Creating at the Crossroads
Creating at the Crossroads
An Interview with Jess Ray by Adalyn Tibbits
“Into your hands I commit my spirit
Into your arms I surrender all
I am but the banks that your river runs through
I’m helpless against you
I couldn’t change this, and I wouldn’t want to”
Jess Ray’s fingers take shape into chords on an invisible guitar neck as she air-strums to the spoken chorus of her new song “At Your Mercy.” She tells me of its birth, a heart cry from the core sung out from her couch in the company of a burden. “I just started singing,” she says. “It’s me confessing before everyone: ‘I do not know the answers. I know now, more than ever, less about what I believe. Yet God is a mystery that is too good to have been made up.’” She tells the moment as if she’s still in it—a morning in her living room with her 1960’s Gibson J-45 in hand, falling backwards into the enigma of an undeniable God.
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North Carolinian through and through, Jess Ray was born and raised in Raleigh, where she currently dwells with her husband, two golden retrievers, and a bounty of guitars. Her eclectic musical taste originated from frequenting Skillet concerts, playing bass for jazz orchestra, and growing up to the sounds of The Beatles and Keith Green from her dad’s guitar. Inhabiting multiple musical universes led to what her listeners call her style: “friendly folk.” “I had a teacher in high school come up to me and say, ‘you’re a folk singer, do you know that?’ and I didn’t even know what folk was,” Ray recalls.
Her folk feel remains steadfast, reverberating in her older record Sentimental Creatures all the way to Baby Take My Hand. I can still hear her rich alto tone filling my college dorm room years ago when I heard “Runaway” for the first time. Ray’s tunes are conversations, the needed companion in the passenger seat, the invitation you were waiting for. From lyrics to soundscape, her records paint Jesus as a friend with a personality, a human laden with love for other humans.
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Ray shares about growing up in a Bible Belt town, the Southern culture in the nineties and early two-thousands stuck in a bubble of time. This bubble—an undisturbed, bland American dream—popped in 2020 with the onslaught of the pandemic. Young people were confronted with the choice to either hold onto their faith, by however thin a thread, or to abandon it, asking themselves “did I do this because I was raised in it, or is it my own?”
Ray’s wrestling birthed two years’ worth of songs. Those songs comprise her newest record, Born Again, set to release in the fall. She describes tapping into her singer-songwriter sound in this new album, simultaneously embracing a love for good beats and chill vocals. The sound subtly leans into fresh pop and lo-fi textures. Ray’s creative risks, lyrically and symphonically, continue to blur the lines between secular and sacred.
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Channeling Ray’s unique tone started with stepping out of the typical Christian music lane and saying yes to how the Maker created her to sing. “Because of the other industries I have a foot in, it’s been fun to go, ‘I don’t have to sing the worship anthem. My voice sounds the best and is most rich when I chill out,’” Ray says. “I feel a vast wealth of content for music, but we’ve stayed so in our box of a ‘type’ of Christian music.”
What makes the “Christian art” box worth staying in? Is it the guaranteed formula of recording a top 40 worship hit? The reward of praise from religious people? It seems we’ve neglected the responsibility of stewarding our gifts in a secular world. It seems terrifying to make art that might speak to a sinful society, so we stay—within the lane, within the church walls, within the coddling arms of comfort—instead of grabbing the gift by the throat and running towards the untapped glory of a fiercely creative God. “There are endless things we can say about God,” Ray laments. “There are just a million paths to take, and this modern era has done a bad job at representing that in Christian art. Christians could be some of the most innovative and influential voices in art.”
Ray tells me of a longing for authenticity, of learning to care less about the label and removing the boundaries put around a boundless Lord. There is an ache, a calling, to create fruitful art that permanently transforms amid conditions that glorify an American expression of a compromised Christianity. For Jess, responding to the call is sometimes playing bars or clubs and then sometimes playing churches. It’s making a creative mess instead of putting parameters around the gift. It’s abandoning a category while being okay with association to a category. It’s writing music about an Eternal Lover for people who’ve never tasted such jealousy. It’s wrestling coexisting with wonder.
“I always push the boundaries about how to talk about God,” she tells me with a gentle fervor. “I’m using a lot of new language around the subject of God and coloring way outside the lines of what Christians have traditionally felt like they can say about God.”
The songs in Born Again run with rivers of color, unearthing a treasure trove of textures with each listen. From garbled local radio to the waters of Lockeland Springs, every choice woven into the mastered mix is deliberate. Ray describes the creative process as “painting and coloring on the songs.” Her three-person production team has a rule: to simply express and not get too serious too soon. The trio embraces a season of making musical messes and open-ended creation. The results are mystic.
One song in particular, “Lilies and Sparrows,” shines with a symbiotic symphony of commotion and calm. “The whole song you’re hearing these sounds pipe up on either side,” describes Ray. “It’s a very beautiful, peaceful song, but you’ll actually hear a lot of chaos in the background, because we’re trying to give this sense of real life. There is a peaceful path available to us in God, but we will be constantly fighting the noise of everything else.”
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I asked Ray what she wants someone to feel as they sit on their couch or drive in their car and listen through her album. She told me the songs are both a bomb and an invitation for the ones on the fence, the ones who’ve watched churches fall apart, the ones wrestling with a choice and a conviction. Jess herself lived on that brink. “I’m not someone from the outside,” she told me. “This album is for those people who identify as true believers, who are enduring even if every other part of their faith feels as if it is unraveling. I hope it makes those people feel seen and less lonely, because they’re a part of a family that is thousands of years old.”
Born Again journeys from burn out, through grief for the kindred spirits who walked away, into the valley of a failing ideal, and arrives at the crossroad of love and question. Ray describes the territory as the tension between wondering if the world “will overwhelm the little bit of love I have for God or if the little bit of love is enough to say, ‘I do not understand it all, yet I still love you and want to follow you.’”
In the deep waters, we discover a new side of Abba’s heart. An intimacy with Christ develops that could not develop elsewhere, and he bestows on us a holy ache. What a privilege to be a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit and a steward of his person. We get to learn what grieves him, what delights him, and how he designed us to love him. He is waiting for his beloved to follow into the endless waters of his love for his bride.
“Is God a person or is he a system? Is he some beliefs I had? Or a person I had a relationship with?” Jess asks. “Can we learn daily to go with him? The Author and Creator of all this, I submit to that. When I fully submit to what he says, he has never let me down.”
Adalyn Tibbits
Writer & Photographer
Adalyn studied Creative Writing and Music in Worship at North Park University in Chicago. She now resides in Northern Washington, where she leads revival worship and writes poetry. Find more of Adalyn’s work here: www.adalynjoy.com
Find Jess Ray’s Work Here