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All We Need Is Love
02/10/2003 4:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Lisa Zhito
Littleton, Colorado.
Jonesboro, Arkansas.
Paducah, Kentucky.
Few artists would like to be associated with a national tragedy. But as with Eric Clapton and window guards on Manhattan skyscrapers, misfortune has placed Steven Curtis Chapman at the forefront of the school violence issue.
For the uninitiated, Chapman has been in the contemporary Christian music limelight almost from the get-go. His pop stylings and bluesy guitar have earned him 29 number one songs, sales of over 4 million records, and three Grammy awards in the past decade--not to mention the attention of Oscar-winner Robert Duvall, who asked Chapman to write a song and appear in a video for his critically lauded film The Apostle.
Like most artists in the Christian music genre, Chapman has rallied behind his share of causes--politically safe topics like prison fellowship, world hunger, and children's issues are favorites with this crowd. Chapman never intended to tackle a hot button like firearms in schools and all of its contentious associations: violence in the media, gun control, and the Constitutional right to bear arms, to name a few. Who wants to step into that mess?
For Chapman, it started with a phone call from his father. A Paducah native and graduate of Paducah's Heath High, Chapman was stunned to learn that a student had opened fire on a before-school prayer group at his alma mater, killing three students. Chapman and his brother had started the school's first Christian fellowship club when they attended Heath. Chapman knew his own teenage daughter could have easily been one of the victims.
"If I had stayed in that community, Emily would have been sitting in that prayer group, guarantee it, front row!" Chapman says. That realization was, for him, "just overwhelming."
Although Chapman had just begun what was supposed to be a one-year sabbatical from the music business (he has since returned with 2001's Declaration and his latest album, All About Love), he suddenly found himself thrust back into the spotlight. As one of Paducah's more famous native sons, he was now being asked to sing and speak at a series of funerals that were national news. CNN wanted to talk to him; so did People. The attention made him uncomfortable.
"I really wrestled with it: 'Should I even go?' Because does it look like, 'Oh, here's this guy trying to get some press out of it, show up and be the big celebrity, and do whatever.'"
But, Chapman also realized, "How do you say no? It's your community you grew up in, and you see them totally bombarded with media. They're all looking around going, 'What do we do?' Cameras are stuck in their faces and I'm one who's used to having a camera stuck in my face, so I'm thinking, 'I need to go speak for them.'"
Chapman did the right thing, and so began his attachment to a very personal cause. One of the first tangible outcomes was "With Hope," a song born out of Chapman's struggle to make some sense of the tragedy, which appeared on his 1999 album, Speechless. Chapman also appeared in an hour-long video called At The Edge, part of a discussion kit called "Bullet Proof?" aimed at ending school violence.
Like it or not, the timing of all this only further connected Chapman to the cause. Sadly, "With Hope" was pressed into service in spring '99 when Chapman was asked to participate in a memorial service for one of the 15 Littleton victims; 2,000 copies of the song were also distributed to Denver-area churches by Neighbors Who Care, an organization that supports families of crime victims, as a gift from Chapman and Sparrow Records. The Littleton shootings happened just as promotion for Speechless was gearing up, and when Chapman started doing interviews for the first time in months, "Paducah" and "Littleton" were the first words on every interviewer's lips.
"In the sabbatical time, I truly became acquainted with grief in a way that I did not have a clue of before," he reflects. "I knew what it was like to be hurting and sad, but I didn't understand that kind of grief."
One is never prepared for tragedy, but Steven Curtis Chapman won't be sitting still, either. His cause has found him, he's up to the challenge, and Steve Curtis Chapman is still all about love.
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