MATT MAHER SONG X SONG
Saints And Sinners
FUTURE NOT MY OWN
“This song was inspired by a prayer from Archbishop Oscar Romero. The spirit of the prayer suggests it’s good to take a step back and consider the long view and remember that you are not God and you can’t see the end result of things. The last line of the prayer is what really struck me. Romero said, ‘We are prophets of a future not our own.’ And I thought, That’s what I need. I need a future that doesn’t belong to me. I decided to write a song based on what would happen if somebody read that prayer. What would their response be? The song became a response to the prayer, ‘God, I need a future not my own. I need a future that’s not of my design.’ This was one of the first songs written for the record that describes the cry of the human heart that doesn’t have a clear sense of where things are going and is looking for a sense of direction.”
DELIVERER
“This song’s a very personal song for me. I’ve been a huge believer in the band NEEDTOBREATHE for a long time and their ability to create music that goes beyond the fringes of the church, so I was honored they were willing to offer this haunting verse and chorus to this song that Bear [Rinehart] wrote out of his own conversion experience. Coupled with that, the bridge was inspired by my recent experiences as a dad. My son, Conor, was struggling with being afraid of the dark. So I tried writing what might be the antithesis of what he was feeling, trying to imagine what it must be like to be a kid and to have those moments where literally there’s no fear—just total trust. I’ve never worked harder to capture that kind of moment; one of a heart cry-that sense of liberation. This bridge is probably my favorite moment on the record.”
GLORY BOUND
“This song is based on an old Woody Guthrie song that’s been around for a while called ‘This Train is Bound for Glory.’ If you look at the lyrics, it basically talks about how there’s no room on the train for anybody but the saved. All the scum of the earth—they’re basically done for. I understand the intent of what the song was trying to say, but it creates a false narrative. Jesus talks about separating the sheep and the goats and the wheat from the chaff; but He talks about it in the context of the end of time. As the church, we’re really content to take on that role ourselves and go ahead and do it for Him. The problem is, when you do that, you’re limiting grace. There’s so many great men and women throughout history who have had conversions at the end of their lives! That’s how audacious and scandalous grace is. So I started writing a song called ‘Glory Bound’ with the idea that there’s a train for everybody, and I don’t know which way your train’s going, but I do know you’ve been forgiven.”
LAND OF MY FATHER
“I had been in England, writing with Luke Hellenbroth, a guy from a great church there. I had this idea for a song based on ‘Thee Our Father,’ all the while looking at the kingdom of God as ‘the land of my father.’ It’s an allegory for heaven in a way. I finished the song with David Leonard and Leslie Jordan from All Sons & Daughters. They’re tremendous songwriters. That song, and even where it sits on the record, is what I call the ‘honeymoon phase’ of the Christian life, where there’s a sense of enjoying who God is and what He’s doing in your life. If somebody’s on a journey, this is where the weather’s great and it’s a nice day out. There are those moments. Just like there are moments as a parent where your kids are great, they’re dancing along to a Taylor Swift song, and you think it’s the cutest thing in the world; and life’s great.”
EVERYTHING IS GRACE
“One of my favorite saints was St. Therese of Lisieux, ‘The Little Flower.’ She was born in France and entered the convent at a very young age and died of tuberculosis in her early 20s. Years after her death, they found her diary. In Catholicism, she’s considered a spiritual giant; a heavyweight. She had a spiritual practice called ‘The Little Way,’ and everything she did, she did it with the utmost level of intentionality, whether it was sweeping floors or washing dishes or making beds or cleaning bed pans. She offered a great quote that said, ‘Everything is grace. Everything is a direct result of the Father’s love for us. So no matter the difficulties you face, however trivial or serious, they’re basically all an opportunity.’ You reach a point in your journey where all of a sudden things start going wrong in life and it’s OK. Everything is grace. Everything is an opportunity. Eleven years ago, I wrote ‘Your Grace Is Enough,’ and 11 years later, it’s still the case.”
SONS AND DAUGHTERS
“If you’re following God, eventually you start loving the things He loves, and you care about the things He cares about. Moving to Nashville, the South, I encountered a greater understanding that so much of the American tradition of music was born out of the slavery movement—rock ’n’ roll, gospel, country, R&B, hip-hop. It all goes back to a group of people who were enslaved and who desired freedom. I had been wanting to write a song based on the speech ‘We Shall Overcome’ by Dr. Martin Luther King. I had begun writing this song with Jason Ingram. I asked a buddy of mine—fellow worship leader and songwriter Ike Ndolo, who grew up in Columbia, Missouri—to write with me. I took what we had started, and asked Ike to, ‘Draw from your experience as an African-American male living in the shadow of the civil rights movement still praying for all those things to bear their fruit.’ It’s really the job of the church today to finish what was started in the ’60s. Just because you can outlaw racial discrimination doesn’t mean you get rid of it. This heart behind this song was to inspire other people. I have to think that there are other leaders in the church right now who have a burden on their heart to help lead a movement like this. I think it’s the centerpiece of the whole record; it’s a really special moment.”
