Still, there’s not a lot of clarity in Kearney’s songs of poetic yearning—is it a girl or God for whom he’d “take a bullet”? Which does he mean, when he sings, “I will wait for you”? But Kearney’s not sure he needs or wants to say what all these references mean definitively.
“It’s a funny thing,” he says. “C.S. Lewis said that romantic love is what proved to him that God existed. So I think that sometimes there’s a healthy blurring of lines between the love a man feels for a woman and the love that we experience for God. That’s why the Song of Solomon exists (in Sacred Writ); it’s God’s way of showing us His love, by putting people that you love on earth.”
“I can’t help but wonder, who is this wind at my back/A whisper to walk on, come on from all of that/It’s undeniable how brilliant you are/In an un-reliable world you shine like a star”Since Kearney remains friends with folks he’s worked with in the past, he admits being cautious describing how he moved from a disc licensed to a Christian label to mainstream distribution through the Sony system. “I’m being coy,” he says, “because I did turn down eight record deals from exclusively contemporary Christian music labels, because I didn’t feel that was the avenue I wanted to go down. I knew that I wanted to be on a pop label that could put my record on the mainstream airwaves. I felt like I made a record that could connect with a whole lot of people. So I was holding out for something. I knew that I wanted to sign with a label that would put it out to as many people as possible, because I really believed in it.”
Ask Kearney where he turns for role models and he speaks of Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and U2—the usual suspects. As the success of his long-lasting “debut” continues, he’s being offered an opening slot on an arena tour with Kelly Clarkson for the summer, the chance to play the kind of venues this caliber of artist represents. Kearney is excited by the idea of taking songs written in his bedroom to big concert halls where they can be transformed into pop anthems for a generation. I got a glimpse of that, as the largely female audience sang his songs back to him in Indianapolis.
Excitement is building, he suggests, “This whole journey has been a process for me to find out what I’m supposed to be doing. But this is it; this is why I was put on earth.”
Related link: myCCM.org/MKearney