What Mr. Rogers teaches us about God and our work
Jordan Raynor sits down with songwriters, David & JJ Heller, to talk about the difference between creating art that is “about the Light” and art that is about “what you can see because of the Light,” what they learned from their shift of releasing full-length albums every year to releasing singles every month, and what Mister Rogers has taught us about how God views our work.
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[0:00:05.3] JR: Hey everybody, welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every week, I bring you a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world-class mastery of their vocation. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences the work they do in the world.
Today’s guests need little introduction. I’m talking with JJ and Dave Heller, the husband-and-wife songwriting powerhouse couple. You probably know JJ’s name. Her songs have been streamed more than 210 million times, it’s a mind-boggling number. I sat down with both JJ and Dave. We talked about the difference between creating art that is about the light of Jesus Christ, and art that is about what you can see because of the light of Jesus. We talked about what they’ve learned from their shift of releasing full length albums every 12 months to releasing singles every single month.
Finally, we opened up with a great conversation about Mr. Rogers. Opened and closed with Mr. Rogers - a great way to structure any episode - and specifically what Rogers has taught us about God and how God views our work. I think you’re going to love this conversation with my new friends, JJ and Dave Heller.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:47.4] JR: David, JJ, thanks for hanging out with me.
[0:01:49.2] JH: Yeah, great to be here.
[0:01:51.9] JR: I stumbled upon something that I never heard before, I couldn’t believe it, it was your version of ‘It’s such a good feeling’ by Mr. Rogers. I was like, “This is amazing”. Are you guys huge Mr. Rogers fans?
[0:02:06.4] JH: Yeah. You know what’s funny? I think the older I get, the more of a fan I am of Mr. Rogers and I think it really clenched it when I watched the documentary about him and kind of cried my way through it. It’s just phenomenal.
[0:02:26.1] JR: I didn’t watch him, growing up, but I become a Mr. Rogers super fan as I’ve gotten older. He’s incredible. I actually had his biographer on the podcast, a guy named Maxwell King who is in that documentary.
[0:02:38.0] JH: Oh great.
[0:02:38.6] JR: Yeah, he wrote this great biography called The Good Neighbor. If you guys haven’t read it, you’ve got to. Did your girls grow up watching Daniel Tiger?
[0:02:46.9] DH: A little bit. I feel like it kind of became popular as they were aging out of it a little bit. But yeah, I love that, and I love that they’re keeping his legacy alive through a cartoon version.
[0:03:02.5] DH: I also think a lot of our fellow co-creators are really inspired by Mr. Rogers as well, and as JJ’s career has kind of pivoted into this sort of family space, the likeminded co-creators that we end up interacting with keep returning to the principles that Mr. Rogers just drove home on a regular basis. “You’re special just the way you are”, that kind of thing. That’s a message that everyone needs to hear.
[0:03:36.6] JR: Yeah, totally, adult, child, I’ve got three young girls, seven, five and one. We hit Daniel Tiger in full strike. It was great timing, it’s constantly on in our house and I made our girls listen to your version of the song this weekend and we loved it, we adored it. All right, JJ, you’re a husband-and-wife team working together as songwriters, when did that start? Before you guys were married?
[0:04:03.7] JH: Yeah, we met the summer before our sophomore year of college.
[0:04:11.5] DH: In 1999.
[0:04:12.2] JH: 1999.
[0:04:13.8] JR: Yes, I love it.
[0:04:16.4] JH: Dave was leading worship for an on campus ministry and I had a friend who was involved there, we ended up painting my friend’s room together and that’s how we hung out for the first time.
[0:04:30.7] JR: That’s a unique first date.
[0:04:33.4] DH: We definitely did not call it a date.
[0:04:36.3] JH: Okay, well, the funny thing is, I had never done this before, but I remembered going home and writing in my journal, “I’m either going to be really good friends with this guy or I think we might end up getting married”. After the first time hanging out and –
[0:04:54.2] DH: It took me way longer to –
[0:04:56.6] JR: I was that going to say, did that creep you out Dave?
