New Avalon member Jeremi Richardson and I had a bit of a detail mix-up at interview time but it was quickly dealt with and moved past easily.

CMCentral (Kevan Breitinger): No problem, we’re talking now, right? How are you?

Fine, I’m doing great, you?

Good. I’ve been listening to the new album all morning and enjoying it.

Oh yeah, there’s some great things on there.

I know you just recently joined the group. Can I ask you how that came about?

Well, the shortest version is: I’ve worked at Disney for the last five years, and the lady who covered Janna and Melissa’s maternity leaves, Jennifer Thigpen, worked there with me. She mentioned me to Melissa when they were looking for a singer, and I had gone to college with Melissa, and that’s how that door opened.

I guess you’re done with Disney, as I read on the website that you had recently moved to Nashville, right?

Correct, I’m in Nashville now, and freezing (laughing).

Yeah, I’m just back from Florida myself, up in New Jersey, thinking ‘what am I doing here?’

Yeah, we’re trying to acclimate. We’ve got the heat going full blast and we’re sitting here in sweats, just wishing for the beach.

Well, it’ll come around again. So this is an exciting change for you. But you didn’t sing at all on the new album, did you?

Correct. The title of the spring tour is the I Will Stand Tour, and they have re-cut the song “We Will Stand” with myself, Michael English and Daniel Doss, and this will be released the same day as the album.

But as you tour with the group you’ll be performing these songs anyway.

Correct, I have already done two of them. “God Is In Control” and the title track, “Another Time, Another Place.”

You’re young enough, Jeremi, that I wondered if any of these songs were new to you?

Believe it or not, the only song that I could not sing along with was “Addictive Love,” and that’s probably one of the more recent songs on the album. I grew up in a preacher’s home and in the South, so Christian music was an avid part of everything we did. So I was familiar with the basic gist of every single one of those tunes.

They really are well selected songs, very well representative of the times. How do you find these songs speaking to you now?

I think it kind of reminds me of the Bible’s Ebenezer places where they’d make monuments to great moments they’d experienced with God. These songs for me recreate those moments. I immediately think of that song “Place in This World,” because that song is associated for me with a significantly transforming moment in my life. So that song takes me to that moment and then makes me reflect on what God has done in my life since that exact moment. A lot of these songs do that for me.