Since her debut record in
1998, Nichole Nordeman has been a staple on Christian radio
with her melodic cry to Christ. As she celebrates the
release of her first Greatest Hits package, Recollection:
The Best of Nichole Nordeman, she took the time to
reflect God’s Glorious Grace in her life, ministry and
music.
One of the things that I love about seeing you live Nichole,
is you really take a lot of time to share your stories with
the audience. Have you always done that?
You know I have. It’s funny, I can ramble and ramble and
ramble and sometimes I wonder if people are sitting in the
audience thinking, ‘just get on with it, sing your song!’
But yeah, I’ve never done anything else. I’m not a really
natural performer and by that I mean I didn’t grow up
aspiring to be on the stage. Many artists say they were
singing in a hairbrush when they were 5 years old, and have
that performer personality, that just wasn’t me.
I’ve always been a pretty private person and a journal
writer, so I wasn’t at all prepared to do what God asked me
to do which was to go out there and sing songs and share
stories, so I deal with it the best way that I know how
which is to talk about my life as I’m learning and share
songs about it.
Your Best Of
collection includes two new songs. Tell me about your
current single, Sunrise.
I was online the other day – this is what artists do that
they will never admit – just poking around the internet
trying to hear some feedback about what people are saying
about the new single, and I came across this blog some girl
had written. She was just being totally honest which she’s
entitled to and she said, ‘You know, I heard that song
Sunrise and I like it and it’s good, but I just don’t
know if it’s deep enough to be a Nichole Nordeman song, the
lyrics are just not deep enough.’
I wrote that song from such an honest and simple place; it’s
not breaking any deep theological ground and I guess not
every song I write has to come from that deep angst place,
but it’s just a song about hope. Anyone who’s ever walked
through a situation that feels profoundly hopeless will tell
you how hard it is to be around people who keep saying,
‘just hang in there, it’s gonna get better, you know, the
Sun will come up and there’ll be a new day.’ That’s so true
and we know it’s true, but when you’re in that valley,
there’s nothing harder to hear than someone who is being
overly hopeful.
So the song is just about walking through that experience
and trusting in the sunrise that inevitability rises after
the long night.
When you went through the process of compiling the new
record, from choosing the songs, to the artwork and
everything involved, did you have the opportunity to spend
some quiet time just reflecting on your entire career, what
God has done and how your life was so dramatically changed?
You know I did. When I talk about the fact that the record
has just been released, there’s a little bit of disbelief
that I’ve been fortunate and blessed enough to make music in
this industry long enough to have a Best Of project.
I continue to pinch myself quite a bit that I’m not still
waiting on tables in Nashville and that God had this plan
for my music and for my ministry. That continues to
surprise me; it’s a pretty overwhelming feeling.
When we were selecting the songs for this record there was a
lot of walking down memory lane for sure and just listening
to certain songs and remembering the place I was in
spiritually whether it was a mountaintop or a deep valley,
and yeah, it was kind of like going back and opening your
diary and reading about where you were during certain places
in your life. The songs represent so many mile markers for
me.
I remember watching a story on the Fox News Channel
regarding Hugh Hefner’s 80th birthday. They
played a 10-second soundbite from him regarding what the
milestone meant to him, and twice during that 10-second spot
he said, ‘I just want to leave a legacy’…..
Wow.
…and the minute I heard him say that, I began to hear you
sing Legacy. It was a beautiful moment where God took the darkness of our
broken world and immediately shined His Light. I couldn’t
get your song out of my head.
Wow. Thank you for sharing that with me. I think what’s
important to us and what matters to us will influence the
kind of legacy we want to leave, so for Hef, that means one
thing.
As a Christian I just feel like I’m constantly having to
readjust what’s important and what I’m investing in. People
are so quick to assume that because I’m a Christian artist
and making Christian music that everything is perfect when
the truth is I get my priorities fairly screwed up in my own
ministry when I make decisions that might be great for the
touring world but not great for my family. There are
moments that what’s important to me gets a little bit
skewed. So even within ministry, or maybe especially in
ministry, it’s just a constant reevaluating of what’s
important, what am I investing in, what’s it going to look
like, how is this decision going to impact my 3-year old and
my husband and my spirit? You know, legacies are constantly
evolving, I don’t think they’re necessarily what they say at
our memorial services; it’s a continual ebb and flow of
change.
