Steven Curtis Chapman announces release of 'Beauty will rise'

|PIC1|Grammy Award winning and multi-platinum selling artist Steven Curtis Chapman has announced plans to release Beauty Will Rise on November 3 on Sparrow Records.

Beauty Will Rise is a collection of 12 new and profound songs created over the past 15 months during the walk through the darkness of the loss of his daughter Maria and while God continued to meet him there on the journey.

Part lament, part praise, part grief, part hope, part wrestling, part pondering, these tracks resonate as Chapman’s personal Psalms. It is a desperately hopeful, raw, personal, and honest recording that is likely the most important of his already incredible 20 plus year ministry.

Chapman announced the news on his video blog (chapmanchannel.typepad.com) from Maria’s Big House of Hope, the special needs healing home recently opened by Show HOPE, the adoption and orphan care ministry founded by Chapman and his wife Mary Beth.

The facility is named in loving memory of their five-year old daughter and is located in Luoyang, China. Maria’s Big House of Hope will care for orphans with medical impairments, such as cleft palate, clubbed feet, urological disorders, blindness, and neurological disorders.

For the first time in his career, due to the intensely personal nature of this project, Chapman made the album in a total vacuum while travelling all over the country on tour last autumn and spring.

From the rooftop of Maria’s Big House of Hope, Steven shared details on his blog entry about how the songs for this project came about.

“I am standing on top of the building that because of it’s name, represents something that we never would have scripted, asked for, or imagined. But, we are right in the middle of part of the beauty that God is bringing from the pain and ashes of our last year," he said.

"I began this process a couple of months after May 21, not really knowing if I would ever feel like I could sing, stand on stage again, or express the emotions, the grief and the loss in music.

"But, in the days that followed, I felt that God was allowing me to write my own songs, and that’s really what these are to me; a collection of my own songs, laments, ponderings, and God meeting me and my family in the grief and in the midst of our journey of the last year. It’s been an amazing, wild process; very raw, real, honest.”

The album’s first single, “Heaven is the Face”, will be released to radio on August 21 with the digital single available on September 8.

Album pre-sales of Beauty Will Rise begin September 25. Chapman spoke about this song via video blog as well (www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnHM_2x-pBI) commenting that “obviously heaven has become a much more real place and something I long for more now than ever before".

"I can’t wait to see the face of my little girl that I long to see again. I’m saying to God, ‘you know my heart, and I know that heaven is so much more than that, but right now Lord, this where my heart is.’ So I’m just crying out to God with this song, and it’s as honest and personal as I’ve ever been, I just poured out my heart.”