Ask Gable Price if his band is a Christian band, and for a long time, the answer was a shrug.
“In Q&As on tour — are you guys a Christian band? I don’t know,” he told RELEVANT. “Just really beating around the bush, because we didn’t want to be pigeonholed.”
Not anymore.
“I’m ready to stop beating around the bush,” he said. “I write about Jesus so often in my music. I write about God. I write about heaven in songs.”
It wasn’t always this complicated. Price started the project alone, in Redding, California, seven years ago, after he didn’t make the worship team at his ministry school. Feeling like he had no musical outlet, he fundraised $1,000 for a four-song EP and pulled in a few friends from school to record it. He wanted to call the whole thing Friendship Rings. One of the guys talked him out of it — the project needed a name that could survive Price moving back home to Cincinnati, which he was already planning to do. So they landed on Gable Price and Friends instead.
“Which is hilarious that we did that,” Price said, “because now, I mean, we have one original member.” Nearly a decade and several lineup changes later, he’s it — the “Friends” have all cycled through, and he’s the only one left from that first Redding EP.
That first EP was written with church in mind. It didn’t quite land there.
“I remember I showed a worship pastor the songs, and I was like, hey, would you ever sing these in your church?” Price said. “And he’s like, it’s a little weird — like a couple of the lines. Not bad theology, but just kind of… I think the way that I say things was a little odd.”
The record after that one, Fraction Heart, came out of what Price calls a faith crisis. “I can’t live with a fraction heart. I’m tired of giving half of myself to this thing,” was basically the whole album, he said. It resonated — and its timing ran backwards from what fans assumed.
“Right after that, I felt like I had had such a stabilization of my faith,” he said. “People were like, hey, have you given up your faith? And I was like, no, not at all. I’m actually just not struggling as much as I was — which is funny, that our most overtly Christian record was at one of my weakest faith points. And all of the ones that people think are my backsliding records are at my strongest points of faith.”
That misreading followed the band into its next stretch, when it started chasing rooms outside the church entirely.
“We were really trying to make a push to play clubs, to play general market venues, to be played on alternative radio,” he said. “But the more we walked that line, the more we definitely veered into — man, we’re talking about God less than people who don’t believe in God sometimes.”
They leaned into the ambiguity, half-joking about it. “We would make the joke that we’re the bad boys of K-Love,” Price said, “even though I don’t even think K-Love had heard our music at that point. I think that’s still my LinkedIn bio.”
Somewhere in there, the band also learned what it looked like to get outplayed by artists who weren’t hiding anything. Gable Price and Friends played support for Switchfoot — a band Price calls one of his biggest inspirations — at a festival in Charlotte.
“We have our amp simulator pedals, we have everything really crisp and clean. We play our set, the crowd’s like, yeah, pretty good,” Price said. “They bring their huge amps on stage, and you should have seen everyone just coming to the stage from the other stages at the festival, being like, what’s happening here? If this was a competition, we got our butts kicked.”
“One Bedroom Apartment,” the band’s newest single, makes the point outright. Released Aug. 21 — three weeks before the tour — it borrows its chorus straight from Joshua 24: “As for me and my bargain, one bedroom apartment, we will serve the Lord… The Lord is my shepherd.” The bridge repeats a single line five times: “I can’t thank You enough.”
Price says the same shift applies to how he thinks about his own faith, not just what he’s willing to name in a song. Growing up, following Jesus meant hitting certain checkpoints — pastor, missionary, whatever version of “sold out” he’d been taught to aim for. He’s 27 now, and most of those checkpoints never happened.
“We all wore the DARE shirts,” he said, “and then you went to college and ate a brownie. Has the target moved?” His answer is that it has — and that missing an old target isn’t the same as losing his faith.
He also says he’s stopped being the holdout.
“Our fans think we’re a Christian band. Other bands that are mainstream bands think we’re a Christian band,” he said. “The only people who still had denial about it — what are we — is me and the guys in my band. We’re like Switchfoot. Ask anyone what Switchfoot is.”
Gable Price and Friends kicks off an 18-city headline tour Sept. 13, running from Grand Rapids to Atlanta through Oct. 4 — the biggest stage yet for a band that isn’t dodging the question anymore.
“I really do think the best days are ahead for Gable Price and Friends,” Price said, “because the most clarity I ever felt was when we called ourselves the bad boys of K-Love. Now I need to figure out what our new catchphrase is — because K-Love has plenty of bad boys at this point.”
