American CCM's most popular singer/songwriter STEVEN CURTIS CHAPMAN has returned with a hugely successful album. Tony Cummings reports.

Steven Curtis Chapman

He's a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy-next-door who's reinvented himself as America's family man but one who's happened to have sold over four million albums. He's the most honoured Christian musician of his generation (38 Dove Awards, including nine for Songwriter Of The Year, three Grammys and 30 number one songs). Now he's returned with the hugely successful 'Speechless' album which some critics are already heralding as his finest ever work. Steven Curtis Chapman admits, however, that his new album only came about after a great deal of soul searching. 1996 found the singer/songwriter at a musical crossroads. "Debut albums were going platinum," Chapman recently told America's CCM magazine. "With all the new stuff going way past where I am at musically, I began to feel this huge indebtedness to fulfil all the expectations of others, as well as my own. I kept thinking, 'What's my role now?'"

That question only grew in enormity when the 'Signs Of Life' tour began. Chapman remembers agonizing backstage before shows, wondering if the lights were going to be right, if the sound would be adequate and, even worse, if the people would get their money's worth. Would they come back next time? "It was a far cry from how I'd first started out," he says, "when I was so excited to just go out there and sing and share about discipleship. While I knew God could use that tour for his purposes, that was the beginning of the breaking process.

"It's an ugly, weird thing (mixing) celebrity with the Gospel," Steven continues, likening it to the condiment concoctions his two sons mischievously create at the dinner table. "I've wondered many times if God really wired us to do what we're doing, the whole Christian celebrity thing. It's supposed to be about being a servant," a role Chapman's tried desperately to live up to throughout his career.

"Ultimately, it was never about 'Is this album going to sell?' as much as it was, 'Are people still going to like me?'" Plagued with self-doubt and weighed down by the pressure, his Tigger-like optimism all but faded, Chapman made the only reasonable decision: toward the end of 1997 he decided to take a year off. The sabbatical didn't mean Steven disappeared from public attention. Chapman's "I Will Not Go Quietly" was selected for the 1998 soundtrack of The Apostle, the critically acclaimed feature film starring Robert Duvall, who also appeared in a video for the song. Later, Chapman and his family enjoyed a mission trip to South Africa.

But so much time off the road forced Steven and Mary Beth, his wife of 14 years, to confront the difficult issues in their marriage. The two make no secret of the fact that they have to work hard to keep their relationship moving forward. "We've struggled with what to do with our disappointment, when marriage wasn't the fairy tale we thought it would be," Chapman says, "and this career makes it complicated," laughing, as he describes how untraditional they both are in their roles: she being both adventurer and pragmatist, he being the sensitive, emotional Mr Play It Safe. His admiration and love for her is apparent in his tone. "She gets really frustrated because I express myself in words, and she doesn't feel like she can express herself that way. And too, she gets a lot of words from me, when (what) she really needs (is) something to back up those words. "The chaos of relationships," he continues, "is one of the greatest places God displays his grace and it is where we come face to face with our need for it."

It was also during his time off that a tragedy of national proportions occurred, the Dec 1st, 1997 shooting spree at Chapman's alma mater, Heath High School in Paducah, Kentucky. Then, in January of 1998, the eight-year old daughter of a couple in the Chapmans' small group from church was killed in an automobile accident. The loss, Chapman would write later in the book he co-authored with his pastor, Scotty Smith, was a "boulder of providence (sending) out waves of grace" (from Speechless: Living In Awe Of God's Disruptive Grace, Zondervan).

As the Scriptures say, "God gives grace to the humble," but this degree of brokenness, this degree of pain and doubt, was unlike any he'd experienced. "I don't know that I'm ever willing to be broken. I pray that I am, and I say that I am, but that process is not mine, it is God's," Chapman says, reflecting on the past year. "But in that brokenness, I have felt tangible expressions of God's grace."

Chapman recalls one day in particular, one simple, yet profound sign of "grace running down hill": "I had stacked some rocks out at this little place in the woods, a place I had gone to pray, desperate for God to do something, to show up or to have some sort of breakthrough. As I was praying, I remember smelling cedar, so strong it distracted me from my prayer. I looked around to see this little cedar tree that had been snapped in half from me stepping in there, moving rocks around. That was where the smell was coming from. It was just a tangible thing, a singn of grace as I was coming to understand it. I had a little note pad out there with me, and I wrote down these words: 'the fragrance of the broken.'"

Grace, he goes on to explain, "...flies in the face of our culture's 'I'm okay, you're okay' mentality, exposing the truth. The only place we can really accept this gift of God is in our brokenness before him. On good days, we're not convinced we need anything; on bad days, we can't accept such good news. It's too good to be true."

It's a control issue, he continues, at the core of which is pride. "I had never experienced grace to the degree that I have recently because I haven't been broken like this before."

This season of awakening to the disruptive grace of God has spawned a creativity all its own, a musical expression of his restlessness that still retains joy and astonishment in all God has done. Lyrically and sonically, Chapman's latest project, 'Speechless', stretches beyond the confines of the pop tradition, achieving a depth and balance previously unknown. It is an album of hope and healing. "Because many of these songs were written from such painful places, I thought the album would be darker, but God began to make all things new," he says. "To see that newness come forward -not to put aside the pain of what I've learned, but to be able to say with sense joy - has been an amazing gift for me."

For the first time in a long time, if not ever, Steven Curtis Chapman was able to approach his craft, not smothered in expectation, but with a sense of reckless abandon, an offering to God, confident that "...whatever happens with this, Lord, you know my heart."

"Steven understands his own strengths better now and he tends to gravitate toward those," says 'Speechless' producer Brown Bannister, explaining how Chapman has grown as an artist. "He knows when he's the one to do it and when he needs someone else to do it. It's the combination of his musicality and his sheer determination that makes him special.

"On a different level," Bannister continues, "he's relaxed a lot. This time around he was freer than he has been in the past in terms of what the public or industry or label expects. He was just so much more relaxed in the whole process."

Determined to keep the music as authentic as possible, Chapman opted to forego using veteran session players in favour of his touring band (Adam Anders on bass and programming, drummer Will Denton, Shane Keister on piano and Randy Pearce on electric guitar). Doing so, he says, took more time and the recording process was more difficult because everybody had a lot more input. The end result, however, is "a labour of love." Recorded without a lot of overdubs, 'Speechless' strikes a balance between the classic and the edgy, incorporating staggering orchestral arrangement as well as a buffet of loops and samples.

Chapman's decision to use his own band and to be more heavily involved in the pre-programming process tremendously impacted the final product. "Because of that," Bannister says, "Steven got more of his own musicality, his own creativity and his own ideas on the tape this time out than he ever has before."