Pictured above: Anthem Lights current members, from left: Joey Stamper, Chad Graham, Caleb Grimm, Spencer Kane
For over a decade, Liberty University alumnus Caleb Grimm (’14) has found ways to reach millions with his music, whether he is playing for the Lord on stages across the country or from his home through social media.
In 2007, Grimm was a college freshman in his home state of Arkansas when he got a call from his older brother, Scott, who had graduated from Liberty. Scott had just returned from the funeral of Liberty founder Dr. Jerry Falwell.
“At that time, I was praying about whether to quit college or something else,” Caleb said. “When (Scott) went out there and saw the campus, he called me and basically said, ‘You have got to get out here to Liberty. This place is absolutely amazing. It’s a special place, and God is doing incredible things here.’”
His brother had been a member of the Sounds of Liberty music ministry group and encouraged Caleb to audition for a group at Liberty. With his help, Caleb submitted a demo for Crimson Flood, an all-male music ministry group known for its country-pop style of music. Shortly after, he received a call asking him to join.
“God just opened that door, and I ran through it,” he said.
Caleb Grimm was a member of Crimson Flood, an all-male ministry group at Liberty, for three years.
His three years on Crimson Flood gave him a glimpse of what he’d soon do professionally.
“(Crimson Flood) was the perfect formative experience to get to cut my teeth on what it’s like to be in a band,” he said. “I got to be on stage many nights a year, I got to travel, and I got a taste for what it’s like to do ministry in that capacity. I absolutely adored it. It all definitely shaped me as a person.”
While he was traveling with Crimson Flood, the creation of a new Christian pop vocal group — Anthem Lights — was underway in Los Angeles. Liberty alumnus Chad Graham was working on his solo music project with fellow alumnus Alan Powell (’07) but realized the dynamic of a vocal group would fit better. They reached out to their contacts at Liberty and held auditions. That’s where they met Grimm and Kyle Kupecky, a fellow member of Crimson Flood, and the four-man group was formed.
“A handful of (students) tried out, and me and (Kupecky) got chosen to be part of the original version of Anthem Lights,” Grimm said. “We commuted back and forth to Nashville while in school, meeting with different record labels.”
Crimson Flood rehearses in 2008.
They eventually signed their first record deal with Provident Records, Sony’s Christian division. Grimm decided to leave Liberty and pursue music full time with Anthem Lights. He continued his studies through Liberty University Online Programs, and in 2014, he earned his bachelor’s in interdisciplinary studies with focuses in music, business, and biblical studies.
Anthem Lights achieved almost immediate success, touring full time with Christian artists like MercyMe, Steven Curtis Chapman, and Natalie Grant and releasing its debut album in 2011. Grimm remembers the day Anthem Lights joined other artists at a charity event for a hospital in New York City, and their image was on a billboard in Times Square.
“Touring is incredible if you’re young and single — getting on a bus every night, touring the country, getting to meet all these people, and obviously sharing the experience with the other guys,” Grimm said.
When the label dropped the group in 2012, they evaluated their future. In their years of touring, they had garnered a loyal following on social media, so they brainstormed a way to interact with their fans while seeking out a new label. They decided to record covers of pop songs and post them to the group’s YouTube channel. The videos received millions of views in a matter of weeks.
“We’d recorded the covers as a way of letting our fanbase know that we’re still doing music and that we wanted to create content for them to foster the community we’d built, and then we saw the views and were sort of stunned,” Grimm said. “We’d spent four months of our life touring not long before this, and we were away from our loved ones, performing in front of a total of 100,000 people over that time, and making next to no money. Yet we’d stayed home for a day and recorded a video that reached millions of people. We started to view the videos as maybe a way we could market original music, rather than touring, and use the internet to share ourselves with people.”
A few months later, they received a check from monetizing the videos.
“We saw that not only is this a marketing tool, but it might be a way to provide for our families too,” Grimm said. “Once that happened, we no longer wanted to be signed to a label; we wanted to be independent because we had built something else. That’s what we did for a number of years.”
The band has continued to release covers of both pop and Christian music along with original works.
Amid the band’s ups and downs, Grimm met his wife, Kelsey, a fellow musician in Nashville. The two married in 2014, joining their lives and their passions for music. At first, singing together was a hobby. They handed out CDs of their music as wedding favors. In 2017, the couple decided to explore what it would be like to take singing together seriously, and the singing duo known as Caleb and Kelsey was established. They created a mashup of two popular worship songs of the time — “Oceans” and “You Make Me Brave” — and posted it to Facebook, garnering 5 million views by the time they woke up the next day. The next video received 43 million views.
Caleb and Kelsey
“At that time, when iTunes was used more, we’d look at the charts there, and I think at one time we had the No. 1 and the No. 3 songs on the Christian chart,” Caleb Grimm said. “We decided to do a whole album after that called ‘Worship’ with a bunch of mashups, and that went No. 1 on iTunes.”
From then on, the singing spouses continued to grow their audience by posting covers and mashups of pop and Christian music, accumulating over 8 million followers across multiple social media platforms.
“It’s an amazing time to be in music,” Caleb Grimm said. “We live in a time when you can write a song in the morning, you can make a video this afternoon, and tomorrow it could be the biggest song in the world. The opportunity to be able to stay home and still support a family is a gift. We have three kids, and to make music and video content that provides for my family, not having to be gone all the time, is a huge blessing.”
Caleb and Kelsey with their three children
While Anthem Lights is still active, he said Caleb and Kelsey is his main focus, as the other band members also have projects of their own. He and his wife have developed more of a focus on Christ-centered music in recent years, which has led to opportunities to share more about their spiritual walk with followers. They have also begun leading worship events in churches and colleges around the country.
“Our heart has kind of shifted really towards worship music and opportunities to lead people in worship,” Caleb Grimm said. “We’ve released a number of original songs over the last several months with messages from our heart and lessons God has been teaching us. It’s amazing to be able to sing other people’s songs, and it’s created a huge platform for us, but now to turn around and use that platform to share things that God has been teaching us is really special.”