[0:04:59.0] DH: No, she did not.
[0:05:00.2] JH: No, I didn’t tell Dave. “Dave, God told me we’re going to get married.”
[0:05:05.8] JR: You’re the one.
[0:05:06.7] DH: That’s a good way to not get married to somebody.
[0:05:10.2] JH: No, I didn’t tell him that until after we were married but yeah, we just kind of had a chemistry right off the bat and so we became good friends. I had just started writing songs at that time. I joined the worship team that Dave was leading and just asked if they wanted to hear a song that I wrote one day after worship team practice and they said, “Sure”. I played it and then the drummer on the worship team really wanted to be in a band and so he got really excited and he’s like, “Let’s be a band!” and he was like, “Dave, you can play the guitar and JJ you can sing and write the songs” and we said, “Okay, sure, if you want to organize everything, that sounds fun”.
[0:05:56.2] JR: Yeah, you can do all the work.
[0:05:57.5] JH: Yeah.
[0:05:58.5] DH: Exactly. He kind of became our booking agent for a while and kind of found gigs for us and we would just sort of pack up on the weekend and go play open mic nights and that kind of thing. It was really fun to see the way that JJ’s personality kind of connected with audiences. Just very disarming and she’s got a really great sense of humor and we would make people laugh throughout a performance and, I mean, it’s one of those things that we’ve found over time is like this – a live performance is about engaging people emotionally. I feel like, even though the content early on was really bad, there was enough kind of personality there for emotional engagement.
[0:06:50.0] JR: Yeah, it made up for it.
[0:06:51.6] DH: Yeah. It was sort of like – I talk about golf kind of this way where it’s like, you get one par in 18 holes and it’s like, “I can keep coming back”, you know?
[0:07:02.6] JR: Right.
[0:07:03.6] JH: Just enough to keep going.
[0:07:05.5] JR: Just enough. Where were you guys in school at?
[0:07:09.2] DH: We met in California, Dave was going to San Jose State University and I was going to San Jose Christian College right down the street and his college had 30,000 students and mine had about 300. I had a friend from high school who was involved in the campus ministry at San Jose State and so that’s how we got connected.
[0:07:31.8] JR: That’s so fun. Very cool to go to college in the Bay area, I’m very jealous.
[0:07:36.1] DH: I’m jealous of my younger self, I want to go back.
[0:07:39.8] JR: Yeah, the elusive 1999 Dave. I write books alone, I have no clue how I could do it with another person. Talk us through your process, I’m sure you’ve been asked this a million times but how does this work you guys writing songs together?
[0:07:54.4] DH: Man, it’s like, we’ve been learning how to do it over the course of 20 years now because the process of writing a song is an exercise in vulnerability basically. It’s like, either you’ve been contemplating this thought that is vulnerable as a journal entry or you’re tossing out an idea that could be genius level or could just be a pile of trash. Right? You’re handing it to somebody else and going like, “Will you please take care of this for me? Will you tell me if this is good or not and how it can be improved?”
I think, early on, when you're starting out, you make something and you think, “This is it, this it’s done. This is the part where you applaud my effort and my incredible…”
[0:08:45.5] JR: Creative genius, yeah.
[0:08:47.5] DH: Right, yeah. Most of the time, it’s like, well, that’s a first draft and we need to keep returning to this and sort of sanding down the edges and making it as strong as it can possibly be. So, I think JJ very much is the poet, the creative force behind what we do, and I have way more of an editorial 30,000-foot view kind of like, “What is this overarching message? How is verse one interacting with verse two?” and that kind of thing.
We’ve learned over time to lean into each other’s giftings so that at the end of the day, what’s the phrase? The total is greater than the sum of its parts, that’s basically it.
[0:09:34.0] JR: JJ, biggest joy, biggest challenge working with your spouse, let’s go there.
