I Can Only Imagine Read online

  Amy’s calm demeanor put me at ease quickly. After a few minutes, I became relatively normal again and was able to speak somewhat intelligibly.

  Brown, Brickell, and Jennifer graciously excused themselves into another room and left Amy to visit with Shannon and me in the studio’s control room. As we talked, Amy told me for the first time how she had heard “Imagine.”

  “Jennifer had a dear friend who was very ill in the hospital. The friend told her that she had to hear this amazing song. When she listened to ‘Imagine,’ she thought that it would be perfect for me. She put the CD into my car stereo system so it would play when I got in. After I heard it, I called Jennifer in tears. I told her how I had already played it at least fifty times. Then I asked her, ‘Where in the world did this song come from?’”

  Amy then paused and asked me, “Bart, where did this song come from?”

  I swallowed hard. “You know, I’ve never told anybody my story. . . . My dad was a monster. I mean, that’s the only word for it. And I saw God transform him from the man I hated into the man I wanted to become, into my best friend. This song was born out of that experience. It took me about ten minutes to write it late one night on the bus.”

  She smiled sweetly, leaned in toward me, and said, “Bart, you didn’t write this song in ten minutes. It took a lifetime.”

  She continued, “This song is a career maker, and I know some songs can be really personal to the writer. Is that what you really want? To allow someone else to record your song and tell your story?”

  This generous question showed Amy’s character and wisdom. She knew whoever released “Imagine” would, from that point forward, be connected to its message. And she was asking me, face-to-face, if I was okay with what was actually my story being forever associated with her.

  “I want as many people as possible to hear it. You can do that. We can’t,” I said. “So, yes, this is what I want.”

  When we had finished talking and everyone came back into the control room, Amy looked at Brown and then back at me. She laughed and said, “Well, Bart, it’s time for me to start the vocals, and I would prefer to not sing them in front of you.”

  I laughed, too, knowing what it feels like for a vocalist to sing in front of the songwriter. We hugged, and Shannon and I said our goodbyes.

  Grace and Favor

  A year later, we had finished our first INO full-length album, Almost There, but Amy still hadn’t released “Imagine.” The band, Brickell, and Jeff all knew we needed to send a song to radio. Every evangelical church in America was reading and talking about a Christian book based on the prayer of Jabez from 1 Chronicles 4, so we wrote and recorded a song called “Bless Me Indeed (Jabez’s Song).” This became our first official radio single.

  While it might have sounded like a good idea on paper to ride the coattails of the book’s momentum, the song absolutely tanked. Very few stations played it, and our record sales started dropping. Needless to say, things were not going according to plan. In football language, we were behind in the fourth quarter, it was fourth down with no time-outs left, and only seconds remained on the clock.

  Jeff was about to send out our second single to radio, but he asked if someone would contact Amy’s team one last time to see if they were still planning to release “Imagine.” Brickell put in the call. At 5:15 p.m. that same day, her team responded to him with a message from Amy herself.

  Amy had heard about the band’s dilemma. She said she knew how a song could change everything in a musician’s career, and how an artist could spend a lifetime trying to come up with a song like this, but we had already done it. Amy assured us that “Imagine” was ours, not hers, and she would sign the recording rights back to us.

  Who does that in the entertainment industry, much less in the music business?

  Brickell called us immediately and told us about Amy’s blessing. When I found out, I called her myself.

  “Bart, you need to finish what you started,” she said. “This is your story. It’s your song. You guys need to release it as your own single.”

  Brickell called Jeff right away to stop the new single from being mailed out. Jeff was, of course, ecstatic about the news. He had wanted to send out the song as the band’s single all along, and now it was finally going to happen. (Remember that second mortgage he had taken out?) His team took off in a mad dash. They unpacked the old CDs, burned “Imagine” onto new ones, repackaged them, and drove to the FedEx center at the Nashville airport, arriving just before the planes left.

  Meanwhile, I got on the phone in the middle of the night and left messages on radio station answering machines to say our new single was coming on Monday. It was a whirlwind weekend.

  “Imagine” reached radio stations on October 12, 2001. The first week, thirteen stations added it to their playlists. Nineteen more added it the second week and nine more the week after. Within a month, forty-one of the top forty-three stations were playing the song. Just as Brickell, Jeff, Amy, Jennifer, and Mark Stuart all knew would happen, Christian radio programmers loved the song and started playing it in heavy rotation. (That’s radio lingo for “all the stinkin’ time.”)

  Milestone Moments

  In early January 2002, I was scheduled to call in for a live interview with Jon Rivers, the legendary host of 20: The Countdown Magazine, a nationwide syndicated radio program that counted down the top twenty songs in Christian music each week. Jon always had a special guest artist on the show for each broadcast, and he had invited me on.

  While I was on hold, waiting for Jon to come on the line, I held my sleeping newborn son, Sam, born on January 4, in my arms. Shannon walked in from getting the mail, holding out a specific envelope toward me. It was the final six-hundred-dollar check from my dad’s pension. The last one. All those years, and this was the end of the road.

