CCM: Do you feel you met that “metric,” as you stated in your band’s bio, on this project?
JS: Yeah, I started looking at it as like, “When I look back at this ten years from now, what will I be proud of?” Or, “I’m really glad we fought for ‘that,’ or let ‘this’ go,” or something. And that was the filter in my mind of what needed to be on this album. “What do we wanna talk about, what do we wanna say?” A lot of times I approached the songwriting process with, “If I only had one chance to say something, what would it be?”

So, there’s a couple songs that, for me, reflect that feeling. The lead single, “He Still Does (Miracles)” is one of those, where I look back over the course of our time as a band, and my life personally, and I see God intervening in difficult times. I see God present and showing up in our lives and that’s something worth celebrating. It’s also a reminder of the fact that we aren’t alone, that God is present. He’s not just someone we read about in the Bible. He’s not just someone that, “Oh, He did some cool stuff way back when.” I think He’s present in our lives now.

There’s a couple other examples, but just one I’ll mention is, the last song on the record is a song called “I’d Never Know.” It’s a special one for me because it basically talks about how when you go through hard times or when you struggle with things you obviously don’t wish to struggle with, it gives God an opportunity to show up in your life in a new way—and when He does that, we have the opportunity to see a new part of His nature. We can see a side of God that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to see without that struggle. So, the chorus says, “I’d never know You as a healer if I never needed healing / I’d never know You as a savior if I’d never needed saving.” And that was just a really cool thought, one that I knew I would be proud of later in life. Like, if we write about “that,” that feels true and that feels meaningful and something that brings a little bit of redemption and hope to the moments that we struggle.

CCM: What about right now, in just the few weeks that the album has been out? Any immediate moments?
JS: Yeah… There is a song on the record called “Parachute,” which is a song that’s sort-of raw on just how much we need God and how much we need to be rescued. It doesn’t have a real pretty bow on it. I think sometimes as believers—I talk about this with my wife and her family a lot—we feel like we have to have this magical answer. Especially if we’re in a position of any kind of leadership, whether it’s like as a pastor or in radio or artist on stage, etc. But God is really mysterious and the way that He works is mysterious, and sometimes there’s things we don’t totally understand. Sometimes that’s just not realistic, and the chorus of that song is a cry our to the Lord and says, “God, I need You to be my rescue…”

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