Beyond Art for Art's Sake
Beyond Art for Art’s Sake:
An Interview with Josh Garrels
By Daniel Dorman
When Josh Garrels picked up the phone to answer our questions, he was at his Muncie, Indiana home. The sounds of his five kids and wife, Michelle, could be heard faintly in the background and he retreated to their home studio for the interview. It seems fitting that we caught Josh at home; a return home, a “holding fast to foundational things” pervades his newest album Chrysaline.
Someone close to Garrels said that where his previous albums felt ‘horizontal’, looking outward and making sense of the world, Chrysaline feels more ‘vertical’, more purely prayerful; Chrysaline is a sacred-music album. Garrels is clear, though, that the move towards a more ‘vertical’, or prayerful style doesn’t constitute a move away from culture to create “a more insular safe culture”; he says plainly, “that wouldn’t be my heart.” He explained that traditionally his ‘wheelhouse’ has been to say things “poetically, parabolically, with imagery and storytelling” and “in a way that invites, universally, people who don’t believe in the Lord… to at least peer into that story and find their place in it”. But, with Chrysaline Josh felt “a need, even spiritually, to come back to a non-pretentious place with God where I’m not trying to guise the story line”. That isn’t to say that his previous albums ‘guised’ the truths of the gospel, but rather that Chrysaline is an expression of Josh’s deeply felt insight that “there are times where we need to just say it, where we need to just be straightforward”.
The phrase from St. Francis of Assissi, “preach the gospel and when necessary use words” is well known by Christian creatives, and he explains that for him and his peers, all throughout his twenties, it became a “sort of blanket statement for our generation and how we engage in culture”. Josh explains, “it’s a good phrase… in context” but he laments the way in which that phrase has been “treated like scripture… I think there is some truth to it, but to lay that sort of program on young creatives feels like trying to intimidate them away from actually singing about things that are the most important”. Garrels feels that a lot of creatives (himself included) sensed in themselves a “latent need to be acceptable, or included in the cultural conversation” but that need for inclusion became “a fixation that went before a deep desire to glorify the Lord and make him known”. In a moment of self-introspection, Josh expands:
“I think I’ve come long enough to see a wake of destruction, lost faith and work that begins to feel like it’s not completely accomplishing anything. I’m moving on from a sense of ‘art for art's sake’. Maybe... I’ve come to terms with having a little bit of the spirit of an evangelist in me. Man, I love art, I love aesthetic, I love hand-craft creativity, I love making music, and I love searching for new image and sound, it’s a joy to me, but I don’t ascribe to doing that just for its own sake. I actually think these things should have purpose, and not everyone will agree with me on that, but I think I’ve moved on from the thought that just to be a Christian and receive widespread applause or inclusion in the overall industry… doesn’t necessarily equal spiritual success or headway being made for the kingdom. And I don’t have the answer to that, but I’m conscious that I’ve been troubled with the fruit that I’ve seen, in my own life and in peers around me, when the highest goal is to create beautiful work.”
Lina Verovaya
To be clear, Garrels doesn’t despair of his earlier work; he expresses a genuine gratefulness for his career up to this point and the ways that God has blessed his music. A minute later he went on:
“This may seem like stern rhetoric; I do believe strongly that we need to have ways of saying things that are inviting and relevant to the time we live in. The greatest evangelists throughout time have been those who know how to speak the language of their time and the language of the people. So as musicians or artists: What does it mean to speak the language of your time, the aesthetic of your time, that is moving to you and to your peers, but then incarnate the eternal story line and gospel into that? That is having your culture redeemed.”
As a part of the recent shift in his music, Garrels shared the story of his past few years, where, for a time, he was unsure whether he was still called to make music at all. As a new believer in the early 2000’s, Garrels “made simple songs to the Lord” which, as he would describe it, “kinda caught fire”. At this early stage in his music, one of Garrel’s roommates said something that would trouble him for years. He said: “at some point in your life, if you do this (music), the Lord is probably gonna ask you to set it down or test it to see if you’ll be willing to let go”. Josh says of his roommate: “He saw that I grew up in skateboarding counter-culture, where music was primary to your identity, so coming to faith was actually a death to music being intertwined with my identity in the wrong way”. And in hindsight, Josh feels that his roommate probably saw that while there was a purity and sincerity in Josh’s songs, he was also receiving everything from music that he had wanted as a young man.
Fast-forward to 2015, after the release of his full-length album Home, and Garrels career had reached a comfortable measure of success: “Right at that very point my music got put on the altar” he explains,
“[I was] holding music out in front of me in my hands and really praying, ‘Why am I doing this? How should I be approaching this? How have I been approaching this? Because it doesn’t seem like I’m in a healthy place; I’m beginning to feel anxious and my body feels like it’s sorta breaking down… I had to start asking those real questions like, ‘okay, this has been fun and I have received some amount of success in my endeavours in this area, but being honest, Lord I’d rather have your presence and be running in full stride doing what I feel like I’m made to do.’”
Before he started making music, Garrels was a preacher, and he acknowledges that there has always been part of him “half wondering” if he was supposed to go back to speaking from the pulpit. In fact, while he was still living in Portland, Oregon, he was offered a pastorate position. Garrels could have “seamlessly entered into the next season of life, maybe still making albums leisurely on the side, but with my primary focus being local—local people and local city and pastorate”. But over months and months of prayer, of “fumbling around and asking for help”, Garrels felt his calling to music confirmed:
“I’m gonna keep making music, it’s what I love to do, but what needs to change is how I’m doing it, the purpose for which I’m doing it, the theological term for it would be a ‘consecration’ of this thing that you have of yourself, your body, your desires, the work of your hands.”
He continued to express how he felt his calling to music confirmed through his time of holding it out to God:
“I’m gonna surrender this; I’m gonna surrender my life; I’m gonna surrender the music, and put it in front of the Lord and consecrate it and say ‘its yours; what do you want to do with this?’ And then let him bring the wind in the sail or bring the fire that actually ignites this thing… I’ve found my place in the story line that I’m describing by reading about the old saints.”
He mentions a whole string of names: D.L. Moody, A.B. Simpson, Hudson Taylor, and Samuel Logan Brengle, saints whom, Garrels realized, all have one thing in common. All of them, midway through their ‘ministerial or missional careers’ reached the end of themselves, a point of crisis and desperation, where they entered into a new dependency on the power of God for their life and ministry:
“Traditionally there is this phase that you enter into: what’s been called the ‘deeper life’—or once again in old terms, the ‘sanctified’ life—where you can begin to say in all reality, because there has been this exchange that has actually happened… ‘it’s no longer I that live but Christ that lives in me’ and, that can sound like a poetic phrase, or something we merely assent to, but I do believe that it is supposed to be a reality: that when we begin to live in surrender to him, we actually function not only in his power but he begins to live his life through us. I feel like that is what I’ve been grappling with in my music but also in my personal life.”
Our conversation closed with Josh humbly expressing his “deep internal longing for more out of this life with the Lord… What I read in scripture, I want to know that it can be had in the 21st century, in an age right now where we need it so bad; I need it and my generation needs it. It is documented that people have been able to enter into this (deeper life), so there is precedent for it; I long for it; and I’m gonna sing about it, and if and when that thing happens I’m gonna sing about it.”
As we close, Garrels expresses that he feels like he has lots of creative energy and vision, lots of “work in him right now”. Josh just released the first of 2 volumes of reworked early (out of print) material (the first came out late January, the second coming out in April), and one mixtape which will also harken back to earlier work.
Daniel Dorman
Writer & Musician
Photography by Lina Verovaya