Stay Close to the Small Things — The Phrase That Built an Album

Five words, said over coffee, by a character who left the faith years ago.

Stay close to the small things.

That's the line that became the spine of STAY. I want to tell you where it came from, what I mean by it, and why I needed an entire album to figure out what to do with it.

Track six. The coffee shop.

In the album's June track, "Old Friend," Wes Bennett — the character at the centre of the record — runs into a woman named Marie at a coffee shop. They knew each other in college. She used to lead worship at the same church he did. Then one year she stopped, and they lost touch.

In the song, she doesn't lecture him. She doesn't pull him aside. She just notices something in his face he hasn't admitted to anyone yet, and over the second half of her latte she says:

Stay close to the small things.

That's it. She doesn't unpack what she means. The song doesn't either. Wes pays the bill, drives home, and the line sits in his car for the next six months.

The line came before the song

Sometimes a lyric arrives because a song needs a hook. This one was the other way around. I wrote the sentence in a notebook a year before I had any idea what to do with it. It was after a conversation with someone I love who had walked away from the faith — and who, in walking away, had said something true.

What they said wasn't "stay close to the small things." What they said was specific, and not mine to share. But the shape of what they said was: don't try to fix the big questions right now. Don't try to win them back. Pay attention to what's still here. The dog. The porch. The bread on the counter. The way the light moves through the kitchen at four.

I sat with that for a long time before I knew it was a song. I sat with it longer before I knew it was an album.

Why "small"

Worship music in our era has gotten very big. Big choruses, big drops, big productions, big movements. There's nothing wrong with big — some of my favourite records I've ever made are big. But big has a problem: it crowds out small. And small is where most of us actually live.

Small is the morning coffee. Small is the dog at your feet. Small is the porch light coming on at the same time every evening. Small is your wife humming a tune in the next room. Small is the napkin on a coffee-shop table with a phrase written on it in blue ballpoint pen.

When the big questions get too big to hold, the small things keep you here. That's not theology. That's just true.

The phrase returns

In the album, the phrase comes back four times. Once in May when Marie says it. Once in September, when Wes finds himself at a smaller church for the first time in years, and feels it land. Once in October, on the porch with Naomi, in the only duet on the record. And once in December, in the closing track, when it's no longer a thing he's holding — it's a thing he's living.

That's how the line works in the real world, too. Nobody hears stay close to the small things once and is fixed. You hear it. You ignore it. You hear it again. You start trying it. You forget. You hear it from someone else. Eventually it stops being a sentence and becomes a way you spend a Tuesday afternoon.

The album cover

There were six concepts for the STAY album cover, and one of them was just a napkin. A white paper napkin on a worn wooden coffee-shop table, with that phrase written in blue ballpoint pen — a coffee ring, a guitar case half out of frame, the warm afternoon light. We ended up going a different direction for the final cover, but I keep that mock-up on my desk. It still might end up as the vinyl B-side label.

For you

If you take one thing from this whole album, take this. Find the smallest thing in your life that you still trust. The cup you reach for in the morning. The window you look out of when you can't pray. The person who knows you well enough that you don't have to perform with them. Don't try to be a better Christian today. Don't try to fix anything.

Just stay close to the small things.

The big things will find you again. They always do.

"Old Friend" is track six of STAY, out now on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube. If you only listen to one song off the record, I'd start there.