Most songs are written music-first: a chord progression, a feeling, then words fitted to it. It is a good method and it produces most of the music you love. I write the other way round, and it is worth explaining why, because the reason is not aesthetic.
What lyric-first actually means
The words are finished, as words, before anything is built under them. Not a hook and a placeholder — a completed idea that can be read aloud and stand up without a chord anywhere near it.
The test is simple and unforgiving. Say it flat, in a normal voice, to another person. If it lands, it is a lyric. If it needs the melody to be moving, it was never the words doing the work.
Why it matters more for worship songs
If nobody sings your song but you, this is a preference. Worship music has a different job: a congregation will sing these lines a hundred times, which means the song is teaching them, whatever anyone intended.
Paul says it outright — songs are how a church teaches and admonishes itself (Colossians 3:16). So a claim about God set to a melody is not decoration. It is doctrine that people have memorised without meaning to.
Music is extremely good at making a line feel true. A well-placed key change will convince a room of something the words never actually established. That is the specific risk lyric-first is guarding against: it stops the arrangement from vouching for a claim the sentence cannot support. The over-promise is the most common failure, and it is much easier to spot on a page than in a room.
The Psalms were words first
This is not a novel method; it is the older one. The Psalms are poems that were then set — the Hebrew poetry has its own structure of parallelism and repetition, and it survives being translated into languages with entirely different musical traditions.
That is the durability argument in one sentence. Psalm 23 works in any language, in any arrangement, spoken at a graveside with no music at all. The words were built to carry it.
What it costs
Honestly: speed and, sometimes, melody.
It is slower. A lot of writing time goes into things that never become songs. And words written free of a melody do not always fit one gracefully — you end up rewriting to serve the tune, and the discipline is knowing which lines can bend and which are the reason the song exists.
Music-first writers get melodies that lyric-first writers rarely stumble into, because the melody came from the instrument rather than from a sentence. That is a real advantage and I do not pretend otherwise.
What it buys
The song survives the arrangement. Production dates fast. The songs still sung from the 80s and 90s survived despite their production, not because of it, and every one of them works on one instrument at half volume.
It travels. A lyric that holds up spoken can be said in a hospital corridor by someone who cannot sing.
It forces you to know what you are saying. You cannot write a finished lyric about a thing you have not thought through. The vagueness that music covers is fully visible on a page.
How it works in practice
The idea usually arrives as a sentence rather than a melody — often something read, or something someone said. It gets written out in full, prose first sometimes, and cut back until every line is doing work. Only then does it get to have chords.
Then it goes back to the flat-voice test, and a surprising amount does not survive it.
Why the album is taking this long
Redemption & Faith is about twelve songs telling one story in chronological order, and it is written this way from end to end. That is the honest reason for the timeline — the words have to be finished and true before anything is allowed to make them sound finished and true.
It is also why being independent matters: nobody is waiting on a release date that would force the second half of that sentence.
Two singles are out — “Commit To You” and “The Righteous Judge” — and both are here with every streaming link.