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Interview with Jennifer Knapp

From listening to her talk, you would never know that Jennifer Knapp is a native of Chanute, Kansas. Her speaking voice is almost as mesmerizing as her singing voice, especially now that there is something distinctly Australian about the way she pronounces her vowels.

After walking away from an illustrious career in the Christian music industry in 2002, Knapp has spent the last seven years Down Under, growing, healing, relearning herself, and – believe it or not – rarely picking up her guitar.

The reasons for her departure are as complex as Knapp herself: burnout, fatigue, frustration, loss of enthusiasm – and yes, that persistent rumor is true: Jennifer Knapp is gay. She’s been in a relationship with another woman for the last eight years.

But, just like with her faith, she doesn’t want to be boxed in by the label. Jennifer Knapp is a whole person, and her new album – Letting Go, which will be released on May 11th – tells a lifetime of stories.

I spoke with an earnest, warm, humble Jennifer Knapp earlier this week about Letting Go, about coming out, about faith, and about the strange phenomenon of being Google-able. AfterEllen.com: Can we talk a little bit about your decision to leave the Christian music scene? I think a lot of people are going to put that all on your sexuality, but that was only one of many factors that made you decide to walk away, right?

Jennifer Knapp: Yes, [my sexuality] was pretty far down the list. And while, for a lot of people, my departure was pretty sudden, I spent another year after I decided to leave clearing up my schedule. So it was quite a commitment for me to kind of have to go through the dates I had on my schedule and know at the end of it, people weren’t going to have anymore.

I don’t really know why anyone was surprised. I talked the entire time about how I wasn’t going to continue. And my relationship, my circumstances about the awareness of my own sexuality, I had to pretty much put on hold because I couldn’t even deal with it. So, I think that was one of the reasons why – one of the many reasons why – I was going, “Wow, I just can’t deal with [recording and touring] right now. I have to get to a place where I can deal with a lot of personal issues.”

AE: Music was such a huge part of your identity, as big a part as anything else, I would assume. JK: Yes. I was really struggling as a person who was losing enthusiasm for my profession, and something that was an amazingly fulfilling part of my life. And that was far more colossally confusing at the moment than any other thing.

For the Christian community to think that I’ve held or harbored some sort of secrets, it’s a little bit disturbing. One can only self-actualize and figure themselves out when you’ve got a quiet place to go do it. At the end of the day, you just kind of have to let people say what they will say. The people around me know the truth of my whole life’s journey, and not just the public life that I have. AE: And you didn’t just stop recording and touring, right? I mean, you just stopped playing altogether. JK: Yeah, I sold all my gear. I kept my favorite guitar at the request of friends who were like “Just keep one thing, and maybe, maybe one day you’ll play again.”

Then, for about five years, I couldn’t even play. I mean, I might pick up my guitar for about thirty seconds, but it was such a painful and confusing process for me that I just didn’t persist until a couple of years ago when I felt like I’d really gotten my s–t together, and could really start to plumb the depths of who I wanted to be. As a songwriter, that process is really sacred to me. I’ve always had to go to some place safe, and only when it began to feel safe again was I able to play and write. I just finally felt free to do it, and I was just happy to have that really important thing in my life back.

AE: Is your old music from Kansas and Lay it Down and The Way I Am still painful to you? What’s your relationship with it now? JK: If you’d asked me that question two years ago, I really thought there was no way I could play that music again in front of people. Writing a song is a really vulnerable process. When I step out onto a stage, I’m sharing something about me that’s really intimate. And knowing that there are some people who will find that confusing and hypocritical, that I can write a song about my faith, yet appear to be someone who is in contradiction of that faith, I just kind of ran away from it.

It started to change when I got back to Nashville and started hanging out with some other people, and just playing with other friends, and listening to people tell stories about what these songs meant to them. I started to connect in an external way, as a listener, to that old body of work. I started to go, “Man, I see that too; this is amazing. Who wrote this song?”

