These days, Josh Garrels spends a lot of time in the loft of the barn on his property in rural Michigan, where he lives with his wife and five children. The space doesn’t look as if it’s been home to barn owls in a while; Garrels recently finished enclosing it and turning it into a studio. There’s fresh green paint on the walls and can lights in the ceiling.
The 44-year-old singer-songwriter has been recording new music in the loft—but that wasn’t a sure thing when he started the renovation a couple years ago.
In 2011, Garrels’s album Love & War & the Sea In Between made waves in the Christian music industry (it was CT’s 2011 album of the year) and in the mainstream. The then-Portland-based artist was hailed as a prophetic truth teller with an independent ethos. His honest lyrics about faith endeared him to Christian audiences, seekers, and nonreligious listeners, who found his frankness and introspection refreshing. Garrels also gave away his music for free, taking inspiration from Keith Green, a Christian musician who did the same in the late 1970s.
Despite finding a devoted fan base and earning critical acclaim, Garrels never really felt at home in the music industry. Instead of moving to Nashville or another creative hub in the wake of Love & War’s success, he and his wife decided to return to the Midwest. Over time, Garrels started to wonder if it was time to walk away from professional music making. He released the album Early Work, Vol. 2 in 2021, then took a sabbatical to see if God was asking him to move on.
Now, after a season of being ready to let go, Garrels feels new confidence as he moves into the next phase of his music career—even if he’s not sure exactly how it will look or sound.
He’s composing the score for the animated short film Forevergreen, which releases this fall.
And his forthcoming album, Peace to All Who Enter Here, Vol. 2 is in progress, with a planned late-summer release. Garrels has been putting out new singles from the album, starting with “All in All,” a blues-inflected folk-rock song that showcases his warm, mellow voice. “Rock My Soul,” released in May 2024, is an unexpected, reggae-infused groove , indicative of Garrels’s renewed creative energy and interest in experimenting with genre.
Garrels spoke with CT about his faith and work since Love & War & the Sea In Between and his ongoing search for signs of life in the American church.
Your album Love & War & the Sea In Between was Christianity Today’s album of the year in 2011. One of the things that stood out to listeners at the time was your unbridled honesty about doubt. As you look back at that album now, does it still reflect the way you feel and think about faith?
My faith has grown and changed over the last 14 years. In some ways, I look back at that time, and compared to where I am now, I could look at it as naiveté.
I came to faith later in life, and there’s a beauty to that. It was like Neo in The Matrix taking the red pill. My eyes were opened to the alternate reality of the kingdom. It was like I’d never heard birdsong before.
Fast-forward to 2011. I’m 31, we have a second kid on the way. We moved to Portland, Oregon. It was the first time I was putting my full weight on music as a profession. Before that, I’d been preaching and making music. I was seeing this wave of close friends walk away from the faith and marriages failing.
Faith Torn Down to the Studs
That was the place from which Love & War was written. Call it what you will, but I saw it as a spiritual conflict that I was in the midst of. I saw this wreckage all around me, and I was asking, “What is happening?”
At the same time, I was watching a lot of war documentaries and thinking about the interplay and the correlation between spiritual deceit and deceit in politics. And I think all of that most certainly applies to where we are now.
Deconstruction has become an overused term, but it seems accurate to say that deconstruction was in part what you were responding to in 2011, maybe even actively pushing against.
I think every narrative we’re given in this world outside of the Lord’s is pitted against our faith. But I also think it’s good to recognize the elephant in the room: Jesus told us that we’re supposed to be raising the dead and the sick should be being healed. There’s this list of wild things. We have such high hopes, and then we don’t see those things happen.
And when we don’t see those things happen or we’re embedded in a Christian church or subculture that feels vacuous, faith can become this cliché, passive thing.
That’s the point where it’s okay to ask questions. But there’s also a decision that has to be made: Are you going to turn this into criticism, critique, and bitterness? Do you go find your favorite theology that matches your experience and turns everyone else into the enemy, and then post a bunch of YouTube videos? Are you going to walk away?
Or we can recognize the tension. We can recognize the unanswered questions and the hopes that have not been fulfilled yet. And we can continue daily to hold them before the Lord and say, “I choose to believe you’re greater than even any of these people are telling me you are.”
That crossroads is difficult, and I think it’s where so many give in to frustration, anger, or sadness. The suffering is too much.
To pretend that’s not happening would be silly. But I’m searching for signs of life while recognizing all of that.
