Chad Lewis Article

What follows is a reprint of the article on singer-songwriter Chad Lewis from the July/August Travelogue. Stay tuned to Jive To The Monkey for a review of Chad's new album, "Fading Grass."

CHAD LEWIS – A HEART FOR THE BROKEN-HEARTED


“I believe that music will play a big part
in my life in the next years to come.”
-- Chad Lewis’ journal, October 21, 2002

I first saw Chad Lewis in March, 2005 in the basement of the original Narrow Path bookstore on Bardstown Road, where he was headlining a standing-room-only concert. I stood in the back in a crowd of mostly young Christians as he told stories and sang original material, including early versions of several songs that, along with never-before-heard cuts, form the record “Fading Grass,” available later this month from Sojourn Music.

In a review of the show, I wrote: “(Lewis’) voice is big---Nordic. Viking. I’d imagine if he lived a few hundred years ago, he’d have been some village’s leading troubadour of sea shanties or woodland ballads. Here is someone who could calm the villagers or lead them into battle.”

Collected and assured, he sang songs of loss and recovery, confusion and identity, fall and redemption, just as he would the next time I saw him, several months later and on rockier territory. He performed a set during a folk music showcase at the Brick House, a community center in downtown Louisville, for a crowd of mostly agnostic and New Age college students. On the tail of an openly hostile comment about a “hateful Christian speaker” coming soon to U of L, Lewis took the stage, gently performing his same songs of providence and grace, and taking time to win over quite a few spectators with his “folk version” of “Ice, Ice Baby.”

This same calm, pastoral confidence permeates his newest album, “Fading Grass”. Not bad for someone whose high school senior class sarcastically voted him “Most Likely To Host A Talk Show” due to his extreme shyness.

Walking down this dusty, old road
My days of youth are faded grass”
-- “Oklahoma Fields,” from “Fading Grass”

As the son of a piano-playing mother and a Southern Baptist minister, Lewis was exposed to the Gospel and music from earliest memory. Saved after a revival service at the age of six, he often sang in church as part of a trio with his brother and sister. His shyness, however, would have made it hard to predict that Lewis would grow up to preach and sing all over the United States in worship services, retreats, youth rallies, and coffee houses.

“I’m originally from Oklahoma,” Lewis says as we sit in the dining area of his apartment, along with his wife, Ginger Glass, on a recent Sunday evening. “We lived in five different places from the time I was born until we finally settled in Memphis when I was in sixth grade. I was already introverted by nature, but Memphis was such a different culture that I shut down completely. I would often go half a school day without speaking to anyone.”

I ask him if his battle to overcome timidity was on his mind when he wrote “Oklahoma Fields” during a trip home for a funeral as an adult.

“Definitely. Mainly from the aspect of God calling me out, using my weakness to become one of his strengths in me. I’m shocked at how God has given me strength to minister. That’s something I could never take credit for on my own.”

“Another aspect of that song is that I’d thought that my life would not be fulfilled unless I had a romantic relationship. When my dreams of marriage to an old girlfriend crumbled in 2002, God showed me that I’d never fully rested in Him. It was always God and something. Never just God. The lesson is that God is sufficient. He’s all I need. It’s the toughest lesson.”

His grief over that cataclysmic breakup also drove him deeper into songwriting, an activity that provided catharsis.

“Oh, how I hurt now. I was awakened at 4:30 a.m. and couldn’t sleep.
I penned the following words to a new song and prayed
that it would minister to thousands of people.”
Chad Lewis’ journal, September 2, 2002

Lewis slowly found his voice as a writer, a voice of bitter experience that has refused to harden, a voice that admonishes and comforts. He wrote many of his nearly seventy songs in the months that followed, as an outpouring of his experience, and this is still the way he typically writes.

“I write songs because I can’t not write them. I write out of a stirring in my spirit, when I’m feeling despair, longing, or even love. The times when I’m really struggling internally are when my songs pour out. I write to get out what’s inside, as well as to let the broken-hearted know that they’re not alone.”

This same theme dominates “Fading Grass,” a record that chronicles God’s sovereignty and asks Him to remind us who He is, and, as Lewis sings in “Remind Me” to “Remind me whose I am.”

Lewis began to hone his guitar skills in his early twenties. “I started taking lessons from an old hippie-folk lady. She instructed little kids -- and me. She taught me Peter, Paul, and Mary, John Denver -- songs like that. I wrote a few songs that summer, but of course they were terrible. I look back now and realize I was just at the beginning stage of my development as a writer.”

I ask him the songwriting equivalent of the “chicken or the egg” dilemma: “Which comes first, the lyrics or the melody?”

“The music usually comes first and I just start singing, making up lines. Whatever is on my heart comes out. But it might be a year or two later when I go back and revisit it.”

At which point, the revision process begins.

“We beat him over the head with song structure.”
Mike Cosper, Worship Arts Pastor, Record Producer

Lewis credits Mike Cosper and Eddy Morris with making him a better writer, although they are loathe to claim too much credit. Cosper and Morris, respectively, produced and engineered “Fading Grass” at Morris’ Ear Candy Studios and each played several instruments on the record. “His songs were great,” Cosper said when asked about the original drafts of Lewis’ material, “and if you know Chad, you’ll hear his music and see how clearly his heart shines through it. “[The songs]” just needed to be tweaked and tightened. He was incredibly humble throughout the whole thing.”

Morris added, “The key to making an interesting record is to start with an interesting batch of songs and keep working at it until it is done … Chad was unusually receptive to our criticism.”

Lewis also received advice from his friend, Nashville singer-songwriter Matthew Perryman Jones, a contributor to the Indelible Grace series of hymn records and a member of the Square Peg Alliance, a group of songwriting friends that includes Derek Webb, Jill Phillips, Eric Peters, Randall Goodgame, and Andrew Osenga of Caedmon’s Call, among others. Lewis visited Jones in Nashville shortly before recording “Fading Grass,” and noted Jones’ advice on everything from songwriting to avoiding burnout.

Back in Lewis’ apartment dining room, he says that he’s grown immensely as a writer during this process---through the help of Jones, Cosper, Morris, and the monthly Sojourn songwriting workshops. “Just learning about structure, getting critiques -- I’ve never been around a whole songwriting community before.”

I have no plans anymore
But to live and die well
Spread love profusely all around
And Your grace tell, of Your grace tell
-- “Sweet Release,” from “Fading Grass”

Lewis became engaged to friend-turned-sweetheart Ginger Glass during the recording process. The two married on June 10, are each pursuing graduate studies in Louisville. They intend to spend at least the next two years here, finishing school. Beyond that, whether Lewis is on pastoral staff somewhere or takes a “tent-making” job that allows him to stay plugged in at Sojourn is up to God. “My heart is just to be a minister who reaches the broken-hearted with the message of the Gospel,” Lewis says.

“With Sojourn’s help, this CD went far beyond my dreams and expectations. I can’t believe these are my songs. [he prays] ‘I don’t have any idea what You’re going to do with it, Lord, whether it’s just for the Sojourn community and a few people as we travel, or whether it really takes off.’ It’s all in God’s hands.”