17 minute read
COVER STORY
Country music’s Chris Janson
GOD’S WORKING IT OUT for Good
by Amy Kerr
WHAT WOULD YOU DO with your life if you trusted that, in the end, everything would work together for your good? For Chris Janson, the answer is simple: exactly what he’s doing right now. He’s a member of the Grand Ole Opry, an Academy of Country Music award winner. He’s co-written songs for Tim McGraw and Hank Williams, Jr. He’s had four #1 hits and toured the country to venues full of fans singing his songs like “Buy Me a Boat” and “Good Vibes” right back to him. Janson is thankful to enjoy his career as a country music singer/songwriter. It's an important part of his life—but not the only one. “What you leave on earth after you’re gone is your legacy. The songs, the accolades, none of that matters,” he says. “I would rather go down in history as father, husband, Christian. Period.”
Spend a few minutes listening to Janson, and it’s not hard to see this is a man walking on solid ground, confi dent and self-assured. Some artists create from a place of insecurity, of feeling alone and separate from others. They spend their days trying to tap into what makes them feel so diff erent from other people. Not Janson. It’s clear he creates from a place rich with connection. A happily married father of four, with a strong relationship with his Creator, this is a man who is home. And it shows in his music. “I’m not trying to be a preacher or anything,” he says. “I’m just trying to be real with people.” Janson and his wife, Kelly, have created something of a family business. He’s the artist, she’s his manager. Dedicated to their family-fi rst mentality, they frequently bring their kids on the road with them. And lately, Kelly's had a front-row seat to watching her husband not only entertain millions, but reach countless hearts through his music. “My brother’s a pastor, and that’s such a great thing. Sometimes I feel like when Chris gives his heart and sings songs like ‘Everybody’s Going Through Something,’ he’s touching almost as many people as my brother in church,” she says. “Before every show, he always says, ‘We woke up today, so we are blessed.’ I see God working through him.”
Growing up in southeast Missouri, being an instrument for God would’ve never entered Chris’s mind. He was too busy picking up and playing all kinds of actual musical instruments by ear: drums, piano, bass. “I don’t read notes. I have zero music theory. I just play by ear,” Janson admits. “When I was nine years old, I got a Fender Stratocaster. I learned songs by The Georgia Satellites, Chuck Berry, all kinds of rock and roll—whatever I could hear. I’ve always been a country music fan, but I was fi rst a rock and roll fan.“ In the end, Chris’s country music fandom won his heart. When he graduated from high school, he moved to Nashville to pursue a career as a songwriter. He’d go in and out of the honky tonks, playing songs by Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. He started picking up regular gigs, writing songs and slowly carving himself a place in the music scene. He was a bachelor who loved riding his Harley and shooting pool with his friends when one night, he saw an attractive blonde walk down the stairs of the pool hall. “I leaned over to my buddy and I said, ‘I want to marry that girl over there.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, right.’” Three years later, they were married. “When we met, I was a single mom,” says Kelly.
Chris, Kelly and their four children
“I was divorced and raising two children, and I prayed, ‘God, send me a good Christian man.’ I didn’t believe they existed anymore. I had a Jesus Calling book, and every day that’s what I read. It helped me to be confi dent that I had God and didn’t have to have a man. Then he showed up. I remember telling him, ‘Well, I have kids.’ He's like, ‘Great, that's a bonus!’ When he decided to ask me to marry him, he asked both my children fi rst, took them with him to get the ring, and they all proposed to me together. His heart is like nothing else you can imagine. He's my best friend.” Brick by brick, Chris saw his foundation getting stronger, thanks to Kelly, his kids, and his faith. It’s something he was thankful for even more when his career started to feel like shaky ground. “When he got his record deal right after we got married, he was at a really weird spot,” Kelly says. “The music business is harder than it looks, and he was miserable. He’d call me from the road, and I would read Jesus Calling to him in the mornings.” “That’s how I became a fan of Jesus Calling—because she was reading it to me,” says Chris. “At the time, I had no idea who I was. Frankly, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it was all God’s timing. And Kelly reading Jesus Calling to me gave me peace during the ‘ulcers in my stomach, freaking out, I don’t know who I am’ phase of my life. And it gave me so much confi dence that I asked out of that record deal and went totally independent for many years.” It was during his time as an independent artist that Chris wrote and released a light-hearted song called “Buy Me a Boat” in 2015. Country music DJ Bobby Bones played it on his syndicated radio show, broadcast to stations across the nation. Soon after, Warner Music Nashville off ered him a record deal. It didn’t take long for the single to shoot to the top of the charts, a fi rst for Chris that cemented his place in the country music canon. With the benefi t of hindsight, he can see this time around, he had some divine help being in the right place, with the right people, at the right time.
