A Formula for Success
By Lisa Collins, senior music editor, gmclife.com
Editor's note: Click here for an update to this story.
Can he do it again? That’s the question everyone in gospel is asking with the March 16 release of Marvin Sapp’s newest album, Here I Am. The answer will come with time, but the CD has gotten off to a great start with the lead single, “The Best In Me” topping Billboard’s Gospel Songs charts, and bowing in at #14 on the mainstream R&B/Hip Hop Songs chart. Recorded at the Resurrection Life Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sapp teamed once again with writer/producer Aaron Lindsey and backup vocals director Myron Butler.
“It’s the same formula. Just bigger music and more encouraging lyrics I hope,” Sapp shares. “We didn’t change anything. We went to the same venue, used the same producer, same background singers, same musicians, because we are trying to produce the same anointing.”
That anointing created the kind of success even Sapp had never dreamed of as the lead single from Thirsty – “Never Would Have Made It” – topped the Hot Gospel Songs chart for 46 weeks, was the first gospel song to hit #1 on the Urban AC chart since Yolanda Adams’ “Open My Heart,” and with 50,503 plays in 2008, was the most played Christian song of the year.
“It’s amazing to have Lil’ Wayne come up to you and say, ‘Rev, that’s my song, man’ or to be looking out from stage in the crowd and see people like Puffy singing “Never Would Have Made It” with you – to perform on The Today Show…,” Sapp gushed.
But for all the heartfelt emotion conveyed in his record-breaking project – written following the death of his father – Sapp’s own personal defining moment was yet to come. It would come, ironically enough, at the pinnacle of his success.
“It was in April of 2009,” Sapp recalls. “My wife MaLinda had a major pain and we took her to the hospital. She thought it was kidney stones, but they checked her out and didn’t see any. But the pain wouldn’t leave. So they did some tests and came back to the room and told us that it was stage four colon cancer.
