Husband and wife - professionally dressed, wearing expensive attire, holding each other, supportive, together, postured. This image graces the typical Out of the Grey album cover.

    6.1 is different. Christine is laughing, apparently at a joke Scott - who smiles in his rustic jean jacket - just cracked. Photos of children in dress-up clothes surround them. Casual, transparent, alive.

    "You find in our songs a lot of the usual Out of the Grey themes, but we are more focused on Christ than we have been," Christine says. "But it hasn't been easy. Having three kids and home schooling them on the road and off the road, having babies on a bus over the years, all forces us to conform to Christ."
    "You had a baby on a bus?" Scott quips with a sly grin that makes it difficult to see whether he is serious.
    "Yeah, you were there."
    "Oh," he continues to tease. "You meant traveling with babies."
    "Sure, Scott," Christine laughs.

A Couple, Now Parents

    Enjoying hits like "Steady Me," "When Love Comes to Life" and "The One I've Been Waiting For," the Dentes traveled abroad through most of the 1990s. Early in their career their children played a backseat role, but their lives were changing, and their image needed to change with it.
    "We had a team of managers years ago that said we should play the whole husband and wife thing down," Scott remembers.        
    "Then the very first show we did, it was so stinking obvious who we were, a husband and wife who loved the work we were doing, that after a little while they were like, 'Okay, well, maybe we'll play up the whole marriage thing.'"

    Now the couple is parenting three school-age kids. It is obvious that family life consumes them. "Music is our work, and we need to be brave and do it," says Christine, "but our children are our lives. We want to live with them with joy."

    Jules (9), Carina (7) and Chloe (5) are traveling this fall with their parents. They're all going to be home schooled. Christine says the decision calls for bravery.

    "It's funny, we describe this feeling by comparing it with our two cats, Wishes and Poushka," she says. "Wishes hides under the bed all day, and Poushka, which means rocket in Russian, is out picking fights with dogs and walking down the middle of the street living life."

    "When we were young, we didn't have kids, we had cats," Scott says. "And Poushka is still around."
    "He's almost 14 years old and he's out there catching squirrels and eating birds. We want to be like that!"
    "Eating squirrels?"
    "No," Christine returns. "Living life!"

    With nearly a million sales behind them and a new label before them, you would think the Dentes would credit much of their joy to their career. Not so. This modern pop couple is focused on their family.
    "Our children are a huge part of our lives," Christine says, "not just a side light."
    "Everybody seems to be on a career path," Scott adds. "Unfortunately, kids sure get in the way of career paths. But our career-building years are alongside our children-raising years, and we have gotten it all!"
    Professionally, they do have it all. Christine has a gentle, melodic voice that can coo the listener up a sloping crescendo. She has been featured with other vocal greats like Susan Ashton and Margaret Becker. Her guitar-playing husband can pluck, pick and pull the guitar strings with Olympian dexterity. These two have duly earned the spotlight of any stage.

    But the Dentes have not taken every stage. "We have turned down star-making opportunities that would've sold more records or given us a larger platform," Scott says. "They would have been bad choices for our family. You don't leave babies and toddlers home with a babysitter for 19 days. You just don't do it."

    Christine explains that these choices weren't always made so easily. "Scott and I fly occasionally on weekends where we leave the kids for one or two nights. We have tried to control all the elements that could possibly happen to our children…"
    "Car seats, baby-sitters, meals," Scott adds.
    "It can exhaust your mind," Christine says. "And as we're flying away, I have to consciously say, 'Lord, this is yours, and I'm going to trust you.'"
    "We have no regrets," Scott continues. "To be able to say, with a clear conscience, that we have no regrets is a freeing thing. We have chosen to live our lives the way God has written it."

The Learning Home,
Sometimes On-the-Road

    All the Dente children are school age, but none have set foot in a formal school. Christine teaches her children in the home, and this fall she is teaching them on the road. "The overall philosophy of home education is that everyday life is learning and growing," teacher Christine says. "Whether we're on a bus together or sitting in a hotel reading history, home schooling gives us the freedom to be able to learn and grow wherever we are."

