Ellie Holcomb
For 8 years, Ellie Holcomb recorded and toured full-time with her husband's band, Drew Holcomb and The Neighbors, before stepping off the road when her first child was born. Her solo debut landed her a Top 10 hit at Christian radio with "The Broken Beautiful" and a GMA Dove Award for "New Artist of the Year." Her new album CANYON releases everywhere Friday, June 25h.
You often hear in songwriting that the more specific you can write a lyric, the more universally felt the song your writing becomes. Did you find this to be true when writing Canyon? That reaching and processing the deepest wounds of your story helped you write the songs needed to heal someone else’s?
That's exactly what happened! In the process of learning to grieve my own pain, I learned to grieve on a global scale as well. The crazy thing? I encountered peace and love in both places, in both my personal and more expanded grief, and this emboldened me in a way I'm not sure I quite fully understand. I suppose that there's less to fear, when you trek down to the places you think might kill you, and you find that a current of love running deeper than your deepest pain is there, and may actually be the thing that brings you back to life. I hope these songs echo off of people's broken hearts and remind them that they are beloved even in their most broken places, and that they are not alone.
It's wild what happens when you learn to sing in a Canyon... your voice echos off all the broken walls of pain above you and its multiplied.
I hope that somehow there is a multiplication of hope that comes from these songs, because that's certainly what I encountered in the pit of my deepest pain.
“Canyon” and “I Don’t Want To Miss It” are cathartic and uplifting, and “Mine” is as well, just in a very different way. “Mine” feels like a lullaby. I’d love to know the recording process behind this song.
I set out to write "Mine" as a song for my kids, and that's exactly what I did with Hank Bentley and Mia Fieldes. We were talking about the often broken road to becoming a parent and about how the only thing you want to do as a parent is love your kids perfectly, but we all fall short of that.
Even still, the heart of a parent is a mirror to the heart of God.
None of us parent perfectly, but we belong to a God who loves us perfectly and who delights in us, just as parents delight in their children. It is such a relief to me to know that even though I will not parent perfectly, my kids are in the hands of the One who made them and who loves them completely.
What I didn't expect? Realizing that even though I wrote this for my kids, even though I am a parent myself with lots of responsibilities to take care of, I didn't know that this song would remind me that before I am anything else, I am first and foremost a beloved daughter of the One who made me. I can't really shake that. I cried singing it that first day. I wasn't expecting the song to sneaky ninja kick me like that. Asking my husband to sing this with me felt like the most natural thing in the world. The first time I played him the song, he cried. He's cried every other time I've played it for him, and he's not a crier.
His voice is tender and strong all at once, just like him, and I'm so grateful to get to parent alongside him. For me, there's something about hearing BOTH a mother and a father sing together that beautifully represents both the mother-and-father heart of God. Drew cried in the studio while singing on this track, and it just felt like it needed to stay stripped down and raw, so my producer Cason played this gorgeous piano on it and we called our friend Claire Nunn to come play cello on it. Cello always sounds like the heart of God to me, so that's a special and beautiful addition to the track. It feels both simple and expansive, kind of like God's love for us. I hope others hear that when they listen to this song, that even mothers and fathers out there would hear the song and remember that they too are God's kids, beloved and with a serious sense of belonging.
Would you say these songs exemplify the freedom you’ve found in recognizing, validating and processing your brokenness rather than ignoring it?
1000 %. It reminds me of a character in one of my favorite book series, The Wingfeather Saga. Podo is an old man with a painful past that he's ashamed of, so he spends his whole life covering up the truth of his past. There's a point in the second book in this series where all of these well hidden and ugly secrets are revealed. I was frozen with fear reading this because I related so much to it. I'll never forget what Andrew Peterson writes after this awful and harrowing scene. He says it like this, "After that day, Podo moved about his days with wonder and peace, because he found that his whole story had been told, and he was still loved." There is such freedom in going to the pit of your pain and finding love and peace and belonging even there. I'll be the first to admit, it's not easy. Tending to pain, and walking through the process of grief never is easy, but there is love and hope even in the darkest corners of our stories, and I do believe that if we can be brave enough to go there, and breathe, allowing ourselves to grieve, there is a God who was broken so we could know our broken stories never get the final word. Love does.
You say that Canyon is “about the ever-present current of God’s love that meets us in the depths of our pain and reminds us that, because of Jesus, our suffering never has the final word.” How do you remind yourself and believe this truth in your day to day?
Breathing has been really important for me this past year. And listening. When I start to feel overwhelmed with sorrow or worry or fear, I've learned that if I can just breathe... even sometimes weep or cry out to God in that moment, I'm usually met with air that fills up my lungs and with peace that somehow surrounds me even when my circumstances are not OK.
I've learned in letting myself sit with the sorrow in my story and in the stories of others, that I don't have to stay there because Love is always moving to the lowest place, and it will carry us through it to a place of remembering that we are held even as we are falling apart, and that death/sorrow/suffering never get the final word.
I think about the empty grave. I meditate on the way we all came from a place of LOVE and that we are constantly longing to get back to that place, our true home, in the arms of the one who made us. It helps me to remember that often we are just scared kids, acting out of a place of fear and forgetting that we are all beloved and that we belong to Love and to each other at the end of the day. Breathing, prayer, scripture, grief, and even singing what's true all help push me back toward the light when the darkness feels overwhelming.
What is your hope for congregations that hear these songs led on a Sunday?
I hope these songs echo from the deepest valleys to the highest mountain tops to remind every beating human heart that they are beloved, that they belong, and that because of Jesus, our suffering never gets the final word! I hope that they help others sing in the canyon, and watch amazed at how God's love meets them in their deepest pain and sorrow. I hope they help people let go of fear and hold onto hope as they remember that God made them, He loves them, and He's rejoicing over them with loud singing day in and day out.
I hope these songs shine like stars in the night, reminding people in the midst of the dark nights of the soul, that light is always stronger than darkness, and that God sees and holds them, even as they are falling apart.
Ellie Holcomb | Canyon
Lead CANYON with your congregation. Resources available at MultiTracks.com.