Thomas Austin, in his opinion, doesn’t write songs that will make a lot of money. He figured that out at Belmont University, where he went as a songwriting major and spent four years discovering that the songs he couldn’t stop writing were not the songs anyone would pay for. Question-askers instead of answer-givers. Sarcastic in the way you can only be sarcastic about things you love. Full of longing.
He’s 27. He lives in Nashville. He’s released two EPs — Indiana and Evergreen — and a full-length album, Eternal Life. This spring, he released a song called “Normal Church” that went semi-viral in his corner of the faith and folk world. Some people found language for something they’d been carrying for years. Some people — his description: “30 commenters who all had beards and kids in their Instagram profile pictures” — got angry.
He kept writing anyway. He still plays house shows.
Thomas talks about the art of writing from tension, why CS Lewis is probably the closest thing Protestants have to a saint, why melancholy in music is not the same as sadness, and what he means when he says that at his best, his writing and his life are the same thing. Near the end, he talks about flourishing. His answer stopped me.
In This Conversation, Thomas Shares:
👉 Why he writes questions rather than answers — and why that’s the only kind of song he knows how to make
👉 The difference between small-l longing (wanting to do something differently) and Big-L Longing — what CS Lewis said about the second one
👉 How CS Lewis laughs at what he loves — and why Thomas sees that as a model for both art and faith
👉 The story behind “Normal Church” — what inspired it, who got angry, and what a wiser friend told him before he released it
👉 Why melancholy in music isn’t sadness — and what it says about how emotionally illiterate we’ve become as a culture
👉 Why “bigger is better” is a temptation, not something anyone actually believes once they look at their own life
👉 What flourishing means to him — and why it’s like a ghost
Writing From What You Know
Thomas didn’t spend four years at Belmont figuring out his sound. He spent four years figuring out he couldn’t write the other kind of songs.
“I don’t write songs that are going to make a lot of money. I couldn’t not write those songs.”
What he writes instead: questions rather than answers. Sarcasm in a minor key. Humor that proves love rather than erodes it. The songs that feel like they come from paying close attention to the world instead of simplifying it.
He’s not dismissive of the other kind. His friend from Belmont knew from the beginning she’d be a CCM artist, and her career has gone exactly that direction. Thomas genuinely celebrates it. But his own internal makeup — “I’m not positive and encouraging by disposition” — means something different comes out.
“I think the best art requires some sort of sacrifice. It’s too easy to write the songs that I write. So it’s kind of nice that it comes at the cost of not making a lot of money.”
That’s not resignation. It’s a settled thing. And it comes, he says, partly from the community he landed in — a small, close-knit world of Theo folk songwriters making music on the fringes of every industry they inhabit. People like Andy Gullhorn in Nashville, Joel Anset in Denver, his wife Sky Peterson.
“Those people stick together. And it’s helped me both professionally, creatively, relationally — it’s one of the biggest blessings of my life over the past couple of years.”
Tension Is Just What Paying Attention Feels Like
I asked Thomas about the tension that runs through his writing — the coexistence of sorrow and hope, the love and frustration held together without resolving.
He offered an early caveat: the word tension has been overused in his circles. Beat to death. He still thinks it’s mostly right.
“I just write what I feel. And I feel a lot of tension. I love a lot about the faith traditions that I grew up with. I’m also frustrated by a lot of it, both out there and in here.”
He doesn’t see that as a position he chose. He sees it as what happens when you pay close attention to the world.
“Tension is just kind of a natural experience of paying attention to the world. And an artist’s job is to write out of their experience. So if I’m experiencing that, I can’t not write about tension.”
And when I asked if that space was sacred — he didn’t hesitate.
“Yeah. I think it’s sacred in the way that all spaces are sacred. There is nowhere that God is not.”
He’s careful about the hierarchy here. He thinks K-Love is sacred. He thinks commercial Christian radio is sacred. Just in a different and quieter way, maybe. He’s not making an argument that his kind of music is more faithful. Just that it’s faithful to what he actually sees and feels.
