Matt Redman Says Balancing Music and Fatherhood Comes Down to This
By Movieguide® Contributor
Matt Redman sees his role as a Christian singer-songwriter as “the hugest privilege.”
“You don’t have to be the loudest voice or the one controlling everything if you’re before God,” he said of worship while appearing on the “WHOA That’s Good” podcast. “It makes a difference in worship. It just changes everything about your life if you can take that advice.”
Speaking about his long career as a musician, he said, “It just sometimes feels like the hugest privilege…My job is to write the songs. I’m going to pour my heart out before God, and if He wants to breathe on any of them, then wonderful.”
Redman also talked about balancing his life as a singer-songwriter with being a good father.
“It’s kind of a big deal for me — that I wouldn’t want my life to contradict what I’ve been trying to bring my kids up in about Jesus,” he explained. “At the end of the day, it’s all grace. I’m just doing my best as a parent…it’s all grace, seeing God’s grace.”
Redman continued, “As a parent, that’s the best feeling — when you see your kid has chosen Jesus and chose to fashion their life around Him. That’s an amazing feeling.”
He is currently promoting his latest album, Coming Back To The Heart, a collection of reimaginings of Redman’s hits.
“During lockdown a while back, I noticed a couple of the songs were having a resurgence,” he said. “The idea is just to present these [songs] in a 2024 way, in a way that, hopefully, they live.”
In an Instagram post about the album, Redman wrote, “These simple songs were all just an attempt to behold God, and then sing in reply to what we see. I’m hundreds of songs and a lot of years into this now and that’s for sure the reason I haven’t run out of ideas – the subject matter is just so outrageously good. When Jesus comes into view there’s always going to be something more to see and something more to say.”
“I hope these songs will help us sing age-old truth in a fresh way,” Redman said in a statement about the project.
Movieguide® previously reported on Redman’s thoughts on worship music:
Singer and songwriter Matt Redman recently shared what he thinks modern worship does well and what it lacks compared to older music.
“I think that I’ve seen so much progress in the music community” as far as “production levels, commitment to the craft of songwriting, and the increasing culture of co-writing,” the writer of “10,000 Reasons (Bless The Lord)” said. “We’re always better together, and most things in the kingdom of God we’re going to be doing together, not on our own.”
Redman told Relevant Magazine, “The one thing I will say is the area that we still need the growth in is really the content of the songs. The lyrical weightiness of the songs…Sometimes people say ‘Oh, hymns are better are than the new songs’ you know, and that’s not actually…a fair comparison.”
He pointed out that thousands and thousands of hymns were created throughout the years, and people think of only a handful of popular hymns when they say these things.
Content is “the area that hasn’t been at the speed of the production and the music. And the external…growth has been a lot better than the internal growth. And so that might be something that we need to keep focusing on,” he said.
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