felt more and more like our hearts needed to be out there . We want to be fully with the team out there . I was going back and forth for a year , and so when we fully moved out there , it was great because I had that community and the church out there to fall right into . They already felt like family to us , which was good because the culture , I mean , going from North Carolina to California is night and day in a lot of ways . So that was the big jump . I just realized how big this country is and here ’ s so much land out there in the west . 35 years of living in North Carolina and living in the east where there ’ s just so many people and not as much land .
You go out there and you think , “ I ’ m driving for hours . I haven ’ t seen anything , not even people , and I haven ’ t even seen buildings , nothing .” And the vastness was just mind blowing . It just opened up . That ’ s when I started writing more . And I think there ’ s something to it , just like a whole new experience and it happening in my mid-thirties . I mean , I ’ ve lived a lot of adult life already and just now having my eyes opened up to this side of the world , I think it unlocked some wells of creativity in me that were really beautiful . And there ’ s something so sweet and special about Redding , and it ’ s not like the rest of California . It was definitely different from North Carolina , but still there ’ s something southern and redneck about it altogether that felt familiar .
[ WM ] Well , you were at the north end of the San Joaquin Valley there . Both Merle Haggard and Buck Owens , were from Dust Bowl families that moved to Central California , and of course the Bakersfield sound came out of that . So there are a lot of … I won ’ t say rednecks , I ’ d say country folks there .
So , tell us about the song “ Made for More ” and the overall project entitled Made for More , and I ’ ll ask you about “ Crowns Down ” next .
[ Josh ] The song “ Made for More ” kind of shifted the whole project from what this thing was originally was going to be , I really wanted to do a live worship album . It had been a while since I had done anything like that , and I ’ ve been putting out these studio projects that I love . They definitely had some worship songs on there , but they were also kind of more artist-driven and just a little more of the singersongwriter writing . But at my very core , I love leading worship and that ’ s how I started in music and that ’ s who I am . I thought it was time to do a live worship album , and the plan was for it not to be any new songs . I was going to take old songs from the last couple albums that felt more like Sunday morning kind of worship songs and let ’ s do those live and do those in a way that showcase that . And that was the plan . But I ’ m always writing . And so , this song “ Made For More ” came , and I wrote it with some friends of mine . It started out of Romans 8 , and then there ’ s elements of Isaiah 43 where the Lord says , “ I ’ ve called you by name and you ’ ve been redeemed ”.
The song goes down this path of finding what our identity in Christ is , and the whole song
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