[0:09:39.0] JH: I mean, it’s kind of hard to say because it’s all I’ve ever known. Our relationship developed alongside of music and so music has always been a part of how we interact with one another, and I don’t think that this kind of lifestyle would work for 99% of people.
We just really enjoy each other’s company. We laugh a lot. We’re also very opposite in a lot of ways, so we complement each other really well. Dave’s very task oriented, he’s really good at getting things done, paying the bills, repairing things that need to be repaired and I’m very much the nurturing, emotional caretaker. I love that our job allows us to spend so much time together and that all of our success in our career can be celebrated together and there’s never really a sense of competition, which is really wonderful.
[0:10:55.0] JR: I would imagine rare in this world, right?
[0:10:58.4] JH: Yeah. I feel very grateful, and I think maybe the hardest part is those times when Dave kind of puts on his manager hat and tells me, as the artist, to do something that I don’t want to do. Then there’s this almost sibling dynamic where you’re telling me what to do, I don’t want to do it just because you’re telling me I need to do it.
Most of the time, we don’t really encounter that, it’s just like, every once in a while, and you know, now that we’ve been married for 18 years, we’ve really worked through a lot of those dynamics. Like Dave’s really learned how to soften the edges and I’ve learned to not –
[0:11:49.6] DH: Take offense?
[0:11:50.2] JH: Yeah.
[0:11:51.6] JR: Being good at receiving feedback, yeah. Important in any relationship, certainly from your spouse that you’re working with. JJ, I’m curious, your bio – I love this line, it says that your faith informs your songs in subtle ways that feel more like poetry and less like a sermon? Why that approach to songwriting?
[0:12:14.3] JH: Well, early on, I remember having a conversation with this other singer-songwriter friend of ours named Jeremy Casella and he had been playing music for several years before Dave and I started our career, and I remember him saying that there are two different types of Christian songwriters. There are those who write about the light and there are those who write about what they see because of the light, and I very much resonate with the second category.
My faith is such an important part of my own life and I can see that it kind of shapes every aspect of my life and there’s so much music out there that’s kind of like – what we call vertical where it’s talking directly to God or it’s talking directly about God. I feel like if we have a relationship with the Lord, then that means that that relationship affects every aspect of who we are and so, that means, it affects our role as parents, it affects our love relationships, it affects the way that we treat our neighbors.
I love kind of putting those ideas into songs, whether I directly mentioned Jesus or not, his presence is there in every single one of my songs.
[0:13:47.3] JR: I love it. This is maybe one of my favorite ways of saying, what we’ve heard a lot on this podcast, there’s a quote I mention a lot from CS Lewis, who said, “We don’t’ need more Christian books, we need more Christians writing great books”. I think what you just said is just a different way of saying that and it’s really beautiful, right?
It’s writing less about the light explicitly but writing about what we can see because of the light of Jesus. In a way that makes Him more winsome, subtly, to people who don’t know him yet. Right?
[0:14:18.0] JH: Yeah. I wanted to just add, even Dave and I had been releasing these I Dream of You albums which are cover songs, essentially, and we turned them into orchestral lullaby versions of songs that most people are familiar with. Just the other day, I was tagged on Twitter and there was this amazing, choreographed dance to my version of the song ‘Make You Feel My Love.’
[0:14:54.4] DH: By Bob Dylan.
[0:14:54.8] JH: By Bob Dylan.
[0:14:55.5] JR: Yeah, Billy Joel, Garth Brooks and Adele, and JJ Heller. That is quite the lineup. I was playing this on Saturday with some friends, we had some friends from church sing-along and that was the hit, that was the one.
[0:15:11.2] JH: Yeah, we made a version of that song and there was this video posted on twitter of these four people in wheelchairs doing choreography and they each had a different range of mobility but they were – it made me cry because, here they were experiencing this music in a profound way and it’s not “a Christian song” but yet, I feel like that was a holy moment.
