Ginny Owens on
An interview with Ginny Owens on her own personal journey and the importance of contemporary music and how it can impact worship.
Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your own background, kind of what sort of path you followed into the music industry and some of the places music has taken you since then?
Ginny Owens: Well, I, went to Belmont University in Nashville and found that there were many singer/songwriters in the world, particularly in Nashville, so I changed my major from commercial performance to music education and I thought, well, everybody else wants to sing so I’ll just try to be, you know, get a degree and be the coolest high school music teacher ever.
I’m sure you could’ve been too!
GO: Well, I have to admit now, I’m very glad that God had other plans! But I just, couldn’t really imagine performing regularly. I mean, I did like to perform, but it always made me nervous, and I always thought relating to a crowd would just be very difficult, especially on a regular basis. But during my student teaching semester, my last semester of college, I got asked to sing. I went to church at Brentwood Baptist at the time. And I got asked to sing for the Offertory. They were raising money that Sunday and I kind of think they asked me because they were like: “We’re raising money; let’s ask the blind girl to sing because it’ll help.” [laughter] There were so many great singers that went to church there; I just couldn’t imagine why they had asked me to sing. But anyway, I sang a song that I had written, and there was a guy in the congregation who was a producer and engineer. He approached me afterwards and said, “Have you ever thought of doing music for a living?” And I said, “Well, maybe for a minute, but everybody else wants to do it, so there’s just not enough room.” And he said, “You might be right, but I think we should record some of your songs and I’ll send it around to people to see what they think.” So I recorded, I think, five piano/vocal demos of my songs, my original songs, at his little studio, and he started sending them around. I didn’t hear anything for months. In the meantime, I was looking for teaching jobs, and I was finding that very difficult because no one wanted to hire a blind teacher!
Finally my friend Doug, the engineer/producer, called me one day and said, “Hey, there’s a publisher friend of mine that wants to meet with you who really likes your music.” So we met; we talked about songwriting and I played him some of my songs. He was very sweet, and he said, “Well, I would love to think about working together.”
So that is kind of how I started. He was my publisher for, I think, 11 years or 10 years. It was from there that he connected me with Michael W. Smith and the folks at Rocketown Records. The record deal came after the publishing deal. From there, I made quite a few records at Rocketown – I think six. And then I decided to do the independent thing for a while and make some indie records as well as a hymns record and a Christmas record. And I continue to write music and do concerts and lead worship.
So, you lead worship at a church here in the Nashville area. When you’re touring around are you usually playing in churches, or in other kinds of venues?
GO: Lots of churches. We also play colleges and lots of different events. You know, we’ll do, say, a fundraiser banquet for a Crisis Pregnancy Center or a specific organization like that. So the concerts tend to look different depending on where we are, and I kind of try to tailor my presentation to the event. It makes it interesting. It’s a little different than touring and setting up your sound and lights and doing your own full band show, but I kind of like it, because it makes you think and you have to prepare. I think what I have learned as I’ve been leading worship and then as we’ve found ourselves doing more concerts where we tailor the songs to the even – where we tailor what we do every evening – I’ve just learned how important preparation is. I feel like I spend more time preparing for everything than I actually do performing.
So you just don’t have a set package that you come in with and play, wherever you’re playing. You’re actually thinking about, “what is the context here and what kind of event is it?” I think that’s very cool. I also think it’s kind of interesting that, you weren’t the stereotypical Belmont student who came here at 17 desperate to be a recording artist. It sounds like it’s something that kind of happened serendipitously.
GO: Absolutely. Definitely. I loved writing music. I started writing when I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. But I also was really shy and I didn’t have a lot of confidence. So I definitely seemed like the least likely candidate for a career as a musician.
So I’m curious, how has being in the music industry changed your perspective on the music industry? So as somebody who kind of looked at it from the outside before, but now you find yourself doing this for a living, what are some of the things you’ve learned along the way?
