In March Lauren Daigle released Thank God I Do, the first single from her forthcoming self-titled album. The music video is set on a flower-festooned street in her home state of Louisiana. Daigle, equally garlanded, wanders through them singing uplifting things about love. Many of the YouTube comments mention how it has touched their hearts or helped them through a difficult time. They make the ones accusing of her apostasy and paganism sound even more unreasonable.
Daigle, 31, has experienced plenty of these kinds of attacks. For a decade the two-time Grammy winner has been one of the biggest names in contemporary Christian music (CCM), a multimillion-dollar industry that tends to go unnoticed beyond its religious base. Its most popular hits are regularly incorporated into modern worship in churches worldwide. Meanwhile its artists exist under a unique level of scrutiny.
Daigle recently signed her first major label deal with Atlantic Records, hoping to cross over into the pop mainstream with her third album – her soulful sound is a mixture of Adele and Joss Stone – while bracing herself for the backlash from Christians who don’t condone mixing the sacred with the profane. “It’s not nearly as bad as it could have been, I’ll say that,” Daigle tells me from her home in New Orleans, wearing a broad smile under an even broader hat. “There’s way more people cheering me on than upset, so I’ll take it.”
Yet Daigle has courted controversy at both ends of the political spectrum. In 2018 she upset conservative Christians by appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, then upset her critics when she said she couldn’t say whether homosexuality was a sin. Two years later she provoked wrath for singing at a worship rally during lockdown restrictions, which earned her a personal rebuke from New Orleans’s Democrat mayor.
The second incident was a “tough one”, says Daigle, because “it painted me in a light that [suggested] I didn’t care”. She had been riding her bike through the French Quarter when she saw fellow CCM artist Sean Feucht leading the event, “and there were police around, blocking the street, so I thought: ‘Oh, there’s this approved event that people are singing at? This is wonderful.’” In fact, Feucht’s event was part of a campaign against Covid restrictions on church gathering. “And it caused this huge fuss.” She didn’t comment on it at the time. “Someone once told me true freedom is giving people the permission to misunderstand you, and that was one of those moments.”
Still, Daigle’s experiences informed the new album, her first to move beyond solely faith-based themes. A seven-hour panic attack brought on by “a deep state of paranoia” inspired the low-key opening ballad Thank God I Do. “I didn’t know what was going on, but two people sat with me through the night, my mom and one of my friends, and they were so kind, so calm. If God had to show up for me through two people, he chose those two.”
Daigle was raised in a Christian family and a laid-back Cajun culture – a world where, she says, “If you have an appointment for 1pm and you show up at 1.30pm you’re still on time.” Daigle was surrounded by music made for dancing. “Every Sunday night in Lafayette, at this place called Randol’s, a zydeco band would come and the whole city would come out and dance. I remember when I was 10 years old, my grandfather putting me on his feet and saying: ‘Come on girl, you’ve gotta learn the waltz.’”
Hurricane Katrina hit when she was 14. “Disasters like that show you what matters in life. There’s this bonding that comes after a hurricane – you’ll never have seen someone before and all of a sudden you’re in their house chopping a tree out of their living room.” Daigle still remembers the sight of people on their roofs, “their skin boiled because it was the thick of summer and they’d been there three days straight”. Her parents made huge pots of gumbo and distributed them in Four Corners, Lafayette’s red-light district. “My family were very open to loving people, that’s always been a part of their narrative, so it’s in my blood to see barriers break.”
When Daigle was 15, she contracted cytomegalovirus, an enervating condition that required her to complete her education at home. First a creative outlet, singing soon became a religious calling – she has described having prophetic visions of “stages and tour buses” while a teenager. After competing in the audition rounds of American Idol, she signed to the CCM label Centricity Music in 2013. Two years later her debut album, How Can It Be, topped the Christian charts. Her 2018 album, Look Up Child, was a blockbuster hit, reaching No 3 on the mainstream US albums chart.
But her popularity was contingent on a Christian audience who were not always as forgiving as they ought to be. “The microscope of people always looking at your life, feeling people will take your best intentions and turn them on you, and doing that in the public eye – that’s a lot,” she says. Attempting to immunise herself from criticism, Daigle kept her private life hidden to the point that she became a self-professed control freak – until the panic attack. “I learned that if I’m going to constantly keep myself contained then I am going to combust.”
There’s more than a glimpse of the personal in her new album: Waiting celebrates holding out for a romantic relationship. Being single as a famous Christian doesn’t make dating easy – Daigle can’t do dating apps, and she’s only willing to be set up by trustworthy close friends. “People will shame you for it, judge you for it, make you think you’re being too picky,” said Daigle. “But being patient, that type of longing, I think is really fruitful.”
She splits her time between Louisiana and Nashville, a city she loves for its tight musical community. The church she attends is a mix of Republicans and Democrats, and she finds herself straddling the same divide that has beset country music for many years: an audience with a deeply conservative core and industry professionals drawn from a more progressive pool (her co-writers on the album include the Highwomen’s Natalie Hemby and Brandy Clark co-writer Shane McAnally, a gay man).
While Daigle is well practised at keeping her political opinions to herself, she admits that her perspective has shifted since Trump’s presidency. “I got wrapped up in the way the politics was being projected, and the animosity,” she says. “Now we’re on this side and I’m looking back at myself, I’m like, wow, yes, I do believe certain things, but did it actually get the best of my faith? At the end of the day, the Bible calls us to unity.”
She finds it “shocking” that Trump is still in the headlines – “it’s wild that there’s this gravitational pull to constantly talk about him” – in a way that suggests a certain naivety. The 45th president’s legacy remains encoded in the country’s current legislative agenda: what about the near-total ban on abortion that went into effect in Louisiana last year, with no exceptions even for rape or incest? “I have no idea, I’m terrible,” says Daigle. “I know that we have a Democrat governor but I don’t know where our abortion laws are in Louisiana.”
There can’t be many thirtysomething women who can afford to remain similarly uninformed. Her US representative steps in to change the subject. But the repeated message of Daigle’s album is to keep listening to other points of view. “It’s a tricky line that we’re walking,” she sings on the gothic Don’t Believe Them. “We got so many people talking, and nobody thinks that they’re wrong.”
• Lauren Daigle is released via Atlantic Records on 12 May.
