Throughout his 17 years as an artist, Bebo Norman has been applauded for laying it all on the table with his lyrical transparency and musical vulnerability. Lights of Distant Cities--the singer-songwriter's eighth studio album--was co-produced with close friend and longtime live collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Gabe Scott along with Ben Shive (Andrew Peterson, Sara Groves). Norman's music provides a common ground for the songwriter and the listener to collaborate in a discourse on life's curious details, and how those day-to-day unknowns play in the greater mystery of faith. 

 

"The last few years have been pretty intense--a long, slow progression, or digression, into a spiritual desert," Norman remembers, disclosing the process of writing songs in the dark of the desert. "I struggled to write anything hopeful. But I wanted to be true to the season I was in, so I simply wrote about the hopelessness I was experiencing." 

 

With the same transparency that has attracted listeners to his lyrics for nearly two decades, Norman admits, "My tendency is to allow the darkness to override the hope I have in Christ. A few months prior to recording I experienced an intense season of recovery and renewal. I finished nearly all of the songs after the recovery process. So you have desperation and recovery, darkness and light, represented within the same song." 

 

A touching contrast evidenced throughout the 11-song track list, and especially affective when heard within the brief parameters of individual songs, he says the end result is perhaps the most unique offering of his career. As a husband to Roshare, his wife of nine years, and dad to Smith, 5, and Miller, 3, Bebo's perspectives have broadened dramatically since he first graced the music scene as a post-collegiate bachelor.

These perspectives, he says, poignantly color the hopeless to hopeful songs on Lights of Distant Cities. I had the great opportunity to speak with Bebo about his new single "The Broken."

 

 

Speaking about this song speaks a lot about the songwriting process of the whole album, honestly. My tendency in my songwriting is to look around me and to see the world and the struggle of life and difficulty of life. Some of that is about relationships, marriage, family community, and spiritually what I'm struggling with. Some of that is as broad as travelling around the world with Compassion International and seeing the condition of man--the brokenness of things and the struggle in developing nations. 

 

My tendency sometimes is to allow those difficulties in this world to overwhelm me a little bit. When I was starting to write this album, I didn't feel like love was winning. If love is not winning, is God not winning? And if God is not winning, then who is God? There's where my brain can go sometimes. With this song, it was very much that way. I wrote the first half of almost all of these songs in a season where I was trying to understand, and feeling a bit desperate. My last album was about longing for things. So, these songs started out of that season of desperation. Then, God gave me this real season of recovery. It became less about knowing things are true in my head and more about that beautiful moment where we feel the truth. It was God allowing me to feel intensity again--asking all of these questions and looking at the world which can seem hopeless at times. 

 

I found myself at this dinner for Compassion International. An African man was speaking who was raised in extreme poverty and it was interesting to get his take on poverty. He kept hearkening back to this idea that poverty is not as much a lack of things, but to him real poverty is a lack of hope, when you feel there's no way out. He talked about a poverty of the soul. Physical poverty takes people to that place of hopelessness, but it points to the real condition of poverty of the soul. That's where this song came from, this beautiful moment of recognizing what we're called to as believers, which is our tendency to feel hopeless. The song is a reminder that there's a great and intense hope in the completed work of Christ.

 

The bridge is based on Revelation 2:1-5: The Loveless Church: "To the angel of the church of Ephesus write, ‘These things says He who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lamp stands:  "I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars; and you have persevered and have patience, and have labored for My name's sake and have not become weary. Nevertheless I have this against you, that you have left your first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works, or else I will come to you quickly and remove your lamp stand from its place—unless you repent.

 

 

For this man who escaped the poverty of the soul, he found the hope of Christ. The goal in the recording of this song we really wanted to create music that expressed the emotion of the song, even if you didn't hear the lyrics. There's a blend of talking about brokenness and hope and what the real hope of the world is. The musical bed feels like real hope and joy, and the lyrics are about allowing God to intervene and show us about real hope in Christ. The transition from the last album to this album is found in this song, where in "I Hope You See Jesus" I'm speaking to myself and to the Church, with a more horizontal conversation and in this song I'm speaking more vertically as God really showed up as I was writing for this album. These songs started more desperate and became extremely vertical. 

 

This album is about being in that place where I am asking these questions in these songs is that I know the answers. Those two elements of faith on the opposite ends of the spectrum where faith is about remembering, choice and decision and willing ourselves to love because truth is truth even if we don't feel it. That part of faith is critical and often times overlooked because it can seem legalistic and black and white. The flipside of that is when faith is what we feel--being overwhelmed by the Holy Spirit and being moved and reminded of how beautiful the work of redemption is.

When I was younger, so much of my faith was based on emotions and feelings, and as I've gotten older I've realized that emotions come and go, and feels bright and hopeful some days and dark and doubtful some days. In some seasons I have to rely on the fact that truth is truth even when I don't feel it. The bridge is really the takeaway message, "Can we fall in love again, for the first time." Allow God's love to push us into a broken world.

 

 

The song is an extraordinarily eloquent musical presentation of the Gospel. What's so amazing about this album is that I connect to every song personally. What I've come to realize is that the bridge of this great song is the cry of my heart: "Can we fall in love again for the first time / We wanna fall in love again just like the first time / Can we fall in love again?"

 

I was saved 13 years ago next month and I don't ever want my faith to grow cool or "lukewarm" as Jesus warns the church of Laodicea in Revelation 3:14-22. Instead, like Bebo, I want to experience my first love and the excitement of what it was like to fall in love with Jesus for the first time, to be born again.

 

Bebo's story is also my story and anyone struggling with the balance of life and faith can truly relate to the incredible messages of these songs. They only grow deeper with each listen--my favorite type of album. Thanks so much, Bebo, for writing and singing some of the deepest and most meaningful songs I've ever heard. As this song so poignantly challenges listeners, "God of the Universe / When we hear the cries that pour out from all the earth / Will You give us hands to reach out and heal the hurt Of the broken?" I lose it when Bebo sings those incredible words, and one of my prayers for the Kingdom of God is that when God and non-believers see us as Christians, that we reflect Jesus. 

 

Corporate Prayer of Confession: "Father, you tell us in your Word that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. We confess that we have frequently relaxed our faith. We have allowed ourselves to become cynical, and our cynicism has boiled over with slander, criticism, prayerlessness, and pessimism. How easily we've allowed ourselves to crumple under the stresses of our lives. Forgive us for our smallness of faith.  In your mercy, hear us, for Jesus' sake." Amen.

 

(You can listen to this great song here.)