New Bebo Norman Record

BEC Recordings’ singer-songwriter Bebo Norman is set to release his eighth studio album, Lights of Distant Cities, on October 22.  Throughout his seventeen years as an artist, Norman has been applauded for laying it all on the table with his lyrical transparency and musical vulnerability.

Lights of Distant Cities was co-produced with close friend and longtime live collaborator, multi-instrumentalist Gabe Scott along with Ben Shive (Andrew Peterson, Sara Groves).  Fans can now hear the debut single “Broken,” which is currently going for adds at radio. Click here to listen.

Norman’s music provides a common ground for the songwriter and the listener to collaborate in a discourse on life’s curious details, and how those day-to-day unknowns play in the greater mystery of faith.

“The last few years have been pretty intense – a long, slow progression, or digression, into a spiritual desert,” Norman remembers, disclosing the process of writing songs in the dark of the desert. “I struggled to write anything hopeful. But I wanted to be true to the season I was in, so I simply wrote about the hopelessness I was experiencing.”

With the same transparency that has attracted listeners to his lyrics for nearly two decades, Norman admits, “My tendency is to allow the darkness to override the hope I have in Christ. A few months prior to recording I experienced an intense season of recovery and renewal. I finished nearly all of the songs after the recovery process. So you have desperation and recovery – darkness and light – represented within the same song.”

A touching contrast evidenced throughout the eleven-song track list, and especially affective when heard within the brief parameters of individual songs, he says the end result is perhaps the most unique offering of his career.

As a husband to Roshare, his wife of nine years, and dad to Smith, 5, and Miller, 3, Bebo’s perspectives have broadened dramatically since he first graced the music scene as a post-collegiate bachelor. Perspectives, he says, that poignantly color the hopeless to hopeful songs on Lights of Distant Cities.