More Than the Music: Wayne Watson's Journey of Grace

0:01 Welcome to the Wayne Watson Podcast, where Grammy nominee and multiple-dub award-winning artist Wayne Watson engages in lively conversation with remarkable people from every walk of life. Artists to healthcare professionals, athletes and leaders to everyday believers whose stories reflect the power of faith at work in the world. Join us as we go beyond the spotlight and into the heart of what it means to live with purpose and conviction, diving into real conversations about the moments that shape us, the faith that sustains us, and the God who inspires it all. Now, here's your host, Wayne Watson.

0:43 Well, hey, and thank you for joining me again for the podcast. The following is an interview that I was invited to do on an online radio broadcaster named Graceway.com, Gracewayradio.com. The executive producer is Jacqueline Dougherty, and she invited me to do an interview via my website email, Wayne at WayneWatson.com, and I graciously accepted. So what you're about to hear is part one of that interview with Gracewayradio.com. Some people come to Christian music chasing a career. But Wayne Watson came chasing the Lord, and his songs followed him.

1:24 He grew up in Wisner, Louisiana with a baseball glove in one hand and a growing sense that God might be after something else. The turning point was almost hidden. A youth camp, a young man leading worship, someone with a video camera and a tape that found its way to Nashville. What looked like a lucky break was, in Wayne's telling, the kindness of God opened a door he had not forced. For nearly 50 years, he has written as a worshiper first. Songs that don't merely describe faith, but they sit with people in hospital rooms in the quiet hours of the night, like Friend of a Wounded Heart, Watercolor Ponies, Home Free, All Bitey.

2:08 A duet with Sandy Patty that still sounds like two believers remembering heaven. He's had 23 number ones, Dove Awards, Hall of Fame. None of that is the point. The point is a man who has spent his life pointing the church toward a God that stays near when life doesn't look like the brochure. Along the way, the Lord. off the concert stage and into the weekly work of a congregation leading contemporary worship at St. Martin's in Houston and learning what it means to shepherd the same people Sunday after Sunday, not just sing to a crowd that goes home. He's still writing, still leading, still listening, and still convinced that gratitude has not made him softer.

2:55 It has made him more in love with Jesus. So, Wayne, thank you. Welcome to Graceway Radio. Thank you. We're so excited to hear not only about your songs, but about the Savior who has walked you through them. Well, thank you. It's such a pleasure to talk with you. I'm glad we could get together today. Yeah, it's wonderful chatting with you before we started this and knowing that we have some ties to just a spot in the road back in Texas. So that was an unexpected little nostalgia trip for me. But before there was the records and the radio, you were just a young man from, talk about a spot in the road.

3:38 Oh, yeah. From Wisner, Louisiana. What did those years, those first years growing up with your family, teach you about the Lord that you still lean on today? Well, it's a smaller spot in the road now than it was when I lived there. You know, a lot of small towns in Louisiana and Texas, maybe everywhere. There just are not things to draw people there. Like, they don't even have schools in my little town anymore. They've consolidated through the parish in Louisiana. They're not counties. They're parishes. But they've consolidated a lot of schools. And so there's not even a school to draw people.

4:19 And it's kind of sad. I don't get back there very often. But the elementary school that I went to when I was five, still standing, but is a skeleton. It burned, and the state has not been able to raise it. It just still stands there. It's very ghostly and weird. And the high school is literally across the road, the street from my house where I live, so I walk to school. I can tell that to your children. I walk to school every day. It was about 100 yards. Yeah. So that's still standing, but it's not being used for anything. But the town I grew up in, for people that may be familiar, I used to call it Mayberry.

5:04 I mean, it was like Mayberry, simple, sweet, not complicated, kindness. We literally had a sheriff that did not wear a gun, and he was everybody's friend. He could be firm. The courthouse and the jail were in the same room, just like in Mayberry. The library was also in the same building, so it made for interesting story times. My dad was a businessman. He was a CPA and had an insurance agency, and he wrote policies for farmers and for whatever you needed for a cow, and those were very simple times.

5:46 Dad was a World War II Navy veteran, very quiet, but not unloving, not that stereotypical, never said I love you and never hugged me. My dad was very proud of me and thankful and and supportive. Mom was a stay-at-home World War II housewife. I have one brother, older, and mom played the organ at church, and we sat on the third row, and she would play the organ and then come sit down with us on the third row every Sunday. Dad was a deacon. I used to laugh about the Baptist deacons. They had several duties, one of which was to stand out on the front step and come in and keep the kids from ringing the bell.

