Stephanie Smith Biography

Stephanie Smith refuses to compartmentalize her life. She can't separate her performance from the song, or her life from the message. Her music , her faith, her calling are so intertwined it is impossible to discern where one stops and another begins. It is that fusion of temporal life with eternal values that dresses her faith in flesh. It is the connection between the intangible spirit and the corporeal expectations of this workaday world that imbue her music with raw emotional transparency that crosses boundaries, cuts through bonds, and nestles softly in the heart of those she encounters.

"Life is not about success," she explains. "It is about following passionately after Christ. I know who I'm going to spend eternity with, so I want to use this life to follow hard and passionately after Him. That's really what my music is about. It is a reflection of that pursuit."

Raised by a single mom with an unquenchable faith in God, music and ministry have been twin touchstones in Stephanie's life for as long as she can remember. But a girl can only live on her mother's faith for so long before she is called upon to make it her own. It was during a youth summer camp at the pivotal age of thirteen that she made a deliberate choice to live her life for God. As always, Stephanie discovered God's timing is perfect, because the next year she met her father for the first time.

"We were at my great-grandmother's funeral and we bumped into him," she recalls. "It was awkward. No one was really prepared for it. He didn't even remember my name. I went home and nursed wounds in my fourteen year old heart. We had no contact after that until I was in college, but even then the timing wasn't right and we cut off all contact. I had a choice to either take on another wound or to practice forgiveness. I can't explain it but this love for my father was just birthed in me. This past year God has reunited us, and I am really excited about this new relationship that I have with my father."

After graduating from high school, Stephanie packed her bags and headed to Greenville College, the legendary launching pad of Jars of Clay, to prepare for a career in music and ministry. Before long the vivacious eighteen year old found herself fronting an up and coming Christian rock band. "It was my first taste of touring and playing live rock ‘n"roll rather than praise and worship," Stephanie muses. " I didn't handle it well. I'm not proud of it, but I lost my head. I made poor decisions. My identity became Stephanie Smith, lead singer of the band. That was not what the Lord intended. He gave me plenty of opportunities to get out on my own, but I didn't take them. So He had to remove it for me."

And remove it He did. Unable to deal with her growing narcissistic, rock-star persona, the band asked Stephanie to leave. The event triggered a momentous change in the young singer.

"When something that you've based your identity on is yanked out from under you, you rebuild on a new foundation," she says. "I took a one-eighty. I changed my major to communications and decided I would never do music again. I went to Guatemala for a month, but that wasn't enough. I ran away to Africa for four months for a semester abroad. I wouldn't even do praise and worship. I would have nothing to do with music because I didn't know how to disassociate this experience with being on the stage. It reminded me too much of the person I had become - a person I wasn't proud of : a person I didn't want to be again."

In Africa she studied Poverty and Development. And more than that, she lived it. Her team lived in a tiny village for three weeks on a dollar a day, without electricity, without running water.

"We were immersed in the culture and experienced poverty and development first hand," Stephanie says. "I came back at Christmastime, the most commercial time of the year. It makes you truly aware of how much opportunity we have simply because of where we were born. That experience gave me a heart for other cultures."

Still, her heart was not at peace. There was still a nagging in her spirit that said, "How long are you going to run from music? Her journal entry from the morning of April 23, 2005 reads, "I don't know how to get started, so if You want me to do music again, You are going to have to open the door."

That afternoon, when she went to see some friends who were auditioning for AgapeFest, Stephanie encountered one of her professors who said, "Steph, you should really consider music again. "She blew it off as coincidence. She hadn't gotten through the doors of the auditorium when a couple of her friends said, "Stephanie, you should be trying out." By the third time someone said, "you should have signed up, "Stephanie broke and started crying on the shoulder of a friend, who just happened to be the director of the festival. Her friend told her, "We've just had a band back out, so we have an open slot. Can you be ready in five minutes?"

After two years of refusing to allow music to play any part in her life, Stephanie grabbed a guitar, and auditioned, eventually winning not only the right to perform on mainstage at Agapefest, but a recording contract with Gotee Records. Stephanie crammed the remainder of her senior year into a single semester, graduated in December, packed her bags once more, and headed for Nashville.

"One thing I've learned is that this town doesn't need another good singer," she laughs. "There are plenty of them. It doesn't need another pretty face to shake things up on stage. But I do have a heart for something refreshing in Christian music, to be like a drink of cold water to a dry and weary generation that is turning on the apathy switch. And I want to partner with other Christian artists that have that same vision. It's "go" time. If you are going to be on the stage you better have something to say."