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It's not a choice most people have to make at the age of sixteen; but then again, most sixteen-year-olds don't have multiple record companies simultaneously pursuing them. There was something in Kendall Payne's bright, hopeful, alternative brand of pop that caught the ear and touched the souls of A&R reps at Christian and general market labels alike. While Kendall's faith was explicit in her lyrics from the beginning, it was delivered with an innocence and passion that was ultimately inviting in a world where such things are too often divisive. You might even say her ability to blend common emotion, temporal experience, and ultimate truth was a gift-a gift capable of carrying her through the lines of doubt and resistance that hinder the attempts of so many.
Now nineteen, Kendall Payne--recently described by one critic as a one-woman Lilith Fair-- explains her eventual choice to sign with Capitol Records, not in terms of potential popularity or potential sales, but rather in terms of potential impact.
"I grew up listening to Christian music and I've always loved it," Kendall says. "I'm definitely closer to the Lord because of it. But I was offered an opportunity that a lot of Christian artists don't have, an opportunity to take God's light right into some very dark places. I had to seize the chance. I met with the people at Sparrow at that time and told them 'I love you guys and I love what you're doing but right now I think God is leading me to be salt and light and I just need to go for it.' They said, 'This is great, we bless you and support you in what you're trying to do.'"
After Kendall's 1999 Capitol Records debut, Jordan's Sister, was released and critically lauded, the notion of releasing it jointly through Sparrow seemed patently obvious. Kendall's lyrically driven, passionate, thirteen song offering had struck a rare balance that hinged on her own honest vulnerability and on her commitment to speak the truth plainly, in love and with compassion. Produced by Ron Aniello (Jude Cole)-with the exception of two tracks produced by Glen Ballard (Alanis Morrissette)-Jordan's Sister emerged as a surprisingly introspective confession of faith.
"When I sit down to write a song, Kendall says, I'm not trying to write a hit and I'm not trying to write what I think everyone else wants to hear.
For me, the process of writing is wrapped up in the challenge of coming before God and saying, 'I'm here to be raw before You, and I'm here for You to change me and use me.' I really think with all my heart that lyrics and music are God given and that most of the time we're just vessels through which they flow. That's why I'm most effected by a song when the writer has the guts to be real and honest. That quality touches me, and I hope I can reach other people that way too."
The project's first single, Modern Day Moses, combines that sense of honesty with what Kendall describes as her absolute core desire. Mixing acoustic underlayers with an infectious, understated chorus, Modern Day Moses takes snapshots of the lives of Moses, Mother Theresa, and Martin Luther King, Jr., all individuals whose faith and obedience changed the world around them. "My greatest fear, says Kendall, is a fear of having my life pass me by without doing the things I was sent here to do. I believe God has placed each of us here with a specific purpose, but so many people walk through lives in a daze never knowing that. I want to be faithful with what's set before me and make a difference in the world. Right now, the doors that have opened for me are through my music."
Kendall's sense of calling in her craft was so pronounced that, even as a sixteen-year-old meeting with record company executives, she developed a mission statement to make sure there would be no misunderstandings regarding her intent. "I would sit down in their offices, Kendall remembers, and I would tell them: Being a teenager myself, I see firsthand the power that music can have in a young person's life. It is their anthem.
It's what they live by and die for. To be honest with you, there's no hope in the music today. I'm all about hope! But the only hope that I have is in God. I haven't always understood Him, but He's never left me and He's never forsaken me. I' not into beating people over the head with a Bible. I'm just saying God is the only thing I've found worth investing my heart into. Now let me sing you my song."
The song Kendall would sing for them, Never Leave, was the new-school equivalent of a soulful ballad. It was one she had penned in the midst of life's difficult passages, a recognition of God's faithfulness of even in the midst of human doubt and duplicity. Never Leave ultimately found it's way onto Jordan's Sister because, as Kendall says, "Everyone-believers and non-believers alike-just seemed to gravitate toward it."
That same hope is expressed more aggressively and pro-actively in the haunting, pounding, interwoven groove of Hollywood. Hollywood is about taking God's hope to the streets, Kendall explains. "It's almost like a war cry for me. I wrote it on the top floor of the Capitol Records building looking out at the HOLLYWOOD sign and at the streets of Hollywood laid out in front of me. I was watching all of the people and just thinking, 'Whoever you are, whatever you came here looking for, it's the Truth that will set you free, and if you listen, I'm going to tell it to you! I'm going to share my hope.'"
Several of the songs on Jordan's Sister enter directly into the struggles and sorrows of real individuals, suffusing them with that same aura of eternal hope.
It's Not The Time, for instance, with a feel of lilting gravity, manages to sensitively chronicle the confusion of a woman Kendall met who had suffered the emotional turmoil and haunting aftermath of an abortion decision.
Another of the project's standout tracks, Fatherless At 14, was written as a simple, acoustic gift to a young girl in Kendall's youth group shortly after the girl's father had died unexpectedly. "I walked upstairs to her bedroom just a few hours after his death," Kendall remembers. "Her eyes welled up with tears and she came and buried her head in my shoulder and stated sobbing and she said, 'I'm not my daddy's princess anymore.' Of course I just lost it too and I sat with her all night. A couple of days later I was thinking about what her father would want to say to her if he could. I wrote Fatherless At 14 and recorded the demo that same day. My A&R director cried the first time he heard it. He decided it should go on the album exactly the way it was, so we just used the demo."
Supermodels, at the other end of Kendall's lyrical spectrum and arguably the quirkiest cut on Jordan's Sister, has already achieved widespread notoriety as the theme song for the WB Network series, Popular.
"You look on magazines, TV, anywhere, Kendall says, and you see everyone aspiring to be this waif-like-drop-dead gorgeous supermodel. It's just absurd. When you look at God's word, at His original plan, he speaks of a woman of character, but we've got it so backwards. Consequently, self-image is a struggle for most girls. Supermodels is somewhat tongue-in-cheek and I hope no one tries to interrupt it too literally, but at the same time I
hope it brings some freedom to girls who are frustrated by that pressure to measure up to something so frivolous and unattainable."
The struggle to find out who you really are on a deep, eternal level is named in the album's celebrative, forward-leaning opener Closer To Myself.
Juxtaposing poetic image with prayerful intensity, Closer To Myself becomes a request for divine illumination to define the shape and meaning of a person's life.
"Ultimately, the only real measuring stick for a Christian is the life of
Christ," Kendall says. "If it's not our own life we seek, we're told in scripture that we'll lose it, but in giving it up for His sake, we gain it eternally. When I sing about becoming closer to myself, to who I really am, that really means becoming something closer to Christ. It means being transformed to his image. That's where you find your true life. That's where you find what you're really made of and who you're created to be."
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