The Playlist Carrying Me Through Spring 2026
At 1:47 a.m., with the cursor blinking at the end of a stubborn paragraph, I had “SO BE IT” playing low through my speakers and a chapter draft open that still would not settle into its final shape. I had already revised the section twice. Then three times. Then once more, because sometimes writing is not inspiration at all. Sometimes it is pressure, patience, and the willingness to stay in the chair until the sentence finally tells the truth.
Some writers need total silence. I am not one of them.
In some of the author groups I belong to, that divide seems almost perfectly split. Half the room wants quiet. Half wants sound. I have learned that I write best with music on in the background, especially when I am editing, cutting, rewriting, and rebuilding. Lately that has meant long nights spent shaping From Church Pew to City Hall: A Journey to Stewardship, my new book in the larger Restoration Voyage world, with the same group of songs turning over again and again like emotional scaffolding.
That repetition is not accidental. In my Four Pillars Model, healing is held together by psychiatry, therapy, family, and faith community. Real restoration is never just one breakthrough feeling. It is clinical, emotional, relational, and spiritual at the same time. Over the last few weeks, these songs have been helping me hear those dimensions more clearly while I work. Some of them sound like surrender. Some sound like memory. Some carry the adrenaline of survival, the discipline of rehabilitation, or the slower, steadier work of redemption. Together, they have become more than background noise. They have become companions.
Here is the playlist that has been carrying me through Spring 2026.
1. “SO BE IT” – Elevation Worship feat. Tiffany Hudson & Chris Brown
The thing I love most about this song is how unhurried it feels. It does not force its way into the room. It rises slowly, with the kind of live-worship atmosphere that makes surrender sound less like a dramatic gesture and more like a long exhale. When I hear it late at night, usually when I am trying too hard to control a paragraph, it reminds me that not everything worth carrying can be managed by force. Some things have to be yielded before they can be stewarded well.
2. “Only In America” – Brooks & Dunn
This song still works because it does not apologize for its open-road confidence. The guitars feel bright, the hook lands clean, and the whole thing moves with that plainspoken, wide-horizon optimism country music can do so well. I keep hearing it as a song about inheritance. Not nostalgia for its own sake, but responsibility. Freedom, opportunity, and public hope are not decorative ideas. They are things to carry carefully, which is part of what I keep returning to in my new book.
3. “Younger You” – Miley Cyrus
There is a wistfulness here that never collapses into self-pity. That is harder to pull off than it sounds. The song feels like turning around and facing an earlier version of yourself with honesty instead of embarrassment. I have spent enough time doing deep therapeutic work to know that memory can either trap you or teach you. This one leans toward teaching. It sounds like someone learning how to look back without getting stuck there.
4. “RUNWAY” – Lady Gaga & Doechii
This track has gloss, force, and attitude all over it. You can feel the performance instincts in it immediately, but there is also tension underneath the shine that makes it interesting. Songs about visibility always catch my attention because they raise a deeper question: what happens when being seen becomes its own kind of pressure? I hear this one as a reminder that presence has to be stewarded too. Public confidence means much less if there is no grounded self underneath it.
5. “The Jesus I Know Now” – Brandon Lake & Lainey Wilson
The duet gives this song its weight. It does not sound borrowed or overly polished. It sounds lived in. That matters. I am always drawn to songs where faith has weather in it, where belief sounds tested instead of inherited untouched. This one lands that way for me. Before a voice means anything in public, it has to survive private honesty, private pain, and the quieter questions nobody else sees. That is part of what makes witness credible.
6. “Summer of ’69” – Bryan Adams
The guitars hit and suddenly the whole room feels younger. That is the magic of this song. It carries momentum, heat, and memory all at once, and it knows that nostalgia is strongest when it is a little mythic. I love that tension. Some seasons in life become brighter in memory than they ever were in real time, but that does not make them false. It just means they still have something to teach. Even the past needs to be handled with care.
7. “Part of Me” – Katy Perry
This song still lands because it knows how to turn hurt into propulsion. The beat drives hard, the chorus hits with force, and the emotional center is not collapse but defiance. There is a point in healing where self-respect stops sounding soft and starts sounding decisive. I hear that here. Stewardship is not always gentle. Sometimes it means refusing to let damage take full ownership of your name, your body, or your future.
