How Can I Thank You Enough Song Story

I was blessed to grow up in a home with two parents who were Christians as well as grandparents who were Christians as well. My parents took me and my older brother, Michael, to our little country church every Sunday and often on Sunday nights and Wednesday nights. Then every few weeks, we’d drive to the Twin Cities where my grandparents lived and we’d go with them to their Salvation Army church where they were very involved. My parents sang in church and so did my grandparents. My grandpa was the Bandmaster in the Salvation Army brass band – which was sort of the brass band version of a modern praise band. So I have a great heritage of Christian music in my family.

The music that we sang and listened to in all those many church services throughout my youth was all hymns. My brother and I used to like to work on reading the notes in the hymnal to learn the harmony parts. At the time, I wouldn’t have picked hymns as my favorite music and I was very excited when such a thing as Contemporary Christian Music came along. But those old hymns had so many memorable melodies and such great lyrics that I ended memorizing so many of them just because we sang them so much. I’ve always continued to sing and enjoy hymns along with all the contemporary worship and multi-ethnic styles I’ve done and I now have many hymns that are my favorites. Among those favorites are the hymns “It is Well”, “There is a Fountain” and “Amazing Grace”.

When I set about to write “How Can I Thank You Enough”, I wanted to take the great poetry and powerful thoughts behind the lyrics of these hymns and really accent them with the incomparable joy of traditional Black Gospel music. So I took two verses from each of these hymns, wrote a new melody for them and then wrote new music for a chorus and tag. When I write songs for Heart of the City, I feature the singers in my mind and what they might do with the song. It was so fun to use this song to feature the unique Gospel stylings of five of our African American vocalists and then to also give myself a shot at a verse as well as a white guy. It’s still a joy for me to listen to and to sing this song with this awesome group. These hymns testify to such an amazing Savior and His amazing Gospel that we could never, ever thank Him enough for.