After high school Nathan was busy at the church his parents pastored in Texas and also worked full time at Lowe’s. “Yes, I sold lots of lumber,” he says. “I still remember a few item numbers.”

Not long after that, he joined the rest of the guys in MercyMe in August 1997.

Now married and with two children, Nathan is celebrating the release of the band’s sixth album, All That Is Within Me. Listen in as he reflects on his memories with the band.

Brio: What’s your role when it’s time for MercyMe to write a new album?
Nathan Cochran: Bart [Millard] writes 90 to 95 percent of the lyrics. He can’t really play anything other than the radio. He has to depend on the rest of us to come up with what you’re hearing sonically. But it depends on the song. Some songs it’s a real collaborative effort among all six of us. Other songs we do individually and bring them to the table. I wish we had a good formula to make it work out right, so if you figure that out, let us know.

I know MercyMe’s desire is to always give your best. How do you know when you’ve done your best?
When you feel you’ve come to the point that you’ve exhausted what you can do, for us, that’s giving our best. When we realize we’ve done exactly what we’re supposed to be doing is when God shows up and is in what we’re doing.

As songwriters and musicians, we want to do what we’re doing to the best of our abilities, but at the same time, if God’s not in what we’re doing, it’s not worth doing.

As the bass player, do you have to be intentional about practicing and improving?
We get together quite often to rehearse, but that’s usually when we have a new record and have new songs to play that we’ve never played together before except in the studio.

How do you keep a good balance of doing your best with the band but also with your family?
The most difficult thing we deal with as a band is how to balance out this job/ministry and time spent with family. Really, we’re called to be husbands and fathers first. If our lives aren’t working at home, it’s not going to work on the road. That’s the way we’ve always looked at it.

For the most part, all of us were in the band before we got married, so our wives knew what was in store for them a little bit. It takes a special lady to be a single mom for part of the year. That can be very difficult for them. We try to at least give what we take. If we’re gone for a week, we try to be home for a week. There’s no perfect formula for it, but we try the best we can.

What’s one of your favorite memories from your experiences with MercyMe?
I should really keep a scrapbook or something, but I’m a guy, so I’m not really into that. We’re a Christian band in a Christian industry, but we’ve done a lot of things Christian bands normally aren’t a part of. We played on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” twice.

We went to Fort Hood in Texas when troops returned home after they captured Saddam Hussein. We played at a big celebration for them with Lynyrd Skynyrd and Jessica Simpson. That was pretty cool! It was honestly a little surreal, because there were all these men and women [soldiers] and we wanted to shake their hands, but we had a meet-and-greet [with fans backstage], and they wanted our autographs. It seemed kind of backwards, but they were grateful we were there, and we were overwhelmed with gratitude for them.

Do you enjoy reading album reviews, or do you ignore them?
I used to try to ignore them. But I laugh at myself, because I was on iTunes the other day, and I caught myself skipping past all the ones with 4- or 5-star ratings and going straight to the 1- and 2-star to find out what people had to say about each record. It comes from trying to make everyone happy all the time, but that’s just not possible. Bad reviews come and go. As long as we’re doing exactly what we know we should be doing, how can you complain about that?

How did you get the name MercyMe?
I wish I had a really good story for that, but the real story is probably better. Before the band started, Bart lived in Florida to intern at a church down there where Michael, our guitar player, was. While he was there as an intern, he didn’t do anything other than order pizza and staple stuff. His grandmother here in Texas would call him, and no matter what time she’d call, he was always home to answer the phone. Finally, one day she asked him, “What do you do all day? Don’t you have a real job?”

He was smarting off to her and said, “I have a lot of time marked off this year to think of a really good band name.”

And she said, “Well, mercy me. Why don’t you get a real job?” That was it, and it freed up the rest of his year.

What’s your favorite song from All That Is Within Me?
My favorite song right now (it will probably be different a month from now) is “Sanctified.” Every record, you have these certain songs that fall together on their own. This time around “Sanctified” was certainly that for us.

Our last couple of records, all the songs came out of trying times. Especially with Undone, we went through a six-week period when eight or nine people passed away that were either family members or someone very close to us. We really felt like we were being beat up for a while.

This time around we felt like we didn’t have any tragic news to talk about. We could focus on the fact that not only can we say we believe God will bring us through this, we know it for a fact that He will bring us through because He has done that for us in the past. We’ve been set free and set apart.

Nathan’s Favorites
Snow activity: throwing snowballs
Hot drink: Earl Gray tea
Winter vacation place: staying home
Pizza topping: pepperoni
MercyMe song of all time: “Unaware” from Undone