It almost goes without saying. Of course, Leigh Nash grew up singing in church, but it wasn’t like you might think.
She wasn’t the golden haired angel singing the solo in the Christmas pageant or the powerhouse vocalist in the junior high choir. She was the girl in the pew on Wednesday nights, sitting between her Sunday school teaching mother and her church librarian grandmother, listening to her grandmother’s sweet voice, just beginning to discover her own.
“I remember wishing that I could hear myself,” Leigh says. “I thought, ‘These people need to stop singing so maybe God could hear me a little better.’ Even as shy as I was, I had the desire to be heard.”
For Leigh, the church was a calm, safe nest in a not-so-calm childhood, a place she witnessed real passion for God, where she encountered the music that first calmed and lifted her spirits.
Set for a November 15 release on Kingsway Music, Hymns & Sacred Songs—the first of three worship projects in the works—marks Leigh Nash’s rediscovery of the sacred songs that stirred her imagination, long before her career ever took a turn toward stardom.
Who knew that a shy young girl in New Braunfels, Texas, would grow up to become the unforgettable, Dove Award-winning, Grammy-nominated voice that breathed life into such massive pop hits as “Kiss Me,” “There She Goes” and “Breathe Your Name.” As lead vocalist for Sixpence None the Richer, a group she started with friend Matt Slocum in high school, Leigh’s voice has taken her to stages all over the world.
After the band went on hiatus in 2004, Leigh released her first solo records, Blue on Blue, and a Christmas album, Wishing For This, both in 2006. She collaborated with ambient dance band, Delerium, on Fauxliage in 2007. In 2008, Nash and Slocum reunited as Sixpence None the Richer to record Dawn of Grace, and are set to release Lost in Transition in early 2012. Since then, Leigh has contributed to projects by Amy Grant, Jars of Clay, Matthew West and others.
Her professional successes notwithstanding, life has offered up its share of personal challenges in recent years: the joyful arrival of her son, Henry, a painful divorce, and the death of her father. And in the midst of all of it, Leigh has discovered the reality of God’s grace and comfort firsthand.