GO: That’s a good question. I’ve learned a lot about the power of a song. I’ve learned how songs can really impact peoples’ lives and so as a writer, I’ve learned how important words are. How much they matter and how necessary it is to be intentional with every lyric I write. I’ve learned the power of performance. I watch people who can deliver a message, whether good or bad, and if they perform well, if they deliver it well, you know, they will have followers.
Also, I think the biggest thing has been to watch the change in the music industry since even when I started until now. It’s quite a different industry than it was. In the beginning, there was a lot of money. I was on a small label, so we never had too much money, but probably what we had for a recording budget then would be what you would spend now at a bigger label. And if you sold 200,000 records, that was pretty good back then. Now, if you sell even 20,000 or 30,000 records, that’s pretty good.
How has that changing economic situation played out in the lives of songwriters and musicians here in town?
GO: A lot less money is made for sure. Everybody’s downsizing. Also, publishing companies were a big deal when I started. You could actually have a separate publishing deal and a record label, and they may not be at the same place. They may not be at the same company. And now that’s almost unheard of. And also now, record labels or management companies get a lot more of the money. So if you sign with a record label, for instance, as an artist, you are probably going to have to give them part of your publishing, or all of it. You’re going to have to maybe even give them some of your merchandise road sales. They call those 360 deals. So that’s a pretty typical way that things work now. So everybody wants a bigger piece of the pie because the pie has gotten so much smaller.
Has that resulted in changes in the kind of music that gets recorded?
GO: I think so.
I mean, if there’s a smaller pie and there are fewer slices to go around, are record companies less adventurous?
GO: Absolutely.
Does that mean there is a narrower band of music that ends up getting out there?
GO: Record companies are much less adventurous . . . and they are not into artist development anymore. And back in the day, you might have two failed records with an artist, but you might keep going as a label with that artist if you believed in them. That rarely happens anymore. And, so, part of it is, I mean, there are far more artists now than there used to be, because you have outlets like YouTube and Facebook and iTunes, and you have ways to get your music out there as just a person sitting in your bedroom making music on your computer. It’s so easy to get music out there. Or if you make great videos. Or if you’re a good performer. There are many avenues that you can go down to get heard. So it means that the people that are in business, like the labels, are either looking for something that’s already working, say, on YouTube, or, you know, an artist with a huge social media following that’s already touring, something that’s already created, so that they don’t have to do the work. They can partner with the artist rather than mold the artist. Also, in a genre like Christian music, there aren’t many radio stations. It’s one of the smaller genres. And so there are certain, I have to be careful how I word this, there are certain characteristics that I think labels look for in their artists because their success is largely dictated by the radio stations and the people that program the playlists on the radio stations. So it means that, for instance, that Christian music is very male-dominated right now. It has been for a while. So there might be one or two females in the top 30 or 40 songs. I would say, in my opinion, there are very few songs that are incredibly deep. People want to play songs that are happy and light and have a pop feel. There’s definitely not a lot of mainstream Christian radio music that really cuts into or discusses the meat of faith or the journey of faith. There’s definitely some, but the lighter, the fluffier you can be, the more you can appeal to a wider audience. That’s sort of what gets played on radio. And so when labels are signing artists, those are the kind of songs that they want to be able to get out of those artists.
You’ve written music for a more general market as well as music that is specifically for worship. Are some of the things that you‘re talking about in terms of the kind of sound and the kind of lyrical depth – are those things mainly true of the broader Christian market? Or do they tend to be true for contemporary worship music as well?
GO: I think so. I think there’s a lot of great contemporary worship music. There are definitely some wonderful melodies in contemporary worship music. I think you have to search a lot harder to find lyrical depth. I think it’s there, but you have to search for it. As a worship leader, sometimes I’m okay with a song being celebratory and not, maybe, having as much to say. But you definitely need a balance. You want lyrics that inspire thought and inspire worship, obviously. So I think it’s finding a combination of those songs that really have a lot to say and the songs that are more celebratory and obviously old hymns...kind of putting a combination of those together, I think seems to be the most effective thing.
