3 AM — A Song for the Night the Words Won't Come

Track seven of STAY is called "3 AM." It's six minutes long. The first sixty seconds are a single Rhodes chord held in the dark. The verses are barely above a whisper. The last ninety seconds have no words at all.

It's the song I almost didn't put on the album. It's the song I'm most glad I did.

We don't talk about 3 AM

Worship music has a problem with 3 AM. We have a lot of songs for Sunday morning — celebration, lifting your hands, the room standing together. We have a lot of songs for Friday night — testimony, breakthrough, the dam giving way. We have almost no songs for the moment when sleep won't come, your wife is breathing softly beside you, and you're staring at the ceiling because you can't make yourself pray.

That moment is real. That moment happens to people who love Jesus. It happens to people who lead worship for a living. It happened to the character I wrote this album around. It has happened to me. And it has happened, I'm certain, to a lot of you reading this.

So I wrote a song for it.

The shape of the song

The song is 56 BPM — the slowest tempo on the record. There's a held Rhodes chord at the start that lasts longer than feels comfortable. That's on purpose. I wanted the first thing you feel when this song begins to be the same thing Wes feels when he wakes up at 3 AM: a room that won't move, a quiet that won't break, a heaviness that won't lift just because you wish it would.

The verses are whispered, because that's how you pray at 3 AM if you pray at all. You don't lift your voice. You don't reach for an emotion. You sit on the edge of the bed and you ask the kind of question that wouldn't survive daylight:

What if it's quiet because no one's listening

What if it's quiet because no one needs to listen

What if it's quiet because I forgot how to hear

What if all three are true

That's not a verse I would have written for any other album. I wrote it for this one because I needed it to be okay for somebody to think that — even if just for one night — and not have the song flinch.

The wordless ninety seconds

Around the four-minute mark, the song stops having words. A gospel choir comes in — not loud, not climactic, just present — and they sing wordlessly for ninety seconds while a single piano figure cycles underneath.

I want to tell you why.

When Wes can't pray, the song doesn't pretend he can. He never says the right thing. He never finds his way back to certainty. Instead, the prayer he can't pray gets sung by other voices on his behalf. That's the whole picture of what the church is supposed to be. When you can't hold it, somebody else holds it for you. They don't need words. They just need to be in the room.

I think that's what worship is for, in the end. Not for the days you have words. For the days you don't.

Why I almost didn't release it

A song this long, this slow, this raw — it doesn't fit on a playlist. It doesn't fit on radio. It doesn't fit the streaming-economy model of every song needing to grab you in fifteen seconds. I knew that when I wrote it. My label knew it. Everyone advised me to cut it down or save it for a deluxe edition.

I'm so glad I didn't.

Because the message I keep getting from listeners is the same message: this is the song I needed. Not the stadium opener. Not the porch closer. The one with the long held chord and the whispered verses and the choir who sings without words. The slow one. The one that doesn't try to fix anything.

For you

If you're reading this at 3 AM — and I know somebody is — I want you to know this:

You are not the only one in your church who has been here. You are not the only one in your house. You are not the only one in your tour van or your living room or your hotel hallway or your old prayer chair. The 3 AM you're having tonight is one a lot of us have had. The song is for you.

Press play. Let the first chord hold. Don't try to feel something. Don't try to fix anything. Just be in the room with it for six minutes.

And then, if you can, go put the kettle on. The small things still work. The morning still comes.

"3 AM" is track seven of STAY, out now on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube. Headphones, lights off, no skips.