Hey, take me back to your days of being a waitress because I
love those stories…
You know, it’s so funny, you talk about God having a plan
for your life. I was so lost myself, I mean I was a
Christian and I obviously loved the Lord, but I really
wasn’t necessarily walking with Him very well or very
closely, and when I finished college in Colorado Springs I
moved out to LA with a girlfriend of mine, not really with
any direction, I kind of thought, well, if I want to do
music it was either Nashville, and you know, who on earth
would ever move to Nashville unless you want to do country
music, or New York, and that seemed too cold, or Los
Angeles.
I had some family out in LA so we moved out there and once
again, got jobs waiting tables, and I just didn’t have a
clue what I was doing, David. Looking back, I felt so,
unintentional; I didn’t have any direction or even dreams.
But, even then, God’s Hand continued to protect me and sort
of move me inch by inch along this path that He was laying
before me even before my knowledge. I entered a songwriting
contest, again not with any agenda other than, well, it
might be fun to meet other musicians, and get a record deal
out of that one event, and of course the journey is a lot
more complicated and lengthy than that but that’s what got
me to Nashville. Even when I got to Nashville and I’m
writing these songs and trying to figure out what it means
to record in a real live studio with real musicians, I just
continued to think, why me? I’m a really good waitress who
likes to write music by myself at about midnight. And that
was the extent of it. I’m still blown away that God has
grown this into what He has.
That takes us back to your days of waitressing with someone
that we both know, Jill Tomality, who among other things,
co-wrote Real to Me
with you. How did that all come together?
The song came out of some latenight conversations that Jill
and I were having over the phone. We’d talk about our
spiritual lives and what we were wrestling with and the
questions that are raised. She’s just one of those honest
people in my life that I can just really let my guard down
with, and both of us were sharing some frustrations that we
were experiencing in our faith walks and with our church,
and just feeling the sense of how God gets so over-hyped.
With both of us existing in the Christian music industry
where it’s all about Christian literature and speakers and
authors and music and everything is just so, well, we’re
just immersed in this culture, which is a wonderful thing
and at the same time, it starts to feel that God is this
product that’s being schlepped at concerts and conventions.
Jill and I were just talking about wanting to really sort of
shake that dust off a little bit and to experience - for the
first time in awhile - what it means to enter into a
relationship with God that just feels honest and real and
personal and not so slick and marketed, if that makes
sense.
We were talking about that for several nights in a row and
that song just came out of those conversations of just
asking God to be real to us.
You’ve always been well-versed with Scripture, but the way
God’s Word has sunk in and moved your life is quite
different now than awhile ago.
You know it’s really funny, my relationship with The Bible
has just changed so much because I grew up in a church and
within a Christian home and in a Christian school from 2nd
grade through the 12th grade, so I have such a
rich foundation in knowledge of Scripture just based on my
early education as a kid, but somewhere along the line, the
Bible became to me – maybe because of Bible classes and
schooling – it sort of became another textbook, like
something I had to do for my class or I had to memorize for
a test on Friday, that I had to study the history of such
and such, and as fascinating as that was, I think for me for
a long time after that I just felt like the place the Bible
had in my life was this obligation.
Many times I would hear people say form the pulpit or a
woman’s conference, ‘Make sure you carve out quiet time with
The Lord and time with just He and you and The Bible.’ It
just felt to me like a heavy sense of have to instead
of get to.
I’m not sure when that changed, but for me now, God has just
shown me what a privilege it is to get to spend time with
the words that He gave us, especially in the Gospels, that
we get to read about what Christ meant when He loved people
and how He lived that out in the smallest of moments and the
most anonymous of moments.
Those
moments used to feel like lessons I had to learn and
memorize and now they just feel like these little gifts.
I’m finding things in Scripture that I probably missed
because it was in the have to category instead of the
get to category. So, I’m just now rediscovering
Scripture in a totally different way and it’s a really
beautiful part in my relationship with God now.
Listen to Nichole and other
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