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Do the words actually pop into your head first, and then you sing it out loud?

Herring No. I just start singing, and it's like they just come out. It's very much a living process, and it feeds my soul. Sometimes I'll just be worshiping the Lord, and out will pop a song.

Let's talk about The Roar of Love. How would you describe that album?

Herring To me, it is such a wonderful expression of the heart of the kids involved in the story of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. The whole thing was an adventure to me as I was receiving it from the Lord; the unlocking inside of me was unexpected. I never thought, I'm going to sit down and write some songs about this book. It was another one of those wonderful experiences where I sat down and hit a chord, and my heart was so longing to be with Jesus. And then out came "Are you goin' to Narnia? Take me along with you." And I thought, Oh, nobody's ever going to want to hear that because that's not a song about Jesus.

The album has been re-released as a collector's edition CD

Boy, were you wrong!?

Herring Yeah. And then it took about five years of just getting a song now and then about it, not really knowing that it was going to become what it became.

Were you reading the book at the time, or had it been a while?

Herring It had been a while, but it had affected me so that it stuck with me. I didn't have to reread it to know what was in it. It stayed with me.

How old were you when you first read Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe?

Herring Twenty-six. But it's all the better to discover when you're older. And hopefully your heart will be childlike so that you can; I think that's what Jesus is talking about. There are so many things that all of us miss in our childhood. Then when we're adults, when we can see them in a different light, I think they become even wider and bigger. And that's probably why it never left me—all the connections of that book to Jesus, who's my Savior, my Lord, my Redeemer, my King, my Lion. It just came so alive because Jesus was so alive in me.

Matthew wrote on his website that this was the project he had the most fun recording. He said your house at the time was like a zoo, with cables running everywhere. You were laying down vocal tracks in one room and instrumentals in another. Can you visualize what it was like?

Herring I'll never forget it. Up to then, we had always done everything in a studio with windows so you could see into the control room. With this, you couldn't see into the control room—so Buck couldn't get upset over Matthew's antics because he couldn't see him. See, Matthew has the ability to be goofy right up to the minute that the button is pushed, and then he's right on. It used to drive Buck crazy.

Annie (center), Matthew, and Nelly had a blast making the album

There was just a lot of goofy laughter and just such a freedom for us. We had so much fun. The thing for me that put the frosting on the cake was when we got done singing our last note on the last song. Then we had to be really quiet. And all of a sudden, the cuckoo clock went off: cuckoo, cuckoo. If you crank it at the end, you will hear the cuckoo clock. It just delighted us. We said, "How perfect to have a cuckoo clock at the end."

Anything else memorable during those sessions?

Herring We did glasses—you know, when you put water in glasses and make it sing? We did that on "I've Heard the Stars Sing Before." Those were all glasses. We pitched them and Nelly and Matthew and I would go in there and play them. It was so fun.

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