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It’s been a strong start for Nashville native, Brandon Heath. After some moderate indie success, the artist has seen his major label debut propel him into the spotlight, even garnering four Dove Award nominations, of which he won the award for “Best New Artist.” Add to that a solid songwriting history as well that includes collaborations with artists like Bebo Norman and Matt Wertz and you’d have to agree, Heath is on the right path to success.We recently had a chance to catch up with Heath and asked him about his recent award, his hometown benefits, as well as discuss his upcoming sophomore album, What If We.

Soul-Audio: I’d like to start with the Dove Award win for “Best New Artist.” In the moments immediately before, what was the internal feeling?

Brandon Heath: I was standing on stage with all the other nominees. We had all just opened the show with snippets of our songs. Standing next to Mandisa, I leaned over and whispered, “I feel like I’m on American Idol.” She laughed. I looked up at my dad in the balcony and he was grinning ear to ear. He was just proud that I was nominated. I think in that moment, so was I. I was thankful to be nominated for good work. And then Jeremy Camp read my name on the card and I lost all train of thought.

Here’s another article I wrote for Relevant Leader:

Every six months we would be evaluated on our job performance and every six months I would fail in one area.

Like my elementary school days where the mark for “Talks Excessively” was a staple along with my letter grades, I always received negative marks for my “Leadership Style” when it came to doing ministry. And the comments that followed were also the same every time: You are too honest and open with people under you. You are too vulnerable for a leader. You lose all credibility when you openly discuss your own sin and destructive habits.

Try as I might to change my personal style for the church that wanted me to slick, polished, and all together, I couldn’t do it. Why? Because it wasn’t true. I was the farthest thing from slick. My life was messed up. Even as a leader, my life looked as chaotic as the lives I was being paid to lead.

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This just might be the best debut you’ll grab this year. And if you haven’t yet listened to Ben Shive and heard for yourself the reason we gave The Ill-Tempered Klavier a 9 out of 10, then stop reading this and head to his MySpace page. But for the already initiated, we wanted to give you a greater glimpse into the songwriting genius of Ben Shive.

From the ‘nerdy’ title to it’s brilliant pop kaleidoscope, Shive’s musical gift to us this year came earlier than Christmas, but we’ll still be enjoying it until then. It was a pleasure to sit down with Ben and have him divulge all his secrets for us - where he gets his musical ideas, how he got started, and where that title comes from.

Soul-Audio: So you’ve been working on Ill-Tempered Klavier since 2006.

Ben Shive: That’s correct.

SA: When you first started the process and you kept the same title the whole time, is the final product what you pictured two years later?

Ben: Yeah, mostly. The only difference is that I’m a young writer and I was an even younger writer then. There are a couple songs, one in particular, that we cut on this original tracking session that we recorded that was very different from where the record ended up. At the time I started writing several years ago, I was really into Peter Gabriel. So we recorded this one song that was a real Peter Gabriel kind of thing.

So in that sense, that changed since then. My vision for maybe what my sound would be started to solidify as I wrote more songs; it started to become more clear what world I wanted to land in sonically. So something that was blatantly Peter Gabriel wouldn’t fit into my world sonically. But I think I did know back then that I wanted it to have a little bit of that psychedelic Beatles thing happening.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

One of Christian music’s brightest young talents comes to us in the form of Jenn Weber. Her musical style is reminiscent of Nichole Nordeman while her vocals deliver a Bethany Dillon double-take. But it’s the heart behind it all that really begins to set her apart, and that’s what comes through in Jenn’s answers to some of our recent questions.

Her new album, World of Wonder, is ready made for radio - a smart, pop affair with the ideal blend of ups and downs, insight and reflection. The lessons she’s learned early in her artistic career are worth listening to, so we hope you’ll take some time to find out more about Weber in this Soul-Audio exclusive.

Soul-Audio: There seem a couple obvious points of reference after just a few listens to the new album, Bethany Dillon and Nichole Nordeman. Would you agree with that at all?

Jenn Weber: When most people try to explain my musical style to their friends, they usually find themselves using one or both of those women as a comparison, so I would agree! Still, we are three unique artists with different stories and varied passions that set our ministries and sounds apart; we do, however, share a similar goal: To follow hard after the Lord and set others on fire for Him! Personally, I can’t think of two other women in the Christian music industry I would rather be compared to so I’m certainly honored.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

I’m not sure who originally shared this quote, but as a writer and pastor, I end up believing that storytelling (whether it’s the stories of others or my own) ends up being a large portion of what I do for a living. Thus I appreciated this quote very much:

“A storyteller is a life poet, an artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words — a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this! Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived. A story must be like life, but not so verbatim that it has no depth or meaning beyond what’s obvious to everyone on the street.”

He’s too busy thinking. That’s the reason you haven’t heard from Centricity singer/songwriter Jason Gray for quite some time. You can tell in the way he meticulously crafts his responses even for us at Soul-Audio, let alone in the songs he releases as his own creations.

Thus, it was interesting to hear from Jason in this time of writer’s block, granting us the chance to gain brilliant insights into the mind of the songwriter. And for those waiting to hear something from the wordsmith, we hope this tides you over.

Soul-Audio: I’d like to start at an obvious place of just hearing what’s happening for your music career at the moment. Can you tell us?

Jason Gray: Well, I released All The Lovely Losers - my first national release through a record label - a little over a year ago. It was actually a re-working of my last independent record that I released in late 2005 called The Better Part Of Me. Centricity bought the masters, repackaged it with new artwork and three new songs, remixed and remastered it for it’s March ‘07 release. I’m happy that these songs have had a long life, but I’ve been living with them for several years now and I’m definitely feeling the desire to sing a “new song.” I’m in a little bit behind the eight ball because Centricity was hoping that I would have a new record this Spring or at the latest this Fall, but as it stands now I don’t have enough songs.

You can read the rest of the interview here.