After experiencing the unimaginable death of his 21-year old son — who died in October 2019 from an accidental drug overdose — contemporary Christian music superstar TobyMac turned to songwriting to try to make sense of the tragedy.
Wrestling with the grief that followed Truett Foster McKeehan’s death in a brutally honest way fills TobyMac’s seventh studio album, Life After Death, out Friday (Aug. 19) via Forefront/Capitol Christian Music Group.
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“I immediately went to write, because that’s what I know to do when I’m in so much pain,” the seven-time Grammy winner tells Billboard. “You go to [write] what you know, what you love and what brings you peace. I immediately started writing — and I wrote ‘21 Years.’ Then I wrote a song called ‘Faithfully,’ and I wrote ‘Everything About You’ in the first few months after Truett passed.”
Not surprisingly, this is TobyMac’s most personal album ever. “I know that people say, ‘My songs come from my journals,’ and I can’t claim that too much in the past — but this time I can,” he shares. “It really is my journey put to music over the last two years that includes every emotion. It’s a very honest record. I’ve had people text me [about] ‘Everything About You’ with my 20-year old daughter Marlee, and they’re like, ‘I listened to that song once and I’ll never listen to it again because I can’t take it.’ I know there’s songs like that that people just don’t want to listen to over and over, I know that sort of goes against everything you think as a pop-writing musician, but this is just a really honest look at my journey — a man that has literally experienced the good, bad and the ugly over the last two-and-a-half years.”
TobyMac admits that as hard as some of the songs may be to listen to, it’s equally hard to promote. “It’s so tender,” he says of dealing with his son’s passing. “I don’t want to make it where I’m just doing interviews to do interviews, so we’re limiting them — because it’s very fresh in my heart still, the loss and grief. But at the same time, it doesn’t stop my belief that music can be like medicine to people, and that music can be therapy to people. I’ve always believed that. There’s hope in who God can be to people. I don’t believe that I offer that to people, but I believe if God chooses to love someone through a song I wrote, that’s up to him, but I always hope for it.”
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Even though songs started pouring out early following his son’s death, TobyMac was surprised that any of them were uptempo, like opening track “Help Is on the Way (Maybe Midnight).” “I stumbled across a scripture that said, ‘God is rolling up his sleeves on our behalf,’” he recalls. “I said to myself, ‘Help Is on the way,’ and this song came out of that verse that encouraged me. After a few months of standing on that thought, as I was walking through that valley, I thought, ‘Hope is on the way.’ It’s like the shafts of light started coming through the leaves of the trees and into the valley and I started experiencing a little bit of God’s goodness.”
“Help Is on the Way (Maybe Midnight)” topped the Christian Airplay chart for five weeks. New single “The Goodness” is now gaining traction at Christian radio. “I was reminded that God loves me and he’s good and that somehow or another maybe this is good for me and maybe it’s good for Truett,” TobyMac says. “All of a sudden, the song ‘The Goodness’ just came out of me. I broke out a pen and wrote it on a napkin like I was an old school Nashville songwriter.”
TobyMac enlisted newcomer Blessing Offor to join him on the track after initially hearing him on a Christmas tune with Chris Tomlin and tracking him down to issue an invitation. “No one in the world could sing ‘The Goodness’ better than the guy that actually recognizes the goodness of God,” he says of Offor. “He recognizes it. I could feel it.”
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Offor is far from the only collaborator on the album. Corey Asbury, Jon Reddick, Sarah Reeves, Tauren Wells and Zach Williams also guest star. “I’ve always loved Zach from afar,” he says of his fellow Christian music star, who sings on “Cornerstone.” “I would say, my voice sounds like a path. His sounds like a dirt road. I needed a dirt road to make this thing sound good.”
Many of the songs work on multiple layers, including the aforementioned tender ballad “Everything About You.” For listeners unfamiliar with Truett’s passing, it sounds like a break-up song, which is fueling buzz that it could be a mainstream hit. But for TobyMac and his family, it’s a wrenching portrait of life without Truett.
“Marlee was struggling after losing her big brother, and I was struggling. I thought, ‘I don’t know how to get to the hearts of my kids about this,’” the father of five says. “Marlee loves music. I’ve never done this with her, but I said, ‘Let’s write a song that talks about how you feel, and let’s get it out there and talk about how I feel.’ I thought music could be a little bit of medicine to her. It could be therapy for us. I asked Jon Reddick to come over and play piano. We just kind of sang and wrote and cried a little bit, laughed a little bit, and ‘Everything About You’ came out.”
Marlee has a warm, evocative voice, but she has no interest in pursuing music, TobyMac says. “Right now music is just like therapy to her,” he says. “She sits at the piano, and always has, for hours but she loves animals more than she loves music.”
The album also features a reunion with Kevin Max and Michael Tait, the friends TobyMac rose to prominence with in the ‘80s as the pioneering Christian rap/rock trio DC Talk. “The second I wrote the first lines [of ‘Space,’] it was definitely something I wanted to do with DC Talk,” he says. “It feels very personal because it is. I wrote it about friends that struggle and friends that feel warm toward each other, but don’t know what to do with the space that’s come between them. I climbed a mountain with those two brothers. Those are my dear friends, and they always will be. We experienced things together that I’ll never experience with another person — so I wanted to honor that. I was so glad that they both agreed to be on it, and so grateful that they would honor what we did, and the friendships that remain.”
Obviously, this begs the question: Will there ever be another DC Talk album? “I don’t know,” TobyMac says. “Sometimes I’ll write a song that sounds more like DC Talk than it sounds like me and I’ll just kind of hold it. So there are a few of those sitting there. Our friend Ryan Tedder sent us a song that he felt like sounded like DC Talk, which we still have sitting there — and it’s amazing, because he wrote it. I don’t know the answer to that [reunion] question. I know that I’m not opposed to it; obviously I asked Michael and Kevin to be on this song, so it’s not a closed door for me.” (DC Talk’s last full-length studio album, Supernatural, came out in 1998.)
TobyMac scored another high-profile collaboration on “Promised Land,” which features Sheryl Crow. “We were just two parents at our kids’ elementary school when we met,” he relates. “Sheryl is one of my favorite artists. She delivers a vocal every time that just feels raw and absolutely real. . .I asked if she would be willing to sing on ‘Promised Land,’ because the song has an Americana vibe. I can’t believe I have a literal legend on a song of mine.”
Emotionally the song takes TobyMac back to his family’s roots. “I wanted to shoot the video in a coal mine, because that’s where my grandpa came from. The song and video pay homage to my grandfather and the working class and the struggle, but this song really is about thinking my promised land was a place. I found out that whether you are looking for it on earth or in heaven that really it isn’t a place at all, it’s a relationship with God. That’s the discovery for me in that song.”
TobyMac performs “Help is on the Way (Maybe Midnight),” “I’m Sorry” and “Faithfully” solo, with the latter summing up where he finds himself now. “I love the line ‘I may never be the same man, but I’m a man who still believes’ — because that’s who I am,” he says. “I might not walk in a room with as much swagger. I might be a little more meek, maybe even a little more sad at times, but I still believe.”
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