By Movieguide® Staff
Aodhán King and Benjamin William Hastings turned a long friendship into a new worship project with Happy to Be Here, a 12-song album now available on Apple Music.
“We really wanted to create songs that we can sing when we go on the road that are corporate, that are church,” Hastings told Relevant. “We’ve missed that.”
According to Relevant, King and Hastings wrote and recorded the album during a fast 10-day stretch in Nashville, where the pressure of limited time pushed both artists away from overthinking and back toward trust.
The project also marks a return to shared roots for two artists who helped shape modern worship through Hillsong. JubileeCast reported that King and Hastings both came out of the Hillsong music world, with King tied to Hillsong Young & Free and Hastings connected to Hillsong UNITED before both artists moved into broader creative seasons.
Relevant said that the idea had lingered for years before a Christmas conversation pushed the friends to act. King said the decision finally became simple: “Should we just do it now?”
Once they said yes, the pieces came together quickly. Relevant reported that the Nashville studio had open dates and that several friends had rare space in their schedules, giving the project a momentum neither artist could have forced.
Related: Hillsong’s Benjamin William Hastings Says Worship ‘Realigns’ God in Our Lives
Hastings summed up the unlikely timing with a line that later helped shape the song “God Thing”: “You couldn’t plan it if you tried,” he said.
That sense of providence runs through the album’s story without making the project feel polished into something artificial. Relevant said that another song, “Waiting to See What God Does,” grew out of a casual comment in the room and became a kind of theme for the week.
King said the compressed timeline forced the writers to let go of the long development cycles that often define worship music. “When you condense a whole record into 10 days, a lot of those things have to go out the window because you haven’t got time to overthink,” he said.
For families who listen to worship music together, that honesty may be part of the album’s appeal. Happy to Be Here does not merely celebrate finished answers; it also makes room for waiting, uncertainty and the quiet obedience that often comes before clarity.
Hastings pointed to “Saturday,” a song about the day between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, as one of the project’s clearest examples of that theme. “It’s hard on the first and we cheer on the third, but most life is lived on the second,” he told Relevant.
The line gives the album a pastoral weight that matches its congregational purpose. Many Christian listeners know what it means to live in the space between grief and answered prayer, and the album appears to meet that tension with hope rather than easy slogans.
The sessions also gave Hastings a fresh way back into worship after solo work that leaned heavily into personal storytelling. “I was really excited to dive back in and make a worship record again,” he said.
King described the recording environment as familiar but renewed. “It felt like we were back at Hillsong, but it’s new, it’s different,” he said, adding that the experience brought them back to the roots and work they love.
By the end, Relevant reported, the artists had delivered the masters only days before release and had not had time to grow tired of the songs. That immediacy seems to be the point: the album came from friendship, trust and a willingness to see what God might do next.
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