Big-L Longing and Small-L Longing
This is one of the most useful distinctions in the whole conversation — and it arrived in passing, almost as a clarification.
I’d been asking Thomas about what it means to hold space for longing, especially for listeners who are in the middle of change and wrestling with the desire to do something different. He wanted to separate two things.
Small-l longing: wanting to do something differently. Wanting to change. That’s hard, he said, and it’s no surprise that we resist it — the very words we use to describe the two biggest groups in American culture, progressive and conservative, tell us what we love and what we’re afraid of. Change for the sake of change is almost never a good idea. But the world changes fast, and the longing to move forward is one of the only things that keeps the world moving.
Christians especially, he said, have a complicated relationship with this. A God who is outside of time and constant, and also active in history. Always the same, and always doing something. Living in that tension means not always knowing when to exercise which.
And then Big-L Longing:
“If you experience some longing in yourself that nothing in the world can satisfy, it’s proof that there is something else.”
He was paraphrasing CS Lewis — and he knew he was botching the quote. But the point held. There is a kind of ache that points somewhere beyond itself. And for the leader in transition who feels a pull toward something they can’t yet name, Thomas’s word is: that’s not a problem. That’s evidence.
Music, he added, has a particular capacity for this.
“I could quote CS Lewis all day long and never get to Bon Iver. Music has a way of making you long for something in a way that words can’t quite reach.”
C.S. Lewis and the First Joke
Thomas reads Narnia every year. He didn’t this year because he and his wife are doing a Bible read-through in January and he fell behind. He said this with complete unselfconsciousness: “I normally read Narnia in January. That tells you what kind of Christian I am.”
He talked about Lewis for a while — his theology, his metaphors, his gift for reducing complexity into something digestible. But the thing he kept coming back to was humor. Lewis laughs at what he loves.
He told me about a moment in The Magician’s Nephew. A bird says something out of place right after the world is created, doesn’t read the room, and Aslan and the animals laugh at him — at him, not with him. The bird still doesn’t get it. He asks Aslan: “Have I made the first joke?” And Aslan says: “No, you’ve only been the first joke.”
“You can hear it — there’s something in the tone of Aslan’s voice. He’s laughing at his own creation. And he’s doing it because he loves it.”
That’s the model Thomas follows. He can poke fun at his wife in ways no one else can because he loves her most. He can poke fun at the church in the same way — because he knows it and loves it.
“CS Lewis makes fun of things in a way that proves that he loves them, rather than dehumanizes them. He laughs at people because he loves people, not because he hates people.”
That’s the theology behind “Normal Church.” Not contempt. Not cynicism. The kind of humor that only works when you’re still in it.
Normal Church
Thomas wrote the song three years ago. He’d just left a church where he’d been leading worship for eight years — no bad blood, just a season ending. He’d also been having a lot of conversations about church criticism. A friend of his had been burned pretty significantly by a mega church. They were having a laugh about it in the car.
His friend dropped him off. Thomas wrote the song and sent it to him. He didn’t send it to his wife or his brother — they hadn’t heard it until he posted it. Two years passed.
Then he posted a clip. It went semi-viral in his small world.
“It made a lot of people angry. When I say a lot, I mean like 30 commenters who all had beards and kids in their Instagram profile pictures who were clocking my theology and making sure it went the right speed.”
Before he released the full song, he had two conversations. The first was with Andy Gullhorn — a friend in Nashville, a songwriter Thomas admires, older and wiser. Gullhorn’s way of helping was classic: he turned every question back on Thomas. And then he said one thing that stuck.
“If you’re worried about being labeled a church critic, the best way to combat that is to go to church and love it.”
Thomas does. The second conversation was with a former mega church pastor now in the house church movement. He told Thomas: worst case, people get mad at you for a year. You’ll come out stronger. And: “I love the song. You should release it.”
He released it. The anger came, and passed. And since then, messages have trickled in from people who said it gave language for something they’d been feeling.
