Artists
Kirk Franklin
The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin
In the summer of 1993 a young unknown gospel musician from Fort Worth, Texas, released-to little initial fanfare-his self-titled debut album, Kirk Franklin & The Family. Wildly accepted and embraced almost immediately by the masses, it went on to spend 100 weeks at the top of Billboard magazine's gospel charts, while also crossing over to the R&B side, and becoming in the process the first gospel album ever to sell over a million units.
But despite that auspicious, record-shattering entrance, the world had seen only the smallest foreshadowing of the work of a man who, in less than a decade, would come to stand with the likes of gospel royalty Thomas A. Dorsey, James Cleveland, and Andrae Crouch as one of the pivotal, defining forces of 20th-century-and-beyond gospel music.
With several stops along the way (to write and produce hits for 1NC and to score and write/produce the major motion picture soundtrack to Kingdom Come) separating him from his own last solo album, 1998's two-million-plus selling Nu Nation Project, Kirk Franklin returns with the new, mind-boggling solo release, The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin. The album is more than aptly named.
Displaying Kirk's absolutely breath-taking grasp of the full breadth and depth of nearly all genres of contemporary and traditional music-secular as well as sacred-it leaps so far above and beyond even his greatest previous work that it could be thought of indeed as a daring but ever-engrossing rebirth of one of modern music's already most fertile minds. With dramatic spoken narratives laid atop cinematic soundscapes, interspersed between 11 Kirk originals (with help from the late Rich Mullins on "He Reigns") of profound lyrical substance, Kirk continues to speak to millions of people of all walks and persuasions.
But with a title that clearly portends evolution, and images of Kirk as a young boy on the packaging, it's clear that there are some serious philosophical changes going on in this "rebirth" as well.
