For over three decades, Kirk Franklin has risen to become a powerful figure in contemporary gospel music. His music, especially, is distinguished as a striking case of when the sacred meets the secular. It’s arrived more like a bridge builder for the spiritually displaced, earning Franklin a massive fanbase across America and beyond.  

From the earth-shaking bounce of his 1997 hits, “Stomp” and “The Storm Is Over Now,” to the timeless refuge of his earlier classic, “Silver and Gold”, Franklin’s discography has always served as a sanctuary for those navigating the critical, fragile space between youth and self-discovery.

Franklin has built a career by speaking directly into the spaces the traditional church often overlooks, reaching young people wrestled by doubt, searching for acceptance, and seeking something real amid a noisy world.

Now, with his 14th solo studio album, I Am What I Am, Franklin continues to stretch the boundaries of inspirational music. The lead single, “This Time” a seismic collaboration with Memphis rapper GloRilla flips the iconic Mandrill horn line famously known from Shawty Lo’s “Dey Know,” fusing hip-hop grit with choir-driven spiritual resolve. It’s more than a crossover track; it feels like a United Nations of culture, bridging generations, backgrounds, and worldviews under a shared experience of triumph over hardship.

By shifting the intent of a secular anthem into a vessel for grace, Franklin proves once again that his ministry is not interested in preaching to the choir, but in building a table large enough for everyone to pull up a chair. This writer had the honor of sitting down with the legendary musician, for Deeds, to discuss his new chapter, his heart for the culture, and what it truly means to step into who you are.

GLORIA for Deeds: Kirk, looking at the state of the world right now, what do you think people are starving for most?

Hope. Hope! Hope! It is so easy for the context of hopelessness to lead a person’s emotional, psychological state right now because there’s so much news, there’s so much reality, there’s so much disparity in these marginalized spaces that most Black and Brown people occupy, that hopelessness is just running wild. And so to be able to have hope is a currency that is very rare right now, and we’re very deficient of it. And I think that the last couple of decades of just turning up and being lit didn’t always leave us with some parachutes, some life vests, you know what I mean? Some tools to be able to hang in there now that the water’s kind of getting a little bit high.

You’ve always connected with the youth. Why do you think young people are so hungry for spiritual grounding today?

Well, it’s because I think that, first of all, I believe that the generation and it started with my generation, especially the generation after is that you had a generation of people that made it a commitment that they were not going to force their children to go to church the way they were forced to go to church. And so, there was a generation that kept that promise, and so we saw the decline of young people engaging in church, and being aware of church, and being introduced to the conversation of faith and all of the things that really were the components of how our people, especially in this country survived. So this generation of Millennials and Gen Xers that were not raised in any faith culture, they’re hungry. And they’re deficient. It’s because it was a generation that didn’t force them to go, that didn’t force them to engage. But it still doesn’t mean that they are not created for it, or that they’re not wired for the divine, for the eternal. So a lot of it is the fault of the generation, and so now we’ve got to make sure that we do everything we can to try to bring them back. And to try to create safe places for conversations, and questions, and dialogue, because they’re not a generation that you can just dominate with religious rhetoric like it was my generation. My generation, “Oh, we’ll just go pray about it,” or “Don’t question God.” They want to know why!

For anyone watching who is exhausted and running on empty right now, how do you anchor your spirit when life gets chaotic?

I think that you first get a lot of that anchoring before life gets crazy. I think that, unfortunately, because we haven’t done a good job of being proactive, of educating, and informing, and engaging, now a lot of people are just catching up. A lot of people are trying to figure out how to swim while the storm is happening, and that’s tough. So it’s going to take a line of people that have already been through the storms, that are now coming kind of on the other side to be able to grab people and kind of pull them out of the water. “Each one, reach one” is going to be a very important component moving forward, as I think that we are going to need help from the community as people are trying to find their way to dry land.

Your new single ‘This Time’ brings together gospel, heavy trap drums, and 2000s R&B with GloRilla. How do cross-genre collaborations like this help you reach a generation that might never step into a traditional church?

I think that music is such a universal language that that’s where it starts. It starts with trying to present music that can speak through the noise and still be true to the message, but the candy is the wrapping for the medicine. Music is the candy that you wrap the medicine in, right? And so, I think you have to be intentional. You got to be creative, try to be innovative to make sure that if that’s the goal, then you’ve got to be aware, you got to be informed. You got to know what’s happening sonically and within culture and society so that when you speak in the language, you are speaking to a community that doesn’t feel that your opportunity is now antiquated.

On your tracks, you blend live vocals, spoken declarations, and pre-recorded playback. How do you decide when a song needs you to speak live over the track versus letting the playback carry the moment?

I don’t know, that’s a great question. I don’t know the how and the why of all of this, and I think that is the mystery of music, right? The mystery of music is that you may go in thinking you have a plan, but as soon as you hit that record button, something else can happen. There’s such a fluidity to the process of creating, that a lot of times when things are done… I always laugh and chuckle at these post-interviews that artists make, because if we were to tell the truth, as artists, man, a lot of times we don’t know what we’re doing! On my mama, Queen, we don’t know what we doing! If God don’t speak, we ain’t got nothing to talk about.