I’m playing a few songs now that still resonate with me, and it’s nice. They are like amazing, faithful friends. AE: If someone wanted to, they could listen to a lot of your older music and project a struggle with sexuality onto it. They could say, “Here’s a person who is coming to terms with something.” Do you hear that when you listen again? JK: I see the argument, but I think it’s a bigger point. It’s not just sexuality; it’s about figuring out who I am and who I want to be. I am a person of faith, and when I became a Christian, one of the joys of that moment of faith, and one of the attractions to me, and one of the most poignant factors to me in continuing on in faith in some manner is that it’s always a movement toward freedom and grace.

I’ve always struggled a little bit with church, with the idea that we’re supposed to be perfect at some point. I can’t do it. I gave up on that a long time ago. And it doesn’t mean that I cease striving to be the best person I can possibly be, but that I cease condemning myself daily for the parts of myself that don’t make sense to other people. That, for me, is why I go back to music and why my faith intersects there.

AE: You know, the intersection of faith and sexuality is a tempestuous place sometimes. And I’ve got to tell you, when I wrote about you publicly coming out, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an emotional response from our readers. It was very meaningful to a lot of people, myself included. JK: There really is such an emotional response from people on this particular subject, especially when you are talking about people of faith, in whatever manner. It’s a community, whether you grew up in your church or your mosque or your synagogue, or whatever avenue you practice your spiritual being. It’s an intimate, private and vulnerable thing. And when that community becomes very vocal about their discontent, it’s very hard.

The same with coming out to our families. These are the most intimate places where we need to find our acceptance and love and compassion for whoever we are. AE: I think one of the reasons it resonates so deeply with people is that you do seem to have sort of reconciled your faith and your sexuality. JK: Reconciliation is a big word. It’s probably better for me to say that I have a peace about who I am as a person. And that has come in large part from the community of people I have around me that love me and support me, and have been just as befuddled by my commitment to my faith as they have been by my sexuality or my music.

I come from a blue collar family. For a long time, I think they looked at me like, “How can you call [being a musician] a real job?”

I’m confusing to a lot of people who know me, but those intimate places are where we love and discover each other. This process has made me love people a lot more than I ever have. I am loving the people around me with a great deal of respect, more than I ever have before. So, it’s frustrating to me as that kind of person to try and say my entire worldview comes from my faith, or my sexuality. If there is any reconciliation, it comes from a place of trying to integrate all of those characteristics we have as human beings.

AE: You touched on an interesting point. I think sometimes gay people of faith feel as persecuted by the gay community for being people of faith as they do by their faith communities for being gay. Do you see that? JK: I think that’s certainly out there. I’m not inventing the turmoil. I don’t want to separate them. I don’t want to say you can only have one without the other. I think we make personal decisions and experience personal consequences on both sides of that dynamic.

We wear so many hats, socially, whether it’s a spiritual person, a sexual person, a person in your community. There are so many ways we have to learn to navigate our social environment, and faith can confound a person by itself, let alone when you start to pile the other social issues on top of it. As long as there are people who are spiritual people and want to take care of themselves that way, I think that confusion is always going to exist. Until you’re willing to take the time to understand why people feel compelled to participate [in faith communities], it will always be confusing, I think.

AE: I agree. So hey, you have a new album coming out! Can you tell me a little bit about Letting Go? JK: Yeah, I do have a record coming out. [Laughing] Not that that’s on a headline anywhere. So, yeah, I’m excited. It’s been a fun process. For me, a lot of the record is about the journey of coming back to writing, and coming back to an idea that I am compelled to share [my music], and really fronting up with some areas of vulnerability for me. As a normal human being, I’m actually really quite private. When I sat down to write the record, I did it by kind of convincing myself that no one would ever hear it. AE: Just to make yourself feel safe? JK: Right. I had to make myself believe no one would hear it – and, you know, that still may be the case.

I kind of took all that pressure away from myself and just wrote all this music in a room, and just really began to journey into why I’ve been gone for so long, and the voices in my head. There are a lot of songs written to the voices in my head; I was starting to feel a little bit crazy. There are some songs about people that I really love, and people that I really care about, and just about relaxing in those relationships. Over the last seven years, I’ve had time to build normal relationships that aren’t based on some alter-ego of myself.

