Worship Musician July 2020 | Page 25

quickly. We felt like we weren’t supposed to sit on this, we didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t know where we were going to be in a month. We actually renamed the album right before we released it to Land of the Living, because that was the song the Lord was highlighting in this time, “I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living”. So, we just did it. We’ve really tried to create a lot of structure and give things the correct time and do everything correctly. But at the same time, in the UPPERROOM we’re always listening to the Lord and if we feel like we need to do something that may be out of the box, we’re going to do it. And so, we did it, and it was amazing. It was a great surprise release. I think it did inspire a lot of hope in people. Obviously throughout this whole conversation we’ve been talking a lot of about spontaneity and moments and things, but on the other side of the coin there are songs, and songs can come out of a place of spontaneity. Songs can also be something that we have labored with the Lord with, and really just buckled down and worked hard on. These songs were songs that we just felt like we were supposed to get out there. They’re not extremely long. There is not a lot of spontaneous on this album, we just really wanted to focus on getting these songs out there. I think there are some amazing songs on the album, and on this album, we probably took a little more of a risk. Half of the album is going to be more corporate worship driven, and then you’ve got another half of the album that’s going to be more songs where you’re going to encounter the Lord in them, not necessarily corporately. But the thing about music and about worship is that you can never predict completely and successfully which songs the Lord is going to bless, and which song will completely take off. You can think you know, and you can calculate it up to a certain point, but at the end of the day you do your best and you offer up these songs and albums as a sacrifice to the Lord and you see what happens. That’s what we did, we got a little bit outside of the box on this record, and we also have some that are more classic, and I love that. I think it shows a lot about who our worship leaders are and what’s on their hearts. With the lyrics, I would say some of the messages are less simple. They’re just deeply engrained messages from our worship leaders and our culture. I think that’s extremely cool, and I think it’s cool also that we have songs that are simpler and that we can do in church as well. [WM] There are 10 new songs on the project. I really appreciate the place that the church gives to “indigenous” worship songs written from within the church community. “Into the Battle” is a great song and a powerful personal anthem for all struggling with anxiety and depression. Please tell us about this song. [Matt] We were actually at an UPPERROOM July 2020 Subscribe for Free... 25