So if the same kind of shallow lyrics and lack of musical substance that characterize contemporary Christian music also characterize contemporary worship music – why should we keep it around? Are there any ways that the church has been enriched by contemporary worship music?
GO: I definitely think so. I think that it is very accessible to a larger audience. So, if you have a congregation with kids that are seven or eight with senior citizens who are 70, they can probably pick up the melody of a contemporary worship song pretty easily. And then also, what’s neat about contemporary worship, I think, is you have simple, singable melodies, and then if they have good lyrics, shallow or deep, if they have solid lyrics that communicate some aspect of the gospel, then that’s what’s going to stick in your head. It’s still a message that, as people memorize, that they’re going to take it with them, whereas hymns are a little harder to memorize. I remember the church I grew up in. I think our church had a policy where we would sing a hymn no more than three times a year so that we wouldn’t grow up too used to it.
What? Whose great idea was that?
GO: I know. So as a person who couldn’t read the hymnbook, I would pick up the melodies, but I didn’t learn a lot of hymn lyrics until after college. And what was funny is I remember coming to Nashville and going to church and being like, “Wow, these songs are so cool because you just can memorize them so easily.” But then I went to a different church and they had different contemporary worship songs. It was kind of like everybody had their own brand at that time. And I guess it is still a little bit like that, but it feels less fragmented now because it is such an industry. It feels like you might know a Hillsong and a Chris Tomlin song and a Matt Redman song, whereas in the past I think you might have sort of, churches at least, seemed to adopt one of those worship icons or worship groups. But I remember that, when I finally started to read hymn lyrics, I was like, “Wow, these are unbelievable, beautiful pieces of art and poetry.”
One thing that people at the Worship Institute are going to be talking about at the Symposium is what faithful discipleship looks like in the world of music generally, but particularly, in the world of contemporary worship music. Can think of any examples of that kind of thing that you have encountered – musicians or songwriters or churches who are really doing a good job of faithfully stewarding the church through music?
GO: I had mentioned Passion earlier – I think one thing they do really well is they have, their worship conferences, always have, really, lots of solid biblical teachers from varying backgrounds, whether it’s like John Piper or Louie Giglio, or people who are very different from each other . . . Brennan Manning. So I love that in they do such a great job of inspiring people to do something more than just an emotional, collective sing-fest, but it’s definitely about discipleship as well. I’ve been to some churches that I think really do it well. I think of places where people use contemporary worship songs to bring a community together as a corporate body, people lifting their voices and praising together. You go into a place and you go, wow, this is a community that collectively really has learned this well. I think the idea of worship and discipleship is very interesting. I’ll have to ponder that some more.
I think it’s a challenge because, oftentimes contemporary worship music is produced by people who are not connected to the life of the congregations that use the music. They may not be connected denominationally or even be part of the same tradition; they’re often not local or even kind of full time church musicians – people who are plugged into the local church. So, in that sense, I mean if discipleship involves kind of relationships developed over time . . . .
GO: Definitely. Although I think so often now, there are worship leaders and musicians in churches that do write their own songs. That’s one thing I love, when I have the opportunity to actually write something specific for a series that we’re going through at church. Maybe that will be even more of a trend. Really it would be a wonderful trend if the worship leaders and the creative arts folks at churches would be able to sort of write their own music; music that could help with and could support discipleship.
Yeah, and I mean, you were talking earlier about how many more artists there are now just because it’s so much easier. You can record a tune in 30 minutes on your Mac Book Pro sitting in your bedroom.
GO: And make a video for it.
Exactly. Maybe there’s a real opportunity there that there wasn’t wasn’t there 30 years ago – for a lot of people to be creating the music for their own congregation.
GO: Right. I definitely think there is. It’s interesting. I was at a church about a month ago where, just out of necessity, sort of for whatever topics they were discussing in their sermons and things like that, they had actually written, the worship team collectively had written quite a few songs and they had made their own record. I do think that’s going to happen a lot more, and should happen a lot more too. I think, if we can serve the local church in that way, that would make a huge difference.
