An authentic response to who God is and what He's done...What we do is useful to the extent that it provides an ability for our community to voice things back to God. If it's unsuccessful in that, then it's just self-indulgence.
There's no end to amazing grace.
To follow Jesus doesn't remove us from the stuff of life. It is not resolution. It is tension and journey.
There are so many great players walking the planet but it is rare to find musicians that can live life together in a way that isn't ego centric. For whatever reason, musicians are just bizarrely composed humans. I think I'm living in the middle of a miracle.
I want to make something I would find joy in consuming. Personally, I enjoy those projects that are worth me investing time and energy and thought into, to find a work that has more to say than will fit in a 4 minute song.
I often say songwriting is like trying to climb down a ladder at night. You put your foot on the next rung and test it out and make sure it holds and then you reach for the next one.
I do love listening to singles casually, but that moment, the thing I'm mining the singles for, is something that makes me dig deeper and find a layered offering that allows for discovery after discovery.
The people we talk about around water cooler at work or at school, they're all the people who are visible in our media whether it's a sports star or a movie star or a writer or a politician. They are people that have received media exposure and have become important to us in a way that's not realistic.
In media, there's a distance and an unrealistic expectation of knowledge about a person that's created.
Language is in the way. Music's in the way. Songs are in the way. Stuff's in the way. That's just our state here. And to acknowledge that we're broken and to even ... create tradition that helps us embrace that, and to understand that, I think is a very healthy, good thing.
My plan is to not be leading (worship) at any church until I really feel like I'm supposed to be somewhere else.
We really had the whole piece laid out in like a Word file, just from beginning to end. It was kind of more like your creative-writing class in school. You know, you have the outline and then you just kind of plug the stuff in the little map you've made.
