UCR Interview • Josh Lovelace of NEEDTOBREATHE • August 14, 2026
GRAMMY-nominated rock band NEEDTOBREATHE is set to play Sandy Amphitheater on August 15. The band recently released their powerful new album, The Long Surrender.
Known for fan favorites including “Brother” (feat. Gavin DeGraw), “Who Am I,” my personal favorite, “The State I’m In,” and many more, NEEDTOBREATHE continues to blend rock, Americana, Soul, and Gospel into songs that resonate through themes of hope, resilience, and redemption. Their electrifying live performances have built a passionate global following and continue to sell out venues across the country.
Utah Concert Review had the opportunity to visit with keyboard player and backing vocalist Josh Lovelace as the band was gearing up to begin the tour. Lovelace talks about the new album, the tour, his origins with the band, how people interpret NEEDTOBREATHE’s music, and more. Enjoy!
Interviewed by Kevin Rolfe
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UCR: Where am I finding you today?
Josh: So we are in Missouri. This is, we just got on the bus last night, so we just started the run. We’re in Maryland Heights, near St. Louis, and we’re… we have rehearsal and a big run-through tonight before the tour starts tomorrow here we’re gettin’ going.
UCR: What is that feeling like? I mean, you’ve been doing this for a lot of years now. Is it… when this is about to start, is there… I’m sure there are some ducks that need to be put in a row, and all that. Is there still that same excitement and anticipation for this? I guess after all these years, what is the feeling like on a day like today?
Josh: I mean, it is crazy. I get really excited about it. The band’s been around for such a long time, and we’ve done so many different shows, and tours, and albums, and, you know, I’ve been in the band… I’m about to start my 17th year with the band, which is crazy, and just seeing a lot of life, and a lot of different iterations of the band, and but it always feels like the first time when you’re about to walk onto a new tour, and we’ve worked harder on this tour than probably any tour we’ve ever done, so yeah, there’s a lot of work that goes into it.
We had some people that came on. We have some new people in the band that are playing with us, and they’re like, wow, I’ve never been around a band that works harder, just non-stop working on trying to make this thing happen. That’s a testament to how much we care about it. We’re really excited about this show. It’s gonna be a little different for us.
In the past, we’ve done, when we do our rock shows, we have, like, video and video walls, and all this stuff. And we wanted to… just the way the world is right now, and just so much information coming at you all the time. Everybody’s on their phones and their screens. We were like, what if we were intentional and took away the video screens and just made it to where it’s like, you’re watching a band? You’re not only watching a band play music, but you’re joining them in this communal kind of thing, and making it more personal. So, yeah, I think it’s gonna be… I mean, already, we’ve not played a show, and it’s my favorite tour we’ve ever done, so I’m really pumped about it, yeah.
UCR: That’s great, and that’s such a good point. So, I was at a concert on Saturday. They had big digital screens; I found myself several times just watching the screen, because I think our eyes are just drawn to that. I had to catch myself and be like,’ What am I doing? The person right there.’ So I think that’s cool that you’re eliminating some of that so the focus is on the music and performance.
Josh: Yeah, it’s crazy. I went and saw Phoebe Bridger’s in Chattanooga; she did, like, a pop-up secret show thing. And they literally took your phone when you walked in, so you couldn’t film it, you couldn’t take pictures, you couldn’t record it, and you also couldn’t be on your Instagram, or you couldn’t be on your TikTok, whatever it was. You had to really be there, and the room, it was so wild to be sitting in a room. And we all sat down, and she came out, and it was, like, really, like, intimate.
There was, like, 300 people there, and it was so wild to look out at the crowd, at, like, the heads of the crowd, and see no phones up in the air. They were enjoying the show in the moment. And, like, they weren’t going to be able to go back and relive this moment. Like, if you wanted to remember her singing this song, or the crowd singing this moment, you have to actually, like, get in tune with your body. I think that there’s something really beautiful about that.
UCR: I don’t really know your story. You came into NEEDTOBREATHE in 2011, if I remember, right?
Josh: Yeah, end of 2010, 2011, yeah.
UCR: How did that happen? Like, where did you come from?
