David Leonard

And so I got to join them and then, you know, come up on the last song, Wild One, and just have so much fun.

So right before their set, David Leonard, he was leading worship.

So they had like kind of like a church service before the whole festival officially started, which is really amazing.

and he was asked to do make room last minute we were backstage getting ready and he was like trying to go over the lyrics and my dad was like hey i know this song really well and it was like hey hey david you don't know me but i know you type of you know and just kind of going through all the lyrics with him and then i was sitting there standing there and i was like Oh my gosh, it's David Leonard.

This is so cool.

And so my sound guy, I just like kind of nudged him.

And then he was like, how about this? I introduce you and you just take it away.

And so he had me lead the whole song and he accompanied me basically and took me, you know, on his platform and introduced me as Carly Ann Taylor and, and kind of just like, it opened up this whole thing.

Welcome back, friends.

That is Just Jesus by David Leonard.

And if you caught that first line of that song said, I don't need the lights, I don't need the stages, that can be an easy thing to say on Sunday morning.

But when you're under the Friday night lights, especially if you live in Texas like I do, that can be a harder thing to say.

I'm right in the middle of my second conversation with David Leonard.

with Brian Smith and Ed Yasinski.

They are longtime sports ministry leaders.

testimonial

perspective, I guess, was how it started, and then I, so we'd kind of been thinking through, like, what it could be like, and then, I mean, like, maybe not even a week later, I had to write, scheduled, Um, with this guy named, um, David Leonard, who I knew already, he's an amazing writer.

He wrote, he's just written a lot of incredible songs.

And then a guy named Andy Cherry who had never met before.

And, um, this was like May of 2024.

So I had like just started writing songs for, um, for myself.

and anyway we wrote we wrote a song called wildflowers i did put it out it was my first single out um as a solo artist it's like a happy sweet song i'm a wild child wearing wildflowers you know and we finished it and we were feeling we were like this is beautiful this is so sweet and um andy's like brilliant musically he kind of played this like fleetwood mac like hook just like messing around as we're chatting at the end of the right and I was like oh my gosh like that would go so great with the song that I have called like Raised by Wolves and they kind of both just looked at me and they were like wait what and I was like yeah you know like Raised by Wolves Saved by the Lamb and they were like Franny we have to write that right now so actually David Leonard I think I think it was David picked up the guitar and he was like be quiet little It's so funny to me that this grown man spits out that first lyric.

And they had known about

All right, the top three, let's do that.

The top three right now, as of this recording, number three, Great Are You Lord by David Leonard, Jason Ingram, and Leslie Jordan.

That's the other thing about the modern songs.

They're like Nashville hits, right? With like, 12 people, but got to get paid.

we were doing Kaleidoscope,

The producer, David Leonard, he used some of our original demos to kind of start the project and then build on it.

Okay.

Basically replaced most of the things in it, but there were a few things that were fine, so we just left them.