Ellie Holcomb carries the song

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Ellie Holcomb keeps her famous father’s Christian-music legacy going strong.

Holcomb and her husband Drew have been making music, solo and together, for over 20 years. Last fall, she released her latest album, Far Country. Next month the couple will begin a joint tour that will take them across the U.S.

BROWN: WORLD’s music critic Arsenio Orteza caught up with Ellie Holcomb to discuss the album, the upcoming tour, and what it was like growing up as the daughter of a famous contemporary Christian music producer.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Successful second-generation musicians are less common in contemporary Christian music than they are in mainstream pop. Ellie Holcomb, however, is one such performer. She’s the daughter of the Dove and Grammy-award winning producer Brown Bannister. And, from the albums that she’s made with her husband Drew to her growing solo discography, she’s doing her father proud.

MUSIC: [“Far Country” by Ellie Holcomb]

This is “Far Country,” the title cut of Holcomb’s latest solo album. The song, like the album, is an exuberant yet probing meditation on the intersection of faith and doubt—particularly the kind of doubt that can spring from getting blindsided by tragedy. I asked Holcomb what inspired her most recent batch of songs.

HOLCOMB: When I was writing this record, the heaviness of the time, of the divided sort of nature of the time we're in was on my heart. But also I lost a dear friend to a long battle with cancer. And then, really the kicker, I have a precious niece, Bailey, who was eight years old when she was diagnosed with a pretty rare soft-tissue cancer, and then we lost her just after she turned nine. And that kind of thing will rock you.

That wasn’t all that rocked Holcomb. There was also the one-year anniversary of the Covenant School shooting. The occasion was especially traumatic for her for two reasons: she had friends whose children were students there, and one of the victims had been Holcomb’s third-grade teacher.

HOLCOMB: So I think it's been a gift for me to get to sing through the sorrow and through the shadows and to wrestle my way. It felt really thirsty and really sad. And so I went looking for, you know, that kind of living water, the peace that I felt like I'd once known, so Far Country tells the story of what I encountered in the wilderness.

And it’s compelling. Holcomb wrote heartfelt lyrics. But the music represents a notable departure from the Americana timbres that fans of the Holcombs have come to expect.

MUSIC: [“Hope’s Gonna Find You” by Ellie Holcomb]

I asked Holcomb about her decision to pivot to such a big sound.

HOLCOMB: My dad, in the executive-producer meeting, was like, “What if you put the guitar down?” Because I love to dance and I love to surf. And so the kind of music that I want to listen to when I'm doing that generally has these, like, kind of bigger pop moments. And he was like, “What if you put your guitar down for some of it, and, like, let yourself dance around on stage?”

I also asked Holcomb what it was like to grow up as Brown Bannister’s daughter.

HOLCOMB: The two things that I gained that I'm really grateful for growing up in the world of music was, one, I had a very keen understanding that the right song at the right time for somebody could—could change the course of things for them, to help people feel hope and less alone. Like, I just heard story after story of that. And then, number two, I grew up being 0% enamored with fame.

Holcomb says she saw that the performing life could be extremely hard on families, and she resolved not to marry a professional musician or even become a professional musician. She ended up doing both. And, beginning in February, she and her husband Drew will launch what they’re calling the Never Gonna Let You Go Tour.

HOLCOMB: It's sort of like my—some of my music, some of his music, and then this body of work that we've created together. We're bringing Drew's band, the Neighbors. And then every night it's different because we always do sort of a section of a night where people just can tell us what they want to hear. And every show's different. It's fun. It's funny. We laugh a lot, tell some stories and play a good number of songs. So it's a blast.

It may be premature, but if Ellie really is going to play what people tell her they want to hear, I’m putting in a request for my favorite track on Far Country, “Small Boat.”

MUSIC: [“Small Boat” by Ellie Holcomb]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.