Interviewer: Why don’t you tell me a little bit about your own background, kind of what sort of path you followed into the music industry and some of the places music has taken you since then?
Ginny Owens: Well, I, went to Belmont University in Nashville and found that there were many singer/songwriters in the world, particularly in Nashville, so I changed my major from commercial performance to music education and I thought, well, everybody else wants to sing so I’ll just try to be, you know, get a degree and be the coolest high school music teacher ever.
I: I’m sure you could’ve been too!
GO: Well, I have to admit now, I’m very glad that God had other plans! But I just, couldn’t really imagine performing regularly. I mean, I did like to perform, but it always made me nervous, and I always thought relating to a crowd would just be very difficult, especially on a regular basis. But during my student teaching semester, my last semester of college, I got asked to sing. I went to church at Brentwood Baptist at the time. And I got asked to sing for the Offertory. They were raising money that Sunday and I kind of think they asked me because they were like: “We’re raising money; let’s ask the blind girl to sing because it’ll help.” [laughter] There were so many great singers that went to church there; I just couldn’t imagine why they had asked me to sing. But anyway, I sang a song that I had written, and there was a guy in the congregation who was a producer and engineer. He approached me afterwards and said, “Have you ever thought of doing music for a living?” And I said, “Well, maybe for a minute, but everybody else wants to do it, so there’s just not enough room.” And he said, “You might be right, but I think we should record some of your songs and I’ll send it around to people to see what they think.” So I recorded, I think, five piano/vocal demos of my songs, my original songs, at his little studio, and he started sending them around. I didn’t hear anything for months. In the meantime, I was looking for teaching jobs, and I was finding that very difficult because no one wanted to hire a blind teacher!
Finally my friend Doug, the engineer/producer, called me one day and said, “Hey, there’s a publisher friend of mine that wants to meet with you who really likes your music.” So we met; we talked about songwriting and I played him some of my songs. He was very sweet, and he said, “Well, I would love to think about working together.”
So that is kind of how I started. He was my publisher for, I think, 11 years or 10 years. It was from there that he connected me with Michael W. Smith and the folks at Rocketown Records. The record deal came after the publishing deal. From there, I made quite a few records at Rocketown – I think six. And then I decided to do the independent thing for a while and make some indie records as well as a hymns record and a Christmas record. And I continue to write music and do concerts and lead worship.
I: So, you lead worship at a church here in the Nashville area. When you’re touring around are you usually playing in churches, or in other kinds of venues?
GO: Lots of churches. We also play colleges and lots of different events. You know, we’ll do, say, a fundraiser banquet for a Crisis Pregnancy Center or a specific organization like that. So the concerts tend to look different depending on where we are, and I kind of try to tailor my presentation to the event. It makes it interesting. It’s a little different than touring and setting up your sound and lights and doing your own full band show, but I kind of like it, because it makes you think and you have to prepare. I think what I have learned as I’ve been leading worship and then as we’ve found ourselves doing more concerts where we tailor the songs to the even – where we tailor what we do every evening – I’ve just learned how important preparation is. I feel like I spend more time preparing for everything than I actually do performing.
I: So you just don’t have a set package that you come in with and play, wherever you’re playing. You’re actually thinking about, “what is the context here and what kind of event is it?” I think that’s very cool. I also think it’s kind of interesting that, you weren’t the stereotypical Belmont student who came here at 17 desperate to be a recording artist. It sounds like it’s something that kind of happened serendipitously.
GO: Absolutely. Definitely. I loved writing music. I started writing when I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. But I also was really shy and I didn’t have a lot of confidence. So I definitely seemed like the least likely candidate for a career as a musician.
I: So I’m curious, how has being in the music industry changed your perspective on the music industry? So as somebody who kind of looked at it from the outside before, but now you find yourself doing this for a living, what are some of the things you’ve learned along the way?
