INTERVIEW: Brent Cobb on His New Country Gospel Album

I’ve always wanted to record a gospel album, because historically in country music history, as a country singer, that’s what you do. There wouldn’t be no country music if there was no such thing as gospel music first. And that’s where it all comes from. So I always knew that someday I would do that. In July of 2020, my son and I got in a pretty serious car accident. We got T-boned, it could have been a lot worse. My son was totally fine and he was one at the time. I only broke my collarbone. It could have been much worse. You start seeing like, everything that leads up to a moment like that. Like that morning, I had to turn around and go get something that I had forgotten from the house. And then I took a different route to go through this rural four way stop that I’ve been going through my whole life. And it all happened, I just thought, well, maybe I should go ahead and make this gospel album. Because may not get the chance, you know?

The first cut I ever had as a songwriter was this song called “Hold Me Closely,” and I wrote this out of thin air. I was 17 or so when I wrote it, and I had no idea where it came from. It was Gospel-like. I wrote it, seriously, in probably 30 minutes. Two days later, my mother’s mother, my Nana, passed away, and she was my biggest fan. When she passed, at the day of her viewing, when everybody comes to the house and you bring a covered dish, and I laid down on the couch in the den just to get a little nap before everybody got there, and as I fall asleep, I have this dream. In this dream, I wake up in the same place on the couch, and I walk in, and everybody has shown up. This is all in the dream. Then I walk into my parents’ living room, and there in front of the door is my Nana sitting on a stool. She’s reading this big book, white book with gold trim. It looks like my parents’ wedding picture book. I was surprised to see her. I said, “What are you reading, Nana?” And she leaned this big book down, and she said, “A song book.” And right when she said that, I woke up. Everything was exactly the way I had just dreamed it. All the people had shown up. So I’ve always taken that as that there are these songs that are already written, and if I’m living right, every now and again, one gets thrown down to me. Well, that song, “Hold Me Closely,” became my first cut as a songwriter, and it was cut by the Oak Ridge Boys here in Nashville.

So [my wife and I] moved back to Georgia in 2018. I stopped touring for a while when my daughter was born. And then when I really started getting busy again, we decided to move back to Georgia so she could have some help while I was on the road. And that’s where all of our family lives. When that happened, as you know, the whole game in Nashville for writing is co-writing, that’s what you do. And I really enjoy the camaraderie of it all and the experience. And since we’re down there, I can’t just go write with whoever, we write together. She’s way more intelligent than I am, she’s actually a pharmacist. And she has great taste in music and just really good instincts and writing. And so in the evenings, when we get the kids down and we got that three hour window to hang out, a lot of the time, we’ll go out on the back porch and we’ll write songs together. We wrote a couple together on my last album and then [“When It’s My Time”]. Usually albums that I do are all written by me, except for one, it might be one that I do written by someone else, but this album [‘And Now, Let’s Turn to Page…’] is the opposite. It’s all traditional gospel except for [“When It’s My Time.”] And we sat out there on the back porch and went to town on it.