Hawk Nelson – Miracle Moments

CCM: It’s a huge, long history…
JS: Right, like we’d been a band for thirteen years, so it took thirteen years to get to No. 1 for our little two-or-three-week turn at No.1, or something like that. My wife and I were living in L.A. and we had this tiny, little apartment that was really expensive. And I remember sitting in our living room looking out over the city, because we kinda had a pretty good view, and I remember thinking, “What now?”

I feel like this is supposed to feel like this transformative moment, but it feels like every other moment. And now, all I can think about is like, “Well, okay, so does that mean that the best we can hope for in the future is to just do this again?” Like, “Is that all there is?” And then, it kinda actually took me on this week-long spiral of, “I thought this would make me happier than it did.”

CCM: Did it have any kind of confirmation for you that, “Well, I’m creative, this is what I’m here for—so, I’m not satisfied with this…”
JS: It did not validate my insecurities at all. I was thinking things like, “Well, I wrote this song with Jason Ingram and Matt Bronleewe and they’re both really talented writers and anyone who sees that this song was successful is just gonna assume it’s because of them. It wasn’t ’cause of me.” And that bothered me a little bit cause on some human level I wanted credit, which is a really dirty, ugly feeling. And when you recognize it in yourself, you’re like, “Ugh, that’s gross.”

So it just unpacked all these things for me. But I think it caused me to refocus on what really matters when you make an album and what you hope will come out of it. And for me, it was like, “If I’m looking for my validation in these things, if I’m looking for my sense of worth in how successful a song is…” then it’s really disappointing, whether it works or doesn’t. It’s not fulfilling either way. And I think for me that kinda kicked off on this new record, this totally different way of writing songs, where I was like, “Look, I want these things to work and I want people to resonate with these songs. That’s still the goal. But I can’t do it from the point of view of being like, ‘This has to succeed for my validation.’ If that’s the way I’m approaching it, I’m never gonna be a healthy individual.”

CLICK “3” TO ADVANCE