‘This Time’ isn’t just a song, it’s built around a raw cry for deliverance from addictions, toxic cycles, and lingering pain. What made right now the right moment to release that specific message to the culture?

I think that it is divine, because this song has been done since January or February with GloRilla’s verse. So this song was sitting around for the last 6 to 7 months.

“In a world obsessed with fast trends, as someone who has guarded his creative vision for decades, how do you build music that actually lasts?”

I don’t know. God again. Sometimes I’m going to suck at interviews, because there are some questions I will never have the answer to, and I am okay with that. It’s just awkward when you have to do interviews and you are expected to have some type of sense, but I have been in it too long, and I’ve seen too much of the invisible hand of God to even assume that I’d be having something to do with anything.

“Given your position and how freely you allow God to move through you, can you consciously sense when the Holy Spirit takes over and Kirk steps aside during the creative process?”

Great question. As I try to find the language, I think that I would say that that is the general feeling that I’m experiencing at almost every state of doing music. That doing music for me is so much of a confirmation of the existence of God. Like how stuff just comes from nowhere… I can just be sitting at a table, or in my bed at night, or at a stoplight, or at a gas station, and it’s like, “Where’d that come from? What is that?”

When you hear a melody that is so familiar, and it seems like, “Why didn’t I write this before?” Like it feels like a melody that is so reachable, so accessible… why at 30 years am I doing this melody? To get that at 56, it’s like: where’d that come from, and where’s that been? So for me, that is so divine when you know you ain’t got nothing to do with that because that’s bigger than you.

“When the music stops and the crowd goes home, how do you protect your peace as a husband and father?”

I try to prepare for it all before that happens. It’s still not easy. There’s still at times crash and burn, there’s still at times the detox needed… and especially now that we’ve empty-nested and there’s not as much noise and traffic running around me, it is even harder to find a space that is comfortable in the silence. But those come with the package. I’ve resolved and come to conclusions: everything ain’t going to be fixed this side of heaven, everything ain’t going to be answered this side of heaven, everything is not going to be completed this side of heaven. Every one of your prayers will not be answered on this side. So I’ve come to resolve that there are just realities that come with what I signed up to do, that it’s just part of the journey.

“What do you know about God’s grace today that you didn’t understand 20 years ago?”

That I don’t have to be perfect to receive it. That perfectionistic mentality is driving us crazy. It’s making us sleepless, we are losing hair, we are going crazy because we think that we have to have it all buttoned up for God to say go, when we’ve got this book of examples of prostitutes, murderers, and hoes, and liars… And not only does He love me, it is also the revelation I’m still coming to that He likes me. Which for me even has more gravity, because you can love somebody and not like them.

“Your upcoming album is titled I Am What I Am. What was the core message or energy that birthed this specific title and project?”

For 30 years now, there’s been so much commentary on: Who am I? Is he sincere? Is he serious? He works with this person, we’ve seen him cussing, we’ve seen him on Oprah, we’ve seen him working with folk that don’t, you know, dancing on stage and doing stuff that doesn’t seem like it fits… and I’ve heard it all. I’m not able to fully explain everything about me except for: I have to live my imperfections out publicly, I have to live my growth out publicly, I have to live my love out publicly. Whether you agree with it, disagree with it, accept it, or don’t accept it, I’m saying that I’m okay with your decision of how you want to structure your thought of me, because I just am what I am. Whatever you think about me, I am what I am.

“What did the studio process look like for this new album, and was there a track where the arrangement or vocal delivery completely caught you off guard?”

The process for the studio album was trying to experiment with different sonic sounds, different ideas, different things that I hadn’t worked on before just trying to see what was happening currently, and taking modern sounds to see how well they connect with this message that is mostly found in gospel music.

The song that really caught me off guard that was a shock to me was the Afrobeat one. I was shocked at how good and authentic it turned out, because nobody co-wrote that song with me. It was me listening to Afrobeat music for about an hour or two, listening to all the top 10 Afrobeat songs, and God loaned me that idea. I went into the piano booth and started downloading the melody, the cadence, the lyrics, and I felt very humbled at trying something different that still sounded good.

“For anyone who feels like their past mistakes broke their purpose, how do they turn that pain into power?”

By celebrating what it’s done in you. I think a lot of times we get lost in the damage that was done to get there, that we need a paradigmatic shift into now celebrating, “I’m here!” And this is what I learned, and this is what I’ve become, and this is what I’m going to do with it. Sometimes we can still be bathing in the wounds of “it hurt so hard, it was so difficult, it was so painful” and those things are true! But if you never get a chance to get to the celebratory space, then what you do is you trigger your neurological space and your spiritual space to just stay there, and now you’re on a loop. You never get emotionally and psychologically past to the finish line. Yeah, we may have crossed bloody, we may have crossed bleeding, our ankle barely hanging on, we may have some scars or be stinky, but yo, we crossed the finish line! So the focus needs to be on more than anything: we crossed the finish line!

“When someone turns on this new album, what shift do you hope takes place in their room?”

Here’s Jesus any way you want it. You want Sunday morning, you want Sunday night, you want Nigeria, you want Nashville, you want the trap whatever it is you want, it’s Jesus wherever you at. Wherever you at, hit play.

‍