Micah Edwards does not want to become like his father.
At 27, the retro soul singer from Houston has reached the age when many men slip into a resemblance. It just happens. The timbre of their voices, the way they couch a phrase, or how they respond to a situation seems, suddenly, exactly like their fathers’.
And it doesn’t feel like a choice, but the manifestation of inherited traits. The re-expression of psychic wounds. Repeated family patterns, emerging as unshakable identity. Is this who I am?
The King James Bible has a term for the self you recognize and don’t want to be: “the old man,” a colloquial phrase for “father” and a synonym for the sin a Christian has to struggle to put off. Edwards knows the feeling.
He is a father himself now. His baby was born just a few weeks ago. He picks up his son, Benjamin David, while he talks on the phone.
“I just believed this lie from the enemy. You’re going to be just like him,” Edwards told CT. But because of the faith we put in Jesus, we get to write a different story. The Lord brought me out of chains, believing I was doomed to repeat what I saw. ”
That’s what his album, Jean Leon, is about: the choices Edwards’s father made, what that did to the family, and how, by faith, he will be different from him. The title comes from the combination of his parents’ middle names. Years in the making and long teased online—while his previous single “Moments” racked up seven million streams—the album releases Friday, June 10.
“There was a moment in time I believed,” Edwards sings on the title track, “I could never escape your reality / But that was yesterday, now I don’t feel the same.”
In the music video he made for NPR Music’s 2022 Tiny Desk competition, Edwards sits on a stool in front of a mic in a garage crowded with barbecue sauce, hunting trophies, and a Ms. Pac-Man machine. He taps the heel of his brown cowboy boot as the bass player behind him lays down a thick groove and a horn section swings into action.
“Oh, baby!,” he sings. “Brokenness is all I’ve ever known—ever known. / But I know the good Lord has far more for me / And I’m not gonna take the gravity / That’s weighing you down.”
Edwards’s parents got divorced two years ago, ending a marriage roiled by his father’s infidelity, narcissism, and abuse. The five kids in the family are still reeling, but also relieved. The cycle of their parents’ bad choices has finally been broken. Now they can move forward.
For Edwards, that means not becoming like his father. When he talks about it, he talks about choices and discipline, about gritting his teeth and being a man.
When he sings about it, though, he sings about a life transformed by love. He sounds like no one so much as Augustine, an anxious heart that has found rest.
“I will be a better father than my own,” he says toward the end of the album, “Not ’cause of me but by grace and grace alone.”
Edwards’s lead guitarist, Ryan Stueckemann, says this deeply religious album wasn’t what he expected when he started playing with Edwards, but he’s also not surprised this is where they ended up.
“From the jump I knew Micah just really loves Jesus,” he said. “The first time we practiced he asked if we could pray, so this is like the most Christian non-Christian band there could be.”
Stueckemann works full time as the music minister at a Methodist church. Three other members of the band are in worship ministry as well, not to mention Edwards, who sings on Sundays at the nondenominational Sandbox Church.
SOURCE: CHRISTIAN TODAY