Having caught the music bug as a child at his hometown’s legendary Bluebird Cafe, Nashville native Brandon Heath released his first studio album, Don’t Get Comfortable in 2006. Dove Awards, fame and multiple hit singles followed—including 2006’s “Our God Reigns” and 2008’s “Give Me Your Eyes.” Two years in a row Heath’s been named Gospel Music Association’s Male Vocalist of the Year.
But despite all the accolades he’s received and the opportunities he’s been given, Heath seems pretty grounded, as evidenced by song lyrics firmly planted in humility, service and God’s majesty. And with his latest hit “Your Love,” he simply wants people to think about, well, God’s love.
Take these lines, which pull us out of our self-focused microcosms and into God’s glory: “You’re the hope in the morning/You’re the light when the night has fallen/You’re the song when my heart is singing/It’s Your love/You’re the eyes to the blind man/You’re the feet to the lame man walking/You’re the sound of the people singing/It’s Your love.”
Heath also contrasts the magnetic pull of God’s love with his own failed efforts to find meaning apart from Him earlier in his life. “I felt it first when I was younger,” he sings. “A strange connection to the light/I tried to satisfy the hunger, I never got it right/I never got it right.”
When asked about the story behind the single, Heath told jesusfreakhideout.com, “[Co-writer] Jason [Ingram] and I had prayed that first morning of writing that we not write under any pretense or any pressure to deliver a hit. [While] I love that it is a hit now … that morning we just wanted to write it, we wanted to keep it simple. And we feel like if God put any priority over everything, He would just want people to know that we’re loved, you know? Like, He just wants us to love each other and love Him. He would want us to know that we’re loved.”
Heath describes his sound as “acoustic pop,” but with lyrics that are “deeper than usual.” In a spoken introduction to the song’s video on his website, he adds, “Just amazing things have been happening, but for me, I really just wanted to capture this idea that if I didn’t know love and I didn’t know that God loved me, No. 1, would I be able to handle this stuff right now and No. 2, would I be able to pour out anything into anyone else? I’ve heard stories of guys that have climbed the corporate ladder. They’re making a ton of money but they don’t know peace, they don’t know hope, and they don’t know love. It just seems like they can achieve, you could achieve, I could achieve all these things in life, but if we don’t know love, we don’t really know peace.”
I like that line of reasoning.