    "When Julian was 5, we weren't ready to put him anywhere, even for half a day for kindergarten," Scott remembers. "We still wanted to eat him up with a spoon at that point. In a sense, it was a selfish thing, but as we got into home schooling more and more, we realized we would've chosen this regardless."

    How in the world can a couple - no matter how devoted - continue to school their children with life in the limelight? "Legally we have to do 'school' 180 days a year," Christine explains. "But those 180 days can occur anytime within the 365. We train our children on a day-to-day, hour-to-hour basis as opposed to trying to squish it into the morning as you're rushing out the door to make it on someone else's schedule. Home education has been more freeing for us than difficult."

Don't Wait to Build a Heritage

    The Dentes have not budged from a message that is bold and inspiring: Seek God in every area of life. The song "I Want Everything" was inspired by Brent Curtis and John Eldredge's book The Sacred Romance. The Dentes - hip and stylish in sound and spirit - break the mold when encouraging other young couples to choose the most important roads in life.
    "We went to a concert a couple months ago and we were talking with a young woman who was waiting for her career to take off," Scott explains. "Then her eyes filled up a bit. 'Are you guys planning on a family?' I asked. Then the tears flowed, and she said she wasn't ready, that she needed to keep touring and build her career.
    "I said, 'Don't wait, don't wait. It will all come together somehow.'"
    Christine was pregnant when Out of the Grey's first record debuted in 1991. Their entire career was in front of them. "We got on a bus with a five-and-a-half week old baby," Scott recalls. "If we had waited, we'd probably still be waiting for children, and we wouldn't have nearly the joy we have now. So that has been a big thing we have said to young couples - don't wait."

Receive God's Blessings

    "Christians have appropriated a lot of the world's ideas about family," Christine says. "We read all the statistics about how expensive children are and how we need to buy Nikes every two months. But I challenge couples to find out what God wants for you. If children are a blessing from the Lord, then receive the blessings, be open to what God wants for you.

    "Being a parent is one of the best, if not the best, job in the world."

    Scott mentions a story of a friend who just had his first child. "He and his wife are in their mid-30s. This guy came alive! He liked our kids a bit, but now he's got his own baby in his hands. He gets it!"

    Christine feels that Out of the Grey's image is maturing as the Dente family grows. "As we launch this record, it appears that this is part of how the Lord will use us in the next chapter of our lives."
    "You know how guitarists have 'guitar licks'?" Scott says. "Well, this is an interview lick. This is stuff we talk about in our house or on the back patio - about parenting and family life."
    The Dentes certainly feel strongly about this. "I guess people are starting to catch on to it," they said. "We're not experts, but the Lord will speak through us in good ways."

Quotable

    "It's all about not waiting but getting a move on. Pressing against the stifling worry about a journey that comes with few guarantees... Scott and I had already recorded five projects when we suddenly found ourselves AWOL (artists without a label). This is the disruption that the Lord used to move us on to better things...

    Slowly we began to realize through our own conversations and through those with friends that, regardless of our circumstances, we still had a gift and calling from God. This standing invitation to serve Him, wherever, soon led us on to Rocketown Records, where we made, with much gratitude, this latest recording."
- Christine Dente on Out of the Grey's latest offering, 6.1.

Factoid

    Many people ask about the meaning behind the title of this album. It was named 6.1 because it's the group's SIXTH studio album and FIRST with Rocketown Records. Some might say Remember This is actually their sixth album. While new songs appeared on that greatest hits collection, it wasn't a full-blown studio effort, but mostly a revisiting of previously recorded material.

    What does the name Out of the Grey mean?
    "I saw [the words] 'Out of the Grey' written in his lyric notebook," said Christine. It never became a song. It was wanting to be -- it never did." She added, "It's just a wonderful phrase. It's slightly a grey phrase in itself, but it alludes to the obvious -- the black and white -- the truth in a world of relativism. It makes a statement that there is something to know, there is truth. And ultimately, God has revealed Himself very, very clearly."

    The group's official website also says it well: "Out of the Grey is an invitation to come out of a certain mindset, which is prevalent in today's culture, that say's truth is relative, that says we create gods that meet our needs, that we decipher right and wrong by what's going on around us. It's an invitation to come out of indifference or indecision, and to come into a place that says there is a black and white."