Review

Culture

Music

23 November 2023

5 min read

I hear you: what the witnesses are saying

Belle Tindall gave herself a deadline of two hours to articulate her first impressions of Witness Me - Jacob Collier’s latest single with Stormzy, Shawn Mendes and Kirk Franklin.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Three happy men stand with the one in the middle draping his arms around his friends.

Shawn Mendes, Jacob Collier and Stormzy.

Anyone listening to BBC Radio 1 on Tuesday night at 6pm will have been treated to the very first play of Jacob Collier’s highly anticipated new single. I love those moments. I love that in our hyper-individualised society, the radio can still invite us into these communal occurrences, occasions that hide amongst the chaos and mundanity of the Tuesday evening commute.

And Tuesday night’s occasion was as follows: we were cordially invited to be the recipients of Witness Me as it rang out over the airwaves, released into the wild, sent out in a thousand different directions.

I was then, and still am, utterly intrigued by this song.

After the initial listen, I decided that there has to be more to it than is immediately apparent. To borrow, and then adjust, a familiar phrase - I think there are ‘heard and unheard’ elements to be grappled with when it comes to this song. And I’ve spent this morning grappling with them on behalf of us all.

Firstly – Jacob Collier, the UK’s beloved musical maestro, has crafted this song alongside grime-artist-extraordinaire Stormzy, pop-sensation Shawn Mendes and Gospel-titan Kirk Franklin. Whichever way you look at it, this is an odd grouping. As Jacob himself said, ‘this particular combination is not one that I saw coming… but it feels so right that it’s happened.’ Aside from Jacob (for whom this song is pretty in-keeping with his musical style), it really does feel as if each of the four artists involved have served something that sits beyond them as individual artists. Offering this song up, not because it wholly belongs with their individual bodies of work, but because it serves each and every listener. Jacob, speaking of this song, put it nice and simply: ‘this song is special and needs to be in the world’.

These four artists don’t need this song, I sense that their thinking is that we need this song.

The first two verses are offered to us by Jacob Collier and Shawn Mendes respectively, while the third is delivered by Stormzy. These verses ground the song, which has such an uncontainable feel to it, in time and place. Where Shawn sings of business, familial trauma and alcohol as a coping mechanism, Stormzy speaks of murder, loss and forgiveness. The chorus, on the other hand, is simple, vague and a little abstract. It goes like this,

I'm with you
I'm with you here
You're the light I need
In the dark I see
I'm with you
I'm with you here
You are all I see
You witness me

Every line of this chorus is carried upon the waves of Kirk Franklin’s Gospel arrangement. Speaking of the Gospel undercurrent of the song, Jacob noted how it ‘was the fundamental, that is what breathed the most life into this song’. And while the verses are interesting, it is the chorus that I find myself grappling with. Both audibly and figuratively, the chorus lifts above the verses.

Jacob’s working with some pretty ancient material here, he’s drawing on themes that have been thought-through and lived-out for millennia, he’s tuning into a heart-cry that’s as old as time itself.

Who are those words above directed to? Who are they flowing from? What is it about those words that have the power to hold this whole song together? What is the unheard behind the heard here?

Let’s begin by taking these lyrics at face value, shall we?

On the surface, these lyrics are a celebration of, as well as a calling for, radical empathy. In that way, this song is an imaginative endeavour; it is dreaming a certain reality into being. In Jacob’s own words,

‘In a time where there are countless divisive forces around the world, my hope is that this song can act as a reminder of the power people hold to come together and really see each other, carry each other, and bear witness to life in all its colours.’

In this sense, it has a touch of James’ retro classic ‘Sit Down’ about it. So, perhaps it was time for another anthem of empathy to roll around. We were made for community, for belonging and for interdependence; Jacob has always made this a primary feature of his work. And I’m grateful to him for that. I’m grateful to anyone who encourages us to stop pretending that we don’t need each other.

So, there’s that. But there’s more to it, I’m sure of it.

I can’t help but feel as though there’s a profound piece of theology trojan-horsing in this song. I don’t think I’m wishing it into existence; there are hints all over the place. Firstly, there’s the hearable omnipresence of the Gospel choir. Secondly, there’s Stormzy’s verse, which is an outright prayer, as he asks God to:

Have mercy on 'em, Lord
I know You're with them in the storm even though it's hard to see…

Have mercy on 'em, and be with 'em
And if grace doesn't cut it, then Your mercy will suffice
In this cold, dark world, we just need a little light 

So, I’m not totally over-thinking this.

In the light of these details and with the knowledge that each of the featured artists sit somewhere along the spectrum of Christianity, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that the chorus, those lyrics that hold the song together, are a prayer too. As well as a celebration of the presence of community, I think it may be an intimate acknowledgement of the presence of God - the only one who truly ‘witnesses our lives in all its colours’. You may think me crazy, but I think that Jacob and team may have just released a little theology into the world.