FIRELIGHT
“One of my favorite stories of someone who struggled and had a very dark side was Mother Teresa. She went through extensive effort to start a religious order. She became a nun, started her own order of nuns and then moved to India; and immediately the presence of God disappeared from her life, and she didn’t feel anything. She started writing letters to her spiritual director, confessing all of her internal struggles. At the same time, her ministry blew up and next thing you know, everyone is finding out about this nun from Calcutta, and everyone loves her. All the while, she was having these moments where she struggled and felt so weak and God felt so distant. She offered a quote that says, ‘If I ever do become a saint, I will surely be one of darkness. For I will not be content to roam the streets of heaven while there’s one soul who still longs for God.’ Her quote captures that hunger of a person, who in the midst of struggle, still loves the marginalized and still loves the oppressed. ‘Firelight’ is a song about disillusionment and that very frail prayer of asking God to burn and shine in the midst of that and to continue to light the way through darkness.”
INSTRUMENT
“The prayer of St. Francis is a huge source of inspiration in my life. It’s such a simple and beautiful prayer. It was written in France and attributed to St. Francis because it seemed to have his character and the dynamic of his spirituality. ‘Instrument’ is my way of weighing in on a lot of things that are happening right now. The chorus is inspired by the song that St. Francis actually did write, which was ‘All Creatures of Our God and King,’ in which there is a reoccurring line that says, ‘Oh praise Him.’ Jon Foreman has always struck me as a St. Francis type person in the sense that he’s a man who has universal appeal as an artist, and he and St. Francis both have been advocates for peace. Obviously, Switchfoot has tried to use their platform in major ways to talk about peace and to promote a less combative relationship between the church and the world. So it seemed fitting that Jon and I collaborated about this song together.
ABIDE WITH ME
“I’ve always been inspired by hymns. My maternal grandparents were a Baptist preacher and an organist. Being raised Catholic, it’s strange that the first time you start hearing some of these hymns, there’s something in your DNA that resonates. One was a really beautiful hymn, “Abide with Me.” As a believer, even my doubt and disillusionment have to meet Jesus at the cross. I think in our walk with God we get surprised when we end up right back where we started. In some ways, that’s the Christian life—learning how to die so you can experience resurrection. I think sometimes the aching we feel is the realization that we will always be restless until we reach heaven. We have moments where we get glimpses of what that feels like, but there’s still a haunting that happens. That’s what inspired this song—reaching a point where somebody’s willing to at least ask Jesus to help them with that disillusionment and that fear.”
BECAUSE HE LIVES (AMEN)
“This whole record started with the making of this song, which was inspired by the lyric, ‘Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.’ Being Catholic, I didn’t grow up singing that song, but it was a massive song in other denominations. I loved the idea of the phrase, ‘Because He lives…’—that realization that because of the resurrection, I’m not dead. The record starts with this prayer of, ‘I need a future not my own,’ and it ends with the prayer of saying, ‘I know He holds my future in His hands.’ I think early on when we don’t know God, we pray, ‘I’m headed toward disaster. I need a different course for my life.’ One reaches a point where you mature in your faith, and you realize God already has the course of your life taken care of. I think it’s a hard thing when you fully surrender to the present, and you give that to God, and then you turn around and you are able to slowly trust the mystery of an uncertain future and know that the certainty in it, is God. I wanted to put it toward the end of the record to help create a space where, if somebody hit track one and just let the whole thing run, it would really take them on a journey of arriving back at the most important place, which is the resurrection. Sometimes things have to die in order for them to come to life.”
REST
“If you could encapsulate the record into one song, it is this song. I got a text message from Thad Cockrell one morning saying, ‘Hey, I have a song idea. I think you’re supposed to write it with me…’ It was the setting of Psalm 23. At the time, my grandmother, who lived in Phoenix, was getting toward the end of her life, and she was really struggling with the process of dying. So I was very much mindful of her as I wrote this song. Psalm 23 gets quoted a lot at funerals, but it’s really an amazing Psalm for people who are going through a time of change. The thing about a valley is, what makes a valley a valley is that there’s a mountaintop on the other side of it. You’ve just got to keep walking, and eventually you’ll hit a mountain. But if you’re on a mountain, you might want to buckle up. I think God is inviting us to slow down a little bit in the hectic pace of our life and to simply rest in Him. For me, it’s the perfect way to end the record.”
BORROWED TIME - DELUXE EDITION ONLY
“This is the song I wrote the day I found out the hepatitis C virus I had dealt with since I was 11 was undetectable. I was out for dinner with my wife, and I got the test results on my phone and realized the virus, for the first time in 27 years, was undetectable. I got home that night and just wrote down this line: ‘Where do we go from here?’ When all you’ve known is brokenness, or when all you’ve known is one particular situation, and then love removes it — where do you go from here? I think people define themselves by their failure and their brokenness—whether it was one particular moment, or a reoccurring moment. We allow those things to define who we are. The phrase ‘living on borrowed time’ originated from the idea that you were borrowing time from your death, and if God has already paid the price for your death, then all the time you have is really His. At this point in my life, I’ve started to realize the most important commodity I have is my time. This song, in some ways, is me saying to myself, ‘OK, what do we do now?’ because I want] to make the most of the time I have in my life.”