6:26 There's a big rope hanging in the back of the church and keep the kids away from that bell. And then take up the offering and serve as the leadership for the church. But it was a wonderful time. I knew nothing else. I did not know there was terror. I didn't know there was war or need or want of any kind. We weren't wealthy by any stretch, but we didn't know that. We had a rich life. Did you come to know the Lord in that church? I did. I did in that little Baptist church. I walked down that aisle. Excuse me. I walked down that aisle, and I'll just be very transparent with you.

7:07 The first time, the language was different where we came from. I remember my dad. My dad passed away 20, almost 30 years ago at age 70. But I remember him waking me up that Sunday morning and said, quote, are you ready to join the church, unquote. And I said, yes, sir. Well, I always said, yes, sir, no, sir. So I walked down the aisle and there was no, I don't think there was any language of, are you giving your heart to Jesus? Maybe there was, I don't know. It was just sort of. About how old were you? I was nine. I was nine at the time. Not too many years later, I realized that that was just a formality and that I really hadn't experienced the walk of Christ in my life and giving my heart to Jesus.

7:57 I think in those few years, I realized something's off. The formality and the ceremony of this is not the point, and it's not working. It was not easy. I remember having some naive thought of, well, now it's going to be really nice and smooth. And it wasn't. Every temptation that came up was a battle. And every mistake I made, I beat myself up over it. I did not accept the grace of God and the mercy of God.

8:38 I lashed myself over every thought, every action, every word. And I'll just go ahead and tell you this. This is a recent revelation to me. I think I counted all those things as my righteousness for most of my life. I counted my sobriety, whatever form that might take. I counted my purity of thought and lip, kindness, all of which is good. but it is not what creates righteousness in me. Those things are an afterflow of the forgiveness of God and Christ in my life.

9:23 And I've spent most of my life thinking, well, I hope you're paying attention because I'm really trying to be good. And that's not the point. It doesn't work that way. All those good things, going to church, fellowship, acts of kindness, kind words, prayer, all those things come after we've been washed in the blood. And that took me a long time to figure that out. Yeah, you talk about your song, which one am I thinking of? A Friend Overwinded Heart. Yeah. As in the process of writing that song. that you had known Christ as your Lord, but you had not known him as friend.

10:03 And then in the process of writing that song, how did that evolve? I wrote that song in the studio in Pasadena, Texas, where you spent some of your life. We were there. I was there at the invitation of a producer friend of mine that was producing a Kim Boyce record. I don't know if you remember Kim Boyce or not. Yeah, wow. And she and her husband are in ministry, I think, still. But I was invited to come and sing backup on Kim's record. And so the studio sounded really good, and everybody went to dinner, and I thought one of the keyboard players had this beautiful synthesizer there, brand new, big deal. And everybody went to dinner, and I just turned up the speakers real loud and played.

10:47 And the chorus, a friend of a woman, went, Jesus, he meets you where you are. Just those chords just kind of came out. And so I wrote that in that studio along with a friend named Claire Conninger. And we literally faxed words back and forth. Young listeners like, what is that? Fax. And it wasn't plain paper fax. It was scroll, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Remember the thermal paper? You had to hold it and like, what are we reading here? But we faxed lyrics back and forth. And Claire helped me finish writing that song. But I wrote that. And I still lean on it today because my heart is still beaten up sometimes by me and by others.

11:27 I did another song. I'm not sure if it was on the same album or not, but a song called Wouldn't That Be Something about a dream I had of being at a party with a lot of friends and Jesus was there. And everybody told me, Jesus is looking for you. And given my background, I remember thinking, no, what did I do? And in the song, he just wanted to come be with me. He wanted to be with me because we were friends. And that is not to lessen the deity of Christ. That is certainly not to dilute the godship of Christ. But I think sometimes many of us live in fear of God's wrath, even though he looks at us through the blood of his son.

