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Juno-award-winning Winnipeg Christian artist Steve Bell is releasing a new single ahead of his 23rd studio album, The Glad Surprise.
"Right around the time Russia invaded Ukraine, Bruce Cockburn's song, 'Lovers in a Dangerous Time,' started rolling around in my brain," says Bell. "He wrote it during the Cold War when he had a lot of fears for his daughter and her friends, what their future might be. Now, with many, many wars going on, love ends up being a miracle."
The first single of The Glad Surprise to be released is a version of 'Lovers in a Dangerous Time.' It includes a medieval instrument called a hurdy-gurdy.
"I don't know Bruce well but he knows what I've done. When I won my first Juno, that album Romantics and Mystics, ended with a Cockburn cover. Afterward, this guy starts walking up and I go, 'That's Bernie Finkelstein, Cockburn's manager.' He called me out by name and I just about fell on the floor. He said, 'I just want you to know that Bruce and I listened to your cover of his song and we just think it's the best cover of that song ever.' I was so astonished."
Bell recently joined Manitoba-born singer Jordan St. Cyr for his homecoming show in Niverville on August 29. Bell has ties with St. Cyr's dad before he was even born, Bell and Gerry St. Cyr were best men at each other's weddings.
"Jordan found his own way. The business can spit you out. He's sort of found his way in there and kept his integrity. It's clear by his songs and I'm so proud of him. When Jordan phoned me and asked me to sing at the concert, I just about cried. He honoured me."
The Glad Surprise will be released on October 1, 2024.
"The title track, 'The Glad Surprise,' was inspired by the writings of Howard Thurman who was a black theologian in the last century. He wrote a book called Jesus and the Disinherited, they say Martin Luther King Jr. never left home without. They were friends. In that book he says 'Life is bottomed by a glad surprise.' It's an astonishing statement from a black man who's grandmother was a slave, who lived through the lynching years, who wrote during the Jim Crow era. For that man to say, 'Life is bottomed by a glad surprise.' we should all sit up and listen."
Watch the YouTube video above to hear the whole interview with Bell, including him sharing about his father and their prison ministry visits where Bell first learned to care deeply about justice.
"Jesus presses right into the very cross, and that cross turns out to be a throne. Like, what? That weakness, that absolute humiliation and defeat is the throne from which Christ reigns. Wow! Nobody can make that story up but that's the glad surprise."