8. “Fight Song (Rachel’s Version)” – Rachel Platten
What works about this song is the build. It starts close to the chest, almost conversational, and then widens until private resolve sounds big enough to carry a room. I understand why some people call it cheesy. I also do not care. Songs like this endure because they know courage often begins embarrassingly small. Not triumphant. Not cinematic. Just small and real. A lot of recovery begins there, with one shaky decision to keep going anyway.
9. “Father Figure” – Taylor Swift
This song has a polished surface, but the emotional temperature underneath it feels much less stable, which is exactly why it is compelling. It sounds controlled and uneasy at the same time. I am always interested in songs that circle power, approval, influence, and distortion without flattening them into something simplistic. Relationships shape people profoundly. So do the wrong forms of authority. Part of maturity is learning to tell the difference between guidance and control before you hand either one too much of yourself.
10. “Testify to Love” – Wynonna
This song has warmth in its bones. It carries that country-gospel directness that does not need overstatement because the conviction is already there. I respect that kind of writing. At a certain point, a restored life should become clear enough to say something on its own. Not louder, necessarily. Just clearer. That is what I hear in this track. Testimony, at its best, is not self-display. It is stewardship of witness.
11. “Setting the World On Fire” – Kenny Chesney with P!nk
This song feels sunlit from the first few lines. The duet chemistry gives it lift, and the whole thing rides with that bittersweet mix of romance and memory that country-pop can make feel effortless. What stays with me is the way joy moves through it. People who survive dark seasons sometimes forget that delight needs protection too. Joy can feel fragile when you have known instability. This song reminds me that pleasure, warmth, and connection are not distractions from healing. They are part of it.
12. “Awake Tonight” – AFROJACK, Sia & David Guetta
This track runs on pulse, lift, and urgency. You feel the energy before you think about the lyrics. Living with bipolar disorder has made me listen to songs like this differently. Intensity can feel thrilling. It can also be misleading. There is a real difference between feeling electrified and being stable enough to last. That distinction has shaped my life, my advocacy, and my writing. Energy needs wisdom. High feeling still needs guardrails.
13. “California Sober” – Demi Lovato
This is one of the more honest songs on the playlist because it refuses the clean, polished recovery narrative people often want. The tension is built into the concept itself, and the song does not try to resolve that tension too neatly. I respect that. Self-governance gets romanticized in American culture, but in real life it is often complicated, uneven, and vulnerable. Stewardship begins with telling the truth about where you are, not just where you wish you were.
14. “My Jesus” – Anne Wilson
What gives this song its strength is how personal it stays. It does not hover above grief. It walks through it. The vocal delivery keeps it grounded in testimony rather than abstraction, and that is why it works for me. Compassion is part of strength. If you build a life that looks disciplined but cannot still feel tenderness, you have lost something important on the way. This song keeps those two things close together.
15. “My Story” – Big Daddy Weave
This song sits close to the center of my own worldview because it understands the shift that makes testimony real: the story stops being mainly about the wound and starts being about grace. That does not erase the wound. It reorders it. My own life has required clinical care, therapeutic honesty, relational support, and faith that could hold under pressure. A healed life should know how to tell the truth about the wound without making the wound its god. This song gets that exactly right.
16. “God I’m Just Grateful (Live)” – Elevation Worship & Chandler Moore
Live worship songs only work when they sound earned, and this one does. You can hear the room in it. You can hear the release. Gratitude here does not sound like performance. It sounds like aftermath. That is what makes it such a fitting closing song for this season of writing. The deeper I get into revising From Church Pew to City Hall: A Journey to Stewardship, the more I realize gratitude is one of the clearest signs that restoration has done real work. Not because life became easy, but because grace kept carrying it.
Music does something strange and useful in the writing life. It can hold an emotional register steady while your mind does hard labor. It can sharpen a scene, unlock memory, or keep you close to the feeling a paragraph is trying to reach before the prose finally catches up. That has been this playlist for me.
Not mood filler. Not random noise. A companion.
These songs have been in the room while I write about healing, public trust, identity, faith, and the long road from private restoration to public responsibility. They have helped me think more clearly about witness, discipline, self-governance, tenderness, and the kinds of truth that take several drafts to say honestly. That is why this playlist matters to me. It is not only what I have been listening to. It is part of how I have been making the work.
You can listen to the Spring 2026 playlist, the music that kept me going as I wrote From Church Pew to City Hall, on my AppleMusic page using this link:
https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/spring-2026-from-church-pew-to-city-hall/pl.u-vdX6tzV49v3
