"When you've spent over a dozen years as one-third of an entity," says tobyMac, "then a part of you starts to wonder how much of what the band does is really you. So I guess the short answer to "why do a solo album?" is because I needed to find out who I was as a solo artist".

The "entity" to which tobyMac refers to is multi-platimun recording group dc talk, which he and friends Michael Tait and Kevin Max formed in the late 1980's. After a decade of trend-setting musical development, award-winning album releases and exhaustive touring, each man is now taking time to express himself through solo musical works. " I don't want to describe dc talk in restrictive terms, "tobyMac continues. "But when you collaborate, by necessity, a little personal vision is lost in the translation. And when you achieve success at the level that God has blessed dc talk with, expectations sometimes run contrary to what your natural instincts as an artist might be."

Momentum really started with my wife and I sitting down and praying, seeing if I was supposed to make a record on my own. I wasn't feeling all that creatvie at the end of dc talk's Supernatural tour, so we prayed a real specific prayer. Once I felt I was supposed to do this, then we began praying for creativitiy. All of a sudden, there was this outpouring. With Momenutm, I blinked and suddenly had 25 or 30 song ideas. Basically a blank canvas with limitless colors."

The first fruit of tobyMac's solo work, the title song from the motion picture Extreme Days, spent a record ten weeks at the top of the CCM Update Rock charts, however, the track wasn't the hip-hop opus many were expecting to be tobyMac's initial single. Instead it was a slamming, rap core track, which he says shouldn't surprise long time fanns, "A lot of times people forget that we have had dirty, distorted guitars on all of the dc talk's records. A couple other songs on Momentum that fall in that vein are "Let's Get this Party Started" and "Yours, " tobyMac adds, "I've been merging guitars, beats and rhymes since 1989. Combining those things is like a slice of heaven to me.