“It took a good thirteen, fourteen years to really get a hit. I think God puts certain situations in your life to mold you. Sometimes you have to live in those hard spaces before you get to see the clarity at the end of the tunnel. And I’m living in that clarity now.” These days, there’s a steady cadence to Janson’s life. He and Kelly start every day with a prayer. Then Chris gets up, goes to his writing room, writes a song if he feels like it. Usually, he’ll write the lyrics fi rst, and the melody will fall into place. Inspiration can strike anytime. For his latest single “Bye, Mom” it struck at two o’clock in the morning. “Talk about a God thing—I sat up in bed and was wide awake with all these lyrics. I picked up my phone and typed them out. I texted my co-writer Brandon Kinney and said, ‘Call me as soon as you get up. We have a song to write.’” Chris knew Brandon was the person who needed to co-write
the song with him. Only a short time ago, Brandon had lost his mom unexpectedly during the COVID-19 pandemic. The grieving son couldn’t even attend his mother’s funeral. “We just started writing this song as a tribute to Brandon’s mother. There’s a line in the song that says, ‘When you realize you’re somebody that somebody loves more than themselves . . .’” Janson stops for a second, lost in thought. “Which, by the way, that’s Christ.” He pauses again, gathers himself. When he speaks again, his voice is thick with emotion. “I actually never thought about it that way. I’m going to call Brandon and tell him that.” “Bye, Mom” is a poignant single that’s touched listeners from all walks of life, with a reminder that the love we have with our people is precious, because we won’t always be together to share it on earth. As believers, we know this. We know nothing in this lifetime will last. But as you lay down to sleep, you never dream that it might be the last time. It’s a sentiment the Jansons are more familiar with than they care to admit. While they were sleeping one night in 2020, Kelly woke up to the sound of a quiet noise downstairs. “I heard just this little faint beep, beep, beep. I’m like, ‘Why is the dishwasher beeping?’” But it wasn’t the dishwasher. Earlier that day, Chris had left his laptop plugged in on a leather ottoman in his writing room. The laptop overheated, causing the ottoman to catch fi re and send a seven-foot fl ame up to the ceiling.
It’s like He was saying, ‘I’ve got you.’
“The house was on fi re right below where our family was sleeping: me, Chris, and our two youngest kids, all in our king-sized bed. The ceiling fan below was already melting from the fl ame, and our bed would have been the next thing to fall right through into the fi re. One more minute, and we probably wouldn’t have survived. The one thing that did survive in that room is our Jesus Calling book.” Adds Chris, “It felt like an awesome random act of God. It’s like He was saying, ‘I’ve got you.’
Jesus Calling survived the fi re
“I can see Him all around me. I saw God when we got married, when our children were born. I see Him on hunts with my kids, fi shing trips—I see Him everywhere. And one thing I pray a lot is to remember that He leads the ship. We need to let Him control it because whatever He has is in our best interest. And He’s never let us down yet.”
Adapted for print from the Jesus Calling Podcast. Put your phone in Camera mode and hover over this code to hear more for Chris and Kelly’s story when it hits the podcast on February 24!
