Musical therapy

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, March 11th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Nashville singer-songwriter Jill Phillips recently released her first record in six years. It’s titled Deeper to Love. WORLD Correspondent Steve West recently talked to Phillips about her new project.

STEVE WEST, CORRESPONDENT: If you like music that is acoustically grounded, lyrically intelligent, and spiritually provocative, you’ll enjoy this newest offering from Jill Phillips. The Chesapeake, Virginia native’s first album debuted on Word Records over two decades ago, in 1999, shortly after Phillips graduated from Nashville’s Belmont University. “Steel Bars,” written by husband Andy Gullahorn, was one of the more popular songs from that record and helped cement her place at the musical intersection of folk, pop, and rock.

MUSIC: “STEEL BARS”

During the long hiatus since her last recording in 2016, Phillips raised her three teenagers and also found time to quietly go back to graduate school, ultimately becoming a marriage and family therapist. Last year she teamed up with producer Ben Shive for six new songs containing some common themes–difficult ones like grief, disappointment, and anger, but also brighter ones like healing, redemption and love. It’s not surprising territory for a therapist who regularly listens to people sharing often difficult stories.

PHILLIPS: I certainly couldn't separate my work in that time of being a therapist and learning just different ways to sit with people in their grief and their loss. I couldn't not be informed by that journey, obviously. And so I feel like the stories are a combination of all of that—this sort of universal story that we're all part of the both/and, that intersection of suffering and great hope. And I think that's where a lot of us live.

MUSIC: “LOVE IS A LONG GAME”

That rousing kickoff for Deeper to Love sets the theme for the album—Love is a long game, a persevering love. Yet there’s another intriguing line in the song, where Phillips sings that “somewhere between the truth and how it feels there is a disconnect.” Like many of her songs, the words hold a tension we all feel at times between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’.

PHILLIPS: It’s just nice to know there's something deeper than my feelings, that’s true. And so when I'm feeling discouraged, or I'm in a season where it feels like, wow, I don't see the hope around the corner, it is so helpful to know that love is a long game, that there's a deeper story being written, there's another chapter to the story to come.

MUSIC: “PRISON OF THE PAST”

One metaphor that pops up twice on Deeper to Love is that of a prison, or of being imprisoned. Parts of this song, “Prison of the Past,” sound like advice she might give to someone she’s counseling, someone who feels imprisoned or trapped in some way. I found listening to her words therapeutic.

PHILLIPS: Maybe it's advice to myself as much as it is to anybody else. What ‘Prison of the Past’ means to me is that we are not defined by the things that have happened to us, that God is always, always, always making things new. And if I didn't believe in transformation, and I didn't believe in healing, I don't think I could be an artist. I don't think I could be a very good mom. I don't think I could be a Christian.

MUSIC: “HOUSE OF GRIEF”

It’s always presumptuous to assume that a song is autobiographical, yet Phillips is not one to hold a song lyric at a distance. Maybe that’s because they so often flow out of her own experiences—walking through her own house of grief, coming to the other side, and then helping others in that place.

PHILLIPS: I am no stranger to grief. And it has really comforted me that one of the names Jesus uses for himself is man of sorrows acquainted with grief. My dad died when I was, I believe it was 25. And it just came out of nowhere. It changed me and that began a journey of more empathy and compassion for people who are suffering, a journey deeper into God, and finding out that he was there, in spaces and in places that I couldn't imagine he would be.

MUSIC: “BRIGHT SADNESS”

Paradox is another feature of Phillips’ songs. Seemingly contradictory words like “bright” and “sadness” don’t rest easily with each other, are even in tension with one another, and yet convey deeper truth.

PHILLIPS: That was very intentional. You know, we're called to be people of hope. But we also don't want to be dismissive. Jesus certainly wasn't. He like wept with people that wept, and yet he wasn't consumed. He wasn't desolate. He, he had this hope, this sort of long view.

Whether through her independent releases or via the popular online Gullahorn Happy Hour she does with husband Andy, Phillips wants what artists have always wanted: to touch someone.

PHILLIPS: I'd love for the songs to reach lots of ears … But if one person hears the song, and they're like, “That is exactly what I needed to hear, that was a message in a bottle for me in my life today, and God used that to speak to me”, I can think of no greater honor as a songwriter.

MUSIC: “GENEROUS MERCY”

I’m Steve West.

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