Texas Soul Singer Wrestles with ‘the Old Man’ and Finds God’s Grace in First Album

Author - Umn ministry

June 10, 2022

“Because of the faith we put in Jesus, we get to write a different story.”

Micah Edwards does not want to become like his father.

At 27, the retro soul singer from Houston has reached the age when many men slip into a resemblance. It just happens. The timbre in their voices, the way they couch a phrase, or how they respond to a situation seems, suddenly, exactly like their fathers’.

And it doesn’t feel like a choice, but the manifestation of inherited traits. The re-expression of psychic wounds. Repeated family patterns, emerging as unshakable identity. Is this who I am?

The King James Bible has a term for the self you recognition and don’t want to be: “the old man,” a colloquial phrase for “father” and a synonym for the sin a Christian has to struggle to put off. Edwards knows the feeling.

He is a father himself now. His baby was born just a few weeks ago. He picks up his son, Benjamin David, while he talks on the phone.

“I just believed this lie from the Enemy, You’re going to be just like him,” Edwards told CT. “But because of the faith we put in Jesus, we get to write a different story. The Lord brought me out of chains, believing I was doomed to repeat what I saw.”

That’s what his album, Jean Leon, is about: the choices Edwards’s father made, what that did to the family, and how, by faith, he will be different from him. The title comes from the combination of his parents’ middle names. Three years in the making and long teased online—while his previous single “Moments” racked up seven million streams—the album releases Friday, June 10.

“There was a moment in time I believed,” Edwards sings on the title track, “I could never escape your reality / But that was yesterday, ...