Todd Agnew
Grace Like Rain fans unite
LOCATION
Memphis, TN
GENRE
Christian & Gospel
MY LINKS
Todd Agnew
What happens when you die?
Why do we define people by their mistakes?
How does God still care for us when we keep messing things up?
Todd Agnew’s willingness to stand up and provide perspective and voice to this and more doesn’t come from a place of anger or defiance, but rather from the experiences of a man continuing to wrestle with the very questions he poses.
From his debut Ardent release Grace Like Rain to the sophomore explorations of Reflection of Something to the epic nature of last year’s seasonal effort Do You See What I See? to the present-day realities of Better Questions, there is a deepening lyrical maturity displaying confidence while still maintaining power and edge.
This set of songs came to Todd with a clarity with which even he was surprised.
“We had planned to do a live worship record next after the Christmas record,” Todd says. “But after taking some time off, I’d written a bunch of new songs. I went into the management office and said, ‘Um, I need to tell you about some things.’
“I went in with my pitch that I needed to do a studio record, to be called ‘Better Questions,’ here’s the reasoning behind it, and here are the songs, all of it,” he continues. “They said, ‘Well, we were going to tell you we thought you needed to do a studio record, too,’ So I thought, ‘Wait, then, I didn’t need to do all this work leading up to this?’”
We started with the idea of doing a real simple record, musically. I’d just finished the Christmas record and it was so big; there was orchestra on every single song, and it’s just this epic thing,” Todd notes. “So my thought was, ‘Let’s do a record with a drummer, a guitar player, a bass player and some keyboards.’ So that’s how we started...but we definitely strayed from that. As we started meshing the creativity and the simplicity together, sometimes the simplicity fell away.”
“We’ve kind of developed this idea that says Christians can’t be challenged by art, they can’t be made to think about anything, we can’t have lyrics that are more than two syllables long, you can’t directly quote stuff out of the Bible because it’s going to go over their heads,” Agnew says. “But my thoughts are, if they’ve connected with some of the things I’ve done in the past, then they’re probably asking some of these same questions.
“And I can’t help those people by giving them the answer, because I don’t know the answer. But I can help them in letting them know that they’re not alone in asking the questions. The church, as a body, can ask those questions, and we may or may not end up finding the answers, but we can walk that path together.”
And for Todd Agnew, an artist willing to stand up and make the music he’s called to make while simultaneously making the points he’s compelled to make, just getting the questions asked in the first place is an encouraging first step down that path.
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