Nashville songwriting sessions are famous for the tedious hours spent trying to get something down on paper, only for a throwaway line in an unrelated side conversation to become the diamond in the rough a song needs to emerge from the chaos. For Phil Madeira and his friend Gordon Kennedy, the gem came when Kennedy asked Madeira about the faith story of a woman he was in a relationship with at the time.
Madeira told Kennedy about her path out of organized Christianity, which took her on a winding road through various Eastern religions and alternative worldviews. “She looks into everything,” Madeira said. “But she just can’t shake Jesus.”
Kennedy looked at Madeira and said, “Well, there’s our song.”
The result, “Can’t Shake Jesus,” was recorded by bluegrass legend Ricky Skaggs in 2010 and has been a mainstay of his live shows ever since.
A Boundless Faith
Phil Madeira is not one to ask about a stranger’s religious faith in casual conversation. And there is enough daylight between his and Ricky Skaggs’ theological frameworks to power a small city. Still, it’s hard to escape the impression that Madeira also has a hard time shaking Jesus from his life.
Madeira and I met in Nashville this fall after he reached out to me following a Good Faith Media article I published about a conversation I had with Jeff Hiller of the HBO series Somebody Somewhere. Madeira binged the show and was reading Hiller’s memoir, Actress of a Certain Age, when he discovered my article while looking up more information on the actor.
“I found him to be fascinating and hilarious,” Madeira said of Hiller, another person no longer involved in institutional religion but whose soul has been shaped by Jesus. “Such an interesting mix of shock, generosity of faith, and tenderness.”
As was the case in Madeira’s conversation with his songwriting partner about his then-girlfriend, I would come to learn he could have just as easily been talking about himself while praising Hiller.
Confession: I was a little starstruck when Madeira reached out to me.
During much of my formative years as an evangelical youth and young adult, I listened almost exclusively to Contemporary Christian Music. As I got older, I returned to the country music of my childhood. This led me into the wide world of Americana, a catch-all term for roots music without a radio or corporate home.
Also, I am one of those music nerds who reads liner notes.
So over the years, I had seen Madeira’s name as a musician or co-writer on the recordings of some of my favorite artists, as his career followed the trajectory of my musical evolution—first with the likes of Amy Grant, Margaret Becker and Sixpence None the Richer, and then later with Buddy and Julie Miller, Alison Krauss and the Civil Wars. Since 2008, he has been the keyboardist for Emmylou Harris.
Although the artists Madeira has performed and written with occupy various ends of the sacred–secular spectrum of musical genres, they read like a list of saints and sinners standing with one foot in this world and the other firmly planted in the next. It’s a stance he is very comfortable with.
In his 2013 memoir, God on the Rocks: Distilling Religion, Savoring Faith, Madeira shared a story of opening presents on Christmas Eve when he was young. His brother had gifted him the record Buddy Miles: Them Changes. Miles was a celebrated musician and had been a drummer in bands that played with Jimi Hendrix, Wilson Pickett and Carlos Santana.
On Christmas morning, Madeira played the album on the family’s Zenith stereo as he air-drummed along. His grandmother, who was Swedish and with whom he had a contentious relationship, asked him, “Vhat do you think Yeesuss thinks of that music?!” Madeira hissed back, “I think He’s up in Heaven tapping along!”
“[H]er compartmentalization of faith and life made her dreary to be around,” he wrote. “I hoped that Jesus wasn’t anything like her image of Him, and I imagined Him being bored to tears by her religion.”
Lessons of Love
In our conversation, Madeira often circled back to Jesus. At one point, he stopped to reflect on lyrics from the old children’s Sunday School song—The B-I-B-L-E, yeah that’s the book for me, I stand alone on the Word of God…
“Do I believe in the word of God?” he asked. “I do. But I believe the Word of God is Jesus.”
Beyond Jesus, Madeira doesn’t spend energy on the myriad ways humans have tried to use the Bible as a litmus test for salvation or to construct theologies about hell or human sexuality. And he has little patience for those who do.
“Social media has kind of ruined everything,” he told me. “Because now you know what is in a person’s heart.” He said this in reference to an acquaintance who would often post Christian scriptures that could be interpreted as anti-gay.
“The funny thing about this individual doing that is that they have an adult son who is married to a man,” he said. “And I’m thinking, ‘Do you want to fall on this sword at the expense of your son?’” As is often the case with songwriters, he didn’t know at the time that this person might have been a spark for a song he later wrote for one of his solo projects.
Oh yeah, in addition to being a musician or songwriter for some of the greatest artists of our time, Madeira has also found time to release over a dozen solo albums.
Madeira wrote “Lesson of Love” for a future project after he had completed all the tracks for his album Falcon, which was released earlier this year. But something didn’t feel right about one of the songs on the album.
“I had one song on there about a friendship that had really gone south,” he said. “I had written probably the snarkiest, meanest, best lyric I had ever written. And then I was thinking about the record, and the older I get, the more I want to be putting good out into the world. It’s not to say the song won’t be heard or released eventually, but I just didn’t feel it belonged on Falcon.”
So he returned to “Lesson of Love,” which he had already recorded with a band, but decided to strip it down to just piano and an upright bass.
The song, which is the final track on the album, tells the story of a mom who disowned her son after he came out as gay to her. It is a beautiful reflection on the ways divine grace attempts to set us free from our fears:
Someone’s trying to get a message to you, but you’re too afraid to let it through
You take the hard line, you gotta play tough
But you still haven’t learned the lesson of love
Learning the Lesson
Phil Madeira is not going to ask you about your faith in Jesus, and he might grow a little uncomfortable or annoyed if you ask him about his. But if you listen long enough, you’ll find Jesus walking in and out of his conversation in surprising, subtle and unguarded ways. Madeira has learned that the lessons of Jesus are the lessons of love—and once you’ve learned one, you’ve already begun to learn the other.
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Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