[0:15:51.3] JR: Well, I mean, listen, the song is pointing us to the ultimate reality of fueling the Father’s love, right? If you’re a Christ follower, you understand that. Dave, I’ve talked to some artists who feel like, if they can’t see the listener or the reader or the viewer connect the dots between the art and Jesus, then the art was for naught. Then I’ve talked to other artist who – like you guys, it sounds like are content, just planting this seed in the heart of that listener, that contains Jesus like qualities. Talk a little bit more about this. Unpack how you think about this.
[0:16:27.8] DH: Yeah, you know, it actually reminds me, we have our own podcast called ‘Instrumental’. I just finished editing an interview with Philip Yancey. One of the things that he was saying is that over the course of his career, he’s been perceived as someone who is relatively extreme, kind of saying things that are a little bit outside of the norm for evangelical culture, and the reflection that he had was that he’s not actually the extreme person, it’s Jesus who was the extreme person.
That Jesus’ behavior was very perplexing to the society at the time and to his closest followers. He was telling stories and parables that were hard to understand and he wasn’t connecting the dots. Phillip was saying, it was like planting a seed and just allowing it to slowly grow and for his audience to observe the way that it ended up developing.
I actually feel like in many ways, connecting all those dots is a little bit of a disservice. Kind of similar to the way that when a baby chick is trying to make its way outside of an egg, it’s the very force of breaking that egg that gives it the strength, like develops the muscles in that chick so that it can thrive as it grows.
If you end up breaking that egg open for it, it ends up not developing those muscles the same way. I feel like we’re trying to honor the intelligence and faith of our audience to just sort of lay our observations out there and allow them to draw conclusions from them.
[0:18:22.6] JR: Incredibly well articulated. JJ, another line my team pulled out of your bio that I loved said, “At some point in our lives, we all want someone to believe in us.” I’m curious if you can recall one of those moments for you, particularly as it pertained to your career. What was that moment where you’re like, “Man, I just really want somebody to believe in this music?”
[0:18:45.1] JH: Well, when I was in high school, I had an English teacher my sophomore year, named Tracy Morris. At the beginning of each class, she would give us five minutes and a writing prompt. It would be anything from, “Finish this sentence to describe the worst day ever” or, “Write a scary story” and I would love it. My pen would start moving and I would just create these worlds that I didn’t know were inside of me.
I remember, a few weeks into class she pulled me aside and said, “Do you know that you are a writer?” I said, “Really?” She said, “Yeah, you’re really good at this and I think that you should consider being in honors English next year because I think you have what it takes”. And at that point, I hadn’t been in any honors classes at all and hadn’t even considered it. But I took her advice, and my junior year and senior year, I was in honors English. It just helped me fall in love with poetry and literature.
It was something that I knew that I liked but I didn’t know that I was good at. She was a person in my life who said, “I believe in you”.
[0:20:15.4] JR: It’s so critical, I’m thinking of a – I had a teacher in the 8th grade who mentored me all throughout high school and just having him say to me early on. Hey, I believe you could do XYZ. It’s like a big deal. You guys gave kids, right? How do you convince your kids, how do you demonstrate that you believe in them in a way that’s not patronizing? Is that even possible?
[0:20:39.9] DH: That’s an interesting question. For most parents, we’re all just kind of figuring it out, sort of wandering and feeling our way through the dark.
[0:20:48.5] JR: That’s encouraging to hear, Dave. Yeah.
[0:20:50.2] JH: Yeah.
[0:20:52.4] DH: I do feel like one of the pieces of advice that we received was to really commend the effort and the work that our kids put into the things that they try as supposed to just celebrating the results and one of our girls is really athletic and the other one isn’t and one of our girls has a beautiful singing voice and the other one is developing her singing voice, right?
[0:21:23.0] JR: Jeez, this is brutal. Yeah.