12:10 And I think when I learned to let Jesus be a friend to me, and even if I stumble, for him to say, hey, come on, let's go. I got you. It changed my life. Yeah, yeah. You spent decades as, you know, a worship leader, too, that I think. a lot of people don't realize. But so, and you know, not only as a recording artist, what was the difference between performing a song about God and then standing in front of a room with people that you're trying to lead to meet Him? Good question. Interesting because I didn't write a lot of worship songs.

12:52 Most of my songs from those early albums were songs about life. I took a little different track in that I didn't sing about life anymore. as it should be as much as life as it is, and how do we process how life is in the light of Christ and in the light of living a spiritual life. I used to read that Bible verse about how God would bring everything into the light. And I thought, oh, that'd be great. Everything is very light and it can see all around us. And I'm not compulsive about many things, but my car windshield is one of those things that I kind of get crazy about. And I drive my son to school every morning, and we drive right into the eastern sunrise.

13:36 And that light, when it hits that windshield, it shows every speck, every imperfection. And then I can either deal with it or just go, okay, that's not a big deal. But light from God shining on us. Gently reveals, here's something, let's address this, let's work on this. But leading worship, I didn't write a lot of worship songs. The first really song that was known to be a worship song was called Almighty. And my mom said, son, if you ever get a song in the hymn book, that would just be awesome. I don't think she used the word awesome. That would be glorious, maybe, is what she would say.

14:18 So back when we used hymn books, Almighty got put in a hymn book, and I think a song called People of God from the second album was in a hymn book. But leading worship is a challenge because going from a performance perspective to where I really wished I could be invisible was the challenge. There is an old... I'm trying to think of it. There's a devotional book that I used to read every day for years called Devotional Classics. I think it was Jonathan Edwards, an old, old preacher from way, way back. And he talked about he would prefer if he could preach behind a veil, behind a cloth, a sheet where no one could see him.

15:08 And I think sometimes as performers, it would be, if we're leading worship, it would be an advantage if we were not seen. Or people would say, why is he wearing that? Or why is she wearing that? Or why does she do her hair that way? You know, all those little initial judgment things that get in the way of worship. But I've been in three different churches. The last one I was at was St. Martin's Episcopal at the invitation of their rector, and I left there in February. So I'm kind of back on the road now doing concerts and conferences and things. But I've loved— being invisible and leading, especially with other really talented musicians, really skilled musicians.

15:52 Very, very rewarding and fun to do and to lead people and to back off the microphone and hear other people participating. Yeah, I've often wondered about, you know, because sometimes in churches, it's still, it becomes more of a performance, it seems. Oh, yeah. You know, with music. because they're so, especially in larger churches that have the ability to have, you know, these sound systems and full orchestras and this big production and where the people are just still not engaging in it, they're watching it and they're not. How, as a worship leader, did you find that happening, or how did you help get people to participate rather than just— Occasionally that does happen.

16:42 Yesterday was Sunday, and to what would possibly send my grandparents and my parents spinning in their grave, yesterday was a baseball day. I have a 12-year-old that we adopted at birth. He's 12, and every other weekend we have ball games. And so they won their game Saturday. So guess what? We were up at 5.30 Sunday morning, and I drove him out an hour from our house to a baseball game. And after the game, we went and had a biscuit, and I Googled churches around me, and there was one-tenth of a mile away. So I pulled in the parking lot, and I asked the guys in the parking lot, I said, is this a Jesus church?

17:23 Oh, yes, sir. And, again, this is me. Maybe some of your listeners feel this way, too. Not only did I not know the songs they were playing, I had never heard the songs they were playing. And all the people around me just stood and watched. Wow. Now, that's not to say they weren't worshiping in their hearts. Yeah. They were not participating in the music. Yeah. Yeah. We attended another church here in town occasionally, and it's a big church. And they do songs that are sort of popular, I guess, and then they will go into a hymn that you and I grew up singing.

18:05 Everybody sings, young and old. What can wash away my sin? Everybody sings it. So to answer your question, how do you get people to participate? First of all, you kind of use it as an educational opportunity. You don't just throw a song out and say, sing with me, because they're scratching their heads going, we don't know this. So take a few minutes, take a few weeks to introduce them to a chorus. And let's sing this chorus. Here's a line. Sing it back to me. I would literally ping pong back and forth with the crowd. Sing this line. And then we sing the chorus. And then the next week we sing the chorus again as a tag to a song that they already know.

