and I think church guys and bands can benefit
maybe, things we could encourage them with
or help them with. There is no doubt when I
look back that was fueled by my time at Dick
Grove School of Music.
[WM] As a consistently good songwriter,
you’ve written and co-written excellently across
multiple stylings that have been embraced by
many denominational communities. That’s
not an easy feat. There is breadth to your
work! Songs like “Hosanna (Praise Is Rising)”,
“Above All”, “Praise Adonai”, “Open the Eyes
of My Heart”, and “Your Name”, are sung
worldwide and in multiple situations. How do
you personally best enter into and work within
collaborative relationships?
[Paul] You do best by going into what you
feel are strong beginnings or a strong start.
You don’t want to go into a collaboration with
no ideas. Most of those ideas are generated
during our times of worship and church. The
kind of church where you can take some liberty
and hang out after a song and linger a little bit
and feel in a sense what’s going on spiritually in
this moment. Then maybe a little prayerful idea
will pop up from a phrase or from a scripture
that you want to sing back to the Lord, or sing
together. So you begin to collect these little
inspired moments that spring up in the midst
of authentic worship. Then I would take those
into a collaborative situation. I think about who
would be a good partner for a song. Looking
back those are God things, people like Brenton
Brown and Lenny LeBlanc, a lot of these co-
writes were people that were just brothers and
friends.
[WM] Something that is fascinating to me is
that you served as a worship leader/pastor for
over 26 years near Lindale, TX, a small rural
community of less that 5,000 residents in East
Texas. I visited you there on one occasion. And
then seemingly, just a few years ago, you and
Rita (wife) uprooted and moved to New York
City; population 8.5 million! Greenwich Village
to be exact. The area that you lived in for so
many years in Texas was a culturally dense
42
February 2020
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