Pioneering a New Expression
Pioneering a New Expression
Profile of Taylor Armstrong by Conor Sweetman
Taylor Armstrong is a serene man with bright eyes, gentle speech and a way of making music that plunges headlong into the longing and the wanting. He picks the guitar softly and sighs words sparingly; experimental guitar modulations haunt the peripherals of his newest music, allowing the melodies to both startle and comfort simultaneously. There’s fresh life peeking out from behind the classic singer-songwriter tropes—especially in the snippets from his upcoming project produced with California producer Abe Yellen.
The innocence in Taylor’s disposition emerges from pools of grief, damage, drugs—and the slow swim back to calm, healing rivers. On long nights spent alone in a New Brunswick barn, Taylor would fill his duty to a local 24/7 prayer house, singing the entire night to his re-introduced first love. He would agree, that sometimes, the loneliest times are the most refining. “I was working and leading worship for 6 hour overnight sessions, usually from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am. Nobody would come, it was just me in a barn, singing. I was obsessed with worship and was living like a monk, only reading the Bible—I finished the entire thing in 6 months. I was living alone, working at a prayer house and just cruising on the Holy Ghost—it was my first time devoting time to just me and God.”
“I wasn’t doing it ‘religiously’, I had worked through some de-construction already. I grew up a pastor’s kid, and when my mom told me about Jesus at 4 or 5, she told me ‘you can accept him, but you have to live different, you have to actually mean it.’ My relationship with God was all or nothing.”
Guiding us through his journey to the unusual point of all-night, barn-bound worship, Taylor explains, “At one point in my life, I went the complete opposite way—totally off the rails. And so when I left that, I needed to go all-in back to Christ. I was very into new-age ways of thinking and transcendentalism and shamanism before coming back, so already my mind didn’t do well with religion and ways of thinking that can be seen as objective or limited.
It’s tough for me to talk about that vulnerable part of my life. I want to get better at it, I’ve been practicing it—sharing my story, my testimony. In the writing of my album, I’m scared to share the messy stuff that makes me feel out of control. Coming out of that time, I took a season where I fully enveloped myself in the ‘Christianese’ way of seeing myself and my faith—it might be the cause for my pendulum swing.”
As the pendulum swung, Taylor has embraced a different way of making his music. In reference to his self-titled EP released in 2020, he says, “This record is one of breaking free from the expectations of being a Christian artist. I’m expressing myself in ways that I feel need to be, where I can share of myself in a context that is not explicitly what we would define as ‘worship’ but is more human as a whole… In my earlier songs like ‘Highest Praises’, the lyrics were very straight-forward, while the newer stuff has shifted in style and tone. I’m not gonna bash what I did back then, it’s just where I was at in my journey of identity.”
Zeus Ramirez
On the topic of idealized versions of ourselves, especially in the realm of Christian media, he shares, “I think there’s a platform and a style—think Nashville Christian, CCM, Elevation, Bethel—that looks and sounds a certain way. So, in our minds, we think ‘that’s what it has to look and sound like if I want to be in that world’. So when I went to ministry school at Bethel in California and I didn’t make the worship team three years in a row, it was hard; it made me very insecure because it’s what I thought I wanted.”
“During my time there, I had a lot of people rallying around me—I still believe we need that communal encouragement, but when we rely on it too much, there’s a tension. In some ways I had an unhealthy thing going, and even some of my community was telling me, ‘Taylor, that’s not who you are! That’s not who you’re meant to be… you have a different sound, a different story.’”
Through time, Taylor realized that maybe the calling on his life was more valuable than the vision of what had been presented as the ideal. “I began to wonder, ‘what if my calling is one of pioneering?’ Maybe there is more value in paving a way for something new, forming a new route, than simply fitting into a mould of what already works and has a platform built around it.”
On Instagram, his short, mystifying snippets bring forth subtle resonance that you can feel deep in your bones without having to use all-caps or exclamation marks to make the point. As one commenter ponders plainly, “You know that feeling when a song just kinda hits you really deeply? Don’t know why but this song did to me.”
With Taylor’s desire to pioneer, there is the looming risk faced by every cultural endeavor that relies on economic structures and self-sustaining work. The question becomes, how can we form a new way of seeing Christian art that doesn’t conjure worn out connotations or demonstrate the worst impulses of capitalistic enterprise?
“We’re already seeing little bits of it now—some of the guys I’m running with are bringing a new way forward. If you look at my related artists on Spotify: Antoine Bradford, Allie Paige, Montell Fish, these guys are all independent artists who are making a living and figuring it out. They are turning down record deals! We’re getting scouted by record labels who are waiting to see how we’re doing and biding their time; we’ve been told we need to become one big entity and create a non-profit. But at the point that you sign with that kind of deal, you’re giving up so much of your freedom as an artist.”
“Looking down the road 10 years from now, we’re starting to see that it’s possible. I look at Josh Garrels and John Mark McMillan and see that if they can do it, maybe I can too. It requires a team, a community, and a lot of hard work, but we’re starting to see that independent success is possible without having to marry yourself to a particular platform.”
“Currently, how I pay my rent, how I take care of myself, is happening through music. There are ways to do it, whether it’s through touring, leading worship, songwriting workshops or a variety of other ways—John Mark Pantana is another example of someone doing phenomenal, creating new ways to work out of a healthy place on an entrepreneurial level.”
As a bystander, you can see the threads connecting this ever-expanding group. They are slowly, organically building each other up in a way that attempts to avoid calcification or a hardening into product-oriented machinery, rather than the outgrowth of deep and beautiful work.
In this new context, Taylor has found the community and motivation that he prayed for constantly throughout his barn-room prayer house days. “All these artists are now my friends, and I prayed so hard for that. When I was living in small-town New Brunswick, I was isolated, but not because I wanted to be. Nonetheless, I’m still reaping the harvest from that season of intense spiritual discipline. I was so lonely and I prayed so hard for companionship and at least some form of musical success. Now, it feels like dreams are coming true. There are things that are happening right now where God is reminding me ‘remember how you spent that year? This is the fruit of that work’”.
In the midst of the new quality of inspiration and musical craftsmanship, Taylor also has to manage the anxiety of how his new work will be received outside the normal avenues of Christian music. He explains, “I’ve had nights where I’m lying in bed, thinking about all the money I’m putting into this new album with Abe, and I wonder, ‘is it even worth it?’ It’s not music that is tailored toward a ‘product’ that my listeners are familiar with. Rather, it’s an emotional, expressive, symphonic experiment. And that’s scary.”
“I lost my mom when I was 17. The song ‘Always’ is just an expression of that grief—the grief that still follows me around like a shadow, and that was it. I felt so much freedom in not having to attach a phrase like ‘but God you are here’. I’m learning that sometimes you don’t need to show the resolutions to your grief.” Taylor peers into the bigger picture going on above and around us, embracing the liminal space while knowing this moment and this music is not all there is.
Conor Sweetman
Editor & Designer
Conor is the editor of Ekstasis Magazine
Find Taylor Armstrong’s music on Spotify & Apple Music
Photography supplied by Taylor Armstrong