Listen to Chris’s latest single “Bye, Mom” wherever you stream or buy music.
aithful iercely 13
BRANDI RHODES BREAKS DOWN BARRIERS FOR WOMEN WRESTLERS
by Laura Neutzling
GROWING UP IN INKSTER, MICHIGAN, BRANDI RHODES never dreamed she’d be a member of one of wrestling’s royal families, or chief brand offi cer for the second-largest wrestling company in the world—or that she’d ever step into the ring at all. Today she’s known as a wrestler who blazed her way through the WWE and independent circuits, married famed wrestler Cody Rhodes and became daughter-in-law of the legendary Dusty Rhodes, and landed an executive role at All Elite Wrestling. But growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, she didn’t even watch the sport—that hobby belonged to her brother. All Brandi wanted to do as a young girl was lace up her blades and spend hours ice skating. As four-year-old Brandi watched the Winter Olympics with her mom, the sport captured her heart instantly. “I loved it so much, my mother decided to take me to the closest ice arena,” Brandi remembers. And for the next seventeen years, ice skating would become her passion. “Every single day, seven days a week I skated—that was my life. I loved the competitive nature of it. I loved the friendships I had through it. And to this day, I’ve put a lot of the coaching I received into what I do now.”
A competitive athlete from an early age, Brandi’s talent was evident from her fi rst days on the ice. Eventually she was coached under Olympic athlete Christopher Bowman, and a combination of his expertise and her hard work and talent landed her in a televised competition she can remember vividly to this day. “I was so nervous because there’s all these cameras. And before you start your program, you’ve got maybe a minute to skate around and warm up. I got on the ice, and my legs were like Jell-O. I couldn't feel them. I remember I prayed that whole warm-up, ‘God, please be my legs. I really need You right now.’ And that was the best I ever skated in my entire life. I just cried through the entire thing because I didn’t feel like I was doing it. I felt like He was.” Unexpectedly, wrestling would fi nd its way back into the skater’s life. After spending some time in Miami, Brandi dreamed of leaving the cold
COUNTER CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Brandi as a child, Brandi ice skating, Brandi with her daughter, Liberty, Brandi with husband Cody weather of Michigan behind and starting a new life under sunnier skies. She picked up and moved to Miami and quickly found work as a model. It wasn’t long before she got a call from an agent asking, “Would you ever be interested in wrestling?” After watching one episode of WWE Smackdown!, Brandi was intrigued and thought to herself, This is diff erent. Women are being taken seriously. They’re having their own competitive matches. When she attended her fi rst live wrestling match, she was drawn to the excitement of the ring and the energy of the crowd— and from there, she was hooked. Brandi took the job and was given her fi rst assignment: announcing in front of 20,000 people. Brandi moved to Tampa for the gig, where she announced matches on a regular basis and began to train to wrestle. As she grew more and more immersed in her new world, she vividly remembers the night she met the man who would eventually become her husband. “I went out on the road soon after starting training, and I met Cody for the fi rst time in an offi ce in one of the arenas. One day, he asked me if I would like to go out to dinner after the show. I said, ‘No, thank you, maybe next time.’ And then he just never stopped. After that, everything just kind of came to be for us. I think we had only been together for about a year when we got engaged, and then we got married less than a year after that. And here we are. We’ve been married seven years.”
There were a lot of fi rsts for me in wrestling.
Having blazed the trail as a female wrestling announcer, Brandi wanted to continue to advance in the sport. She wrestled in matches by herself and with a team. She appeared in national commercials. She even started her own swimwear line. “There were a lot of fi rsts for me in wrestling,” Brandi says. “It didn’t really register with me until I announced at my fi rst WrestleMania—that’s when a lot of people started throwing stats around and when people looked into it and said, ‘Hey, is she the fi rst woman to do this?’ And the answer was yes. So it’s something that’s really cool and I’m really proud of.” As accomplished as she was in the ring, Brandi’s taken on a new role: as the mother to a baby girl named Liberty, born in June 2021. As she refl ects back on the winding road she took to blaze a trail for women in the wrestling world, Brandi gives credit to the faith that taught her “everyone is accepted in God’s eyes” and gave her the courage to be a groundbreaker in her sport. “It’s the reason I still pursue my faith today.”
To keep up with Brandi Rhodes, follow her blog and social media platforms.
Adapted for print from the Jesus Calling Podcast. Put your phone in Camera mode and hover over this code to hear more of Brandi’s story!
