By now you may have seen billboards around town for TobyMac's Winter Wonder Slam at Mellon Arena and wondered to yourself: Who is TobyMac and how is he headlining the arena?

Your Google search would reveal that TobyMac was once a member of boy band DC Talk and he has been referred to as "the Justin Timberlake of Christian rock."

TobyMac (Kevin Michael McKeehan), three albums into a solo career, cooked up the Winter Slam several years ago, and it has been mostly a South and Midwest affair until this month when it makes its first appearance in the Northeast.

"It came about because I thought no one really tours between Thanksgiving and Christmas and if they do it's generally more of a traditional Christmas show," he says, "so I thought, let's combine rock 'n' roll and hip-hop and punk and let's have this big Christmas party."

Mac will be joined in a half-house setup by Canton, Ohio, pop-punk band and two-time Warped Tour veterans Relient K, hip-hop artist B. Reith and pop-rocker Stephanie Smith.

"I asked each band to do some kind of nod to Christmas, whether it's one song or half a set," Mac says. "Each of the bands handle it differently. Last year practically half of Relient K's set was Christmas whereas I do one or two Christmas songs."

Mac will focus on his solo material, while also throwing a bone to fans of DC Talk, a hip-hop/rock trio that dominated the contemporary Christian scene from the late '80s until 2000, when the members went their separate ways. When they formed in 1988, the Beastie Boys and Run-DMC were already experimenting with rap-rock crossover and Run-DMC had just done its thing with Aerosmith on "Walk This Way," but DC Talk certainly helped pioneer it in the Christian market.

By the time DC Talk got to its final album, 1998's "Supernatural," it had abandoned the crossover for a straight pop-rock sound. Mac obviously leaned toward the hip-hop side, as his three albums, starting with 2001's "Momentum," indicate. He's currently putting the finishing touches on "Tonight," the follow-up to 2007's "Portable Sounds," which earned him a Grammy nomination.

"It's the same pot of musical gumbo," he says of the record, which is due in January. "It's all over the place stylistically -- always guitar meets hip-hop or dance beat. That's how it's always been for me, some kind of groove with a guitar over it, and then I might rap a vocal or sing a vocal depending on what the song calls for. It's songs about life, songs about the struggle of life, things that you fall into and things that you once in a while overcome. It's about hope and faith -- all the songs that sort of make up my life."

The line that Mac treads is a tricky one considering that some of his songs approach the intense, angry vibe of rap-rock bands such as Linkin Park.

"Typically, I am driven in my songs," he says. "On 'Tonight' the whole theory behind the song is 'It starts to-night!' and the whole thing is I want to change and I'm starting tonight -- I want to be a better man. There's intensity about it, maybe borderline anger 'cause you're sick of how you've been and you want all that to change."

In terms of how he deals with faith in his songs, Mac says, "The last thing I want to do is beat people over the head with my faith. That's not the guy I am. I'm writing songs about every man's struggle, every man's joy, every man's pain. I'm not trying to proselytize, but normally that struggle, that pain, that joy comes from my faith. My faith in God plays a role in whatever I'm feeling. Or at least I want it to. So whether I'm leaning into or gleaning off of it some kind of joy or peace, the faith in God plays a role in all things, and that tends to come out in my music. When I'm writing a song about trying to be there when they're hurting, or not being there, faith plays a role in that, in that remorse I have over that."

Behind the scenes, the 45-year-old Mac lives in Nashville with his Jamaican wife Amanda and five children, ranging from 3-year-old Judah to 11-year-old Truett, who makes regular rap appearances on his records in the guise of TruDog.

Being a committed father accounts for a certain amount of lag time between albums.

"It takes me a little longer. I was hanging out with my friends last night in Sanctus Real and they were working on a record with my producer, and they're there from 9 in the morning till 2 in the morning. I'm a guy, when I work on my record, I work from 10 to 6 and then I go home and eat with my family and bathe my kids and read them a book, pray with them and put them to bed. So it just takes me longer because I'm not working those insane late-night hours. I did back in the day, but I look at it more now just like my job. I go from 10 to 6 and then I come home and I'm a dad and I want to be a dad. That's always in the mix."

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.