Time to throw it back to some youth group days with a mashup that will only play with a very specific audience!

dc Talk was a huge influence for Robert and I, not only musically and performance-wise, but probably on a much larger scale when it comes to musical tastes.  Despite playing music together for over a decade, we have always agreed that the only real musical common ground is with this band.  I don’t think there’s a single lyric or band fact about dcT that either of us can’t spit on a moment’s notice and we even celebrated his wife’s birthday with a road trip containing their entire discography (Robert and Laura have since reconciled).  We both belong to dc Talk Facebook groups, regularly discuss their influence on both secular and Christian markets, and constantly revisit their catalog to look for nuances we might have missed.

One could say that we’re down with dc Talk.

Our fandom aside, it was easy to see that their fingers were consistently on the pulse of what was happening or about to happen in the music industry and they were always ahead of it.  Their album production was able to go toe-to-toe with every #1 album and their musicianship was insane.  And the craziest thing?  Their last two albums hold up REALLY well.  They were charting everywhere in the late 90s/early 00s and even won four Grammy’s.

That’s why this mashup to me is so interesting, in that it’s one of the only ones I could find, not just of their 1996 breakout crossover hit Jesus Freak, but of anything by their band.  I know a lot of this is that there are very few instrumentals or stems available for their music, but with so many remixes of their work out there, you’d think more mashups would have popped up.

Either way, there are one or two others out there, but none that are nearly as good as this one. DJ Nerd42 (who, if you look through his back catalog, is certainly a fan of TobyMac) seems to do a lot of work with Linkin Park instrumentals and found a great combination between Numb and Jesus Freak that cleanly blends both band’s strengths together.