In February, we attended an immersive visual and audio experience of Bethel Music’s new album, Come Up Here. From a studio in Nashville, we were “placed” right in The Redwoods where these songs were captured, and heard about their origins from some of the key writers, musicians and vocalists on the record.

Afterwards, we sat down with Brian and Jenn Johnson for a deep dive Q+A where we learned about song selection for the album, its unique recording setting (and the hurdles and joy that came with it), and that the message of the entire record comes down to the idea that there is heaven to be experienced in the here and now of knowing Jesus.

This record is meant to capture and communicate this very sensory, heavenly summoning. Can you tell us how this purpose for the record affected the songwriting process overall?

Jenn: Revelation 4 says: “Come up here and I will show you what to do” and just conveys that “mountaintop” experience.

So many times in the Bible there was this call to go up to the mountain and have this encounter with God and then come back down.

The place that I grew up on is a mountaintop in The Redwoods and so, we've always wanted to record there because The Redwoods are just very special when you're there - you feel small in this grandiose place.

And so just that point in itself of the awe and wonder going to God and who He is in creation and beauty and all of that is in this record.

So, as we were choosing songs, we really chose them around that theme of who God is and his grandeur, holiness, wonder, and awe.

**We’re curious to know your song selection process for Come Up Here. How did you decide certain songs weren’t ready for certain seasons?**

Brian: We have long lists and folders with little song ideas going back 5-6 years. We were digging in the archives and it's just kind of like, wait, we forgot this! This feels right! And then we called Amanda (Cook) and she's like, yeah, I can make it work and come out. It was just cool.

Then I'd written another song with Daniel Bashta as well, who’s another writer, and that's partly what brought up the idea of digging in the archives for another one that maybe we did together.

It's an interesting thing - it's like an admin thing. You forget about it because you have to organize and then once you get the list in front of you you say, oh my gosh, I remember that song. So, it's really as simple as that. But what's amazing about this is our reconnection with Amanda on this album. It's a special time.

Jenn: We stayed connected over the years, but just to rework together is what’s been really fun. She's been family forever. I have a song I'm working on right now that will probably come out sometime this year that I started 20 some years ago, and I just never felt the green light to put it out. This year I worked on and finished it with Gable Price, and I'm so excited whenever it comes out this year.

We wanted to ask about the production as well – how you all captured it. We know the experience was a 3-day process. Can you tell our community more about the technical side of things?

Jenn: Yes, so it’s my family's property, and so we had scouted the location because it's hundreds of acres of Redwoods, and we scouted where we wanted to do it. But when we actually went up there, there was a torrential downpour. So, we're setting up and sound checking in the rain.

Brian: They had to dig a flat spot into the hillside. It was just muddy!

Jenn: My dad was out there with his machinery and we had to actually do the 2-day recording. After that, we didn't have any rain, so we actually got to capture everything with no rain, which was awesome. But getting up to that point was a muddy mess, all included. Even the funny insider fact is all the girl's hair - we looked like we had gone through a storm, because we did!

Brian: We had to get all the pine needles and spread them out over the mud and then replant the ferns around the stage.

Well, it was definitely worth it. Did you guys consider having a crowd there? Why did you all decide on not having an audience?

Jenn: Yeah, we went round and round but honestly, because my family's property has only a one lane road to get up there, we needed to cap it at just the band and the crew.

Brian: This fall we will do a live one with some of those songs.

Jenn: Live is our bread and butter, but I think that I love to do new songs in a creative way, either in the studio or something like this, and then redo the songs live so they translate well for the Church. Because that's where we live!

We love all the music, but songs that translate for Sunday, that's our pride and joy in a huge way.

So it'll be fun to re-do these albums and record live acoustic representations of them. But I really love when there's a creative way to hear and experience new songs; I think it gives you another dimension of hearing it, you know?

Get the forest dirt under your nails.

Did you all capture all the audio in those 3 days? Were there any overdubs or anything?

Brian: We did some overdubs, but a lot of the audio that you hear was live. The sound in the woods was the best studio because it's open and it's dense, so you're not getting any reflection off of anything. In a studio you don't get any reflections, but this was natural. It was pretty amazing.

