Granger Smith - Singer/Songwriter on grief, death, God's timing and walking away from music

Sports Spectrum Podcast

Sports Spectrum

Sports

5 • 661 Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 2024

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Granger Smith is the author of the New York Times bestseller "Like a River" released back in August of 2023. After 24 years touring as an award-winning, platinum-selling, country music singer-songwriter, Smith chose to leave the music business to pursue a future in ministry. His 2023 “Like A River” summer tour was his last as he moved into full-time ministry.

Over the course of his groundbreaking music career, Granger has released ten studio albums, one live album, and two EPs. Granger has charted over eight singles on the Billboard country charts, including the number one hit "Backroad Song."

Today on the podcast, we talk to Granger Smith about his decision to walk away from music, the importance to tell his story, growing up with Texas high school football, how loss can be a teacher after losing his son River to a drowning in 2019 and God's timing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up, guys? Welcome to Sports Spectrum. I am Jason Romano. Today we're going to talk to a country
0:05.8	music artist who walked away from his very successful career as a musician to follow God's call
0:15.3	and to go all in on learning more about Jesus. His name is Granger Smith.
0:22.7	Granger is also an author and a lot of what he wrote about in his most recent book,
0:27.8	Like a River,
0:28.8	finding the faith and strength to move forward after loss and heartache,
0:32.4	is about pursuing Jesus after going through tragedy.
0:42.7	Now, Granger lost his youngest son River in early June of 2019 after a drowning accident. We don't go into rehashing that story during our conversation.
0:49.7	I feel like he's done that enough on other podcasts And certainly he does it in the very first chapter of
0:55.1	his book, like a river. People can go read that. So I didn't want to just rehash that day,
1:01.6	but I wanted to talk about grief. I wanted to talk about following God's call on your life.
1:07.0	You know, he made a big pivot. He walked away from the music industry that's helped, you know,
1:11.9	provide him a very, a very luxurious life, if you will. I mean, the guy was on tour, has 11 albums.
1:18.5	He's toured with Garth Brooks. His song, Backroad Song is probably his most famous. And even just recently
1:24.4	as August of 2023, he was still on tour.
1:28.0	And then that became his farewell tour.
1:30.9	And he walked away.
1:32.1	And now he's in seminary and he's promoting this book.
1:34.7	And he's really just sharing the love of Christ and learning more about who Jesus is and
1:39.3	learning scripture.
1:40.2	This was really encouraging, I think is the best word that I can provide in this conversation with Granger Smith.
1:47.8	I think you guys are going to really enjoy hearing about his journey, what he's learning about loss as a teacher in life.
	...

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