Worship Musician Magazine March 2023 | Page 9

Side . This is your debut full length recording . I believe that it was initially recorded ‘ live ’ last year at the Cirkus Arena in Stockholm . Is that correct ? Tell us about the recording and what is the backstory behind it ?
[ Eric ] We ’ re a local church , and Hillsong Church is … I mean most people in the world know about Hillsong Church , and I think we ’ ve all , like a lot of people in our team have been involved in a lot of the other Hillsong Worship in Hillsong United and Young Free recordings and been writing songs for it and been a part of those recordings . So , I think it was sort of like a new thing , but also not really new for us . But we always felt for a long time that God was doing something significant in our church here in Sweden . I mean , songwriting has always been a big part of our church here and just bringing new songs into church .
And we always had that in our heart . We were just waiting for like an opportunity for that to happen . And last year we felt like we were ready to do something new and to release something from our Stockholm room , and we decided to call it Stockholm Worship , presented by Hillsong , so that ’ s even in the logo . We ’ re a local church , so we started to write songs for that . We wrote songs for I think a little bit more than a year . We brought in songs to church . Some of them fly in church , some of them did not so much . And then , at Easter last year , you know , we pressed ‘ record ’. We went into this iconic venue . It ’ s called The Cirkus . We packed it with a couple thousand people and the atmosphere was electric , and I was really in the moment . So , yeah it was incredible .
[ WM ] Wonderful . What about the song “ Sing Hallelujah , ( The Victory Song )”? Can you give us some history of that song ?
Sing Hallelujah , ( The Victory Song )
[ Jonatan ] When we were writing this song , I was just coming out of a very heavy season with my family . Me and my wife and our family . We lost a son . Brandon was only three months old when we realized that he had an incurable disease . And they just told us basically he can have up to maybe 12 months or 16 months , and we had him for six months and then we lost him . So , when we were in that season you start to question a lot of things and especially with worship . It becomes something different .
But I also remember how important worship was for me during that season . It was the easiest . To be honest , the only way I managed to pray during that season was through worship . But there were also songs that I felt like , I can ’ t sing this because right now , this is too hard for me to sing or whatever . But we really felt as a family , like the only way to go through this is to be totally honest , like brutally honest with ourselves , and with God . And even being encouraged going through Psalms and David ’ s response sometimes to God is crying out or even screaming out . So , we felt like
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