Bebo Norman
Bebo Norman Bio
You can't understand light unless you understand darkness,
because that's where life is most often lived…somewhere
between the two. It's messy and it's beautiful all at the same
time." -Bebo Norman
The lessons of Between the Dreaming and the Coming True,
Bebo Norman’s remarkable new album, are these:
In finding peace, we come closer to the furies that rage
around us.
There is power in music – power that reflects the transformation
that Bebo Norman has experienced in these past few years.
Of course, some things don’t change. On Between the
Dreaming and the Coming True we hear the same urgent spirituality
that has been evident in all of Norman’s work.
But it speaks differently – not only in his familiar
acoustic sounds and through the intimacy of his marriage of
guitar and voice - but in powerful arrangements brought to
life by a full band and crafted by Norman who served as co-producer
on the project. Choruses soar, drums thunder, and the piano
lets loose drapes of brilliant texture bathing Norman’s
message with a more vivid light.
Listen closely and follow the flow of the music. “Into
the Day” begins the album with a promise to the tortured
soul of rescue and drifts to “Be My Covering,” a
meditation on the ravages born by our modern world. “I
Know Now,” finds freedom hidden in despair, “Sunday,”
reveals an appreciation for love as an island in a turbulent
sea, and the last track, “Now That You’ve Gone,”
serves as a cry for those who are wounded by loneliness and,
frankly, is a strange finale to an album that preaches hope.
In the two years since his last album, he has, by his own
admission, become more confident as an artist – more
willing to explore what he has to offer and let his ideas
grow as they will.
All of this contrasts with his state of mind in the fairly
recent past. Even after breaking onto the music scene with
The Fabric of Verse, which Norman released independently some
ten years ago, he often felt that something was missing.
“I wrote a lot in those days from turmoil and loneliness,”
he says. “A lot of that had to do with being single and
living on the road without much of a home. The funny thing
was that when this began to change and I entered into a season
of my life where, for three or four years now, I’ve understood
what peace is, that made me worry a bit too, because I didn’t
know how to write from peace. I’d never done that before.”
The answer, he soon realized, was to use the contentment
he had found as a prism through which he could see the troubles
in the world from a new angle. “The rub is that I’m
living in this peaceful place right now that’s played
out against a backdrop of a world that looks so confusing
and frightening,” he explains. “I watch friends
of mine in failing marriages. I watch people that I love get
sick and die. I watch war and poverty and natural disaster.”
With that, Norman was confronted with a number of questions
that gave birth to a new attitude in his writing.
“In the middle of all this, I’m asking, how does
this make sense? What is this peace I feel in a world that’s
so clearly not at peace? Who is God in light of how I see
Him in my life, in this world? And who am I?”
And so the seeds took root for Between the Dreaming and the
Coming True. It began with the title, which he admits to finding
rather than creating. In naming his project after Robert Benson’s
book about discovering God even in the depths of depression,
Norman lit the beacon that would inspire him through the first
steps of writing. Fortunately, he found an ideal writing and
producing partner in Jason Ingram, whose songs have been recorded
by Building 429, Sonicflood, Rebecca St. James, among others.
Ingram was thrilled at the opportunity to write with Norman.
“I’ve always loved Bebo’s songs,” he says.
“They’re honest, vulnerable, and very well crafted.
I knew he would set the bar high, but this meant that I could
be proud of what we would come up with. And as I got to know
him, I realized as well how different this project would be.
He wasn’t in a place where he wanted to be safe. He wanted
to write from his heart, so it was an especially great joy
to work with him when he was in that emotional space.”
Working at Ingram’s home studio and sometimes at Norman’s
retreat by a lake in his home state of Georgia, they came
up with songs that surprised them both. They were more candid
than either had expected, which in turn inspired the writers
to take greater chances.
“My first efforts, which I did at home on my own, were
about being at peace,” Norman says. “And right away,
they didn’t feel compelling to me. Of course, peace is
beautiful, but if that’s all you present in a song, if
you don’t explore what it took to get to that place or
present the fact that peace can exist even in a difficult
world, then you’re not doing a service to those songs,
to your listeners, or to yourself.”
So they dug deeper. Below the surface of the joy they both
felt in their marriages and the strength derived from their
faith, they found something that too often eludes the Christian
perspective.
“Whether we want to admit it or not, we are in the same
place as those who don’t believe as we do,” Norman
says. “For all of us, life is fluid. It ebbs and flows.
We get caught in darkness and some days we escape into light.
Life is beautiful one moment and tragic the next. But we seem
to spend all our time trying to separate the two - to somehow
weed out the bad moments and highlight the good. We forget
that all these things flow into one another.”
Working together, they completed “Bring Me to Life”
on their very first day. Other songs followed quickly as Norman
found his new creative rhythm.
“The more we wrote, the more new it felt,” Norman
remembers. “I started getting up in the morning, already
excited about writing. Making music, writing songs and playing
them, hadn’t felt like this since I was in college –
and part of the reason was that I understood that these new
songs were about real life in a vast world. They were songs
about relationships -- with God, with my wife, with Jason
as my co-producer, with our families and our friends and our
communities -- lived out in a real world that’s messy
and beautiful all at the same time.”
Their collaboration was spontaneous. Ideas popped out of
nowhere. Possibilities multiplied: Why stick to the acoustic
guitar sound that had become Norman’s calling card? Why
not add other musicians? For that matter, why not invite the
musicians you knew in your heart were right for these songs?
“If Jason and I had each made a list of which musicians
we wanted for this project,” Norman says, “every
single player we ended up getting would have been number one
on either his list or mine.”
Instrumentalists on Between the Dreaming and the Coming True
include: Adam Lester on guitar; Tony Lucido playing bass;
Ken Lewis on drums; Gabe Scott on accordion; Shane Keister
at the piano; among other extraordinary musicians. String
arrangements were done by John Painter. Bebo, along with Painter,
arranged horns on “I Know Now,” with Painter playing
French horn, trumpet and trombone on the song. Norman and
Ingram took control of co-producing ten of the eleven tracks
on the project, enlisting the talent of Glenn Rosenstein on
“The Way We Mend,” a song Norman wrote with Dave
Barnes.
The combinations worked. From the comfortable, backyard,
laid-back vibe of “Sunday” to the tidal surges of
strings and brass on “I Know Now,” and on the songs
that Norman wrote with other collaborators or on his own,
the magic sustains throughout Between the Dreaming and the
Coming True. The music or the lyrics if read in silence, are
eloquent enough to stand on their own - but when joined together,
they become nearly radiant.
As the world is introduced to these songs, and as the tour
dates being booked for he and his band draw near, Norman can
take a moment to put everything in perspective.
“One of the things I want people to know is that Between
the Dreaming and the Coming True comes from my willingness
to step forward unapologetically, without any disclaimer.
We weren’t thinking about making it radio-friendly or
writing singles or trying to present any sort of ‘image.’
For the first time in my life, I let each song speak for itself.
And I think that when you look into them, they’ll show
you who I am.”
This isn’t just Bebo Norman’s greatest musical
accomplishment. This is a journey through the tumult of our
times and the secrets we hide even from ourselves. It is a
monument to the believer’s paradox - that peace in God
will lead to pain as well as redemption.
Between the Dreaming and the Coming True, in other words,
is an epic that whispers intimately and a pledge of love that
endures through the worst of times. Courtesy bebonorman.com
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