  Six hundred dollars represented a lot of money in our monthly budget. Fear gripped my heart. What am I going to do? How can I possibly replace that income? I have a newborn son! I thought. Lord, help, I prayed.

  Jon picked up the phone to start the interview, jarring me out of my financial panic. In his stellar radio voice, he said, “Well, Bart, so many of us know the story of you writing ‘Imagine’ about your dad’s death. How proud do you think he would be with the big news today? What do you think he might say to you?”

  I had no idea what he meant, no clue what he was referring to. “I’m sorry. I don’t think I know what you mean.”

  Jon laughed. “Well, then let me be the first to congratulate you! This morning ‘I Can Only Imagine’ hit number one at Christian radio all across the country! You have the number one song in all of Christian music!”

  There, on live radio, I started to weep. I couldn’t believe it. I remembered how, when Dad told me about the pension, he’d said, “I don’t know what will happen after ten years, but I’m sure I will find a way to keep taking care of you.”

  On the very day that the last check arrived, the song I wrote—about Dad and for Dad—went to number one! He had indeed found a way to keep taking care of his son. Right on time, on the exact day, at just the perfect moment, as I held his grandson in my arms.

  No one can write better scripts than God.

  Everyone in the Christian music industry had known about Amy’s plan to release “Imagine” as her first single on her new album. But we had released the song as our own, and it had gone to number one on the Christian charts.

  Amy had scheduled a major concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville during Gospel Music Association Week in April. Back then the event culminated with the Dove Awards, which is kind of like the Christian Grammys, on the week before Easter Sunday. So many people were asking questions about the song and why we were releasing it instead of Amy, so Brickell called to work out a plan with her team. We wanted to show how everyone had worked together toward the decision.

  At the concert, Amy shared how “Imagine” had affected her. She said that she loved it but realized the song needed t
o be sung by the writer who had lived the story. She did an amazing job of explaining why the song was first being released by us, and then later, in a slightly different version, by her on her upcoming Hymns album.

  Then came that surreal moment when I took the stage to sing the second verse and finish out the song with her.

  For many years, MercyMe had worked so hard to make it as a band and to be well-known and respected artists in our own right. Since I was a kid, I had been Christian music’s biggest fan, and now I was sharing in the legacy of my beloved music.

  MercyMe was still relatively unknown at that point, so the media was all over me for comments afterward. They had no idea who I was. Years later, someone who was there that night told me he had never seen a grin as big as the one I was wearing.

  But later that night, once everything had had a chance to sink in, I wept with the realization that, for the first time I could remember, life was better than anything I had ever dreamed in my imagination.

  At the Dove Awards later that week, “Imagine” won Song of the Year and Pop/Contemporary Recorded Song of the Year. I was humbled and honored to also win Songwriter of the Year. It is still so ironic to me that I have worked so many long hours on so many songs but won that coveted award for the song I wrote the fastest.

  The Song That Won’t Go Away

  “Imagine” had stayed at number one on Christian radio for weeks in 2002. Then one morning in 2003, someone called in to a mainstream FM radio station in Dallas and dared the DJ to play “Imagine.” The station aired a popular morning program called The Fitz Show whose on-air personality often played a truth-or-dare-type game on-air. Callers would challenge him to do random, sometimes crude, things.

  Once the caller explained what the song was about, the DJ said, “Not just no, but no way!” But one of the producers at the station “just so happened” to be a Christian who was attending seminary to prepare for the ministry. He later told me that he believed God had brought him to that station to make a difference. The producer got the song and urged the DJ to play it. He finally agreed to do so as a joke for his listeners.

  A friend called to tell me about this mainstream station playing “Imagine” right at that moment. I thought it had to be a prank, or else my friend had to be wrong about what he heard. I was at home, so I turned on the radio and tuned the dial to 100.3.

  The DJ was telling people to please stop calling—they would play the song again later. I couldn’t believe it. This was for real!

  The rest of the morning show was dedicated to playing “Imagine.” People called in to talk about what the words meant to them and how it made them feel. The DJ even said at one point, “What is the deal with this song?” The phones just kept ringing with people asking what the name of the band was and how to get the song.

  The station also had a weekly online popularity contest that gave listeners the opportunity to vote for their favorite song. The next week “Imagine” went to number one at that station and stayed there for several months, winning out over all the mainstream pop songs of the day. Can you believe a song about Jesus and heaven beat out songs about partying and clubbing?

  The DJ said that he had been told that MercyMe lived in the Dallas area. “So, Bart, if you’re listening, please call us.” So I phoned in, and he invited the band to be on the show.

  In an interview around that time, Jeff Moseley, the head of INO, talked about the mainstream attention, saying, “It was a surprise, and it wasn’t. We have felt for a long time like there was more to ‘Imagine’ than the long run at Christian radio. We thought it could make an impact at mainstream. At the same time, we recognized that we couldn’t do it ourselves. Something was going to have to make it happen.” Well, that something certainly did occur in a way no one would ever have dreamed up.

  I kept thinking that if there were a list titled “Top Five Christian Songs That Were Never Meant to Cross Over to Mainstream,” I would have for sure put “Imagine” down as one of them. After all, it came complete with the J-word in the lyrics—something rarely done in secular media—and the message was so blatantly and unapologetically Christian.