GO: That’s a good question. I’ve learned a lot about the power of a song. I’ve learned how songs can really impact peoples’ lives and so as a writer, I’ve learned how important words are. How much they matter and how necessary it is to be intentional with every lyric I write. I’ve learned the power of performance. I watch people who can deliver a message, whether good or bad, and if they perform well, if they deliver it well, you know, they will have followers.
Also, I think the biggest thing has been to watch the change in the music industry since even when I started until now. It’s quite a different industry than it was. In the beginning, there was a lot of money. I was on a small label, so we never had too much money, but probably what we had for a recording budget then would be what you would spend now at a bigger label. And if you sold 200,000 records, that was pretty good back then. Now, if you sell even 20,000 or 30,000 records, that’s pretty good.
I: How has that changing economic situation played out in the lives of songwriters and musicians here in town?
GO: A lot less money is made for sure. Everybody’s downsizing. Also, publishing companies were a big deal when I started. You could actually have a separate publishing deal and a record label, and they may not be at the same place. They may not be at the same company. And now that’s almost unheard of. And also now, record labels or management companies get a lot more of the money. So if you sign with a record label, for instance, as an artist, you are probably going to have to give them part of your publishing, or all of it. You’re going to have to maybe even give them some of your merchandise road sales. They call those 360 deals. So that’s a pretty typical way that things work now. So everybody wants a bigger piece of the pie because the pie has gotten so much smaller.
I: Has that resulted in changes in the kind of music that gets recorded?
GO: I think so.
I: I mean, if there’s a smaller pie and there are fewer slices to go around, are record companies less adventurous?
GO: Absolutely.
I: Does that mean there is a narrower band of music that ends up getting out there?
GO: Record companies are much less adventurous . . . and they are not into artist development anymore. And back in the day, you might have two failed records with an artist, but you might keep going as a label with that artist if you believed in them. That rarely happens anymore. And, so, part of it is, I mean, there are far more artists now than there used to be, because you have outlets like YouTube and Facebook and iTunes, and you have ways to get your music out there as just a person sitting in your bedroom making music on your computer. It’s so easy to get music out there. Or if you make great videos. Or if you’re a good performer. There are many avenues that you can go down to get heard. So it means that the people that are in business, like the labels, are either looking for something that’s already working, say, on YouTube, or, you know, an artist with a huge social media following that’s already touring, something that’s already created, so that they don’t have to do the work. They can partner with the artist rather than mold the artist. Also, in a genre like Christian music, there aren’t many radio stations. It’s one of the smaller genres. And so there are certain, I have to be careful how I word this, there are certain characteristics that I think labels look for in their artists because their success is largely dictated by the radio stations and the people that program the playlists on the radio stations. So it means that, for instance, that Christian music is very male-dominated right now. It has been for a while. So there might be one or two females in the top 30 or 40 songs. I would say, in my opinion, there are very few songs that are incredibly deep. People want to play songs that are happy and light and have a pop feel. There’s definitely not a lot of mainstream Christian radio music that really cuts into or discusses the meat of faith or the journey of faith. There’s definitely some, but the lighter, the fluffier you can be, the more you can appeal to a wider audience. That’s sort of what gets played on radio. And so when labels are signing artists, those are the kind of songs that they want to be able to get out of those artists.
I: You’ve written music for a more general market as well as music that is specifically for worship. Are some of the things that you‘re talking about in terms of the kind of sound and the kind of lyrical depth – are those things mainly true of the broader Christian market? Or do they tend to be true for contemporary worship music as well?
GO: I think so. I think there’s a lot of great contemporary worship music. There are definitely some wonderful melodies in contemporary worship music. I think you have to search a lot harder to find lyrical depth. I think it’s there, but you have to search for it. As a worship leader, sometimes I’m okay with a song being celebratory and not, maybe, having as much to say. But you definitely need a balance. You want lyrics that inspire thought and inspire worship, obviously. So I think it’s finding a combination of those songs that really have a lot to say and the songs that are more celebratory and obviously old hymns...kind of putting a combination of those together, I think seems to be the most effective thing.