18:46 And we add the verse to it. So just using it, you know, educating them a little bit on a new worship song. Yeah. Yeah. was always helpful, and people would grab onto it that way. Yeah. A lot of songs that are written nowadays also tend to focus, you know, more on what we're feeling, what we're, you know, it's more introspective rather than focusing on Christ. And then some of them are just difficult to sing, you know, for the average person. Yeah. Of course. There's a lot of I in worship music these days. And I'm not.

19:27 Again, addressing the performance thing, and if anybody's listening that might have some influence on this, you've got to realize the banker and the farmer and the fisherman and whomever, they don't sing as high as you do. Yeah, it might be in your wheelhouse, and you might sound like a rock star when you're singing it, but they can't do it there. So consider maybe bringing it down to where normal, everyday folks, who are probably hesitant to sing anyway, A lot of people are probably reluctant to sing in public. So if you'll educate them on the song that you're doing, and if you'll put it in a place where they don't feel like they're having to break their necks to sing it, maybe you get a little more participation.

20:11 Yeah. There's the, when you wrote, you know, Watercolor Ponies, That was, you know, at a time in your life when you were raising boys and you're raising children. But now you're a grandfather. So does that song still resonate with you? Does it resonate with you in a different way? I'm a nine-times grandfather. Whoa! Whoa! My oldest son, Neil, has three boys, two of them. One of them's out of the house, out of school, and the next one is a senior at University of Tennessee. And then his last one is a freshman in college in Nashville. And my middle son and his wife, he's worship leader, worship pastor at First Baptist Church in Covington, Louisiana.

21:01 And they were told they couldn't have children. They have six children. Thank you very much. They have two sets of twins and two singles. The oldest twins are now 16. And I have a 12-year-old that we adopted at birth. So my business and my time is more spent with children. the seventh grader, which is raising completely different issues than my older boys when they were in middle school. It's a completely different culture. You have to be on guard and be careful not to over-parent, but certainly don't under-parent. This little church we went to yesterday, he spoke about something I had never heard before about King David.

21:43 and about his three children. Now, tell me if you know, you're a pastor's wife, so you probably know this. Amnon was David's son. Absalom was the second son. Tamar was David's daughter. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. Is that familiar to you? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Okay. I guess I knew the names, but apparently Amnon assaulted Tamar. Yeah. And nobody, this guy's point was in parenting, you got to say something. Yeah. Apparently years went by and Absalom's anger burned toward his brother and he killed him. And all this time, David, a man after God's own heart, apparently had kept his hands off the situation and it just festered and boiled and boiled.

22:28 And so that was his preaching point was to be engaged with your children. Yeah. I learned a long time ago when my older boys were home and I was playing 150 concerts a year, I never stayed gone very long. I'd go out for a couple, three nights and come home because I knew raising boys, I needed to look them in the eye. And sometimes it worked and most times it worked, a couple of times it didn't. Yeah. Well, you made the choice early on to move to Houston instead of being Nashville. Right. your desires to raise your sons differently than in the industry.

23:11 Yeah, and I don't want this to sound self-serving, but I remember considering moving to Nashville when the boys were young, and I would go to Nashville six or eight times a year back then. Record companies, we'd have things and meetings, and I would record the time up there. And I remember every time I came away from Nashville, I was kind of energized creatively. But at the same time, everywhere I went, it was in your face. And I didn't want to be defined by what I did. I didn't want my boys to be defined by what their daddy did. And I have wonderful friends in Nashville who lived in Nashville and Franklin and Belmont, all around.

23:53 And they've managed to maintain. But I just didn't think I could. So we've been in Houston since we lived in Baton Rouge until 82 and then moved here. So the song Almighty, you know, said it was in a hymnal now because it's extremely worshipful. You know, it's it's declaring who God is and and all the wonderful descriptive words of who he is. And I was wondering about have there been seasons in your life where that was. you know, this ready-made anthem for you, but then also that it was a struggle to sing? And do you have any stories about... All the songs have been, had seasons when they were difficult to sing.

24:43 All of them. I don't think God's intimidated by our questions. I don't think he's intimidated by our doubts. And the older we get and the more we, The more we know, I guess, the more we know, the less I know. That's where I am in my life now. I'm not sure about a lot of things. And I think, again, I love history. I've read tons of history. How does an omnipotent God deal with the millions and millions and millions of souls that have come into this world. Some snuffed out tragically quickly.