  Other mainstream stations around the country heard about the song’s success in the Dallas market and started to play it. A representative of Curb Records called Jeff and said they wanted to help get the song out to a broader audience, so our label partnered with them. They sent it out to every reporting radio station in the country, with a simple, singular printed message: “Play it once. If you get a response, great; if you don’t, throw it away.”

  The song went to number one in virtually every market where it was played.

  One programmer reported, “I heard ‘Imagine’ on another station and decided to play it. The first time, I gave no introduction or announcement, and I immediately started getting calls and e-mails from people about the song.” Another said, “‘Imagine’ is the first song with a blatant Christian message that we’ve added in sixteen years.”

  When asked about the mainstream attention, I always said that, unless somebody has a vendetta against God, the song is not a threat to anyone, believer or not. It just makes you ask a lot of questions like, “What’s next after this life?” and “What if this heaven place is real?” We had the incredible privilege of assuring people that we believe it is. The world is our mission field, and MercyMe’s fans have always supported us by praying that we will maintain the message and make a difference for the kingdom of God.

  We had released our major label project called Spoken For in 2002, and everyone on our team had been busy promoting it. When mainstream radio blew up, we had to switch gears and go back to work on Almost There because of all the sudden attention “Imagine” was getting. That season was full of a ton of hard work, but it was an amazing time. We led worship at a Christian conference and then flew to Los Angeles to be on Ryan Seacrest’s radio show. We played a denominational conference in an arena and then played The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Having a hit on Christian and mainstream stations produces some really interesting opportunities.

  Here are a few stats to put into perspective what had happened:

  •Almost There released in August 2001 and was certified Gold (half a million in sales) within ten months.

  •Our second album, Spoken For, was released three months later.

  •Our first single, also titled “Spoken For,” went to number one on Christian radio.

  •Our second single, “Word of God Speak,” went to number one on Christian radio.

  •Almost There was certified Platinum (one million in sales) in July 2003.

  •Spoken For was certified Gold in October 2003.

  •“Word of God Speak,” from the Spoken For album, won the Dove Award for Song of the Year in 2004.

  After the mainstream radio miracle occurred, Almost There sold another one million records. And, as developing technology changed the way we buy music, “Imagine” became the first Christian song to reach two million downloads sold. In December 2017, Almost There was certified as Triple Platinum (sales of three million), making MercyMe only the second Christian artist in history to reach this milestone, behind our friend Amy Grant.

  It is absolutely crazy to me that as I write this, seventeen years after its debut, “Imagine” just hit number one yet again on the iTunes Christian chart. Only God could have orchestrated such a miraculous way to have millions of people hear about heaven and their own opportunity to see Jesus face-to-face. We won’t know until Christ returns how many people have been affected by such a simple song based on a phrase from my Mammaw Millard.

  In every interview about the song I’ve ever done, I’ve told the story about my dad. “Imagine” is an ongoing tribute to my heavenly Father and to my earthly father. Dad always told me he would be forgotten soon after he was gone, but his attachment to this song has kept his story alive. What a legacy!

  MercyMe’s prayer has always been that God would use us in this generation as He did the biblical psalmists in thei
rs. What an immense privilege to think that a song we wrote might outlive the band. We just want to lead people to the throne of God through celebration, worship, and praise. We were doing this long before worship music became commercial, and we want to keep doing it as long as the Lord allows and calls us to lead. Why shouldn’t we? That is the very reason we were created!

  Looking back on my life, through all the faith and fear, victories and failures, mountains and valleys, this one thing I know, just like the song says: Lord Jesus, I will forever, forever worship You.

  CONCLUSION

  Even If

  They say it only takes a little faith to move a

  mountain,

  Well, good thing,

  A little faith is all I have right now,

  But God, when You choose to leave mountains

  unmovable,

  Give me the strength to be able to sing,

  It is well with my soul.

  —MERCYME, “EVEN IF,” FROM LIFER (2017)*

  Let’s get real: I can see how it would be easy for you to read about the hit songs, awards, celebrities, and spotlights on stages all over the country, and then do the math on selling millions of records. You could quickly come to the conclusion that my early years were really tough, but then the metaphorical yellow brick road led me to the classic storybook ending. From that point on, life was all unicorns and rainbows, right?

  It was really tempting to end the book with the previous chapter: “Imagine” went to number one, and we all lived happily ever after. The end. Goodnight! God bless you! Thanks for coming! We’ll see you next time we’re in town!

  As I mentioned up front, the movie was forced to tell my story in under two hours because that’s the nature of the format. But here, I’ve had time to kick back and dig into the details. You’ve been able to put a bookmark in my life and jump back in when you wanted. But if we are going to be honest about following Christ, we have to talk about the doubts with the faith, the questions with the answers, and the trials with the triumphs. So let’s pull back the curtain and go backstage. Get on the bus, Gus. Let me tell you about my life in 2004 and 2005, following the controlled chaos of 2002 and 2003. While MercyMe was experiencing the best year ever as a band, I was going through the worst year of my personal life.