Great Frederick Fair 2018

A four-time GRAMMY® nominee, American Music Award winner, GMA Dove Award winner, K-LOVE Fan Award winner and Billboard’s 2016 pick for Hot Christian Songwriter of the Year, everybody knows that MATTHEW WEST has gone all in in his music career, but with his eighth studio album set to release, he’s ready for his fans to know that he wants to go all in in every area of his life.

The album, aptly titled All In, released September 22, 2017 with Sparrow Records and is largely an answer to a question West has been asking himself lately: “What does it look like to be all in, like never before in my life?”

As someone who lives his faith in the public eye—West says he knows how easy it can be to coast, to pretend his spiritual life is in a better place than it actually is.

“That’s a dangerous place to be,” he says. “That’s what the Bible talks about. Being lukewarm. So I’ve had this idea that I want to be all in like never before. I want to be all in on this record, I want to be all in with the songs that I write, I want to be all in with my time with the Lord, I want to be all in with my wife, I want to be all in with my relationship with my daughters.”

Because he was writing from a place of such personal conviction, longtime West fans are going to be able to hear something a little different on this album: the most vulnerable music of his career.

Since 2009, the singer/songwriter has been collecting stories from people all over the world. By now, he has well over 40,000 of them. And for the past several albums, he has taken their stories of heartache and hope and turned them into songs. All In includes songs like these, dedicated to others’ stories, but this album will give listeners a glimpse into West’s personal stories as well.  

While writing early this year in a cabin in Tennessee, West says he was surprised by how personal his writing was: “I scared myself a bit. I guess it was just time. Time to take some inventory of my own story, where I’ve been, where I am now, and where I’m going.”

All In is an album that encourages and inspires from the first track to the last. Each song connects with listeners by challenging them to go all in with different areas of life. West’s story might as well be our story too; for that fear of regret, of not living life to the fullest, is in all of us.

This is exactly what the title track speaks to. The lyrics of the pop anthem “All In,” set the tone for the 13 tracks that follow. The song honestly admits in the first verse, Turns out safe is just another word for regret.

To combat regret, we must do what the chorus says, which is the heart cry of the album: I’m going all in / Headfirst into the deep end / I hear you calling / And this time the fear won’t win.

Through the writing of All In, West recalled memorable moments from his faith journey, moments that were turning points in which he had to decide if he would be all in or all out. One of those happened years ago at the Assembly Hall Arena (now the State Farm Center) in Champaign, Ill., during a Steven Curtis Chapman concert.

The song inspired by this moment, “The Sound of a Life Changing,” tells the story: Just a poor college boy making noise, writing my first songs / Steven Curtis up on stage singing “Speechless” / Left me speechless and amazed / Tears rolling down my face / I heard a still small voice say, “That’s gonna be you someday / Telling the world about amazing grace / Telling the world about a God that saves.”

“I called Steven to join me at the cabin to write the song with me,” says West. “How’s that for a full circle moment?”

Another big name in the faith inspired what West says might be the most personal song on the album, “The Beautiful Things We Miss.” During a conversation with Rev. Billy Graham, West asked the renowned evangelist if he had any regrets.

“He told me his biggest regret is that he spent so much time traveling away from his family,” recalls West.

The more contemplative ballad reflects on how easy it is to become focused on the things in life that won’t matter in the end. Quoting the chorus, West, who has been married for over 14 years and has two daughters, says, “I don’t want to look back someday and find everything that really mattered was right in front of me this whole time.”

In this vein, the album includes songs written for and about his wife and daughters. LuLu, his oldest daughter, even jumped in to sing on “Becoming Me,” a touching tribute to West’s mom, wife and daughters.

“I can remember overhearing my mom praying for me when I was a child,” says West, who wrote the song from the perspective of his daughters’ admiration of their mom. “The mother in the song has gone all in with her love of God and family.”

West also wrote a song specifically for his wife, Emily. “Jesus & You” expresses gratitude for the anchors in West’s life. As the chorus of the soulful melody says, When I think about the only things in life that pull me through / I hit my knees for Jesus and you.

