Until I was probably about ten or eleven, the only music I had listened to was Christian music. The songs we sang in church and at bible camp made up 99 percent of the music I knew. I was always so shocked when other people didn’t know who I was talking about when I talked about my favorite Christian artists.

Eventually, as I got older, I discovered Christian rap. And eventually, I stepped away from Christian music almost altogether. I heard it in church but no longer listened to it on my own. My view on Christian music was rather small minded because of the way I was raised. I didn’t truly realize the diversity that could exist within the genre of Christian music.

So imagine my surprise when, recently, I was listening to a new album on Spotify and all of a sudden, Christian music was blasting from my speakers. At first, I didn’t realize what it was. It had this freshness that I had never really experienced in Christian music before. I looked down at my computer and looking up at me were the faces of the artists in Citizen Way.

The song “WaveWalker.”

Released only a few days before, I was blown away by how quickly I fell head over heels for the song. Its upbeat feel pulled me in from the first few notes and kept me enthralled for all three minutes and thirteen seconds.

The same Christian messages I’d been hearing my whole life were in there, but at the same time I could have gotten up and danced to the song. It was like my childhood and my favorite kind of music now all mixed into one and tied up with a pretty bow.

I instantly looked up Citizen Way and was thrilled to find quite a few other songs by them. There’s a range of sounds presented throughout their songs, which definitely helped keep me engaged, but the fact that with every one there was that mix of my childhood music and my music now was what really hooked me. It transported me to when I was younger and life was simpler, filling me with happy nostalgia. With each new song I listened to, I fell a little more in love with their music.