“God works across time. That song no longer feels that meaningful to me. But it’s awesome to see that it’s meaningful to other people.”
We Don’t Know How to Hear Sadness
Thomas and I got into a conversation about melancholy in music — about what it means to find comfort in something that most people would call sad.
A friend of his, Denver singer-songwriter Joel Anset, named it well. Joel makes similar music — quiet, introspective, minor-key — and he’s noticed the same response from listeners.
“People will feel longing. People will feel melancholy. Basically any emotion that doesn’t make them feel like they’re at the beach and they will label it sadness. Because we don’t have the bandwidth. We’re not a very emotionally literate people.”
The world around us exists to numb us to our heavier emotions. When a song makes us feel them, we don’t have language for what’s happening — so we call it sad and put it away.
Thomas finds it hilarious.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve written a sad, sad song. I can go there. But I don’t very often.”
What he writes is closer to longing. The ache toward something. The coexistence of grief and beauty in the same measure. These are not the same as sadness. But when you haven’t been taught to name them, they feel like the same thing.
Bigger Is Better Is Just a Temptation
I asked Thomas what he’d say to someone who believes bigger is better — who can’t yet imagine that smaller might be enough.
He was careful. He didn’t want to be preachy about it. But he was also clear:
“That is so obviously not true. If it were true, then almost all of my experiences of art are a lie.”
His favorite artists are mostly small. The music that has actually walked him through life — his circle of Theo folk writers, people like Andy Squires and Stephen Wilson Jr. — none of them are large. And on an even more intimate scale: everyone kind of already knows that small is good for them. Nobody chooses the Hillsong livestream over a church that actually knows them, if they’re honest about it.
Then he mentioned something that happened 20 minutes before our conversation. He’d reached 6,500 followers on Instagram. He noticed it. He felt briefly like he’d made it.
“I don’t feel any different than I did a year ago. I don’t feel like I’m reaching more people.”
He quoted a Simpsons character, of all things — a wealthy man who says: “I’ve made a lot of money in my day, but I would give it all up for just a little bit more.”
“If you can recognize bigger-is-better as a clown, rather than a threat — you can kind of laugh at it. And when you recognize a temptation as a clown, it loses most of its power.”
Flourishing Is Like a Ghost
I asked Thomas what flourishing means to him near the end of our conversation. He admitted up front: he used to work on a podcast explicitly about human flourishing, so he knows the right answer.
Then he gave the real one.
“Life with God and with other people. Fully known and loved by God and other people. And in service to God and to other people.”
And a paradox at the center of it: paying attention to your own life somehow makes you more able to give yourself away. Serving others somehow produces the flourishing you can’t manufacture by pursuing it directly.
“It’s a dance between those two things.”
But then he said the thing that stayed with me:
“Flourishing is like a ghost. Anytime you turn to look at it, it kind of goes away. The more that we can learn to enjoy things instead of just contemplate them — I think the greatest avenues for that are God and other people.”
For the Leader in Transition
📌 The thing you couldn’t stop making — even when it didn’t pay — is worth paying attention to. That’s not a distraction. That might be the thing.
📌 Small-l longing (wanting to do something differently) is a healthy human impulse. Big-L Longing — the ache toward something that nothing in the world can satisfy — is proof of something real. Neither one is a problem to fix.
📌 Smaller isn’t less faithful. It might be where the actual work lives. The 6,500 followers who read every DM can matter more than a stage of 60,000.
📌 God works across time. The thing you created in a season of pain might find its person years later. You don’t have to feel the original wound to release it.
📌 You can love something and still be honest about it. CS Lewis proved that. Thomas Austin is trying to prove it. The church needs people who do both.
Questions Worth Asking
- What is the thing you couldn’t stop doing even when it cost you something?
- Is the longing you feel for something different a sign of failure, or evidence of something worth following?
- What would it look like to love the church you came from the way Thomas loves his — honestly, humorously, without walking away?
- Where in your life are you chasing bigger — and is it actually taking you anywhere you want to go?
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