With their tidy plaid shirts and their heart-on-sleeve love songs, the Smoking Popes always seemed a shade more wholesome than their punk-pop peers. Turns out that stuff was just the tip of the iceberg: last week front man Josh Caterer left the band to devote his time and talent to Jesus. "I'll basically continue to write pop songs, but they're all going to be about the gospel," he says.

Caterer first embraced Christianity a few years ago. "Things were going very well for me," he says. "The band was signed, I married the girl of my dreams. It kind of sounds like a cliche, but I had everything I wanted but I still felt empty. So I tried excessive drinking and recreational drug use, and that, after a while, led me to a point where I began to seek God."

He had an epiphany at a Popes show last summer, when he noticed how most of the kids in the audience were singing along, hanging on his every word. "I asked myself, 'What am I saying to them? What am I giving them?' and I realized the only thing I could give them that would be of any value to them would be Jesus Christ," he says. "I expect lots of our fans to be surprised by it, although I think some of them got the feeling that I was moving in this direction."

The Popes parted ways with Capitol Records in December and are presently shopping an all-covers album that was recorded before the split. The remaining members--Mike Felumlee and Caterer's brothers, Eli and Matt--have decided to disband, but they plan to release a compilation of early Popes singles this spring on a new label of their own. Josh Caterer plans to release an EP of solo acoustic versions of traditional gospel songs next month.