[0:21:26.6] DH: They have different giftings and rather than trying to pit them against each other and saying, “Why can’t you have this talent like your sister?” instead, we just kind of celebrate –
[0:21:39.7] JH: The effort.
[0:21:41.5] DH: Yeah, their effort and the way that they approach their different giftings in the way that they can use them. On the way to school this morning, our daughter, Lucy, is in a drama class and she was –
[0:21:55.0] JH: She’s 12, so she’s in 7th grade.
[0:21:58.0] JR: Yeah, fun times, yeah.
[0:21:59.7] DH: She is rehearsing the Jabberwocky poem from Alice in Wonderland and everyone is reciting it and we were just sort of talking through the way to articulate different nonsense phrases that are a part of that poem and just, kind of, helping her understand like, “Oh this is the scary part, how can you communicate being scared?” and, “This is the end, so how do you put a flourish on the final line because you’ve said that line before but how do you make it different?”
It’s really more just about trying to cultivate curiosity and celebrating the experience of being alive and present rather than trying to make everything into a competition or defining finish lines.
[0:22:47.2] JH: Yeah, we’re really working hard to celebrate who they are rather than how they perform, and it can be so subtle, the difference. It is so ingrained in us, in our culture, to say like, “Oh great job, you scored a goal” or “You got an A” and you know there is nothing inherently wrong with that. But I think, instead to say, “Wow, you worked so hard at school. I know this was really hard for you.”
Or instead of, “Wow, you scored a goal” to say like, “I really love watching you play soccer. Do you like playing soccer?” and just allow them to enjoy the experience of living without always having to be number one to find that joy so, yeah. But, man, parenting is so hard.
[0:23:40.8] JR: It is so hard but you know, this theme here I think is right. It’s celebrating the work rather than the product of the work, and I think as Christ followers, we really dig deep. It’s like, “Oh, well the reason why we do this is because this is what the Father has done for us.” I told this story so many times on my podcast, my listeners are sick of hearing it but every single night without fail, when I put my girls to bed, they’re seven, five and almost two.
I say, “Girls, daddy loves you no matter how many bad things you did today” and they say, “Yeah.” I say, “You know, I also love you no matter how many good things you do” and they say, “Yes” and I say, “Who else loves you like that?” “Jesus” and I think we need to hear those same words whether we’re 12 or 7 or 72, spoken over our work and our lives. The Father loves us because we are His child not because of our performance.
Ironically, I think that’s what provides the ultimate motivation to do good work as Jesus said for others. Not because we need the Father’s approval but because we want to do it in response to the Father’s approval as a means to making them happy. Does that makes sense to you guys?
[0:24:45.2] JH: Yeah, totally and it’s funny, even that description reminds me of when we made our first full-length Christmas album a few years ago, we decided to ask Brown Bannister to help produce the vocals and he is an award-winning producer. He’s won Grammy’s working with Amy Grant and a bunch of other Christian music artists, and I was nervous because he seemed like a really big deal.
Then the first time Dave and I met him, he was just so warm and welcoming and he always has a smile on his face. He’s not in a hurry, he makes us coffee every time and I just got to feel so comfortable with him that when I went to track vocals, I wasn’t tracking from a place of fear of like, “Oh, is Brown going to scold me if I don’t hit this note or is he going to be impressed with me?” but it was this – I wanted to sing well because I think Brown just drew that out of me.
He reminded me of the joy of singing and so when I would give a good performance, we would all celebrate together. It was kind of this really beautiful experience.
[0:26:17.7] JR: I got some beautiful picture of our relationship with the Father, right? We talk a lot on this podcast, I believe the scripture calls us to the pursuit of excellence at home and at work but not the attainment of it, right? We are loved regardless of the results of the performance and that’s what enables us to go out there and perform fearlessly, right? We’re the unique resource that I feel like other people don’t have to that end.
