Sara is in the studio right now working on her next album, and I caught up with her recently to find out how it's going.

Robin: When last we left you, you were on The Other Side of Something. Where are you now?

Sara: Well, since then I've added to the beauty. (Laughs.) I hope. Add to the Beauty was definitely an answer to The Other Side of Something. The Other Side of Something was coming out of something, a faith crisis, a time of reflection on what I'd been doing all my life. I've always been a zealous person, a person who wanted to do this thing well.

My children introduced in me a lot of questions. Because I was introducing these very innocent children to a very chaotic world. I was asking Job's questions and Jonah's questions, and I was finding answers at the time we were recording The Other Side of Something. But I feel like Add to the Beauty was a direct response to that album. I had a song on The Other Side of Something called "Like a Skin," in which I asked the question, "Can people change? Can I change?" The answer was yes, which I answered with a song on Add to the Beauty.

My Jonah question was, "Are you a personal God?" And God's answer to me was, "Tell me about Nineveh." I got to thinking about Nineveh, and Nineveh was an evil place. What happens in evil places? Children are abused. Women are abused. People are lied to and hurt. God said to me, "I was being faithful to a child in Nineveh." So I began to see that the whole time I was asking God, "Where are you?" God was asking me, "Where are you?"

So there's a through-line of thought that can be followed through all of my albums. If life is a story, then my new album, which is yet to be titled, is a continuation of that same storyline, of where I am in response to God's imperatives to me. In light of his great, generous love for me, it's about how I want to offer that same love in return.

The new album is a clarification of terms. Add to the Beauty spoke about the Kingdom in very broad brushstrokes. This is more of a clarification of what, in our world, in 2007, that looks like. What conversations do we then have if we are to not be afraid, if fear were not part of the picture. It takes the same ideas and makes them more specific, in the same way that these issues in my own life have become more specific.

Who's producing the new album?

Brown Bannister produced Add to the Beauty, and I felt like I had more to say with Brown. I was so thoroughly pleased and satisfied with Add to the Beauty, as an artist, with the way it came out. I enjoyed The Other Side of Something, but I felt like I really wanted Add to the Beauty to be a beautiful album. I wanted it to be an album I could turn on and there's no sonic offense to be found. I felt like it was, on every level, portraying the beauty that I was trying to get across.

Likewise, on this album, I'm trying to talk about faith in a way that gets past our guard. The idea, as always, is so that someone is thinking about God before they know they're thinking about God. Or thinking about faith before they've categorized it or put it in a box. I find that music is a very powerful way to do that. Even for me -- I'll find myself thinking about something because of a song, that maybe I wouldn't have come at it if you'd told me the title first, or if I'd come in the front door as a Republican candidate or a Democrat candidate.

With this album, I'm writing about social justice. But I'm trying to get past the guards. This is not a liberal conversation, this is not a social gospel, it's not a guilty conversation. Guilt is a huge waste of time. It's not a finger-wagging conversation. In my effort to steer away from all those things that traditionally come along with "We Are the World" or those calls to social justice, I'm once again trying to write in the same way that I write about faith. I'm writing to the person who believed all their life and it just doesn't resonate anymore, or to the person that has never believed and finds himself thinking in a new way about God.

Now, I want to write to the soccer mom, and to the any number of us who are new to this conversation about social justice. I want to talk about ideas that are difficult to consider, but in a way so that we're thinking about these things before we've found categories for them.

So you have an actual agenda with this album.

Well, I probably always have an agenda, in that I am very theme-driven. And I'm always writing about myself, but hopefully not selfishly. So I can only write about what I'm experiencing. Two years ago, I was introduced to the work of International Justice Mission, and it has just completely rocked my world.

So yeah, I guess I do have an agenda. I just recently read an article by this woman who was abducted by the L.R.A. in Uganda. She was in a school for girls and she was taken captive, and she saw all kinds of things. She was tortured and raped, and she witnessed all these horrible atrocities. But the reporter asked her, "Is this difficult for you to talk about?" And she said, "No, talking is my gift. My friends that are still captured cannot talk. This is my privilege to talk." This is how she describes her experience there: "If God had not taken me to see what is happening, I might say that there is nothing that I can do. But that is not what I say."

If she can find the guts to talk about this stuff and find a way to articulate her experiences... Her courage asks me what I'm made of. Her courage asks me some pretty hard questions, it asks me who God really is. So I've found a lot of joy and hope, actually, in this conversation. I'm hoping to convey that in music, and if that's an agenda, then it is. But I truly feel that I've had a conversion experience in working with I.J.M.

Gary Haugen, the president of I.J.M., says that the poor and the oppressed will save us from our life of trivia, and I have been saved. I feel a great sense of purpose and a great sense of joy. Having gone to church my whole life, and worshipped God my whole life, and wanting to be a quality artist, I've spent all this time grooming and grooming and grooming my personal faith, my personal devotional life. And that is necessary, but it's kind of like tuning a car and tuning a car and tuning a car and tuning a car.

So then I look up, and I see friends like this young woman who is out speaking and saying these things to defend the widow and the orphan... She's doing donuts in the parking lot (laughs), whereas I have yet to really drive the car. I've reupholstered it and I've painted it, but to drive the car is a tremendous amount of freedom and a tremendous amount of joy. So without being heavy-handed and bringing out the doom-and-gloom of how bad the world is... I believe that God is doing a very real thing today. And he's calling on us to be a part of it.

A joyful social justice album? Can it be done?

It is my goal that it not be a drag. Musically, I've tried to go in new directions. I was really inspired on this album by Paul Simon's new album, Surprise. Musically, it's on par if not better than anything he's ever done. So here he is, sixty years old, and he's still musically creative, out of this world. At thirty-five, I'm not going to stop trying to be creative, I'm not going to just default to my old "Sara Groves chords."

So I'm excited about this album. I hope that musically it is something new and creative. Enjoyable to listen to, whether you're pulled into the social justice imperatives or not.

Do your kids play into any of this renewed interest in social justice? Is any of it about the kind of legacy you'll leave behind for them?

There's a song on this album called "Song for My Sons." It says, "This is a song for my sons, when they understand it... Don't let your love grow cold..." At the end of Jesus' earthly life, right before he's crucified, his disciples are all gathered around him and they're saying, "What will life be like for us?" They're basically asking what will the end-times be like. And Jesus replied, "In the end times, because of the increase of evil, the love of most will grow cold." Not a few -- the love of most will grow cold. "But if you will stand firm to the end, you will be saved."

I love that what Jesus is saying we'll stand firm in is not politics or creeds, but in the love of Jesus Christ. Because he loved us, because he literally bankrupted Heaven, because he saved me when I had nothing to offer, I am compelled by his generosity to be generous. I am compelled by his passion and justice to seek justice and walk humbly and do what he did.

I think about legacy a lot. I think about my kids. I want them to be leaders. They're going to face stuff that I've never seen, and I want them to be strong. I want them to have that sense of who they are in Christ, and I want them to poor that generosity out in their own way.

Our mission statement when [my husband] Troy and I started doing this ten years ago, has not changed. It's, "Everybody has a next step with God." The atheist can wake up and become agnostic. The ninety-two year old woman who's served God all her life still has a purpose. As I've embarked on my journey, I still believe that. Every person has a next step in their journey with God, and until I die, I'm not going to quit trying to figure out what those next steps are.

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