Undivided

by Vicky Beeching

  The phone meeting ended, and he told me I was his very last call of the year before he headed off to Christmas with his family. As the closing hymn rang out—“O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord”—I snuck back into the service.

  Debriefing with my parents over a cup of tea later, I told them I’d got the green light from the record label. My dad, an accountant, was understandably cautious. Would I be able to make ends meet? They weren’t offering me much money as a signing bonus—how would I survive? Mum was worried about my emotional well-being. How would I cope alone in a new country? I’d be so far from family and friends. They were both happy at my news, but understandably concerned at the idea of me disappearing off to the other side of the world.

  The next morning, I remembered I’d scribbled the immigration attorney’s name and number on the ice-covered notice board on the street. But the sun had come up and a warmer day had unfolded. When I went to check, I found the numbers had melted and completely disappeared. I still smile about that every time I walk past that notice board in my parents’ village. Note to self: never write crucial messages in ice.

  Part III

  America

  15

  As the news that I was moving to the States sank in, I began the process of applying for an American work permit. Eventually the voluminous paperwork was done, and I boarded a plane to Nashville. The first thing on my calendar was a signing meeting, where, on the top floor of the EMI building, I would put my signature on the long and detailed recording contract.

  My lawyer had already gone over it, so I knew I was getting a fair deal and had his approval. But I was worried about something else—the “morals clause.” Common in acting, athletics, and music deals, a morals clause allows the contract to be legally terminated if the person engages in behavior that brings disrepute to the employer. What “disrepute” meant in mainstream contracts was open to interpretation, but in the Christian music industry it had faith-based overtones and would be judged by evangelical standards of behavior. I knew that meant being openly gay or in a same-sex relationship would likely result in a one-way ticket out the door and the crashing and burning of my livelihood.

  As Jennifer Knapp, another recording artist, wrote about her own journey in American Christian music: “It’s not unusual to have morality clauses woven into recording contracts. . . . The principal obligation for every artist is to endorse and maintain that same evangelical standard, or look for another job.”1

  Nervously, I signed the contract knowing I was walking an emotional tightrope. I was excited to serve God with my music and looking forward to a new chapter of life in a new country, but I was also terrified of what it meant for me emotionally and psychologically. Were my feelings for women ever going away, and could I face a life of lonely singleness forever?

  My days at Oxford had led me to consider that being gay might not be sinful, but I’d shelved those questions as my music career gathered pace. Because of my career, my beliefs needed to remain traditional, so at heart I continued to see myself as broken and shameful.

  Other than the exorcism and the Catholic confession in my teens, I’d still never told a single soul. I’d never acted on any of my feelings for women, not even the briefest of kisses, and work had become my sole focus. My emotional life was increasingly shut down and I was well on my way to becoming a workaholic. I busied myself with the endless logistics that come with moving to a new country. Alongside this, my hectic touring schedule began.

  The different internal time zones across the US were tough on my body. I’d play a concert in California, then board a plane for five hours to reach New York to sing there the next day. I felt the three-hour time difference painfully; if I boarded a flight at nine o’clock at night in Los Angeles, when I arrived in New York, it was five o’clock in the morning. Relentlessly ping-ponging back and forth across the huge country, plus regular flights farther afield to Europe, left me with constant jet lag.

  One evening, one of the music-industry guys who’d clocked decades of living this way reached into his bag and pulled out a small bottle of pills. They were Tylenol PM, over-the-counter sleeping tablets. “You won’t manage this way of life without these—or a much stronger version,” he said. Handing me the bottle, he added, “Take one twenty minutes before you go to bed.”

  I nodded, anxious for something to help me beat jet lag. I took one that evening and sank into slumber more speedily than usual. Wary of becoming dependent on any form of medication, I thought, I’ll only take these when I’m exhausted. But from that day forward, I found myself needing Tylenol PM nightly. Even in the first few weeks of my American music career, I was already entering survival mode.

  The signing advance the label had given me was spent, almost entirely, on my immigration lawyer’s costs in getting me the US work permit. The rest went to my management—as music managers typically take 15 percent of the artist’s income. So I began my American life with zero in the bank.

  The months rolled by, and the lifestyle was far more intense than I’d imagined. Days off didn’t really exist, and every week looked the same. I was either at the label writing songs, in the studio recording them, or out on the road singing and doing promotional work.

  Touring meant boarding the next plane, rehearsing the next band, playing my heart out, and collapsing into yet another cheap hotel bed, then getting up at the crack of dawn to catch another flight and do it all again. I was on the road in a foreign country, with hired musicians who were strangers to me, and it was nonstop without weekends or evenings to recover and rest.

  Of course, there were bright spots too. I was doing what I’d dreamed of: a full-time career in Christian music. I was lucky, and I knew it. The adventure of living in the States was a lot of fun and a cultural learning experience. Although we speak the same language, the US and the UK are very different places.

  First, I had to master the different terminology. Petrol was now “gas.” What we Brits called the loo was now the “restroom.” A flat was an “apartment” or “condo.” Crisps were “chips,” and chips were “fries.” I made plenty of linguistic slipups during those early days.