Josh: It’s been such a long time. I have to go back sometimes and remember. So I was… for me, just the big picture is I’ve always played music. When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was get done with high school and go play in bands. I just knew that I just wanted to play music for my life. When I was a little kid, I was banging on pianos when I was 5 years old, like, my parents knew it. I had no backup plan; even at 5, I was like, that’s what I wanted to do. After high school, I played for some bands, and I joined this other band that was kind of a smaller band, but it was a rock band, and we were doing some shows. I was with them for, like, 6 years, and my mentor, actually, it was crazy.
My mentor, the person that when I was growing up, he played piano and played in bands, and he now plays for Luke Bryan. He’s a great piano player. He was just my hero as I was a kid, and he actually played, piano and organ on the Outsiders album for the band. What was crazy is he had called me, and this had been, like, 2008 or 9. He’s like, man, I just played a record… played on this record called NEEDTOBREATHE. Dude, you gotta check out this record; it’s so great.
So I literally went to Walmart and bought the record, back then, and I was like, man, this is such a great record. I became a fan of them, actually kind of through him. Then our band that I was in was playing some shows, and we played some shows with them and met Bear and the other guys, kind of just, you know, became friendly.
I came to see a show, actually, in Tennessee. They were playing in Pigeon Forge at some, like, weird event, at some weird, like, convention, or something, I can’t remember what it was, and I was standing in front of the house, and I went back, and I was just like, “Man, you guys are great. Listen, if you ever need a piano player, but if you ever need somebody to just push cases around, I believe in what you guys are doing. I love this.
Then, a month later, I get a call from Seth, the bass player at the time, and was like, “Hey, we’re working on a record; would you want to come down and record some piano on it?” And I was like, oh, man, I would love to do it.” Little did I know that was an audition. They were trying to figure out what to do next. and…
I played on The Reckoning, and then my first tour that I did was the Taylor Swift tour. We opened for Taylor Swift for, like, 90 shows. That was my first tour in 2011. And then I’ve just never left. It’s beautiful. I do have a really interesting and sweet perspective of the band, because I liked them before I was around, and I have an appreciation. I’m also the musical director for the band, so I handle anything that’s music-related, or set list, or, like, arrangements, or keys of the song, or where Bear should sing here or there.
Starting my 17th year with the band, and we’ve had so many wins in the band. We’ve had so much hurt and heartache, and a lot of things that have happened in the band. I look at us now, and we’re healthier than we’ve ever been, and we care more than we ever have. But the road to get here has been really tough. So 17 years of ups and downs will make you appreciate where you’re at more than ever. And I do.
UCR: Thank you for sharing all of that. That’s such a cool story. It’s just never lost on me how people end up where they are in music.
Tell me about NEEDTOBREATHE’s latest release, The Long Surrender. Is this a situation where Bear writes the majority of it, and then you find the best places to add to the songs or arrangements? How does this become the finished product that it is?
Josh: You know, I think there have been times that we’ve tried to write as a band. We’ll, like, sit down and be like, alright, let’s try to get everybody involved, and that can be a really beautiful thing. We’ve had our records, like, Out of Body, Into the Mystery, some of the Caves, those, we kind of collaborated a lot on those. I feel like, in this season, what’s been really great is Bear is really in a very prolific time. It’s easy for me to say this, and I’m in a band with him, and he’s one of my great friends, but, like, he’s one of the best songwriters I’ve ever met, or known about. He’s so good at what he does.
So, a lot of times, he’ll bring a song in, be like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And I feel like my role in it is to lift it up. That’s kind of where I want to contribute in that way. I can usually tell when he’s really passionate or really inspired by something. Then one might be, like, 60% there, and you’re like, oh, that’s not all the way there. Then if you don’t water that, you’ll never get The Outsiders, you’ll never get Brother. You never know what the song is. So I think that, for me, has become my goal as a friend and a band member: how do I make sure that he feels like he’s supported in whatever he’s trying to bring to the table?
This last record was such a beautiful… the whole band was going through different things personally. He was writing songs and bringing them in, and they were kind of really singular to him. I think that he would bring those in and be like, hey, what do you think about this? And we were all seeing it through the lens of our own stories that we were going through, and we’re like, man, this is so powerful.
So he wrote everything on this last record, but brought it into the band, and we created the record kind of live in the room. It was like, here’s the song, let’s mess with the chord changes and all that, but for the most part, I want to hear a singular voice telling this story. And it was beautiful, because the singular voice that was telling the story was the mouthpiece for everyone else’s personal stuff that was going on.
