For King & Country - Burn the Ships World Tour

The night was separated into two sets, both performed by For King & Country. The group is two brothers, Joel and Luke Smallbone, who are originally from Australia.

These guys put on a very active show filled with many explosive moments. There are always things happening throughout, with the band and stagehands. There was a moment were the cello player threw his cello a solid twenty feet to a stagehand before running up the other side stage to play the drums. This was an outstanding performance filled so much and action, with many stories to help see and understand the music to its fullest.

After the first set, Luke talked about “Compassion International,” which is a charity organization devoted to sponsoring children overseas who most likely live in poverty. He went on to talk about how there was a time when he was a child, and his family of eight moved to Nashville to start a new life. They were pretty much without any means, it was hard and many people in the neighborhood helped them by giving them things, etc.

The brothers know what it’s like to have nothing and that if it wasn’t for people helping them, things could be much different today. When they moved, their mom was pregnant with their sister. Long story short, some random person paid the hospital bills and, to this day, they don’t know who paid for their sister to be born.

In the second set, Luke talked about the concept behind Burn the Ships, and where it came from. The stage even looked like the front of a ship, and the center screen was like a sail. He went on to tell a story about his wife, in which she is having a problem with pills. She wasn’t able to stop and had him come home to help her. When she had regained control of her life and was managing her addiction, she had found some pills at home. She said it symbolized all the shame and guilt she had. She flushed them down the toilet.

For King & Country – Burn the ships world tour at Target center

It reminded Luke of a story about an explorer. When the explorer’s ship got to land, he told the soldiers to go and explore, but in the end, they just wanted to go back to where they came from to return to where they were comfortable and to what was familiar. Return to the past.

Later the explorer gathered all the soldiers up at the beach and gave his general the signal to burn the ships so the crew couldn’t go back to the past. For Luke’s wife, it was about flushing the pills so she couldn’t go back to the past. To me, burning the ships is about taking an action so you can’t go back to a past that would tear you down and hold you back in life or keep you from becoming the person you were made and meant to be.