In crafting his Capitol Records/CCMG release Joy in the Morning, Tauren Wells found himself in what he calls “the golden hour of creativity,” and that’s not a bad place to be.
“Songwriter Paul Duncan said, ‘You’re in the golden hour of creativity where the sun is just right to get the right thing,’ and I really feel like that was true,” Wells says. I was in an interesting place because there was no demand from the label or anything like that for another album. I just wanted to start writing, so there was no pressure, no timelines.”
For Wells, the songs on his third album (released last Friday, June 10) were fueled by the freedom he felt to create without constraints. “A lot of these songs came from a place of freedom and honesty — not to say that my other works have not been honest — they have been, but there was just something special about how this particular moment was captured in my life and what I hope to bring people,” he says. “No matter what happens with the public reception of it, I’m so grateful to have been a part of this body of work.”
The 36-year-old Michigan native first burst on the contemporary Christian music scene fronting the band Royal Tailor before embarking on a solo career. “I never thought I could do it as a solo artist. I really felt like I needed Jarrod [Ingram], DJ [Cox] and Blake [Hubbard]. They were all brilliant,” Wells says of his former bandmates.
“Once I got into it and started to actually write songs and people were kind of saying, ‘Hey there’s something there as a songwriter,’ I thought, ‘Oh, okay well that’s cool.’ It literally came to a point where it was like, I can’t go forward in this configuration, I wasn’t even trying to go solo, I was trying to go home. I was newly married. We had our first son and our second son was on the way and I just couldn’t make sense of being gone 200-250 days a year.”
Wells admits he thought that music would just be a hobby until the breakout success of his Hills and Valleys project. “Then the Lionel Richie thing happened,” he says of being tapped to tour in 2017 with the icon. “Launching Hills and Valleys with the Lionel Richie tour is something the best marketer in the world could not have coordinated or arranged. I have a song on my new album that says “has to be God”– that was a ‘has to be God’ moment. My album Hills and Valleys did not come out until the first night of the Lionel tour. I only had an EP out, so for me to be on that tour literally makes absolutely no sense. I have to say that was a major catalyst.”
Since then, he’s been nominated for 10 Grammys, won six Dove Awards, earned three No. 1 singles on Billboard‘s Christian Airplay chart and over a billion global streams. He’s also toured with TobyMac and Mariah Carey and his duet with H.E.R., “Hold Us Together,” was nominated for a Grammy last November and a BET Award.
Joy in the Morning looks sure to continue the momentum. He led with the first track, “Fake It” featuring Aaron Cole, which stands at No. 18 on the Christian Airplay chart. “It’s a celebration,” says Wells, who recently co-hosted the K-LOVE Fan Awards. “It’s an up-tempo song you can dance to, something for your playlist for the beach. I wanted something up, vibrant, fun and that song just checked all the boxes.”
Wells is also particularly excited about people hearing the title track. “I feel like as people collectively, we’ve been in the longest night,” he says. “‘Joy in the Morning’ is just a reminder that our problems have an expiration date, that even in your darkest season, the darkest time of your life, the sun will rise again. Now is not forever. There is still hope and for me being a believer, that informs my ultimate hope and that is the horizon of heaven.”
“Come Home” was issued prior to the album’s release as a focus track, and Wells is passionate about the song’s message. “That song is important to me, and I want people to hear it,” he says. “I just want anyone who feels like they’ve been pushed outside of the margins of acceptance and love that there is still room for them. And on a deeper level, I wanted to speak to my peers and my family within the church and just kind of lovingly let everyone know that we’ve got to do better. We’ve got to do better at being known by our love, that is the defining factor of the believer and sometimes it gets lost beneath the religiosity of the day.”
Wells wrote or co-wrote each of the album’s 10 tracks and cites “Empty” as one that’s particularly close to his soul. “I just love that it considers the idea that we can get everything we could ever want and more than we could ever need and still not feel fulfilled and that perhaps it was designed that way,” he muses. “The C.S. Lewis quote was — and this is a paraphrase —something like, ‘If we experience everything the world has to offer and it doesn’t satisfy our desire, then we have to ask the question were we created for another world,’ and that song to me has that same essence to it.”
Wells will be taking the new songs on the road when he embarks on the Joy in the Morning tour this fall. The theater outing kicks off October 6. Cole and Lakewood Music are slated to open the dates.
Most musicians view live performances and recorded music as forms of escapism, but Wells is hoping his songs offer audiences more. “It’s cool to be able to create music or a piece of art or put on a live show where people get to forget about their problems, the pressures of life, the everyday routine of things,” he says. “But I do think that there’s a second layer to it, another dimension of what if we just didn’t let people get out of their lives for two hours? What if we allowed them to get into their lives… to really look inward and to evaluate the condition of our soul, to think about what’s been on our mind and what our attention is being pulled toward?
“I think so much of what we consume are things that numb how we’re feeling,” he continues. “My hope for this [album] is that people become aware of how they are feeling and that somehow these lyrics and melodies give them language to something they haven’t been able to quite put their finger on yet.”
Only three albums into his career, Wells feels this is just the beginning. “What I hope is the longevity of my career will be defined by my willingness to keep showing up and being authentic and to not try to be any more or any less than God created me to be,” he says. “I think creating from that place, building relationships from that place, is the secret.”
