The Pivot

Every single person who knows Tim Timmons seems to have this same response when his name comes up: “Dude! Timmons! I LOVE that guy!” It just seems like he has poured his heart and life into every third person I’ve met in the past few years. He’s a musician, a pastor by default, a writer and a family man. The crazy thing? Twenty years ago he was told he had five years to live. Talk about a pivot, r...

Ben Young is an author, a speaker, and a pastor at Second Baptist Church in Houston (one of the largest churches in Texas), But what’s super fun about this for me is that he is the brother of one of my former bandmates, Cliff Young, of Caedmon’s Call. I used to see Ben ALL the time, as the band really used Second Baptist as our headquarters. It’s where we rehearsed, borrowed musical gear (with at...

Davy Basinger was the lead singer of a band called Bleach. If you were in a youth group in an American church in 1998 then you know EXACTLY who I’m talking about. Bleach and my first band, The Normals, were on the same label and had the same manager, and so we found ourselves getting to play a bunch of shows with them when we were getting started. They were a few years ahead of us and they became...

Christine Dente is best known as one half of the duo Out of the Grey, but of course, she’s much more than that, particularly to their three kids and now two grandkids. I don’t know her terribly well, but I saw she had just written her first novel and that fascinated me, so I was thrilled when she was into coming over and chatting about it. I won’t lie, I jumped in way too deep too fast for any tra...

Chris Llewellyn was excited to come over and NOT talk about music. I met him years ago when I worked closely for a season with his band, Rend Collective. That crew is easily the hardest working bunch of musicians I’ve ever met, and quarantine, while not great for business, has given Chris some time to breathe deep and take a little break for a bit. It was fun to catch up and talk about Chris’s jou...

I’m a big fan of Savannah Locke. She is an incredibly gifted writer and communicator, and as always, my conversation with her went places I did not expect. We talk about hiring your replacement, starting a business, John Mayer’s middle name… We call a number of grown men “angel babies”. Most powerfully for me, we got to unpack the season of life where we met: When she was trying to see if the musi...

You might know Janice Gaines as an award-winning Gospel singer, which she is. But there are so many other incredible things about Janice you have to know: She is brilliant. She got her Masters of Divinity because learning Greek and Hebrew sounded FUN. She’s a mother of two young boys, a wife, a nationally recognized speaker, and she’s on staff at her local predominately white church, as directory...

Pete Marra is a serial entrepreneur with a deep love of Scripture. Already he’s been a tech CEO, a church planter, an underground missionary, and a self-made millionaire who lost everything overnight. He’s a devoted husband and father and he has led his family on a life of wild adventures. Our paths crossed about a year ago and we became fast friends. He has challenged me in a great way and encour...

Nancy is an author, a teacher, a mother and a wife. She sadly has a unique story with grief, but one that has allowed her to serve thousands and thousands of people over the last number of years. I’ve heard Nancy‘s name a lot over the years, but getting to know her over this conversation was delightfully surprising. She is full of energy and deep knowledge and wisdom. This was a fun and life-givin...

It was so fun to talk with Jillian Edwards. We got to talk about new motherhood and how it is both shaping her songs, and a metaphor for the songs themselves. She is clearly driven by music, and this drive has led her down some interesting and unique paths. She has a new record out called “Meadow”. It is beautiful, warm and inviting, and you need to listen to it. CLICK HERE for more info about Jil...

Michael Blanton was the manager and A&R guy who discovered and developed Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith and Rich Mullins, among many others. He and his circle of friends were at the heart of the birth of Christian music, and his career boasts over 70 million albums sold. He’s also a father and a husband of over 40 years. We became friends almost randomly about a year and a half ago and I found him to...

Alvin Love is a Grammy-winning songwriter and producer, a co-founder and pastor of Nashville Life Church, and an all around pretty incredible guy. This was honestly one of the most fun and exciting conversations I’ve had in a long time. I first really heard of Alvin because of a record that he wrote and produced for his mother, legendary gospel artist CeCe Winans. The album is called “Let Them Fal...

