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Warren Barfield: Fighting The Good Fight
05-27-2008
by Beau Black
Warren Barfield’s third album released last week. But in April, he sat down with writer Beau Black during GMA Week to reveal his heart, inevitably sharing what he thinks is worth fighting for…
“The headband is the new chain wallet.” So observes Warren Barfield, would-be E! commentator, surveying the hotel lobby packed with a variety of big-name and would-be Christian artists, all uniformed in their alt-rock best for radio and media folk.
That fashion tidbit’s the least of what Barfield has learned from his five years in the industry, a span that’s seen him mature from wide-eyed (and much-hyped) newbie at our first meeting to a veteran with a healthy dose of realism during Gospel Music Week this past April.
His perspective informs a new set of songs that take their title from “Love Is Not A Fight,” which, on first listen, reveals itself to be the kind of song that makes careers and, more importantly for Barfield, hits people right where it counts, somewhere between heart and brain.
When Barfield first came to Nashville, he found himself the center of a good deal of attention: “On that record, I’m Mr. Positive. Life is great; I was on top of the world.” The “poppy, feel-good” record reflected that. But by the time his second came around, he had changed labels and lost his focus.
“You get to this place where you have this idea of what it’s going to be like, and it can’t ever live up to those expectations,” he says. “I was disappointed, just because I had set the bar so high. So when it was time to do the next record three years later, it was a dark time for me—‘I don’t know what life is about or who I am. Life hasn’t turned out like I’d wanted.’” The record, a darker, more complex album that critics loved but many Christian music fans missed, reflected his mental state.
And so it is with Worth Fighting For (Essential). After a season of “doubt and struggle,” he’s writing again from a happier place. As he’s grown older, “the things that don’t matter start to fall away,” and priorities fall into new order. The majority of the record, he says, “is ‘this is where God has me right now. This is what I want to be about—I want to be focused on what’s important.’
“Am I invested as much in my relationship with God as I am in my career? Because that’s [the former] what’s really important. Am I invested as much in my wife as I am in my retirement plan?” he muses.
The project’s focal point is a doozy of a song that seems to belie its title: “Love Is Not A Fight.” “My wife is a clean freak—a little OCD, over-the-top. One night we had some friends over at the house playing some games, and I dropped a pretzel on the floor on accident. She had already done her cleaning for that day, and she let me know that wasn’t OK.” Guess where this is going.
“I, trying to save face, thought it’d be funny if I dropped a whole handful of pretzels on the floor.” The ensuing, lengthy fight “got really bad, really quick. It opened this door to everything one had done to hurt the other over the last year. The next day after we’d calmed down I thought, ‘Man, I was an open door away from leaving.’ It would be easier. But that night [I] didn’t.
“No matter how close someone is, you can take it for granted. If you don’t wake up every day and fight for it, you can lose it. So if one day something much bigger than a pretzel falls and I walk to the door, God, come and barricade us in—force us to work it out. That became my prayer—to make the things in my life that I value important enough to fight for,” he explains.
He says that in the music business “[we] have had these dreams since we were kids to do what we do, and it’s easy to make our goals more important than our relationships. I dreamed of doing music for a living long before I met my wife. It’s easy to go, ‘Music was here before you were, so if someone’s gotta go, it’s you.’ That’s not God’s plan. He created marriage long before he created my career. It’s not just marriage—it’s kids, it’s a house. I felt that God’s saying He’s more concerned about my relationships than the songs I write.”
The results are more relatable songs that apply out this theme in a variety of contexts, from our importance to Christ (“One Thing”), to marriage, to worship (“Singer Not The Song”).
“Singer” dissects worship as “something we sell. The church and our culture have bought into that, and worship is often a thing to us,” he says. “It’s something I do for 15 minutes on Sunday morning, a CD we listen to. I’ve always been uncomfortable with this. Is worship about the song I sing? That’s a way to worship, but is it just as much so to go out and cut my neighbor’s yard? Is it also sponsoring a child in Africa I’ll never meet?”
Again, Barfield returns to the importance of relationship: “It’s less about the song than about the person singing it. Are we worshipping when we’re singing it? It’s difficult to talk about—people say, ‘So you’re saying what I do on Sunday morning’s wrong?’ No, no. It’s not something we turn on and off; it’s the way we live our life.” Not about show—celebrity names or trendy clothes, or clean floors or saving face for friends—but stuff of eternal significance.
Check out our review of Warren Barfield’s new record, Worth Fighting For (Essential), here. For an in-depth look at “Love Is Not A Fight,” straight from Warren, click here. Visit warrenbarfield.com for more information.
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