God being ‘light in the darkness’, the one who ‘sees us’, the one who’s ‘with us’ – these are biblical concepts. Jacob’s working with some pretty ancient material here, he’s drawing on themes that have been thought-through and lived-out for millennia, he’s tuning into a heart-cry that’s as old as time itself. This does not dimmish the radical call for empathy that has been so praised in this song. On the contrary, the two concepts are utterly dependent on one another. Seen as this whole song could have been drawn out of a biblical book, I shall enlist one to explain further:

‘dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.’

I mean, come on - that could have been the fourth verse to this song.

This new single is called ‘Witness Me’ – And yes, I witness you Jacob. Last night, on my commute home, I witnessed you put language to our deepest desire. I witnessed you sneak a prayer onto BBC Radio 1.

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Mental Health

Music

5 November 2025

4 min read

Deliverance in the dark: Springsteen’s Nebraska and the scars that shaped it

His starkest album emerged from a season of pain, where family, faith, and music collided

Giles Gough

Giles is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

An actor playing Bruce Springsteen walks down a dark street, hands in jacket pocket.

Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen.

20th Century Studios.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen-White as the titular rock star, follows Bruce Springsteen's attempt to make possibly his most unconventional album, Nebraska. This also happened to be one of the most difficult times of Springsteen's life, battling with mental health. Before the film's release, let's briefly explore some of the root causes of Bruce's depression, and find out what part family and the church had to do with it.

When it comes to Springsteen's discography, there's something of a disconnect between the casual fans' favourite and the album favoured by critics. Born in the USA is the monster hit album, with its era defining hits and blue-collar Americana. But Nebraska is the one that musicians and writers wax lyrical about. Written and recorded in a small bedroom in Colt's Neck, New Jersey, Nebraska is an album filled with acoustic melancholy folk tracks. With no conceivable singles and no chance of getting radio play, this was not the album that Columbia records wanted him to make, but it's the album Bruce felt he had to make.

"Nebraska was the pulling back of the bow, and Born in the U.S.A. was the arrow's release" writes Warren Zanes in his 2023 book, Deliver Me From Nowhere. In it, Zanes tracks with loving detail not only the technical problems of turning recordings that were only meant to be demos into songs that you could feasibly release, but also the mental health struggles that had driven Bruce to focus on such dark subject matter. It marked a moment of the artist unpacking his issues and answering the question: what do you do when you realise that the things you've loved most have begun to do you harm?

That harm can be traced back to Springsteen's early life in 1950s New Jersey. His father, Douglas 'Dutch' Springsteen, also suffered from mental health problems, at a time when there wasn't even the vernacular to describe such things. Dutch would grow to become jealous of the attention that his young son would get from the women in his family, which would exacerbate his existing paranoia. As well as being neglectful and demeaning, Dutch would also become violent towards his son. Springsteen describes in his autobiography how on one occasion, his father was teaching him how to box when Dutch threw a few open palm punches to his face that landed just a little too hard. "I wasn't hurt" Bruce writes "but a line had been crossed. I knew something was being communicated. […] I was an intruder, a stranger, a competitor in our home and a fearful disappointment". If this was young Bruce's experience at home, little respite was found in the outside world.

Springsteen grew up quite literally in the shadow of the Catholic church, and it permeated every aspect of his community. Bruce attended a Catholic school, where on one occasion he was hit by another student as a punishment from one of his teachers. This was compounded during his time as an altar boy, when the priest he was serving at a six am service gave him a public thrashing for not knowing his Latin. So before Springsteen started high school, he had been physically abused by his father, his school, and his religion. When these pillars of his life (who were meant to represent God to him) treated him this way, is it any wonder that young Bruce's take away from all this is that God is not a safe person to be around?

Years later, when Springsteen finally takes a break from the constant recording and touring cycle, he has no way to escape the damage done to him by the experiences of his early life. In Nebraska he illustrates the lives of down and outs, blue collar workers striving to get by, and even serial killers. The subject matter was so dark that when his manager Martin Landau first heard it, he started to worry about Springsteen's mental health. Thankfully, Springsteen would get the help he needed and forty years later, is a terrific example of someone who has done the work of tackling their own issues.

Where Bruce has landed on his relationship with God some forty years later is still quite hard to pin down. He's reluctantly adopted the adage of 'once a Catholic, always a Catholic' even if he admits he doesn't participate in his religion all too often.

There's no clear delineation point between him going from being a non-believer to a believer or vice versa, but that has not stopped him from creating some truly magnificent art with intense Christian themes. References to Jesus and the gospels pepper much of his musical output. Songs like Devils and Dust show the conflicted faith of a soldier in Iraq, whilst his song, The Rising, written in response to the terrifying events of September 11th, re-imagines the firefighters climbing the stairs of the twin towers as souls rising up to meet their maker. The finished product is a compelling anthem that would give even the most heartfelt worship song a run for its money.

It's quite possible that Bruce is interested in Christianity only in as much as it is woven into the thread of American life. How much the upcoming film will focus on his relationship with God or lack thereof is unknown, but the influence the church has had on him, for better or for worse, is undeniable.

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