  One embarrassing error happened in a sermon I preached at a traditional church. I spoke about erasing fear and shame from our lives. In the UK, the word we use for an eraser is “rubber.” I said from stage: “To make my point about removing shame and fear from our lives, I’ve brought packs of rubbers to hand out to you all, so you can take them home and remember this sermon every time you use them.” There was a very awkward silence, and I had no idea why. Only after the service did a church member explain to me that in America erasers are just called “erasers.” “Rubbers” refers to only one thing: condoms. As you can imagine, I never made that embarrassing mistake again.

  As well as slipping up on words, another issue was my British accent. Occasionally, my pronunciation meant I’d get badly misunderstood in the simplest conversations. This happened the day I met the CEO of the biggest Christian radio network in America.

  I was nervous to spend time with him; EMI told me he literally could make or break artists’ careers by deciding who got radio play and who didn’t. A lot rode on this visit—my new single had just come out and we needed to get it in heavy radio rotation on his vast network of 440 stations with 12 million weekly listeners.

  The CEO’s wife picked me up from the airport and drove me back to their house. She was wonderfully welcoming, chatting away about their latest project—remodeling their home and building a huge patio deck on the back, so they could sit outside and enjoy the view over the nearby trees.

  When we got to the front door, he opened it. I decided to instantly strike up conversation based on what his wife had been telling me in the car. “Hi. It’s lovely to meet you,” I said as he shook my hand. Thinking their new wooden patio would be a great conversation topic, I added, “Your wife tells me you have an enormous deck.”

  Unfortunately, my clipped British accent made the last word s
ound like a different word altogether. He looked shocked. I realized what had happened and melted into a pool of bright-red embarrassment.

  “The patio!” I blurted out. “She said you have a huge new patio on the back of your house that you’re both really enjoying.”

  “Oh, the deck,” he said, trying to suppress a massive smile. “Yes, we just had it built. Come on in. Let’s sit out there and have some supper.”

  Nashville is a major hub for songwriters and is the epicenter of country music as well as Christian music. I quickly discovered a professional songwriter’s workweek consists of scheduling back-to-back co-writing sessions, in the same way that businesspeople fill their appointment calendars with corporate meetings.

  EMI had a suite of purpose-built writing rooms, each furnished with armchairs, guitars, a piano, and a coffee table. The walls were decorated with framed gold records, albums by EMI artists who’d sold millions of copies. Songwriters would book the rooms in two-hour blocks, often getting together with someone they’d never met before and attempting to craft a hit song from start to finish. This was new to me. I’d tried co-writing with a few other worship leaders in the UK, but we’d just gone to each other’s houses and drunk tea, rarely actually finishing a song.

  Nashville was a whole new world for me: writing with strangers, with the clock ticking and the pressure mounting to come up with a finished hit in just a couple of hours. This was not my style—songwriting had always been a very personal and introverted thing, rooted in times of worship. I wasn’t sure I could do it on demand and with others I didn’t even know. But I had to. Label staff told me that, from their research into Christian music sales, songs with multiple writers were performing better than those written by one person. So I needed to learn to get on with it.

  Professional songwriters definitely have their quirks. One man always brought a potted cactus and his lucky pen. One woman couldn’t write unless her dog was sitting under her chair. Whatever had worked for a previous Grammy-winning song (the cactus, the pen, the dog) had to be repeated at every session—just in case it had been the secret to that moment of inspiration. I suppose they were the musical equivalent of carrying a four-leaf clover.

  Odd as they were, these rituals made me smile. I wondered if I’d develop my own eccentric habits, now that I was a professional songwriter. After all, I did like to bring my favorite mug to each session, so perhaps I was on a slippery slope toward owning a lucky cactus.

  I took up residence in a writing room, as EMI needed at least ten songs for my first album. I was grateful whenever I heard my co-writer for the day was a worship leader too. Those sessions were a breath of fresh air, as we had much in common and worked the same way. We usually started our sessions with a time of prayer, played a few worship songs, then kept riffing around chords and phrases, experimenting until a song took shape. I experienced some amazing co-writing sessions like that, as the other writers had the same aim for their music as I did, but those days were the exception rather than the rule.

  Songwriting is a tricky art. I was trying to write music that could be used in corporate worship meetings. This required a certain approach to lyrics, melody, and structure—the songs needed to be relatively simple and easy to sing and play. Pop writers preferred composing radio hits and loved elements of surprise and complexity in the chords and arrangements, and their phraseology just didn’t resonate with me. The more pop writers I was paired up with, the more our collaborations sounded less and less like what I’d hoped for, and my personal connection to the music was minimal.

  The label said my songs needed a commercial element; each album required radio play, and so a portion of the tunes had to be smooth, catchy, pop. Resigned to this, I didn’t feel able to challenge the way my music was changing. My most popular songs, “Yesterday, Today and Forever,” “Above All Else,” “Captivated,” and others, were written by me, alone, in times of prayer and worship. It confused me that they’d signed me based on songs like those, but wanted to take my writing in a different direction.

