Spring sings! Think about that for just a moment— all the ways in which Spring sings to us. Artist, author and musician, Ellie Holcomb joined me to talk about her new Easter children’s book, Spring Sings!
The LaBerge family loves Ellie’s books already and we are excited to welcome this latest book, and the accompanying songs, for our new crop of the LaBerge tribe.
We also take a stop on the “Memory Bank” tour and ask Ellie what life is like on tour with her husband Drew and family.
So as “Grandma Carmen” I am particularly excited to share this interview with Ellie Holcombe.
This is an edited transcript of Carmen’s interview with Ellie Holcombe on The Reconnect with Carmen. Listen to the entire interview on MyFaithRadio.com or wherever you get podcasts. (Interview begins at 27:00 mark)
Carmen: You’re certainly familiar with Ellie Holcomb’s music, but she is also now this very gifted and proven children’s book author. The latest of those books has just sprung forth. It is Spring Sings and like the others, it has music that goes with it as well. So the Sing Spring songs, which features seven songs, including five original ones, is dropping as well in addition to the book. So Ellie, let’s just invite people in. This is kind of a big project, and yet this is one component, part of it. So when you think specifically about Spring Sings, just what comes to your heart and mind?
Ellie: Yeah, so I’ve always known that I wanted to write an Easter book ever since I started writing children’s books because Easter, I think Easter is the most beautiful story that I know. It’s the pinnacle of what we believe, that love beats death. And what I love about spring is that every single year the earth tells this story too. The Earth reminds us— and I love that, because God knows that we might forget so He writes it all over the earth. Death is never the end of the story because God loves to make everything new. And so it has been so much fun writing that into both words and pictures and melodies.
Easter is the most beautiful story that I know. It’s the pinnacle of what we believe, that love beats death. And what I love about spring is that every single year the earth tells this story too. The Earth reminds us— and I love that, because God knows that we might forget so He writes it all over the earth. Death is never the end of the story because God loves to make everything new.
Ellie holcomb
Carmen: One of the things that you encourage us to do is to actually not just see beauty, but hear beauty all around us. That’s been an invitation that has been very, very sweet as a way of inviting our grandkids as they get a little bit older, some of them like, okay, let’s actually listen now, what do we hear that’s beautiful— not just what do we see that’s beautiful? So the pictures are beautiful. I mean, the illustrations in these books are fantastic, and so we celebrate that as well. They’re very engaging and invite us in. But when you invite people to hear beauty, that’s not just in song, but sometimes it’s in song, it’s in tone of voice, it’s in tempo. Just talk with us even as an artist about what does it mean to hear beauty?
Ellie: I love this question so much, Carmen. Well, the other day we had a day off. I’m on the road right now with my husband. We’re on tour together, which is so fun. So I’m singing the song of the book in cities. We’re way up north right now. It’s winter, we’re in snowstorms and stuff, and I was singing about Spring, but I love that. So yes, of course, songs—but I think of when you go into a building that you love, whether it’s your school, whether it’s your home, whether it’s your grandma’s home, and you hear the voices of people that you love, that feels like listening to beauty. And then when we had a day off at home, one of my favorite things that happens around the springtime is you start to hear the birds come back. I mean, I think of Bambi, they’re twitter painted or whatever, but they sing in a more rambunctious and joyful and sometimes very loud way.
We’ve had a couple of nests right outside our bedroom and we’re like, wow, really wish they located that nest somewhere else because they are singing day and night. And so I think that there is a beautiful thing about just, you could hear the wind blowing through the trees. You can hear the rain coming down on the roof that’s nourishing the earth and helping new things to grow up. So there’s so many ways that we can listen to beauty, but part of the reason I love songs is that they follow the structure of “Home Away Home,” when you play a key of the song.
And that’s the story that we’re all living, Carmen. We all come from where good things come from and we’re all kind of away from home, but we’re all making our way back home. And so even a piece of music that doesn’t have any words, I think speaks to that in our hearts and in our souls. The story that we’re living in. It’s the story we’re made for.
Carmen: Is “Home Away Home” a song already? It should be. That’s beautiful.
Ellie: Well, that’s a great idea. I think I’m going to write that
Carmen: One Home Away Home there’s a cadence and my mind is like, there’s a thousand things you could say about Home Away Home. I mean there would even be a baseball theme there.
All right. The Memory Bank tour is something that Ellie Holcomb is engaged in right now with her husband, Drew Holcomb. So I thought since we’ve got you here, Ellie, we just ask, how’s the Memory Bank tour going and what are you singing about on the Memory Bank tour?
Ellie: I love this. We are having an absolute blast. So my husband Drew is also in a band called Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors. We started touring together six years ago. We’d never made a record together. And so this is our first year that we released a full record that we wrote and recorded together, and we are making some serious memories out here on the road. The record title and the title track is Memory Bank, and the tour title. It was inspired by Drew’s dad. So he had a brother with spina bifida who’s in a wheelchair, and his mom and dad were amazing, amazing people of faith. They really took the posture. We don’t know how many days that we’re going to get, and I guess that’s all of us, right? Our days are numbered, there’s no guarantees. But for the days that we have, we are going to get after them.