AE: In Australia? JK: Yes, living in Australia was really fantastic for me because no one stopped me on the street; no one had ever heard of me. I was a joke to my friends. They were like, “Look at you: you’re on Google! You’re on YouTube!” It was half a world away, and they couldn’t believe this person in the computer was a real person, even though I’m sitting right there in the room.

I never played for them. I just wanted our relationships to be about our relationships.

AE: You really never played for them? JK: No. I mean, I had this job once, and I’d been there a couple of weeks, and all of a sudden I walked in and all my coworkers were snickering. So I was like, [whispering] “Hey guys, what’s going on?” And I walked around to the back of the computer and they’d YouTubed me. They were playing all these clips and saying, “Oh my gosh, you’re really good!” Like, they couldn’t believe that this total nerd they work with was in any way Google-able, or famous, or that I even did other things. And I think that taught me a lot. That’s when I actually started to have the courage again to try to write. I felt normal again, and maybe even a little jealous.

One of the major catalysts for me was when my live album came out. Gotee Records released a live album and I bought it off of iTunes. I had no idea it was being released. And I was like, “Man, what are you doing? You have to start writing again.”

AE: Wait, hang on. You bought your own record off of iTunes? JK: [Laughing] Yeah.

AE: Someone needs to reimburse you! JK: I guess I do get it back, in a weird way. You know, I don’t even have a physical copy of that record.

AE: I do. You can borrow mine. JK: [Laughing] Thank you. You know, my mom is the one who told me about it. She was like, “Oh my gosh, you’re writing again? You have a record out?” And I was like, “What? What are you talking about?” So, I went onto iTunes. I thought she was crazy or something. But there it was, and I was like, “Hmm, I should probably listen to that.” AE: And listening to how awesome you are made you want to write again? JK: It was a process. And my new record is a lot of that. I didn’t feel the pressure to write for a Christian market. I didn’t feel the pressure to have to write for anybody. I just let myself go, and I left myself write, and just experience it. And I think, as a songwriter, it’s just a form of therapy for me. It really was a fantastic and wonderful experience. I just enjoyed writing about things that were the topic of the day. It didn’t have to be the story of my whole entire life, my entire being wrapped up in three-and-a-half minutes. I think there are really some vulnerable songs on the album, probably more vulnerable than I’ve ever been.

AE: Wow. That’s saying something. JK: [Laughing] Yeah. I just didn’t feel the pressure to have to veil it in this life of perfection that is often expected from people of faith. I’m really quite proud of it. It’s a really meaningful record for me, and in writing it I felt like I could really begin to move forward and take ownership of my art.

AE: How did the new record come about? JK: Well, it was the culmination of a lot of things, and playing for friends, and then I sent a demo to my manager with a note that said, “Do these suck?” because I didn’t know. They were personal to me. I wasn’t trying to write a record that would sell. I wasn’t trying to write anything for anyone else. But it was nice, once I came out of the troll hole that I fell down. [Laughing]

AE: And then you wanted to share it with people? JK: Yes. Music really does connect with people. We’re all different and we all disagree with one another from time to time. And we all find surprises in our own lives, like “Wow, I didn’t know I was like that.” That’s the joy we can have in the sanctuary of music, that connection. Music is a sacred space and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to come out. I didn’t want to have a veil of secrecy as opposed to a veil of privacy. I’m just really happy with the record, and I hope people will find something in it that means something to them.

AE: What have your live shows been like so far? JK: Well, we’ve only played one so far. It was a quiet crowd, humble. People who have only listened to me in light of my faith, they’re shell-shocked, I think. They’re trying to figure out of I’m going to turn into something militant and volatile. Or, you know, they want to see if I’ve grown a second head.

AE: I read a comment on your Christianity Today interview where a guy said he was really bummed to find out you’re gay, but only because he had always harbored a secret dream of marrying you. JK: [Laughing] Well, what can I say? I’m a heartbreaker. AE: Jennifer Knapp: equal opportunity heartbreaker. JK: [Laughing] Except I’m taken. It’s all done.

Jennifer Knapp’s album, Letting Go, will be released on May 11th.

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