It was so powerful. The long surrender, and how that kind of came to be, was so much about the surrender of it. Just being like, I don’t know what this is, but I’m just following my friend into this and where he’s at, and how he’s feeling. That became such a beautiful record because of that.
UCR: You guys did a great job on this album. And that insight totally adds to what The Long Surrender is all about.
I appreciate your time. I have just a couple of final questions.
Does it matter to you how the songs are interpreted? Or does it just make you happy that people connect with them and interpret them their way? What I mean is, a lot of people seem to connect with your songs in a religious way. They consider much of the message to contain Christian themes. Then there are some people that interpret the message to be of a romantic nature. And they connect with the song in that way. Does the actual meaning matter to you if a person is connecting with it? Do you want to say, “No wait, that’s not what we were saying in this song.”?
Josh: When we write a song, it feels like it’s 80% of the way there, and then the listener is the 20% that writes the rest of it. So we can write a song called “The Outsiders”, and we’re singing it because the band’s from a small town, and we go to these big cities and play these shows, and go to these fancy dinners, and they’re trying to be like, hey, you guys are gonna be the next The Killers. And we’re like, I don’t know, we just feel like we’re just a bunch of, you know, Southern kids that just got lucky. We wrote a song called “The Outsiders.” We are The Outsiders. That means that to us.
But somebody else might listen to that and be like, I feel like I’m in my family, I feel like I’m not like everyone else. We have people that have tattoos of “I’m the outsider.” They’re like, I’m my own person, I’m who I am, and I believe in myself, and all those things.
And then, of course, with the faith element, that happens a lot, because that was some of the values and things that were important to us growing up. And still are, in a lot of ways. To the point where it’s like, the things that are most important to you, whether it’s your spirituality, or your family, or your marriage, or whatever it is, those things, if you’re coming through the filter of being honest, those things have to come out in your art. On this set, like, we sing a song that It’s about Who am I to be loved by you? That was actually written as a song to your spouse, or whatever. There are people that take it, and they’re like, who am I to be loved by God? Or who am I to be loved by my kids? I could almost get emotional thinking about it.
You just present your opinion, or your perspective, and someone else says, yeah, totally. Also, it could be about this, and you’re like, yeah, it could. Yeah, you’re totally right. That is so cool to me, and like. It gives the songs, and it gives the music more color. It gives it more like this world where you’re able to just see it however you need to see it.
UCR: You’ve played here in Utah many times. Do you have any memories that stand out from those concerts?
Josh: Yeah, actually, I remember… first off, we love playing in Utah. It’s beautiful. I have one memory where we played… we were playing a show, and it, it was an outdoor event, and it poured down rain on us. Absolute monsoon, and we had to cancel in the middle of the show. It’s like an outdoor, like, flower garden…
UCR: Yeah, Red Butte Garden.
Josh: Yeah, yeah, yeah! So we were there, and we made it, like, 3 songs into the set, and then they’re yelling at us; they’re like, you gotta get off the stage, there’s lightning. So everybody had to go back to their cars, we had to go sit on the bus, we were just waiting it out, and eventually they were like, we have to cancel the show. There’s just no way. And I remember we went we I guess at the time, I think we tweeted- which dates us a little bit, maybe- but we were like, hey, we’re going back out. We walked out to the soundboard, and anybody that stayed, we just played acoustic for, like, 20 minutes out there, and everybody surrounded us. It was pouring down rain, and we’re out there singing; everybody’s singing with us.
Then we tweeted, hey, we’re going to this pub. I can’t remember where it was, but we’re gonna show up, and we’re gonna do an acoustic show in an hour. And we packed the place up. This place was so kind to let us do it. And it was so fun, actually, in a time when it was like, man, this is such a bummer. All the lights and all that stuff didn’t even matter, because we just walked in and played.
Actually, we have a friend of ours; her name is Bree Kennedy. She opened for us in the fall of last year, and then since then has kind of come out and helped us and sing back up, and she’s actually from Utah and has never gotten to play a hometown show with us. So she’s pumped to come out there.
UCR: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me, Josh. We’re very excited for Saturday.
NEEDTOBREATHE is playing Sandy Amphitheater on Saturday, August 15 with support from Drew & Ellie Holcomb. It’s hard to believe, but there are still some seats available. For tickets to the concert, click here. See you Saturday!