathe is. I think us getting back to that on this record, it’s where we all felt led to go.”

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