Jenn: Singing outside that night in a forest was absolutely epic, with all that beautiful lighting outside and the stars. I wish the camera would have panned up to the stars because it was magical.

It was pretty awesome just to be out there and just sing “Holy Forever” in nature. It was so cool.

Well, that actually kind of leads into my next question about how it felt worshiping in this beautiful place, in the midst of His creation. Is there something, as churches start leading these songs, that they can do to kind of recreate that atmosphere? How can they capture the awe and wonder that you all did in The Redwoods?

Jenn: I think that the beauty of a great song is that it can be done simply on an acoustic guitar. I think that is a telltale.

What I love about these songs is that they really translate, and I'm sure down the road we're going to do acoustic versions to really show that.

But that's the beauty.

Brian: The production is huge and massive - a lot of the demos that we listen to are just guitar, so they take on a whole different feel, but they work in an acoustic environment, surprisingly.

Jenn: It is not what you expect.

Speaking of “Holy Forever,” you all mentioned it's Grammy-nominated this weekend. How does it feel to have this song reach beyond the walls of the Church? And why do you think that is the song that is being chosen out of all of them right now?

Jenn: I mean, I'm glad it is, not only because it's our song that we're a part of, but I'm glad it is because… Holy Forever? Are you kidding? As a song title alone, “Holy Forever” wins.

That’s amazing in it of itself: that there’s not humanity in the message behind the song. It really just is this heaven, awe and wonder, worship song. It’s eternal and epic.

Brian: And that word thousand: a thousand generations. It means forever; it’s eternal generations. So not just a thousand! It's kind of like the idea of heaven with a 1,000 generations, every generation since.

Jenn: There’s this idea of not only the heaven that we go to one day, but the heaven that is the here and now of knowing Jesus.

That right there is really the message of the whole album!

Speaking of awe and wonder as the themes on this record, was it a common thread between all of the writers' current faith walks as you all were writing this album? And also, why was that theme important for 2023?

Jenn: When we did the call, we all got together and talked through the vision of the album: what we were feeling and sensing. We talked about Revelation 4, we talked about community, we talked about a lot of the themes that you hear in the record.

So people either wrote songs from that theme or they went back to their archives, like Brian was saying, for songs they already had that matched those themes and finished them.

So everyone kind of had their own journey to get to it.

But we love to vision cast the heart and the spirit of what we want to do. We also try to share any verses that come to mind, any themes or words that we all have as a team, we try to share those collectively to kind of keep those in the writing themes and even ask the Lord who we should be partnering with to write for each specific project.

As a team, is there something you guys will do to kind of maintain this “eyes up” mentality going forward? What’s your greatest hope as these songs reach the Church and worship teams across the world start leading them?

Brian: I think that we all, as humans, try on different heart postures and at the end of the day, when you go through all the seasons, the one heart posture that never fails is the one that's just magnifying Him.

It’s like the ancient tree: when we lift Him up, we focus on Him.

All these songs remind people about heaven, remind people that praise is the highway to the throne of God, and that there’s just never going to be any other way.

Sometimes we try on the heart posture of talking about ourselves, all the problems and processing, and then we deconstruct everything. But eventually you get tired of that, and you just go, “there's no life in this.” At the end of the day, there's nothing better than the feeling of giving Him something in song. The feeling you get from that is worship and it changes us.

I think our team has been through so much. It's honestly unbelievable what the team has been through - all the little things that no one knows about, and I think that everyone landed in a place on this album that whether the songs land on charts or whatever, they landed in a place of us going back to singing about who He is which is what we used to do.

Jenn: It definitely felt like it was a special moment for our team to see glimpses of them being around the campfire, sharing devotionals, etc.

One of those cool moments, and I don't think we even talked about this anywhere so here's your exclusive (laughs): we were around the campfire doing devotions in the morning and I'm reading Revelation: “Come up here, I'll show you.”And I had borrowed one of the intern’s bibles. We read the whole entire chapter of Revelation 4 and then I close her bible.

On the back of it, there is a picture of a mountain loundscape with Revelation 4 on the bible stitched into the leather. It was really weird, like….whoa. And she had had that Bible forever. Just crazy. Nods from God!

Bethel Music