25:26 World War I was just the most horrific thousands and millions of people. And then in World War II, millions of six million plus Jews killed in concentration camp. How can God... process. But then you see pictures of outer space like we've seen in recent years from these telescopes. It's like, wow, we think we're such a big deal. We are a big deal only because God watches because he loves us. But look at the vastness of this. And we think, but you know, when I was in college, I remember you could buy a calculator and And it had way too many buttons on it for me.

26:14 But there were two or three people that had them, and they cost $300 or $400. And you could do all kind of logarithms and blah, blah, blah. And now they're at the checkout counter at Target, and they cost $10, you know. And the processors that we're using now to talk, 20, 30 years ago, we wouldn't have been able to comprehend that. So the vastness of God, I just quit trying. I just said, you know what? I'm so glad you've got this because I don't get it. I don't get it, but I trust that you do. And every song that you're going to talk about that we have talked about, there have been seasons where I sing it, and I'm not a name it and claim it guy, but I sing it because I believe it, and it helps me anchor back to that belief.

27:00 Brilliant. Brilliant. He wrote Home Free when a friend's wife had passed away. And I was wondering, when you're on the road, how did you sing that song, knowing that there were people in the audience that were probably just come from someone's deathbed or had someone dying? And to sing that song for those people... How did you, how could you keep yourself together? You know, I don't get. I don't know. I sang that at her funeral. She passed away.

27:41 And the words, home free, I'm standing there with her husband, my dear friend, in the hospital room. And, you know, terminal patients, everybody will know, terminal patients tend to peak and then fade. And then peak and then fade. And then I remember him saying she was going through a very particularly rough time. And I remember him saying, if she can just get through this one, she'll be home free. And I walked out of there, and I remember thinking, yeah, one way or the other, she will be. And so I wrote that song. I sang it at her funeral. And I did get choked up at her funeral because we were very close friends. You know, I get more choked up.

28:24 I think the choke-up songs lately have been re-singing Touch of the Master's Hand that was 1980. Did it last week at a concert in St. Louis, and I just got a little catch in my throat from it. And singing about my kids... When I wrote Watercolor Ponies and writing somewhere in the world about a little girl that would marry my boys one day, and now they've both been married a long time and have children and families, I get choked up about that. And especially singing about this little guy that we adopted. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect that to be my life at this age. And I've learned more from God about having this child who's not my blood child.

29:10 Than a lifetime of Sunday school. Who? Because God has adopted us. We're not his natural born children. He said, I choose you. A friend of mine pointed out that in certain cultures around the world, you cannot disown an adopted child. You can disown a blood child. You can say, you are legally no longer my child. But an adopted child, you can't. because you chose them. If that doesn't preach, I don't know what does. So I hang on to that. Yeah, yeah. What were the circumstances that led you to adopt later in life?

29:54 Darkness, loss of the first family. I don't know if you knew that or not. No, no. Dark night of the soul is real. You know, there's no reason not to say it because a lot of your listeners are there. I went through a divorce in 2005 after 30 years. Nothing funky. People thought it was funky. People assumed that it was me or her. Mm-hmm. Nothing to be proud of, but it wasn't that. I was single for five years, and I married my wife, Megan, and we adopted this little boy.

30:40 We lost two others, and I was so mad at God as to why you dangle these carrots in front of me and then pull them away. And my wife said, honey, that's not our baby. Mm-hmm. We didn't want just a baby. We wanted the baby that God wanted us to rescue and bring into this home. And his life, again, not patting ourselves on the back, but his life would be very different than it is now. And I love this child. I cannot put into words. I cannot put it into words. But to think 40, 50 years ago that I would be saying this now. Any part of that story I just told? No, not me.

31:22 Yeah. My peers, many of whom the names you would know and your people would know, they went through it, but not me. Very proud. Not proud, but thankful. Wow. Wow. Thanks for listening to the Wayne Watson Podcast, where stories of faith, purpose, and everyday life meet and continue to uplift hearts around the world. Be sure to follow, leave us a review, and share this episode with a friend. To learn more about Wayne's music, ministry, and upcoming projects, visit waynewatson.com. Every journey of faith begins with a story. and every heart finds its rhythm in the Lord.

32:04 Until next time, go well, and may you keep walking in step with His song flowing through you.