  One of the A&R (artists and repertoire) guys the label assigned to manage me confessed he knew nothing about worship music or about the type of songs sung in churches. The resulting year was a series of car-crash moments where, at every turn, his lack of experience in worship music meant he made the wrong call on song choices, album artwork, marketing plans, and touring options. It was soul destroying.

  As my music began to feel less and less like “me,” the connection I had to my own songs diminished, the less impact I saw them having in churches, and the less I enjoyed playing them on tour. I’d made my career the sole focus of my life, having shelved all hopes of dating, marriage, and a family of my own. It was scary to sense my job was no longer filling the hole in my heart that it once had.

  Behind all the busyness, my loneliness grew and grew. The moments in concerts when I sensed a connection with God and his people were dwindling as the songs took a more performance-based direction. Music had always been my outlet for faith and feelings, something that had brought me joy since I was fourteen, sitting in my room with my mum’s guitar. Now it was increasingly about creating radio hits that would sell.

  When I thought of my songwriting heroes, yes, I had huge respect for hallowed mainstream writers like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Cole Porter, but my ultimate inspirations were the hymn writers from years gone by. I wanted to write for the church. One morning, working alone in a Nashville songwriting studio, I decided to pen my own modern-day hymn. My aim was to include some deep theology, as the hymn writers of old did, instead of producing a catchy radio hit. What I created that day would become the most requested song in my worship-leading career, “The Wonder of the Cross.”

  Every Easter Sunday, I received messages from churches that said it was their go-to song about the death and resurrection of Christ. Other churches told me they used the hymn every month, after they celebrated the Eucharist. I felt as though I’d finally written something that combined my love of theology with my love of music.

  My most memorable live performance of that hymn was at the Crystal Cathedral, a vast building made almost entirely out of glass, in Orange County, California. Back in the 1980s when it was built, it cost $18 million and was said to be the largest glass building in the world. Although I didn’t agree with the ethics of the high-budget building (surely that money could have been spent on better things) or other aspects of the church’s theology, the experience of playing there was certainly unforgettable.

  With a live orchestra behind me, I was blown away by how the hymn came to life. The church had one of the largest pipe organs in the world, and it resonated through every glass pane of that building. The performance wasn’t just for the 2,500 people seated in the cathedral; it was also broadcast live for the TV program Hour of Power. I remember how amazed I was when I googled the viewing statistics: 1.3 million viewers watching from more than 150 countries. I was terribly nervous I’d get the words wrong or sing out of tune under the pressure, but thankfully the orchestra played so beautifully that the music swept me up and carried me along.

  16

  “Look down the lens! Give me some attitude!” one of the photographers called out to me. “Come on, work it!”

  I stood awkwardly on the spot, unused to professional photo shoots and clueless about how to “work it” for the camera. We were in a big white warehouse the label had rented for the day, filled with racks of clothing, a stylist, a makeup artist, a hair team, and a group of EMI staff. Everyone had their eyes on me as two photographers and their assistants encouraged me to move around and try a few different poses.

  For a relatively shy Christian girl, this was a lot to take in. I blushed and asked if we could take a quick break. Everyone was friendly and well-meaning; we needed photos for the album cover, so it was just part of the job. But it was a world away from my background and culture, and I was facing it alone, in a new world.

  “Could we persuade you to wear this dress and thes
e killer heels?” the stylist asked me. I explained that I wasn’t a big fan of dresses and that I’d never gotten the hang of wearing high heels and keeping my balance. Thankfully, they dropped the idea of photographing me in a flowing dress standing in a waist-high swimming pool of water.

  All of this felt like a different universe from singing in British churches. High-pressure situations had become a daily occurrence. If it wasn’t a photo shoot with a roomful of label people staring at me, it was a radio interview going out internationally, or a live TV segment being broadcast to millions. Soaring adrenaline levels were now the norm, and my body was complaining. I was loving this new career, but it was taking a big toll on me. Other musicians pushed themselves hard too, but my workaholism had deeper roots: I was trying to outrun my own pain. If I could never be in a relationship or married, work needed to be everything, so I gave it every waking moment.

  In the scarce free time I had, I tried to make friends in Tennessee. Being a British girl in Nashville was a constant source of amusement to the people I spent time with, and it made me smile too. These friends loved my accent and would copy it. Sometimes at dinner, they’d pretend we were all British, to see if they could convince the server. After a while they became excellent at disguising their Southern accents and perfecting the art of sounding British, fooling many into believing that we were “all here on vacation from England.”

  Some of it was fun socially, but the same old issues constantly resurfaced. A couple of guys I’d become close friends with told me they had feelings for me. When I said I didn’t want to date them, they’d needed some space to get over it, and our friendship had ended. I was devastated to lose them, as they’d become a ray of sunshine in my lonely, busy life.

  It was tricky with the girls I’d befriended too. They constantly chatted about which guy they wanted to date and constantly asked me which of the men I might be interested in. It felt isolating—a throwback to high school—as I couldn’t join in these conversations or go on any of the double dates that formed a core part of the social scene.