I: So if the same kind of shallow lyrics and lack of musical substance that characterize contemporary Christian music also characterize contemporary worship music – why should we keep it around? Are there any ways that the church has been enriched by contemporary worship music?
GO: I definitely think so. I think that it is very accessible to a larger audience. So, if you have a congregation with kids that are seven or eight with senior citizens who are 70, they can probably pick up the melody of a contemporary worship song pretty easily. And then also, what’s neat about contemporary worship, I think, is you have simple, singable melodies, and then if they have good lyrics, shallow or deep, if they have solid lyrics that communicate some aspect of the gospel, then that’s what’s going to stick in your head. It’s still a message that, as people memorize, that they’re going to take it with them, whereas hymns are a little harder to memorize. I remember the church I grew up in. I think our church had a policy where we would sing a hymn no more than three times a year so that we wouldn’t grow up too used to it.
I: What? Whose great idea was that?
GO: I know. So as a person who couldn’t read the hymnbook, I would pick up the melodies, but I didn’t learn a lot of hymn lyrics until after college. And what was funny is I remember coming to Nashville and going to church and being like, “Wow, these songs are so cool because you just can memorize them so easily.” But then I went to a different church and they had different contemporary worship songs. It was kind of like everybody had their own brand at that time. And I guess it is still a little bit like that, but it feels less fragmented now because it is such an industry. It feels like you might know a Hillsong and a Chris Tomlin song and a Matt Redman song, whereas in the past I think you might have sort of, churches at least, seemed to adopt one of those worship icons or worship groups. But I remember that, when I finally started to read hymn lyrics, I was like, “Wow, these are unbelievable, beautiful pieces of art and poetry.”
I: One thing that people at the Worship Institute are going to be talking about at the Symposium is what faithful discipleship looks like in the world of music generally, but particularly, in the world of contemporary worship music. Can think of any examples of that kind of thing that you have encountered – musicians or songwriters or churches who are really doing a good job of faithfully stewarding the church through music?
GO: I had mentioned Passion earlier – I think one thing they do really well is they have, their worship conferences, always have, really, lots of solid biblical teachers from varying backgrounds, whether it’s like John Piper or Louie Giglio, or people who are very different from each other . . . Brennan Manning. So I love that in they do such a great job of inspiring people to do something more than just an emotional, collective sing-fest, but it’s definitely about discipleship as well. I’ve been to some churches that I think really do it well. I think of places where people use contemporary worship songs to bring a community together as a corporate body, people lifting their voices and praising together. You go into a place and you go, wow, this is a community that collectively really has learned this well. I think the idea of worship and discipleship is very interesting. I’ll have to ponder that some more.
I: I think it’s a challenge because, oftentimes contemporary worship music is produced by people who are not connected to the life of the congregations that use the music. They may not be connected denominationally or even be part of the same tradition; they’re often not local or even kind of full time church musicians – people who are plugged into the local church. So, in that sense, I mean if discipleship involves kind of relationships developed over time . . . .
GO: Definitely. Although I think so often now, there are worship leaders and musicians in churches that do write their own songs. That’s one thing I love, when I have the opportunity to actually write something specific for a series that we’re going through at church. Maybe that will be even more of a trend. Really it would be a wonderful trend if the worship leaders and the creative arts folks at churches would be able to sort of write their own music; music that could help with and could support discipleship.
I: Yeah, and I mean, you were talking earlier about how many more artists there are now just because it’s so much easier. You can record a tune in 30 minutes on your Mac Book Pro sitting in your bedroom.
GO: And make a video for it.
I: Exactly. Maybe there’s a real opportunity there that there wasn’t wasn’t there 30 years ago – for a lot of people to be creating the music for their own congregation.
GO: Right. I definitely think there is. It’s interesting. I was at a church about a month ago where, just out of necessity, sort of for whatever topics they were discussing in their sermons and things like that, they had actually written, the worship team collectively had written quite a few songs and they had made their own record. I do think that’s going to happen a lot more, and should happen a lot more too. I think, if we can serve the local church in that way, that would make a huge difference.