Исполнительница Allie Paige отказалась от христианской музыки ради керамики и бразильских ритмов

Allie Paige has mastered the mug. For the past six months, the indie singer-songwriter has been taking ceramics classes with the goal of filling her kitchen with her own work. She has moved on to bowls. Plates, she said, are still out of reach. It is a small, unhurried way to spend an afternoon for an artist who spent her twenties inside church walls, first as the synth player in a worship band, then as the engineer who helped record its debut album out of a four-by-four shed behind her pastor’s house. Paige built a career on that foundation, releasing worship music alongside her own indie project before her sister’s death sent her faith, and her songwriting, somewhere she never expected it to go. A decade later, Paige has two solo albums behind her, a November tour opening for Jervis Campbell ahead of her, and a relationship with God that no longer resembles the one she grew up performing on stage. She has stepped back from worship leading entirely. She has traded contemporary Christian radio for 1970s Brazilian records. And she has started questioning whether the songs earning her the most streams are the ones she actually wants to be writing. “I used to be like, I’m a worship leader, and now I’m like, I’m not a worship,” Paige said. “I don’t want to do that. That’s not my calling.” Paige grew up in classical piano lessons she said she hated, and it was a community college radio production class, taken almost on a whim, that first got her hooked on producing. She started her own project not long after joining the church band, splitting her writing between worship music and everything else until the everything else won out. Her debut album, “Miles,” took three years to finish and came out in 2017. She dropped out of college to tour behind it, worked at a smoothie shop to cover the gap and spent the next decade nannying until she could finally go full time, about two and a half years ago. The years in between were not gentle. Not long after “Miles” came out, Paige’s sister died. Another family member later died by suicide. Her parents, she said, have been in crisis for years. Somewhere in the middle of it, a producer held her album hostage in a contract dispute so severe she had to rebuild the entire project, “His World,” from scratch. “Not everything ends well,” Paige said. “God is present, but he doesn’t stop bad things from happening.” She is careful to draw a distinction here. Paige still identifies as spiritually connected to God and still writes about him. She has walked away from the version of faith that came prepackaged with easy resolutions, the kind she said she was handed growing up and performed on stage for years. She refuses to write about God as though the story always makes sense. This refusal has started to cost her something, and she knows it. Paige has noticed that her best-performing songs follow a formula: pop structure, simple lyrics, spiritual language just digestible enough to travel. She has started catching herself writing toward it, chasing the version of a song that she knows will perform well before she has even finished writing it. “I’ve realized that my songs that perform the best have a formula,” Paige said. “I started to lean more into that because I’ve gotten to a place where I’m like, I just want to be successful, and I want my numbers up.” She released a song recently that she almost did not put out because she recognized the formula working in real time as she wrote it. It became one of her top-performing tracks. She is trying to find her way back from that, back to writing the way she did before an audience existed to please, back to what she called the point of art: saying something true and letting people take it or leave it. The search has led her somewhere unexpected, away from contemporary Christian radio and toward records that never mention church at all. Her last album, His World, was built almost entirely on a diet of Bossa Nova and reggae. She found a 1974 record by the Brazilian musician Jorge Ben Jor with a song about Jesus, sung in imperfect English, that she called one of the most incredible songs she has ever heard. She paired it with a 1960s record by Bossa Nova singer Maria Toledo and kept both on repeat for months, hunting for language about God that did not sound like a worship set. Her current influences run the same direction. She named Cleo Sol and Natalie Bergman as the two artists shaping her most, both women who write about faith and loss without flattening either one into a single tradition. Bergman wrote her album after losing both of her parents in a car accident. Paige said reading about that process, and hearing what came out of it, felt like a breath of fresh air after years of bedroom pop sameness. Outside music, Paige’s life has gotten quieter and, by her account, more peaceful. She got married about two years ago and has spent much of that time settling into it. She is deep into ceramics. She has taken up yoga. And after more than a decade of reading almost nothing but theology and self-help, she has started reading fiction again, a habit she said felt indulgent and unproductive until she gave herself permission to do it anyway. She recently finished “The Book Club for Troublesome Women” and cried. Before that, it was “The Midnight Library,” which she said left her sitting with the uncomfortable question of how many different lives she could still choose to live at 33. “I feel like I’m rewriting my life in a lot of ways,” Paige said. The rewriting extends to the music still ahead of her. She has two more live videos coming from “His World,” a November tour opening for Jervis Campbell up the West Coast and through Utah and Colorado, and two more full projects in progress: one with her brother, one under her solo pop name. She has not toured since 2020 and said she can count her live shows since then on one hand. Paige has little interest in returning to the version of herself who had it figured out. She would rather stay in the questions a little longer and see what comes of it.