Songs born from a crisis of faith

Shelters (Stonycroft), the new album by the Needtobreathe keyboardist Josh Lovelace, is his third, following as it does his 2017 release Young Folk and its 2019 sequel Growing Up. He, however, considers Shelters his first. “The first two records,” he told me, “were for kids. Then, I got a little older, they got a little older, and I wanted to write about things that weren’t necessarily for kids or families and that were also maybe too personal to share through [Needtobreathe].”

The result is an expertly produced, breezily layered, relentlessly catchy, and largely confessional 11-song offering that finds the happily married 39-year-old father of two coming to grips with long-simmering issues. “I had,” he says, recalling the 2020 COVID hiatus, “a lot of time to look in the mirror.”

Lovelace saw that although he’d grown up in a “really loving home” as the son of a Baptist youth pastor who “cared for people a lot,” he was under­going a crisis of faith.

“I started looking at the way I grew up,” he says. “You know, ‘If you’re in this building, you’re good to go, but if you’re outside the building, you’re as far away as you can be.’ And I was like, ‘That doesn’t feel right.’ So I started asking tough questions. And it started bleeding out in my songwriting.”

The songs “High Throne” and “Praying Wrong” address the inside-the-building-or-out issue head-on, while “Flames & Smoke” and “Not the Best Version of Myself (Right Now)” allude to the crisis-related anxiety that caused panic attacks onstage. The title of “I Stopped Drinking Yesterday” is self-­explanatory. (Update: He hasn’t had a drop in over a year and a half.)

Perhaps most fundamental to Lovelace’s struggles was the issue of how to access grace. “Growing up, it was like, ‘Just give everything to this, and you’re going to be OK.’ Then you find out that while you might feel better for a while, the world still smacks you in the face. And you’re like, ‘What do I do next?’”

What Lovelace did was see a therapist who helped convince him “there’s not a one-stop-shop for salvation.”

“What I mean by that is that a part of my salvation, or the thing that saved me, was the people around me—my wife, who stood by me even though she didn’t understand what I was going through, my kids, who were gracious to me when they didn’t know if Dad was all there, and the doctors and people that took the journey with me.” The “shelters” to which the album title refers.

Asked about his faith today, Lovelace demurs: “My faith is important to me, but it’s a personal journey.” He says, “Hopefully other people can find themselves in the story.”