A prolific songwriter and gifted worship artist , Sean Curran has emerged as a vibrant force in current Christian music and worship . For worship teams adapting his songs for the church , it ’ s refreshing to learn of the deeper think-thru process behind his lyric crafting .
[ Alex ] So I looked it up and it ’ s been five years since you and I had a visit , and I remember the cover of that issue of Worship Musician ( June , 2019 ) because you were jumping in the air playing a white Fender Mustang .
[ Sean Curran ] ( laughs ) Yes , I remember that .
[ WM ] So let ’ s get to it . Your new project is called Basic Faith , and I can tell you that when I was your age , I thought I had it all figured out . I was not in a place of basic faith whatsoever . But the older I get ; I find that I have fewer and fewer non-negotiables regarding doctrine . And so , tell me what does basic faith mean to you ? And tell us about that song as well .
[ Sean ] Okay . I love this . I mean , this is a great launching point . So , when I ’ m thinking about basic faith , particularly the word basic in my mind , I was trying to tease out something like a fundamental foundation , not necessarily simple , because I don ’ t think faith is simple in many regards . I can also say that as a 36-yearold man , I encountered God when I was eight years old . So , I ’ m in this interesting window where I ’ ve actually been walking with God for a lot longer than I haven ’ t been . And there are certainly a great many things that have deepened in me and wisdom and hopefully maturity and spirit and truth . corner , but it is about trusting the one who ’ s leading us . I think sometimes , I don ’ t know if we mean to do this , but I think sometimes faith really gets conflated with things like certainty .
And I ’ m not sure if that ’ s the best way to think about faith , because the more certainty you have , the less faith you need . Yeah . I think faith has a lot more to do with trust . It has a lot more to do with the companionship of God . And so , I ’ ve also been doing a bit of this experiment where over the course of the whole record where whatever the concept of the song was , I would throw it into this imaginary conversation with me and my younger self .
And that was really interesting because I think sometimes when people frame that idea , it is often if you could teach your younger self one thing , what would it be ? And I found that more often than not , something of the inverse was happening . There was something that maybe I put down that I shouldn ’ t have , or there was something that maybe as we grow up , we grow out of certain things that we shouldn ’ t , things like trust , things like wonder . And so , I actually found my , not the childishness , but the child likeness of my younger self was teaching me a lot in that experiment . I think basic faith as a song has a lot to do with that . The journey of faith , the intersection of real life , and God , how do we find God in our every day . I don ’ t know if that ’ s a question we ask enough , and it haunts us . That ’ s where we spend most of our time .
[ WM ] You mentioned several things that I could do a whole interview on with you . The subject of wonder is one of those . Because it ’ s gone . Wonder is gone ! I think social media and the internet have destroyed that because I mean something as basic as going to the record store and buying a vinyl disc , and you have this beautiful 12-inch by 12-inch cover that creates wonder and it ’ s 144 square inches , and you turn it over , and guess what ? You have another 144 square inches to look at , right ? And you see things and you imagine things , and you get that record home and you cut the shrink wrap and you pull the sleeve out . And guess what ? There ’ s more wonder , because that sleeve is printed , it might be cross marketing for other artists , it might be lyrics , it might be all the credits . It might be a diary from the artist that ’ s gone .
[ Sean ] Yes , I agree . Wow . I want to say I love your description of this because what you ’ re teasing out of this also is something experiential . You can articulate it so well because you experienced it , and we ’ re missing some of that too . Also , I want to say that I feel like I hope that all of our time and all I ’ m trying to do is a bit tricky . We ’ re trying to thread some needles . I ’ m trying to offer some thoughts that have some critical thinking but are offered without a critical spirit . And we ’ re also living in a time that is growing harder and harder to do .
But I thought of it when you were talking about I ’ ve also recognized that there are a lot of things that I ’ ve over complicated . There are a lot of things that maybe I ’ ve reached out and kind of grabbed back into my own hands as if they ’ re better in mine , these really wild ideas that you just were prone to do . And so I would hope that for me , what this song is doing and what it would be doing for other people is to try and recognize that real faith takes a lifetime . Maybe faith isn ’ t about knowing what ’ s around every
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