By: Rhema 99.7
Above: Chris Sebastian | Facebook
We catch up with Chris Sebastian (current contestant on The Voice and contestant from the Voice Season 1) to talk about music, faith and the painful journey he and his wife went on after losing a child through miscarriage.
I was approached by Idol for a number of years to be on the show when it was still running, but being Guy Sebastian’s brother, I didn’t want to copy what he had done; I didn’t want that comparison between us. When the Voice came around, and the structure of the show was that they didn’t see you at first, I thought that would alleviate the comparison.
My earliest memories are seeing people singing at Sunday school, my favourite song being ‘Jesus, Lover of My Soul’, and thinking, “I want to do that.”
Tell us about your song ‘I Found You’
I’m so glad people have connected with ‘I Found You’, because it’s a unique song for me. My song-writer brain was like, “let’s make a really cool song for radio.” But I realised that I hadn’t written a song just for God in a while. So I sat down and wrote a tribute to God. I had no plan for it to go anywhere but people loved it.
Listen: Chris Sebastian – I Found You
It’s really not difficult to be a song writer who is both Christian, and in the world. You shouldn’t have two identities; it’s not about having one part of you that’s accessible to the faith world and another for the rest of the world. It’s just about being the best person you can be, across the board.
My wife and I lost a baby in 2018. We had told our family we were expecting and had really been looking forward to starting a family. To have a glimmer of that life and then to have it gone all of a sudden, was devastating. We are faith people and we understand scripture as much as we can, so we know that God’s not just setting us up and taking things away from us. But emotions are tough things to navigate and it was a difficult time. I sat down with the intention to write a song in which people could see the pain. I tried but nothing was coming to me, which doesn’t really happen to me.
So I had a bit of a pray and was reading something out of the Bible app and all of a sudden, these lines started coming to me. It was like an outer-body experience; I have never written a song faster than this. There was a warmth that surrounded me, and I ended up writing on the floor of the studio in a mess. It was such a healing experience for me. We were trying to be tough and shoulder the weight of that loss, but that night I was completely honest, and that’s how the song ‘Soon’ came about.
Listen: Chris Sebastian – Soon
Article supplied with thanks to Rhema 99.7.