“This song is about being all in with my marriage,” West explains, “communicating how I feel about her, rather than assuming she already knows.”

All In is not all personal. West still found inspiration from others’ stories to write songs like “Power Love Sound Mind,” which he wrote after reading about a soldier who was struggling with post traumatic stress disorder; and “Dream,” taken from stories about people who needed to dream again after going through a major struggle.

West is still, and probably always will be, collecting stories through popwe.org, a web home to a nonprofit he started with his dad, Pastor Joe West. The mission of popwe is to encourage people to craft, share, and live a more meaningful life. West even formed a new company, Story House Collective, built to encourage and support the next generation of storytellers who work in the music industry.

One of these next-generation storytellers will be joining West on his All In Tour this fall. Up-and-comer Leanna Crawford will open for West as they hit 38 cities across the U.S. 

“I absolutely love writing songs, and I love watching those songs come to life in the recording studio,” West says. “But it’s getting on the bus, hopping on stage in city after city and carrying that music to a live audience night after night that completes the creative circle.”

It’s no wonder that the artist who is giving it his all in every area of his life—faith, family, songwriting—wouldn’t also be doing that for his fans who come to see him on tour, where he will be all in, doing what God called him to all those years ago: telling the world about amazing grace, telling the world about a God who saves.

Some years from now, the name Jordan Feliz might be the obvious answer to a trivia question that goes something like this:

What artist launched his career as a hard-touring heavy metal singer, then switched gears to become a church worship leader, before finally signing a Nashville record deal and emerging as a preeminent soulful-r&b-groove-pop artist in CCM?

Well, if the question comes up someday, you’ll already know the answer: Jordan Feliz.

Fronting the West Coast buzz band A Current Affair gave Jordan’s powerful vocals some major exposure right out of high school. The band performed on the Warped Tour and other high profile gigs before dissolving. But heavy metal was never Jordan’s passion; it was just a fun experience with his friends and a way to stretch musically. As a child, Jordan had grown up with R&B artists like Sam Cooke and Earth Wind & Fire providing the soundtrack to frequent family road trips. Artists from what his father called “the good music era.” Those
were the sounds and stylings that stuck in Jordan’s musical memory and by the time he was old enough to realize that his own singing voice was a gift, it was those early groove-funk-soul singers that had shaped his personal aesthetic. If he was going to make records, those were the kind of influences he wanted to draw from. Which brings us back to that Nashville record deal he signed with Centricity Music.

Jordan Feliz’s first full-length solo project, The River, reinterprets the rich influence of 70’s sensibilities in a modern pop context. Intentionally constructing uncluttered tracks free of production tricks and excessive instrumentation, Jordan instead focused on arrangements that were designed to give his fine-grit-sandpaperysmooth vocals center stage. The eleven songs on The River are soul-influenced pop numbers, but the instruments present are precise and articulate in their voicings and melodies, saying only as much as they need to and no more.

“I was the kid growing up with the headphones on listening to every lick and reading the lyrics,” Jordan says. “My dad had a collection of cassettes. My mom had some vinyl. I discovered artists like the Commodores, Bill Withers, and Nat King Cole through them. When I was in the studio making The River, I told my producers I didn’t want thirty guitars stacked on one track. I didn’t want five different guitar tones. I want to put one guitar sound on a song and find a way to make that one lick sound massive, the way those 70’s artists were able to do. If you stack too many sounds on one track you can lose the song in all that clutter. Building ‘clean’ tracks on The River was very intentional.” 

Tag-team produced by Colby Wedgeworth (Lincoln Brewster, The Main, Lydia) and Josh Silverberg (Newsboys, Jon Foreman, Plumb), The River is packed with radio-friendly pop melodies that manage to hit those marks without compromising Jordan’s unique musical personality. The best example of his singular vision is the record’s powerhouse title track and first single, The River, which has already spent ten weeks on the radio charts at #1. While it sounds like a pulse-quickening mega-hit from the first listen—instantly singable and repeatedly listenable—The River actually rides on a deep current of soul-driven funk influence that serves to set it apart from other contemporary radio fare. 

