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Biography (courtesy of Spring Hill Music)

When it came time to choose a title for his Spring Hill Music debut, Wayne Watson didn't have to think too long about it. For a man who has spent his whole career writing and singing about life, both the divine and the temporal, the phrase Living Room seemed more than appropriate, especially in light of what he's learned over the last few years. This project finds him stretching himself musically and spiritually into some new spaces.

"I feel like the two words "living room" have a lot of connotations," Wayne says. "After knowing the Lord most of my life, I feel like He is giving me the room to live the life He intended me to live. I feel like I'm finally living, because I understand more about what it means to have a relationship with him, and not an oppressive relationship. Just to live and to be at liberty to live is something that I'm enjoying, finally, after quite a few years."

The phrase also applies to Wayne's relationship with his audience. He explains, "A comment we get often in concert is for people to say, 'Man, we just felt like we were sitting in your living room and you're just playing for us.' In a concert of a few thousand people, that's a good thing to happen. That's a very warm, comfortable thing and I take that as a very high compliment."

Wayne has always written and sung about all aspects of life, drawing from the belief that if God is the Lord of your life, there isn't anything of which He isn't a part. This is apparent throughout his catalog of hits, some of the biggest of which were written about his family — wife Lynn and sons Neal and Adam. But Living Room is unique in his discography in that the two boys his audience watched grow up in his music are now helping him to create it.

Oldest son Neal stepped into the producer's role for this project, with Adam contributing to the writing of two songs. The whole experience was a little surreal for Wayne. "I've written about these boys all of their lives," he muses. "I've written stories and songs about these little guys that grew up in my house and I haven't really stopped until the last few days to think about it. This is wild-Neal, the oldest, first born, sitting in that producer's chair. We started out co-producing but I've said 'You just do it' and he just loves it. And here's Adam-newlywed, tender-hearted Adam, who's a young man and the things he's expressing in his songs are just very moving to me."

One of those songs is the album closer, a starkly beautiful piece called "Steal Me Away." Adam wrote the chorus while he was in a practice room at Baylor University. "He came home for spring break and I asked him if he had any songs I might use for the project," relates Wayne. "He told me later that he wrote it when he was just overwhelmed with burdens and life and the world, and things pulling his attention away from what was godly. He wrote this little chorus "Steal me away, steal me away/from the devils and the dealers that cannot satisfy me." I said 'I'd love to use that, can I write a verse to it?'"

Adam happily let his father collaborate on the song. The two discussed some direction for the verses that would amplify the song beyond the situation that birthed the chorus, but it was several months before Adam heard the finished tune. "He played the demo for me and I was almost moved to tears," remembers Adam. "I thought, 'That's exactly how God wanted to finish this song and I never would have been able to do that by myself.' I really think God ordained for me to say 'Here's all that I know, now you take it and let God say through you what He will.' That was a really cool thing that impacted me."

Neal's involvement came about as Wayne was struggling to develop some excitement for entering the studio again. He explains, "I was having a hard time getting passionate about the recording, because it is work to do. Yeah, you have the idea for songs, or a message that you wish people could hear, but the effort to get it recorded and get it packaged and get all of the stuff done that you have to do when you do a record-it was tiring to think about."

"And I thought, 'There's a piece missing. I need someone to help me feel energized about this thing.' And I was sitting outside on the patio one day and it just hit me-my son Neal lives here in Nashville. He's an aspiring producer who's got great ideas, and he has young ears, that I don't have anymore. Neal was the piece of the puzzle that was missing.'"

As a young man trying to make his mark in world of production, Neal admits to some trepidation when he got the call from his father about the project, mainly because he was concerned about his dad's motives. "My initial thought was 'If he's doing this out of charity, I'm going to turn him down cold,'" Neal recalls. "So I tried to feel out where he was headed, what he was looking for and why he asked me. He explained it and I felt very at peace about it. I felt like it was something the he really thought I should do, that he wanted me to be part of it. He said that the idea he would get to work with his sons made him excited about doing another record. And to me, if there was nothing else, that was enough."

Working with a producer who is so familiar with his whole musical career found Wayne being stretched in ways he hadn't been before. "I go to easy licks that I've done for 23 years, vocally. Instrumentally, I play things kind of the same. He'd come on the talk-back in the studio occasionally and very gently go 'Uh, why don't you not do that?' And I'd say 'Okay, what do you want me to do?' And he'd say 'Anything else,'" Wayne relates with a smile.

"It sounds different than if I would have done it myself-Neal's pulled up ideas I never would have thought of," he continues. "I think the goal has been to make it fresh and modern sounding, but not to abandon where I come from. I don't want to abandon an audience that's been with me for 20-plus years. But at the same time, I want to stretch them and I want to stretch myself."

That stretching is especially evident on "Climb On Up," "Somebody Sing," and "Something's Gonna Humble You," which mine territory that is musically a little more aggressive than past Wayne Watson recordings. "It's a little more organic, a little less produced, a little more earthy-we kept things more simple this time," describes Wayne. "There's not a lot of flash on it. We intentionally kept it from being layered up with strings and a lot of pretty things this time."

Wife Lynn wasn't left out of this family project either, as Wayne composed "The Promise" for her. He is frank about the struggles the two have gone through the past few years as they adjusted to their "empty nest" and the fact that they are very different people today than they were when they got married 29 years ago as young college students. The two took advantage of some marriage counseling to learn how to relate to one another again without having the buffer of their children between them. Wayne feels that counseling has an undeserved stigma attached to it.

"People need to understand that there is nothing wrong with seeing a counselor," he says. "Marriage is work-you have to work at it. I think that some people are blessed with an easy relationship — it just happens. But with most of us, you have to do some denial of yourself and some things you might want. They may or may not be godly things, but things you just have to work at to keep on track."

The result was a stronger union and something Wayne wanted to commemorate in song. "Lynn and I were speaking with a friend who told us to write down our expectations for our marriage from here on out. Of course I filled up a page and she filled up a page, and I wrote on the back that I want, when we come to the end of our lives, to have loved each other so much that who ever is left-whoever precedes the other into eternity – the one left will not be relieved, but that they will find a void there. I want our love for each other to have been so strong that there is something missing. Not a disabling kind of void, but a missing, a longing. I want us to have that kind of relationship," he says.

Apart from playing a part in his songs, family is also what keeps Wayne on the music ministry path-but not his own family. "A couple of years ago I wrote down some reasons for why I keep doing this, but the biggest one was because I realized that every time we open our mouths, there is the potential for eternity to be affected. I especially feel a burden for the young moms and dads, because I think that there may be one or two things that are sung or said every night that have the potential to change generations of their family. And that's what keeps me going."