Following widespread acclaim for his first album, The River, Jordan Feliz began the journey of recording a new one. But the process didn’t start how he expected or hoped.

“I started going through anxiety and honestly didn’t know how to begin, because I felt like‘Everything I create isn’t going to be good enough.’” Jordan remembers.

He was on tour, trying to write for the album, but experiencing panic attacks. He found himself unable to connect with the songs he’d been working on.

“My head wasn’t in the right spot. My heart wasn’t either. it was more focused on appeasing people. It was listening to myself and not to God.”

Then back home with friends and co-writers Paul Duncan and Colby Wedgeworth, he marched not around the fear, but through it. And on the other side was solid ground.

“I said ‘What if I just can’t do it?’ but then Paul says to me ‘Look man, there’s no pressure. Everything in your future has already been plotted by Jesus. He has paved every step of the way for you, in a way to have favor on your life. Our future is not wound up in our success, but in the inheritance of God.’”

With those words, something clicked for Jordan. He took a breath. He let go. He remembered that his future is held by the strong, kind hands of the Father.

“Sometimes it’s really hard to silence out the world and just listen to the small, still voice. But once I refocused and listened to Him, He had a message for me,” Feliz shares. “A fire was set in me to write a song about freedom. A song we can sing to be stoked that every single day there’s a God that loves us, never ceases, and never fails.”

That day they wrote “Witness,” which would go on to be Feliz’s first single for Future, in only 45 minutes.

“And that’s when the record started.”