Faith in the Workplace

"Set your seal upon this rebel girl,
be my companion in this tear-stained world."
lyrics from Before the Daylight's Shot
—Ashley Cleveland

The most public feature of this married duo is Ashley Cleveland's powerful, passionate voice. "Muscle and blood," says Emmylou Harris. "Grit, angst, and passion," says Amy Grant, "she sings the way most of us feel." Anyone viscerally drawn to Ashley Cleveland's unvarnished artistry will be undone by her way with a hymn.

Less visible, less vocal, but a powerful force in Nashville music, is Kenny Greenberg. His highly admired work and low profile add texture to probably every country album you love.

In this rare dual appearance and too-brief conversation, Ashley and Kenny share the microphone to riff on the subjects of creativity and work, failure and success, business and art, marriage and music.

High Calling: To start, tell us how much of your work is creative—the way we think of successful artists spending their time—and how much of your day, for lack of a better phrase, is the usual grind?

Kenny: I've worked hard to make my life a good three-quarters creativity. But we're both self-employed and there are phone calls to be made. Each day probably has a good hour of calling, but I've really tried hard to get to a place where I can stay as much as possible in a creative mode.

Ashley: This is actually a big question for me. Over time, I feel like I have sacrificed a lot of creative energy to the more mundane, daily grind. By the time I deal with the needs of my family and my desire to have some creativity in our life together and then get the elements of my business together, the thing that gets lost is that creative space.

God gifts each of us in unique ways, and they're all creative. We don't look at an accountant's job, necessarily, and say, "Oh, that's a creative job!" But it is. You have to give time to creative thinking. I need to set aside time to think about song ideas—the creative expression of my work. I need to think about how I want to communicate in concert: what stories I might tie in to move toward a certain idea. Sometimes I'll come up with a great idea—once every few months, maybe. The rest of the time, I'm slogging away wondering whoever told me that I could write a song.

Kenny: She's making an important point. I cowrite more than Ashley does, and as much as everybody wants time for creative space, to make yourself be creative is hard. It definitely is easier to make these five phone calls. A common experience among writers is to sit down then say, "We better go get another cup of coffee before we start. Are your pencils sharp? Let's go sharpen them."

High Calling: We've heard people talk about "BIC"— Get your "butt in the chair" and work.

Ashley: Once you're there, you usually find that you can stay there a while and go into that zone. But there's resistance; and for me, it's consistent enough to be alarming. I realize that I resist getting my butt in the chair, and because of that, I'm sacrificing a gift precious to me.

High Calling: It's almost a stewardship issue.

Ashley: I definitely think we have a stewardship obligation to our gifts. And I think it's common for humans to look for the easy way out. But that disregards the Giver and the investment. They say you use two percent of your brain or some appallingly paltry bit. But I think we use two percent to ten percent of our gifts. If we were using our gifts the way the Lord intended, it would be astounding. But it requires surrender, diving into the mystery that I resist too. I'd much rather do something I don't have to think about that will produce instant results. It's the fast-food mentality.

High Calling: You've turned what you love to do into a business, and I wonder: business requires you to sell records and make compromises. Other people tell you how to do your art, how you should express your faith. How has that challenged your faith and your love for music?

Ashley: When you discover music, it's like you've found the hidden treasure. Then you get into the music business, which has nothing to do with artistry, and the artist becomes the commodity, along with her music. And you're either marketable in their estimation, or you're not. It's a feel-good-on-the-front-end kind of industry. You're the greatest! There's never been anyone like you! They blow so much smoke up your skirt, you feel like Mary Poppins.

A tiny percent of artists remain bulletproof, but everybody else hits that day when no one takes their phone calls. And it's devastating. You find yourself worrying about who's playing your song on the radio or how many records you sold last week. Creativity is sucked into the business machine. And what gets lost is your art.

Regaining my artistic footing was huge after feeling so devastated. Simultaneously, when expressing music in a faith context, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions about what is appropriate. But once I got my artistic footing back, I thought, "I feel accountable to certain authorities in my life but beyond that, I'm going to do what the Lord has called me to do and do it with all my heart; because I know how it feels to lose this." Trying to keep the business alive, you begin to second guess. You try to change your music or your presentation to remain marketable. At least I did. And it was a terrible failure. I didn't like my music, and it wasn't working. I compromised myself. So I'm a little militant now about not compromising my gift.