Speaking of risk, Dave, I want to ask you guys about this. You guys do something, I don’t know if it is common in music and I don’t think it is, you guys release a new single first Friday of every month, so 12 new singles a year. What’s the motivation behind this practice? Why do you guys do this?
[0:26:57.6] DH: Funny story.
[0:27:00.7] JH: What’s the motivation behind this insanity?
[0:27:03.9] JR: Yeah, why would you do this to yourselves, yeah?
[0:27:07.2] DH: This is actually really funny. I mean, we’ve always loved creating new music. The model of the music industry for most of its history is –
[0:27:19.4] JR: Is insane, can I say that?
[0:27:21.7] DH: Yeah, that’s true but it’s like – it used to be work hard on an album, develop it for a year. You know, write all of these songs, put them into this nice little package and then go take it out to the marketplace and sell it for as long as you possibly can. You know, run songs up the charts one at a time and stretch that investment over the course of two, three, four, five years depending on how successful that album is. So, when we started playing music, that was the music industry that we got into.
We were making CDs, I mean, we still kind of kept up a relatively frantic pace releasing albums about once every year or year and a half, but I mean, we would release that album and then we would go tour that album and then we’d go back into the studio, that kind of thing. Well, around 2016, we were watching fewer and fewer people buying albums and streaming was starting to grow.
We had a distributor at the time who was storing all of JJ’s CDs and it was very inexpensive to make large quantities of albums because we could just take them out on the road with us and sell them over years and years.
[0:28:49.9] JH: Yeah and, when manufacturing CDs, the more you buy, the less they are per unit. So, we were like, “Well, what’s the difference between making 10,000 units and 20,000 units?” It is only actually a little bit more money and then we can sell them forever.
[0:29:07.5] DH: Right, so once upon a time, our distributor called us up and they said, “Hey, your CDs are taking up space in our warehouse. We’re wondering if you could pick them up” and I was like, “Sure, how many are there?” and they said, “60,000.”
[0:29:22.7] JR: This is so good.
[0:29:25.1] DH: I was like, “Can I come see what 60,000 CDs looks like?”
[0:29:29.9] JR: I’m having a hard time visualizing this, yeah.
[0:29:32.3] DH: It was four pallets. I mean, four pallets stacked very high. What that meant was we couldn’t park a car in the garage for a long time. Here we were with a garage full of CDs, and we still wanted to make music but we didn’t want to make any more CDs and so we came up with this idea: like, what if we just started releasing songs one at a time, a month at a time and just put them out on these digital platforms.
It’s been an incredible, incredible season in JJ’s career because we started that in 2017. I think at the time, her listenership was something like, or her streams at that time was something like 800,000 over the course of the month. The latest month that we had data for was a few months back but she had something like 14 million streams and –
[0:30:29.2] JH: It’s working.
[0:30:30.1] DH: Yeah and those are all, I mean, primarily songs that we had never put on physical copies of product and we’re just so grateful that her music is able to reach every corner of the world where, especially parents can play these songs over their children, and it is bringing peace to more people than ever and we are simply being faithful to go through the creative process and extend our, hopefully, our gift to the world on a monthly basis to say like, “Hey, we made something new. We hope you enjoy it. We hope it brings meaning into your life.”
[0:31:14.3] JR: I love this strategy so much. I love looking to musicians for ideas on how to become a better writer. I don’t know why that space has always been very interesting to me but I would imagine releasing songs once a month also makes you better songwriters because the feedback cycle is so much tighter, right?
[0:31:33.6] DH: That’s true. Yeah.
[0:31:34.5] JH: Yeah.
[0:31:35.4] JR: You know what types of songs are working not once every two years but every 30 days, right? JJ has that impacted how you’ve created?
[0:31:44.5] JH: Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, it takes the pressure off because every song can kind of be an experiment. Like, if this song is a flop, then just wait another month and you might hear a song that you like. It’s given us the opportunity to work with different producers because we’re only committing to one song at a time. It’s given us opportunities to write with other song writers and just kind of kept us accountable to keep creating.