Gabe Scott was ten days away from opening Ladybird Taco, his first restaurant, when America shut down for the quarantine. We sat down, socially distant, together in their almost-finished dining room and talked about his journey from musician to restauranteur. I first met Gabe as a musician twenty years ago. Over the years he’s been a huge part of the music of Andrew Peterson, Crowder, Bebo Norman,...

You might know Rachael Lampa as a young CCM pop singer with mad vocal chops. And it seems that for a while, that’s how Rachael knew her self, too. She has had some amazing experiences as a musician, all kinds of cool things on TV and traveling the world with huge artists, and those are fun stories. But what clearly lights her up is the work that she and her family have done with the homeless and i...

Kevin Twit is a pastor, theologian, songwriter and friend. He's a Nashville legend, having shepherded many artists and thinkers through their college years as the leader of RUF at Belmont University. An expert and frequent speaker on the subject of old hymns, he's just a smart dude, and I'm thankful to know him. He married Alison and I and we have been friends for over half my life now. Our intern...

Where do you even start with Ron Block. As a musician, he is an absolute legend. You know how many Grammys Taylor Swift has? Ten. John Legend? Ten. How many Grammys has Ron Block got? FOURTEEN!! You know how many Dove awards for best album packaging I have lost? Two. Ron has won a lot of those awards, of course, from his tenure as banjo and guitar player for Alison Krauss and Union Station. He’s a...

David Johnson is the founder of an organization called Silent Images. They are storytellers who come alongside non-profits and ministries to help them share the work they’re doing through video and photography. But David wasn’t always a business owner or a ministry partner, or even a photographer. This is a great empowering story of what happens when you choose to say yes to the doors that open in...

You probably know Mark Stuart as the lead singer of the massively successful band Audio Adrenaline. But he’s also a husband, a father, a new author, a divorcee, and a man deeply in love with the nation of Haiti. And, he lives in an RV…. Audio Adrenaline and The Normals, my first band, were actually label-mates around the turn of the century. Obviously, they were a huge success and we, we were not....

Ben Shive is a genius record producer, piano player, string arranger, and poet. He's also a husband, a father, a church elder, and a dear friend of mine, and to many in our community. I've known and worked closely with Ben for twenty years now, and while I've always marveled at his skill and musical prowess, in the last few years I've been more and more impressed by who Ben has been becoming as a...

A couple years ago Jeremy Cowart was named the “Most Influential Photographer on the Internet” by Huffington Post, Forbes and Yahoo. He’s also an artist, an entrepreneur, a public speaker and a husband and father of four kids. Before all that, he was probably the first “web designer” I had ever met, way back in the early 2000s. Not only is this dude an incredible artist and photographer, but he’s...

Don Donahue is back! Together, he and I spend this hour discussing questions sent in by listeners after our interview last month. We get to tell some great stories and talk about community, intentionality, and what it can look like to be open to God's leading in our lives. Thank you for these great questions! What an honor to get to share this hour with Don, one of my heroes. If you enjoy this kin...

Nate Larkin was a pastor, the son of a pastor, a young husband, and also a sex addict. His story is one of incredible sadness and also incredible hope. He has gone on to found an organization called the Samson Society, a fellowship of Christian men who are serious about authenticity, community, humility & recovery. It’s been a place of much healing for thousands of men walking through addictio...

David Hampton finally told a friend that he was an alcoholic. Years later, he’s now an addiction recovery specialist helping people out of the situation he had once been in himself. I first knew David, though, as the worship leader at the church I attended in college. I had heard through the grapevine that his wife was not doing well. I did not realize she was bedridden for years with MS, and sadl...

Garett and Carrie Buell met and married when Garett and I were in the band Caedmon’s Call together, and Carrie was in a band called Alathea. Since leaving music full-time, they have started an incredibly successful real estate and architectural photography business, Studio Buell, with a staff of eleven photographers, also mostly former musicians. This was a delightful trip down memory lane of how...

Don Donahue might not be a familiar name to most of you, and that’s how he likes it. But as a kid reading liner notes in his bedroom in Illinois, there were three or four names that always seemed to pop up on album after album and Don Donahue was one of them. Turns out he was A&R on some of the most important albums of my youth, Michael W Smith’s “Change Your World”, Rich Mullins “The World As...