Trusting God and the healing and maturing process helped guide gospel music artist Lisa McClendon through a needed break from music in the years between her last studio album, 5 AM The Sound of Waking Up to Him (2018) and the present.
Her journey led her to graduate school to pursue a degree in STEM psychology. Understanding herself and her underlying actions, like why she associates with certain kinds of people and repeating behaviors, she said, was key to understanding God moving in her life.
“[I went back to school for psychology] just to understand, and I didn’t understand what God was about to do in my life,” she said. “[Returning to school] just opened up my entire world.”
That understanding culminated last month, when McClendon returned to the music scene and released the single, “Perfect.” Backed by a smooth, R&B style beat, the lyrics speak of flaws, i.e. insecurities, panic attacks, and fear that people suffer from and repeats these hopeful lines in the refrain: “nobody’s perfect/but we’re all worth it.”
“We oftentimes try to keep our testimonies [private] to save face, if we’re honest,” McClendon said. “’I’m always perfect and…nothing ever goes wrong’. But for me, in a space of spirituality and in as a believer, I’m looking at the life of Christ and all I know is His story. Sometimes, we skip over the part of his vulnerability, when he realized he had to go to the cross.
It inspires people when [they] realize that they’re not the only ones that face anxiety, divorce, or peace. I think that should be our responsibility to tell a certain part of our story, because it helps people.”
McClendon shared that “Perfect,” which addresses imperfections and insecurities, was born out of her own insecurities about recording new music after so many years. A friend of hers, who she insisted meant no harm, told McClendon that her music should be at least as good as, if not better than, music he had heard online.
“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Oh, well, maybe I’m not good enough anymore. Maybe I don’t know what I need to do,’ and I didn’t actually record it,” she said. “’Perfect’ is based on that. I hear you all on our DM’s. I see the comments. I’ve been seeing them for several years. But the fear of failure, the fear of not being able to top [hit song] ‘You Are Holy.’ All those fears have just kind of grabbed my throat, my chest, and it’s hard to do. I’m totally insecure. I feel like I’m going to fail.
“That’s when I wrote ‘Perfect’ and actually recorded [it] the first time…[I] took it back to my friend and he says to me, ‘This ain’t it…you need to do some different.’ Now, mind you, I had only had about four or five [other] people in my circle that listened to it, [and they were] like, ‘Oh my God, you got to put this song out. We need this’.”
Rather than listen to the four or five people who said she should release the song, McClendon listened to the one who said she shouldn’t and, as a result, she sat on the song for almost a year due to the same fears, insecurities, and comparisons with more successful people she sings about in the song.
Then, one day, she called out to God for the strength to overcome the negative voice.
“The ability came, and I said, ‘if there [is] an opening today at the studio, you’re going today, and you’re not making any excuses, and you’re not cancelling again,’ and that was the day and I got up,” she said. “I didn’t have all the pieces together. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I just had to break that fear, I had to break past that barrier.
“That was so important to take that first step. I was like, ‘if you take that first step, you’re going to be brave enough to keep going, because there will be no turning back at that point’ and that was the breaking point. I went in the studio and when I saw my producer…I said, that’s it. I don’t care what anybody says, I’m putting the song out. That’s a lot of people, we have dreams, we’re going to do something, but somebody has questioned it or maybe we’ve questioned it and when we first started, we didn’t question it. I’m hoping that this song breaks people free, gets them out of that stuck cycle, and [they] just go do it. Just do it.”
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With nine novels in print, including his highly-successful science-fiction teen series, Reject High, Brian Thompson continues to shape his career as a storyteller who fuses high-concept plots with down-to-earth characters.
When he is not urging others to pursue their writing passions, Thompson chases his own: being a full-time high school English/Language Arts teacher, and co-running the day-to-day operations of Great Nation Publishing. A proud graduate of both Morehouse College and Temple University, Thompson and his family live in East Metro Atlanta, Georgia.
https://authorbrianthompson.com/