There are some months where I don’t feel very inspired, and I don’t know what to write about but we have to release something and so it is just the discipline of having that deadline and then we’ll write something that I had no idea was rattling around inside and it will turn into one of my favorite songs. So, I’ve really loved the rhythm of releasing a song every month. When we started, I thought, “Maybe we’ll do this for a year and then certainly, we will be burned out by that time” but so far, it just feels like a good rhythm.
I mean, especially when we invite another songwriter into the room and that’s kind of been our secret weapon. We just constantly surround ourselves with people who are more talented than we are. It really kind of feels like cheating because we get to work with them and then my name goes on the single and my photo goes on the single. It kind of feels like wearing a couture gown or something and everybody complimenting you on how you look. I mean, things I didn’t, like –
[0:33:32.4] JR: Right, I didn’t do a thing, I put it on, yeah.
[0:33:36.6] JH: Yeah.
[0:33:37.9] JR: Let me ask you this, this is so interesting to me because the principle here, the universal principle is decreasing the size of the bets that you’re making, right? With an album, it’s one big bet every two years. You guys have found a way to decouple that and place tiny bets every month. As an author, I try to do the same thing because the book is a big deal. I spent 400 hours writing each of my nonfiction books, right?
It’s like, I got to know that content is going to work before it’s in book format. So, I break my stuff into YouVersion Devotional Plans and video content or whatever, seeing how it works and then package up the best stuff into an end product. It sounds like something similar. So anyways, long way to get to this question, you mentioned writing block. I’m curious, how you guys – how the process works for collecting ideas for songs before you know whether or not it’s a good idea?
Because I think a lot of times, you know, our best ideas look like any other average idea before we actually start to work with it, right? Have you guys found that to be true?
[0:34:43.3] JH: Oh yeah.
[0:34:44.3] DH: I kind of feel like it sort of applies back to what JJ was talking about with songwriting in your previous question a little bit. It’s just that, I feel like we show up and we work at the process and our work is based on all of our previous experience that we brought to it before, but we actually have very little clairvoyance. It’s very hard to predict what is going to be successful.
[0:35:16.5] JH: Yeah, exactly.
[0:35:17.2] DH: I mean going back to this conversation that we had with Philip Yancey, what he was saying is like, some of these most successful books were the ones that he had the most reservations about. When I look at the successful songs that have come out of JJ’s career, sometimes it’s undeniable and other times, we’re just scratching our heads going like, “Really? This song?”
I do think on the one hand, you certainly have to be at least confident enough in what the thing is that you’re putting out into the world that you are not going to be embarrassed of it. But I feel like our strategy is a little bit less scientific in terms of trying to somehow crack a code to what is going to be commercially successful because after 20 years of doing this, we just know that we know nothing.
[0:36:10.4] JR: Nobody knows anything, and this is what anyone in any creative field – if you’re an executive at Netflix or Paramount or a record label or publisher knows, nobody knows anything. And so, to your point Dave, you trust the creative process in disciplining yourself to create and increase the creative output and number two, yeah, just place lots of bets. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.
All right, three questions we wrap up every conversation with. I’d love for both of you to answer these questions. Number one, which books do you tend to recommend or gift most frequently to others? Dave, I’ll start with you.
[0:36:51.5] DH: Well, I end up being approached quite a bit by artists who are kind of newer in their career who are looking for advice on how to get going in a career especially in Christian music since that’s where, how JJ kind of came up. The book that I often recommend to people is Andrew Peterson’s memoir called, Adorning the Dark, and it’s largely the story of his creative journey and his reflections on what it is to be a Christian who is playing music for the church but also trying to have their music resonate outside of the church.
You know, he is a few years older than us and is a wonderful writer, a great thinker. It’s a very inspiring book and so I always recommend it to artists who are kind of just starting out.
[0:37:49.9] JR: That’s a great answer for anyone in our audience. JJ, how about you?