So Drew, by the time that he was a senior in high school, had visited probably 46 states with his family, most of those in a conversion van with a brother who was handicapped. And so they would be driving home from a true week trip, or they’d hit three or four states and his dad would nervously laugh and say, Hey kids, hope you don’t expect to inherit anything. We put it all in the memory bank. So we very much adopted that way of living. We bring our kids on the road, they were out with us for two weeks and get to explore cities or kids, help us sell merch and help us. They’re a big part of what we do. So I highly encourage making memories and investing in just doing things that you love with the people that you love.
Carmen: What do you love about being a wife and being a mom?
Ellie: I think that it’s my favorite work that I’ve ever done. It does require a certain measure of work, but I think there is something so beautiful that you start to realize when you first get married. Our counselor says, with any change in your life, even if it’s a good change, there’s always a funeral when you get married, it’s the end of this. You’re just on your own and you’re kind of doing whatever you want without checking in with people like in college or whatever.
But I think what is born in building a life and saying yes to certain highs and lows, for better or worse, with a person is this embodied love that mirrors the love of God. And it has been so beautiful. And then that is just extended with kids. Carmen, I think there is something so beautiful about the way a child comes into the world, whether that’s where you’re carrying that child or even adopting that child. There’s a process to get there. And so there is this very strong sense when you’re carrying a child that it is not all about you. Your literal body is not even your own. You’re like, what is happening? And so there is this beautiful invitation as a parent into this other centered life where you get to practice over and over again, giving your life away and loving someone at their highest moment, at their best and at their worst, and then being loved by someone at your best and worst moments. And it’s beautiful.
Carmen: Ellie, one of the things that I appreciate you is how honest you are in good times and bad times in times of difficulty. I have appreciated the very public witness you have given in terms of grief and walking with others in darkness and seasons of grief. For those of you who are listening and you’re thinking about Fighting Words, the book and the devotional that Ellie wrote more for adults than for kids, as we’re talking about a kid’s book today. But you’ve learned a lot along the path of life and you sing about a lot of it. I wonder if there’s just something that comes to mind just as a word of encouragement to somebody today that might be walking in darkness or grief, because this is, we are not at Easter yet for a lot of people right now, we’re not at Easter yet.
Ellie: Yeah, Carmen, thank you for your words. They’re really encouraging to me. It’s so interesting. I wrote the book Spring Seas, really, in a season of deep loss. We lost our niece Bailey at nine years old to a year long, really aggressive battle with cancer. And it was awful. It was so hard, and she was so wonderful, and I miss her so much. She was very close with our kids, loved her. And so it was probably our kids first real. I mean, they’ve lost grandparents, but just losing somebody that young is anyone who’s out there, who’s listening, who’s lost someone young in your life. I’m sorry. It is awful. It does not feel like it’s the way it’s supposed to go. And so it was a wild, wildly beautiful and healing thing to be writing a children’s book about resurrection, when you were losing a child that you loved.
And I guess what I want to say to you, if you are walking through it, whatever, it’s anxiety, depression, people you love are struggling, financial stress, loss, grief, whatever you’re facing right now, I think the mystery that I continue to marvel at is that—over and over again in my life when it feels like sorrow is just going to absolutely crush me, and the weight of grief is going to crush me— I continue to encounter the Man of Sorrows himself who has already walked into the grave and come out of it.
[T]he mystery that I continue to marvel at is that—over and over again in my life when it feels like sorrow is just going to absolutely crush me, and the weight of grief is going to crush me— I continue to encounter the Man of Sorrows himself who has already walked into the grave and come out of it.
Ellie holcomb
And so I think it was a really healing process for me to write this book and to sing songs about spring and to pay attention to the song that the earth is singing that God has. I don’t know, I would imagine God like a conductor conducting the spring and now these bulbs come up and now the daisies and the daffodils and all right birds, you go and okay, and now the trees, it’s time for your prom dresses, ladies. Here’s okay, the cherry trees with the pink blossoms.
And I guess what continues to be the mystery that we’re invited into is that in the hands of love, death is never the end of the story. And so my prayer, there’s a song I’m writing a full length record right now that we’ve processed a lot of this. But one of the lines that I wrote was, let the tears that we’ve cried turn to rain that brings new life. I praise the Lord that you’re always by my side from the grave until the garden you fling the doors of heaven open. And so my prayer is that, that you would sense the Man of Sorrows catching every tear that you cry and that you would know that if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
Carmen: Ellie, thank you. Thank you for the way you allow God to have such free access to your heart and your mind, and the way that He then shares that with the rest of us, through words spoken just now, but the way that you sing and the way that you sing with us and to us, and then also the way that you’re speaking to our kids and to their hearts. And so thank you for Spring Sings, but thank you for so much more than that as well.
