CCM: You’ve written a lot of hit singles over the years on a variety of topics, so why for your very first book did you feel burdened to address the subject identity in particular?
MW: It was looking out at the crowd every night and seeing a kid out there singing that song at the top of their lungs, “I’m a child of the one true King.” It hit me even with my own children that…from a young age, we get attacked. Everybody’s trying to slap a different nametag on us. This is a message that I needed to dive deeper into.

As a songwriter, my job is to be really good at packing an entire message into a three-minute song and making it rhyme. With books, I have the chance to go deeper. This was a message that I felt like, chapter by chapter, I could explore a different nametag that many of us are tempted to take ownership of and, with that nametag, expose it for the lie that it is—and in doing so exposing others to truth in Scripture of who God is, and who God says we are.

Really, a lot of it was me thinking about my own kids and thinking about how the world’s going to go out of it’s way to get my kids to lose sight of who they are in Christ. These days, a lot of my motivation is my own daughters, whether it’s my songs or my book. I write messages that I would want them to hear, and chances are there’s somebody else out there who needs to hear it or wants their kids to hear it as well.

CCM: Have your daughters read the book?
MW: [Laughs] I asked them the same question. I gave each of them a copy. But it might be slightly beyond their reading level at this point. Maybe it is something they could look back on and get a kick out of saying, “Wow, my dad actually wrote a book—and he didn’t have a ghost writer [laughs].”

CCM: You have said your start as a writer outside of music was your CCM Magazine column about a decade ago. Do you remember what your first CCM article was about?
MW: That’s a great question. I was invited by CCM Magazine to write an article. They basically told me it could be whatever I wanted it to be, and so I thought about writing an article on the topic of songwriting. I called it The Writer’s Block, which had a double-meaning, as you might imagine.

CLICK “4” TO ADVANCE

Leave a Reply