We reckon every new track Branan Murphy puts out is gold. Adopted by older parents, he grew up listening to the Beatles and the Beach Boys, which taught him an old-school respect for melody. But his thoughtful reflections on living in faith really set him apart.
‘I grew up in the Southern United States,’ he told Alex, ‘in a region that is referred to as the Bible Belt.’ Church life and the Bible were part of the fabric of his culture but, as a teenager, struggling with his sense of identity, they weren’t real to him.
‘I actually had a friend of mine who was a little younger than me died tragically in high school. And I’m from a small town, so that rocked our community. It was a big deal, really affected a lot of people.’
That loss got him thinking seriously about the ideas of spirituality, truth and sin he’d been surrounded by all his life. ‘Along the way, God was so good, just to have people in my life who really shared the Gospel with me in truth. And I was able to see my sin for the first time. And so repentance and faith happened for me at like 17.’
In You Don’t See What I See, Branan describes that life-changing revelation. ‘There’s so many people out there, myself included, who lived their lives without the correct understanding of how God sees them.’
there’s so many people out there, myself included, who lived their lives without the correct understanding of how God sees them
Branan says many of us get caught up in how other people see us, or how we see ourselves, and that gets us into trouble. ‘I don’t really put a bow on it,’ he said. ‘There’s no resolution. I’m just diagnosing the culture, that we’re so caught up in the things that we can see, and the things that we’ve experienced.’
‘All the while, God is saying I see something so different in you. I’m doing something so different for you. I’m playing the long game, and you’re so worried about the short game all the time.’
Talk About It goes deeper into the causes of our short-term thinking. He describes it as ‘a song for the culture’—a response to our social media crazed society. ‘We’re saying a lot, but we’re not really saying anything at all. We’re so connected to each other, but we’re really not connected, because what’s missing is real relationships with each other.’
‘We ain’t going nowhere ‘til we work this out,’ he sings, pleading for us to start having real conversations about the big issues our world is facing today. ‘That’s really what this song is for,’ he said, ‘to get us moving.’
We love the way Branan thinks almost as much as the way he sings. Stay tuned to Vision180 to hear his new tracks before anyone else.
