For a long time, Melanie Penn thought her voice would always be a vessel for music written by someone else. The classically trained Nashville-based singer-songwriter got her start in the early 2000s as a Broadway vocalist, performing roles like Sandy in a national tour of Grease.
Even after she became a worship leader at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan (led by the late Tim Keller), Penn saw songwriting as an intimidating undertaking, something meant for people with another kind of gift. Her gift, as she saw it, was singing.
But in 2005, Penn realized she was singing songs to herself throughout the day: her songs. She had lyrical and melodic ideas—lots of them—and she started to wonder if songwriting wasn’t so forbidding and mysterious after all. She reached out to Ben Shive, a Nashville-based producer and songwriter and now her long-term collaborator, to see if he would work with someone new and determined.
Twenty years later, Penn has found a home in Nashville, continuing to collaborate with Shive and a community of Christian musicians on projects like Anchor Hymns. Her 2017 Christmas album, Immanuel, was a musical study in perspective. Penn brought her experience as an on-stage performer to her songwriting, capturing the different voices and points of view of characters in the Christmas story.
Penn’s new album, The Rising (which released September 19), is a resurrection album. She’s adamant that it’s not for Easter alone, though it does invite listeners to inhabit the story from the perspectives of Peter, Thomas, Mary, and other biblical characters.
The Rising seamlessly blends story and worshipful reflection across tracks that range in style from intimate and folk-influenced songs to upbeat chamber pop. Penn takes moments from Scripture’s narrative—like Thomas’s encounter with the risen Christ—and expands them, inviting listeners to join with the disciple in asking for confirmation and assurance in the midst of doubt.
Penn spoke with CT about The Rising, her path from Broadway performer to singer-songwriter, and her approach to musical storytelling.
A lot of Christian musicians start out in Nashville. It seems to be where all of the action is, the place where performers have the best shot of getting a foot in the door. But you began in New York City in musical theater. Can you talk about your path from Broadway to the kind of songwriting you do now?
In college, around my junior year, I realized that I wasn’t going to have a career in classical music. I’m classically trained. I was singing opera, and my voice just topped out. There were things that my voice just wouldn’t do.
But I had good tone and clarity, and I was good with languages, so there were a lot of things going for me. And I loved musicals. So I decided to go to New York and try to make it on Broadway. For some reason I thought that would be easier.
I became an equity actor. I did a lot of cool stuff off-Broadway. I did a major national tour with Grease. But gosh, that’s a hard life.
recommended
Still, I really wanted to sing—though the through line in all of my early career is that I was always singing other people’s words. I thought that songwriting was for certain special people, and I put myself in the “non-special” category.
Once I realized that I was writing my own songs and that I might be able to do this, it was like I opened a pressure valve and all this steam started coming out. I just kept writing.
Ben [Shive] hates this story, but this is really what happened. I read an article in a magazine that said Andrew Peterson was the best Christian songwriter of that moment, so I got on Andrew Peterson’s website and saw that his latest CD was produced by Ben Shive. I messaged Ben on MySpace, and two weeks later I was in Nashville playing through demos.
When did you realize that you liked writing songs that center narrative storytelling? That’s been a hallmark of your music on Immanuel and now on The Rising.
I don’t use a lot of abstract poetry in my writing. I’m very direct. I like listeners to know exactly what I’m talking about. There are some artists who really dwell in the land of the abstract and they create a mood or vibe. But I want someone who is adjacent to Christianity to find my music and be able to understand it.
With Immanuel, I stumbled into this narrative style of writing by mistake. I wrote a song for the three wise men called “Follow the Star.” Then a couple of days later I wrote “Isaiah’s Song,” which is the first track of the album. At that point I didn’t even recognize that I was writing a Christmas album.
When I realized that I had this common thread, first-person perspectives from different moments of the Nativity, I was off to the races.
I so easily accessed what I had been doing on stage, which was inhabiting a character. I had been trained to see the world through someone else’s eyes and think about what’s motivating that person.
Your training has provided you with a broad musical vocabulary, which is audible in your eclectic style. What were some of the influences that you tried to bring to bear on The Rising?
The Rising is different from Immanuel because Ben and I cowrote all of the songs. This was a more collaborative project.
One thing we have in common is that we love the music of Stephen Sondheim. I’m obsessed with the way he does story and his lyrical richness. There are unexpected rhymes, slow reveals.
Sonically, I’m definitely influenced by the lush pop of the 1980s. Judy Collins is a big influence. And you can hear that Ben has really leaned into his gift for symphonic arranging over the past few years. He brings this sophisticated, orchestrated voice and sensibility to the music on the album.
How does the vocal storytelling you do in The Rising differ from the storytelling and acting you did on Broadway? Obviously there are some big differences between how you sing when you’re projecting for a big theater, but what are the similarities and differences when it comes to musically inhabiting these characters?
An album setting is so much more intimate. I’m always thinking about clarity, almost holding back. On a Broadway stage, it’s all about the money note. But I don’t think an album is the right place for that, at least for me. I want someone to hear my voice and find it calming, with a pure, gentle quality.
In a live setting, I can make things a little more exciting, leaning into moments when I can show off some vocal prowess and deliver.
Is there a song on The Rising that feels more personal to you than the others? Was there a character you identified with in particular?
Well, I’m an actress, so I found my way to identify with everyone. But the song for Thomas was the one that I very intentionally wanted to lift out of the narrative and give to a modern person who is doubting, for the deconstructed person who has walked away from faith.
Deconstruction’s not really a thing where I was living in the Northeast. But here in the South, I have met so many people who are deconstructing because they were all in on faith and Jesus, but then something happened. There was trauma, and they just can’t stay. They haven’t healed.
I wanted the song for Thomas to be for that time of deconstruction, Thomas sings this line, “I already lost you one time; I can’t do it again.” This is for that place of unbelief, wanting to believe, not knowing which end is up. At one point in the narrative in John’s gospel, Thomas says, “Let’s go to Jerusalem and die with him.” Thomas was all in.
related
You worked as a worship leader in Tim Keller’s church for a time. Did you ever consider gravitating toward writing worship music or pursuing a career as a worship leader at a different church?
I really like writing songs for people’s daily lives, as a way to relate to an audience outside of congregational worship. But then the question is “Where is the home for this?” It’s not for Christian radio, and it’s not for Sunday morning.
But I love writing this way, and I want to continue writing this way. I think the future for music like this is going to be in live concert experience.
The Rising is a whole work. A friend described it to me as an oratorio, and I love that description. It’s complete. It’s a journey. And I want to find settings to share it.
As someone who honed a gift for songwriting after thinking you didn’t have the ability, what would you say to people who feel a pull toward creating music but don’t see themselves as writers?
It never feels natural. It’s like going to the gym. It’s difficult work. I think we have to cut through this idea that if you’re good at making art, you just breathe and it comes out. That notion keeps a lot of people back because they start and it feels hard. Then they start to believe that they just aren’t good at it.
I ask for help. I ask God for help, and I say to God, “I’m available.” I do think there is a supernatural exchange that can happen and that God is willing to pour out skills, wisdom, and increased creativity. Asking is really important.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today. Her book The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families, cowritten with Melissa Burt, will be released this October.