[0:37:53.1] JH: I find that the book that I gift to the most people is Every Moment Holy. That is a book full of liturgies about everyday life. There is a liturgy for your morning coffee or the first fire of the season or changing a diaper and I think it’s just such a brilliant reminder that every moment is holy. We don’t have to wait until we walk into a sanctuary to be in the presence of God.
God is interested in every detail of our lives, and we can invite Him into even those mundane moments, and I find that these liturgies in a lot of ways are like songs and that sometimes we don’t have the words to describe what we’re going through, how we’re feeling and so it is nice to say someone else’s words and then those words resonate with your soul and so I love giving this book. Whether it’s like, you know, we stayed with some friends a couple of years ago at their house and so I just sent it as a thank you gift for hosting us, but you know, it’s great for Christmas, birthdays, blah-blah-blah. I love it.
[0:39:14.2] JR: I love it. Hey JJ, you just released a new children’s book called Hand to Hold, based off your hit song by say name. I actually read it to my girls last night. Can you tell our audience about this book?
[0:39:24.4] JH: Yes, we got to work with an amazing illustrator named Alyssa Peterson and it was such an amazing process seeing our song come to life in a totally different way, like with these beautiful illustrations. The song itself and the book is almost like a liturgy for bedtime. It is a blessing to speak over your children as you’re putting them to bed.
The chorus says, “May you never lose the wonder in your soul. May you always have a blanket for the cold, may the living light inside you be the compass as you go and may you always know you have my hand to hold.”
[0:40:09.0] JR: I love it. You guys can find a copy of that book at jordanraynor.com/bookshelf as well as the other books recommended. All right guys, who do you most want to hear in this podcast talking about how their faith in Jesus Christ influences their pursuit of masterful work?
[0:40:24.1] JH: I mean, piggybacking off of Dave’s answer for the first question, I would love Andrew Peterson. I just feel like he has so much insight into the creative process. I love how he’s built an entire community around faith-centered art and literature through his Rabbit Room, and I think he just has a lot of insight to provide like bringing excellence to our work.
[0:40:54.8] JR: That’s a good answer. Hey Dave, I’ll refer the last question just to you, what’s one thing from today’s conversation you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?
[0:41:03.8] DH: I might go back to what we were talking about with Mr. Rogers, that idea you are special like it’s not the things you wear, right? It’s not your possessions, it’s not your performance. You have value already and I think when we set out to define, “What is JJ’s music for her audience?” the definition that we came up with is that inside of every human being, regardless of age, is a little kid who just wants to be told, “You are special, and everything is going to be okay.”
Whether that’s an actual kid or whether that’s an adult, that is who we are writing music for and we feel like the reason why we are able to provide that message is because we have a Heavenly Father who is telling us the exact same thing.
[0:42:03.8] JR: Amen, so well said. Guys, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you guys do every day from making the world more beautiful through your music, for reminding us of our Father’s unconditional love, for your commitment to serving your listeners through the ministry of excellence. Guys, you could find JJ and Dave Heller anywhere, very easy to Google them. Make sure you get a copy of Hand to Hold. I love this book. Guys, thanks for joining us on the Call to Mastery.
[0:42:29.2] JH: Thanks so much.
[0:42:30.1] DH: Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:42:31.5] JR: I hope you guys loved this episode. Hey, we don’t have ads on the Call to Mastery. We might in the future probably, and I don’t know, I don’t know what we’re going to do but this is all free content. I am praying that it serves you incredibly well that you find it incredibly valuable. If you do, pay it back by just leaving a review of the show. You cannot imagine how important ratings and reviews of the podcast are.
If you are listening to this, especially if you are listening to this in Apple Podcast, look up the Call to Mastery, click through the show and give it a quick four, five-star rating, whatever you think is fair and leave a review. Let us know what’s working in the show, what’s not working so we can make it even better for you. I love you guys, I appreciate you listening. I’ll see you next week.
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