said , you ' ll be editing this , so I ' ll leave that up to you . But I started when Third Day was over in June of ' 18 , which is a little over three years ago , I started doing some independent country stuff . I ' d always wanted to do that . I finally had a chance to . So , I was going out doing shows in little clubs , and did a couple independent country albums and put them out . But at the same time , I always knew deep inside that I belonged in Christian music . That ' s where my heart was , and that ' s what I knew for 25-plus years .
I started in January of ' 18 , going to Nashville , really for the first time ever , to write , because we ' d always written , or most of the time , on albums , anyway , we ' d written our own stuff . And so , I ' d never really had that experience of going and writing . I ' d done country stuff , but never written Christian music with writers in Nashville . And so , I started that in January of ' 18 , having some ideas and looking forward to possibly recording a record and putting it out in the Fall or the end of the year of ' 19 , and a little thing called Covid hit and threw a curve ball to everybody .
And it really helped me , though , in some regards to be able to have more time . I started doing Zoom writes , which I never thought I would want to do . At first , I didn ' t want to go to Nashville . Then I ended up loving it . I had a great first couple of trips going there , they were incredible . So that inspired me to keep going every week , and then that got shut down , I want to say in March maybe , if I ' m remembering correctly ? March or April of ' 20 .
And so , we started Zoom writing and thought I was going to hate that , and almost refused to do it . And then I said , " Well , I ' ll give it a try ," and ended up actually liking it ! It helps , silly enough , in some regards to writing . It really kind of takes away the periphery stuff and really , it helps you to fine tune and get straight to the music in writing . Of course , I prefer to be in a room with the writers , but there are some good things to writing on Zoom .
I ' m kind of straying from your question quite a bit , but on New Creation , a lot of the record , or quite a bit of the songs , have some autobiographical content , and some of it ' s not completely , some of its storytelling and writing , but a lot of its songs like " 1991 " and " New Creation " specifically , and also " Love is the Reason ." All three of those specifically have bits of my own life in it . photo by Alex Ferrari
For " New Creation ," that ' s one of my favorite songs . As I explain in the song , there ' s something about a person who ' s been talking about Jesus for a long time , and believing it , and knowing it , but at the same time , when you actually come to a place in life when you have to live through it , and Covid kind of brought that upon me . There were some pressures , and there were some things that I dealt with during that time and during that season . And just like