Album marks singer's return since family's loss of daughter last year

Beauty Will Rise is a collection of 12 songs from Steven Curtis Chapman, created in the 18 months since the loss of his daughter Maria in a tragic auto accident. Part lament, part praise, part grief, part hope, part wrestling and part pondering, the tracks are "personal psalms," Chapman said.

Due to the personal nature of the project, Chapman made the album in a total vacuum while on tour last fall and spring. From Maria's Big House of Hope—an orphanage for special—needs children in China financed by Chapman's Shaohannah's Hope foundation—he wrote on his blog that the orphanage "represents something that we never would have scripted, asked for or imagined. But we are right in the middle of part of the beauty that God is bringing from the pain and ashes of our last year."

Chapman said he began writing a couple of months after his daughter's May 2008 death. "I felt that God was allowing me to write my own songs, and that's really what these are to me, a collection of my own psalms, laments, ponderings and God meeting me and my family in the grief and in the midst of our journey of the last year."

Of the first single, "Heaven is the Face," Chapman said that "obviously heaven has become a much more real place and something I long for more now than ever before. I can't wait to see the face of my little girl that I long to see again."

Sparrow Records released a CD single to Christian retail and digital markets in September.

To order, call 800-877-4443 or go to www.emicmgdistribution.com.

Kathy Maynard is director, B2B marketing and sales operations for EMI CMG Distribution.

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