Isolation. Loneliness. Depression. Fear. Desperation. Grief. But at times, triumph and celebration.
All these emotions and more have come our way courtesy of the COVID-19 pandemic. But what has brought us through these hard times?
Famed musician and Grammy Award winner Harry Connick Jr. has a ready answer for his own pandemic survival: His faith. And now, he’s sharing that answer on a new album, Alone With My Faith (Verve/Capitol CMG), recorded in his home studio during the pandemic.
“There were times when I was upset; I was really down,” Connick tells Dr. Steve Greene on a recent episode of the Greenelines podcast on the Charisma Podcast Network. “My heart hurt. And I was wondering what was going on, and I wrote that into songs, and other times I felt triumphant and celebratory.”
Connick shares how this album, a departure in multiple ways from his norm, came about.
“Last March of 2020, I think we all had a similar feeling, which was one, kind of shock that this pandemic was shutting the whole world down, and two, confusion—there was a lot of information out there that was conflicting,” he says. “And it was scary, because we didn’t know what we were up against.
“And as a couple of weeks went by, and we started to slowly get a handle on it, I thought, Well, you know, I could use this time productively,” Connick says.
He adds that he’s always wanted to record a gospel album, so that’s what he decided to do. He began with hymns such as “How Great Thou Art” and “Old Time Religion,” he says, “just some songs everybody knows.”
But then God changed his heart. “I started to think about some ideas I had about what I was feeling with the pandemic, which I had an inkling that a lot of people were feeling the same thing,” he explains. “So I wrote a bunch of songs too. So the album turned from a straight-up gospel album to an album of faith, and all the emotions—the entire spectrum that I’ve saved that I was feeling over the last year.”
The lyrics of the title track, featured in this video, presents just what Connick describes:
My life has changed/ My world is uncertain/ Everything’s strange/ Everything’s new/ But I’m not concerned/ With What tomorrow will bring/ Cause I’ve got today/ And I’m gonna pull through.
Alone with my faith/ What I know is true/ What gives me assurance/ When I don’t know what to do/ I don’t have all the answers/ But I have always known/ I’m eternally faithful/ So I am never alone.
Listen to the entire interview with musician Harry Connick Jr. on this episode of the Greenelines podcast here. Be sure to subscribe to Greenelines on your favorite podcast platform for more inspiring stories like this one. Find Alone With My Faith at this link. {eoa}
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