Genre: Folk/Acoustic/Americana, Pop/Rock
For fans of: Shawn Colvin, Amy Grant, Margaret Becker
Label: Reunion Records

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Much has happened in the five years since Carolyn Arends last recorded a "regular" album, 1999's acclaimed This Much I Understand. She went indie and started her own label. She and husband Mark had their second child. She wrote a couple of books. She toured. And she did a few niche albums—a greatest hits CD, a rootsy acoustic record, and a project of poignant songs about parenting. But all along, something more was stirring in the heart and soul of one of Christian music's finest singer/songwriters.

Which brings us to Under the Gaze, the seventh album from Arends, the winner of multiple Dove and Vibe awards. Under the Gaze is a delightful, eclectic sonic blend—her signature folksy pop and tender ballads, with tastes of bluegrass and traces of classical touches throughout—featuring the incisive, insightful artist at her literary best.

The self-produced album has been a long time—in many ways, a lifetime—in the making. The project's 11 originals (including one co-written with Connie Harrington) explore everything from laughter to tears, from infancy to the elderly, from life to death, from here to the hereafter—all under one overriding theme: God's infinite gaze. He sees all—the big things and the little, the magnificent and the mundane. It's all beneath his watchful eye—a notion Arends has come to appreciate more fully in recent years.

"If I had to identify an enduring theme in my music, it's this idea that you can't compartmentalize life," she says. "All of it belongs to God. Even the most seemingly silly thing is so fraught with promise, because it's alive with who God is. I keep coming back to that in my songwriting, apparently because it's a hard thing for me to learn!

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