Michael Cochren, frontman of the Christian band Cochren & Co., says the church deserves better music, and his band’s third album is his case for it.
“I feel like the church deserves the best. The church deserves to have the best music,” Cochren told RELEVANT Magazine about Runs in the Blood, a 12-song record that’s been out since May.
In his early 20s, Cochren played four-hour cover sets in southern Indiana bars, VFW posts and moose lodges, learning his craft one late night at a time. College changed what he wrote, and eventually where he was welcome to play it, once he started treating his songs less like bar-room filler and more like journal entries about personal struggle and God’s grace.
“That’s not what they paid me to come and do,” he told RELEVANT. “They didn’t pay me to come have church.”
Movieguide® has tracked that shift before. Back in 2024, Cochren talked about the Bible study that snapped him out of what he called simply “going through the motions” with his faith, years before any of it showed up on an album.
Runs in the Blood took nearly three years to build, with work starting the moment the last record wrapped. Cochren has said the song “The Lows” set the tone for the whole project, drawn to its “grooving bass line…almost like a funk thing,” he told CCM Magazine, before folding in the country, soul and Southern Gospel he grew up on.
He’s careful to say the record isn’t only a memoir. “A lot of people’s stories” are woven into it, Cochren told CCM Magazine, including “All I Need To Know,” a track written after he and his wife prayed for a child for eight years before their son finally arrived.
Related: Cochren & Co. Lead Singer Talks Moment God Changed His Life: ‘Presence of God’
The album has found an audience. It pulled 1.87 million streams in its first week, with the single “What Grace Can Do” alone topping 5.6 million streams and landing on Spotify’s Christian Rising and Amazon Music’s Divine Sound playlists, according to Jesus Freak Hideout. Cochren & Co. will carry the songs on the road this fall as special guests on Zach Williams’ Revival Nights Tour.
“This is a collection of the most honest music I’ve made about who I am, where I’ve been, and where I’m going,” Cochren said.
The title carries its own double meaning. It nods to Cochren’s family history of faith, and to something older still: “It’s also about what runs in the blood of Jesus that has washed me, that washes all of us,” he told RELEVANT.
That eight-year wait for a child sits at the emotional center of the record. “I felt like it was never gonna happen,” Cochren admitted, before he was approving the album’s final masters with his newborn son in his arms.
“I’m holding my offspring in my arms and it’s like, wow. God, you are really blessing me here,” he said.
Still, Cochren won’t flatten eight hard years into a tidy happy ending. “I don’t ever want to be someone that just says that God is good because he gave me what I wanted,” he said, pointing to Romans 8:28. “God was just as good to me in the eight years in the valley, in the pit.”
Fatherhood hasn’t slowed the road, though, and Cochren now tours most weekends while his son stays home.
“It is a constant battle,” he said of the pull between his calling and his family — the same tension, in a way, that once cost him a bar gig for talking about grace instead of just playing covers.
Read Next: Cochren & Co. Talks God’s Graciousness with Matthew West
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