Joel and Luke Smallbone are the husband and wife team behind the hit movie, Unsung Hero, about their family s unlikely journey from Australia to Nashville, Tennessee to Los Angeles to New York City, and the challenges they overcame along the way.
00:02:09.720Luke and I were very young at the time, but our dad, speaking of music, was a concert promoter in Australia.
00:02:15.120Lost what would be the equivalent of half a million dollars.
00:02:18.120Lost the house, life savings, the car, everything.
00:02:20.580Got offered a job in Nashville, and to sort of salvage a dream, went to mom and said, what if we, you know, took our six kids, 16 suitcases, mom was six months pregnant, and moved continents, and only to arrive and lose that job.
00:02:35.720And so, with no way to get back to Australia, no car, no insurance, no way for our sister to be born in a hospital with a high-risk pregnancy, we found ourselves banding together, raking leaves, mowing lawns, breaking child labor laws, probably, and overcoming together.
00:02:54.140And that's really where the story kind of picks up.
00:02:55.960It kind of chronicles our parents and our sister, Rebecca St. James, as she steps into music.
00:03:02.080But as you mentioned, 1995, this is even preceding that.
00:14:05.180It does start to make sense when I hear a little bit of your story that you guys do everything, you know, and you sing, and you've got all these kind of musical acts and won all these awards, and then you make movies, and you do this, and I guess you mow lawn, too.
00:14:23.380One acquires a lot of skills when one is tested at a young age and really trying to scrape by.
00:14:31.040How did you, you know, when you hear stories of young people getting involved in the music business or families getting involved in the music business, the image that comes to my mind is, you know, the Jackson 5 or something, and all these just horrifically abusive, dysfunctional kinds of stories.
00:14:46.540Did any of those pitfalls ever present themselves to you?
00:14:50.060How do you navigate those waters, especially as a family in the industry?
00:14:55.040Yeah, I think that, man, there's a lot to what you just said, right?
00:14:59.180We've heard a lot of difficult stories about families working together.
00:15:02.680And look, that will always remain, right?
00:15:05.380For every good family story about a son coming and taking over the business, you're going to hear another one where it goes, you know, sideways.
00:15:13.140But I think that the thing that, as I, you know, my wife, according to me, we've got four kids ourselves.
00:15:17.520We're not Catholic, but we could almost be, right?
00:15:20.880We, what we've talked about in our family is if you want your family to stay in some sort of harmony and unison, you have to learn how to do two things.
00:15:30.760You have to learn how to resolve conflict, and then I think you have to practice forgiveness.
00:15:35.260Because the truth is, even Joel and I, we're very, very close, but we are going to come on opposite sides of some sort of issue.
00:15:42.240And if I hold to my guns and he holds to his guns, you're going to end up in something that's kind of nuclear.
00:15:48.280And that's when you start to realize your family is always kind of on the precipice of, I don't want to say breaking up, because that's the, you know, there's, there's a, your family is hopefully a little stronger than that.
00:15:56.980But you realize that family is that fragile at times.
00:16:00.420And the other thing I've realized about family is someone's always got to go first.
00:16:03.180So if there's a strainment between a father and a son, someone has to have the courage to say, hey, dad, can we go chat about something?
00:16:11.940Or a dad saying, hey, son, can we go and chat about something?
00:16:15.780You have to, you have to work at resolving conflict because struggle is inevitable.
00:16:21.900But it's what you do to overcome disappointment, what you do to overcome struggle that, to use my dad's phrase, that separates the men from the boys.
00:16:29.660It's a great bit of advice because sometimes you hear this very glib phrase, especially as it regards marriage.
00:17:05.520And end of family broadly, there has to be an agreed-to process for resolving conflict where you're all on board.
00:17:14.160And then that point of forgiveness and charity and just always, you know, willing the good of the other and trying to be as gracious as one can be, even when conflict arises.
00:17:25.500Those two ingredients, absolutely indispensable.
00:17:28.620And you look at how broken the family is in America today.
00:17:31.740Hey, this is not just, you know, mamby-pamby sort of, you know, nice saccharine advice.
00:17:37.900This is urgent advice to resolve a major social problem.
00:18:39.880We were literally physically unsafe at points, but we felt safe emotionally, spiritually, relationally inside their love.
00:18:46.100And it's because they were safe with each other.
00:18:49.260And I think that's, that's another sort of trickle down of the issue here is, no, you're probably right.
00:18:56.400Happy wife, happy life is not the truest sentiment of the statement.
00:19:01.440But I do think, you know, a happy, beautiful marriage where you're best friends and you're in this thing together and you understand that this is the one institution that God passed down to humanity.
00:19:13.720Everything can sort of follow out from there, all your relationships, including the relationships with your kids.
00:19:19.720And we're, man, we're just, we live it in different ways, Luke and me and the rest of the kids.
00:19:23.660But we're really proud of the fact that, again, tomorrow being 49 years for our parents, they have modeled that idea of just tenacious longevity and consistent choosing one another against all odds.
00:19:39.900I love, when I, when I think about this with my grandparents' marriage, they were married 69 years before my grandpa died.
00:19:44.940Six kids, you know, the whole shebang.
00:19:47.380And I say they, they had a kind of tyrannical normality to them.
00:19:51.840They were absolutely determined to the point of death to have a good family and a good marriage and to do the right thing and to, you know, love, love one another.
00:20:02.780A great way to, you know, commemorate this providential release date that coincides with the anniversary is for everyone out there to go and see the movie Unsung Hero.