“I’m a big melody guy,” Jordan admits, “and musically The River is my own personal happy place. It’s a great driving groove that just feels good to sing. The song itself is an invitation to anyone who hears it—whether they’re stuck in pride and legalism or wallowing down in the mess they’ve made of their lives—it’s an invitation to take whatever we have and to run to Jesus. It’s an invitation to go down in amazing grace and to rise up being made new.”

The song Beloved on the other hand, while every bit as soulful and catchy as the The River, was penned from a more personal and autobiographical posture. Jordan’s wife was about to give birth to their first child, and Jordan began to consider what he, as a new father, would most want to communicate to the daughter he was about to meet.

“I wrote ‘Beloved’ before she was born,” Jordan says, “and I wrote it with two guys who both had little girls. The thing I really wanted my daughter to grow up knowing was that no matter what the world tells her, she’s beloved. She’s loved beyond compare. Regardless of what any of the people around her think, she doesn’t have to be concerned with measuring up because I’m gonna love her unconditionally as long as she lives.”

Picking up lyrically right where Beloved leaves off, another pristine and powerfully grooving track, Never Too Far Gone, completes the thought of a father’s love for his child serving as a living analogy of God’s love for each of his children.

“There was a time in my life,” Jordan recalls, “when I was running back to God but at the same time feeling ashamed and unworthy of his love. Having my own daughter and experiencing the massive love I have for her really opened my eyes to how Christ looks at us though. No matter how much I feel like I’ve messed up, no matter how far gone I think I am, the gospel tells me there is nothing I can do that will separate me from the love of my heavenly father. Nothing. It’s so clear to me now that anything I feel for my daughter is just a small echo of the love God feels for me and for all of us.”

Finding that center of truest identity in the love of God is a theme that runs deep through the songs on The River, but finds its most direct expression in the massive pop track Best Of Me. Best Of Me is a towering cut that manages to marry a blistering melodic intensity to an honest lyric. Feliz’s vocals drive right to the heart of the common struggle to lay down one’s own dreams in order to embrace God’s dreams instead.

“For so long I resisted giving my whole life to God because I was afraid of losing control of who I am,” Jordan explains. “Best Of Me was born out of the realization that when I finally did surrender my life to the Lord, in him I found the best possible version of myself. In the moment I gave everything to him, my identity shifted from being defined by who I am, to being defined by who he is. And when your identity rests in who he is, you can weather the storms that would have otherwise torn you apart.”

Having just navigated a long and stormy transition after leaving the security of local music connections and a church staff position in California in order to move to Tennessee, Jordan Feliz and his wife experienced firsthand what it means to learn to rest in the simplicity of faith in a Father who daily provides for the needs of His children. In fact, they set out from California without even enough money to make it past Phoenix. But along each leg of the journey, some music gig opened up that provided enough funds to drive the next leg. By
the time they reached their new home, Jordan had actually made several hundred dollars from the move.

“We believed God had made it clear from the beginning we should move to Nashville,” Jordan says, “but that didn’t mean it was easy. After we got here I couldn’t find a job. My wife and I were sharing one car. I was posting handyman ads on Craigslist and working as a valet downtown. I could hardly get any people to write songs with me.”

At that point, Jordan and his wife found out they were pregnant. The uncertainties and pressures and responsibilities were quickly mounting. Their whole lives felt like they were up in the air. Jordan describes it as a frightening time, but one that drove them to prayer and dependence on God. And in amazing fashion, they saw those prayers begin to be answered.

“The last year has just been like a whirlwind of good things falling into place,” Jordan says. “I signed the record deal with Centricity in February of 2015 and I finished my EP July 5th. Then, I actually won a brand new car, completely out of the blue, right before my daughter was born July 20th. My first single went to radio July 31st and shot up to #1, and the love I’ve received from radio and from new fans has been an incredible blessing. I got a slot on the Big Daddy Weave Tour which has been an amazing experience as well. And then we went right back in the studio to finish the full-length project. My life feels like it’s gone from zero to one hundred miles per hour in a blink! After so much difficulty and uncertainty, God answered our prayers. He is there for all of us and all we have to do is remain faithful.”