I imagine that as a musician living in rural Michigan, you might find it hard to find a vibrant songwriting or musical community. Was there a time when you thought you might end up in a place like Nashville, where there’s a more concentrated faith-oriented creative community?
My wife grew up in the jungle in Peru as a missionary kid. I grew up in a weird cult commune in Indiana. I’ve never been part of the dominant culture. It was tempting, early on, to move to a place like Nashville because I thought that might be the ticket to having a sustainable music career.
I rely heavily on intuition and feeling, maybe too much so sometimes, but I will follow it when I’m making a decision. Early on, I ended up just saying no to all the opportunities, all the offers, but still taking each one seriously at the same time. I wasn’t just being a snob. I would think about it and say to myself, “That sounds awesome,” but then it wouldn’t feel right.
There are times when my wife and I wonder, Why did we choose such an obscure path and then keep choosing it over and over? I think this strange path we’ve been on is just God’s school for us.
How do you think that relative isolation has served you as a writer and musician over the years?
If I’m honest, I sometimes think it doesn’t. Especially when I look over at my peers who have migrated to Nashville and the support network they’ve built. Sometimes it does sound nice to be on a label or have an advance for the next project. And the excitement of collaboration is really special when you’re in the midst of it. That’s the part I really long for at times.
But I do think that in places like Nashville it’s possible to end up in a feedback loop, and in our worst moments we end up just looking around at what everyone else is doing: What’s hot right now? Who’s the good mixer? Who do we want in the room? What was big on the charts last year? Even if no one’s saying it out loud, there’s that kind of momentum when you’re in an industry that’s the bread and butter of a whole city.
I think maybe I know myself well enough to know that I might end up being the one looking around at what everyone else is doing. That’s part of the reason I’ve pulled out of social media; I maybe engage with it once a month. I can only take so much comparison before I become paralyzed.
There needs to be some referencing in creative work; you can’t create in a vacuum. No one does. So I still have my touchpoints.
The choice not to locate to a major metro area has had some costs, but you’ve been making career decisions to give up potential profits for a long time. You’ve been giving away music for free since the prestreaming era, right?
When I was a brand-new Christian, I read No Compromise, the biography of Keith Green written by his wife, Melody. It was handed to me when I was wet cement.
I didn’t even know who Keith Green was, but I was touched by the book, and it left me with this sense of “I think I’m a Christian; I love music; I guess this is how you go about it.” In some ways, it was a divine appointment, being given that book as a 20-year-old.
When Myspace came along, musicians could just post their songs. People sent me live recordings they had made of my concerts, so I could find a good song and post it. All of a sudden, my music could be downloaded hundreds or thousands of times.
As an independent artist, there was so much excitement in being able to give my music away for free. It could only help me to take barriers down between fans and what I was creating.
By the time I recorded Love & War & the Sea In Between in 2011, groups like Radiohead had already experimented with giving away whole albums for free. I had spent a lot of time and energy on the album, and I was confident that it was a good one. Then one day, when I was praying, saying, “I want you to have the glory, Lord,” God broke into my reality and said, “Then give it to me.” And I knew, however I chose to answer that, I would be held to account.
So for one year, if anyone bought the album, we gave the money away. I can’t remember exact numbers, but I think we gave away over 100,000 albums. Before Spotify, those were big numbers. And even giving the album revenue away, we were able to pay off our debts and put a down payment on a house. It was one of those classic examples of “I gave something away, and he filled my lap to overflowing.”
In your discography, there’s a lot of music that could be marketed as worship music, but you seem to have resisted the label. How do you see your music’s relationship to congregational worship?
Early on in my career, I would try my hand at writing congregational music, and it just never felt right. Writing as a singer-songwriter, storytelling about faith, that felt so natural.
But as I’ve grown and matured, I see more and more the need for songs outside the personal singer-songwriter space. Songs that proclaim, worship, praise, or at times teach theology—I’ve become more intrigued with the possibility that a song could touch all of us and that those words could enter our hearts and change us.
When you look at the American church right now, are there songs you would want to give its congregations to sing together? Are there truths or ideas you think you could help the church sing to God or each other?
I do see some things in our divisive time that I would like the church to come to terms with. How do we correct in a way that brings liberation and healing and restoration and faith building and not just more angry divisiveness?
When I was a new believer, someone put their hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes, and said, “This goes as deep and far as you want to go with it.” And that was like music to my ears. We can pioneer with the Lord, and there are things we can find that are special and distinct for our time.
I’m not saying we add to the truth. But how can we take this dynamic, limitless truth of the living God that we find in Scripture and just keep turning that diamond and finding new refractions? Let’s retell the story.
