LifeLight
At LifeLight Sioux Falls, the Nashville singer traced a career shaped by family music, catastrophe and the realization that entertaining a crowd was no longer enough.
The most revealing song Jesse LaBelle performed at LifeLight Sioux Falls began with a different name.
Before “Hey Jesus,” there was “Hey Rachel,” a love song written by a younger man searching for validation in another person. LaBelle kept the melody but redirected its attention after converting to Christianity. The change amounted to more than replacing one name with another.
“I’d been writing about the wrong kind of love,” he said. “My love songs had not been complete.”
It is a striking admission from someone who spent years writing and performing conventional pop and country songs. LaBelle has shared stages with Garth Brooks and Elton John, played Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe repeatedly and learned how to hold a room long before his music became explicitly Christian. Now he leads worship at Cross Point Church in Nashville and sings about the same hunger for connection, except the intended recipient has changed.
Horizontal songs became vertical ones, in his description—music no longer directed across a room toward another person, but upward.
That distinction runs through his 2025 six-song release, My Story. The title leaves little room for ambiguity. LaBelle considers those songs an account of where he stands now and, just as importantly, the person he no longer wants to pretend he is.
His history with music reaches back much further. LaBelle’s grandmother, Betty, was a recording artist, and some of his earliest memories involve singing back to her. Asked what remained of her voice after all these years, he did not mention range, technique or a particular song.
Sweetness was what survived.
“She had such a sweet voice, like a songbird,” LaBelle said.
He now uses the same word for his fiancée. Music and affection became associated early in his life, almost inseparable, passed between generations before he understood either one well enough to name it.
“Love and music, to me, have always been hand in hand,” he said. “It started with Betty.”
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The first Nashville room
LaBelle’s first performance in Nashville happened at one of the city’s most storied listening rooms.
He played an open-mic night at the Bluebird Cafe before moving to the city. The venue has since become a recurring stop rather than a single line on his résumé, but his affection for the room still carries the faint disbelief of someone who began in Nashville exactly where aspiring songwriters are told important careers begin.
“The Bluebird was actually the first place I ever played in Nashville, believe it or not,” he said. “That’s always been a special place.”
Years of larger stages followed. There were recognizable names, professional rooms and the learned mechanics of entertainment: reading an audience, shaping a set, knowing when to pull people closer and when to let the song do the work.
LaBelle no longer talks about those experiences as the highest form of what music can accomplish.
“The difference between that is everything,” he said when asked about entertaining people versus reaching them. “Reaching people is 100 times more important than entertaining people.”
Then he went further.
“I don’t think I reached anybody when I was entertaining them.”
It is probably too unforgiving an assessment of his earlier career. Songs reach people in ways their writers never see, including songs written before the artist has settled on what he believes. Still, LaBelle’s statement exposes how severely he now separates applause from purpose. He does not dismiss the old years as wasted, but he wishes he had understood then what worship later taught him: attention and connection are not automatically the same thing.
Four encounters with survival
The cross hanging from LaBelle’s neck carries more weight than its size suggests.
It contains copper recovered from bullet casings after LaBelle survived a shooting, melted into silver by his friend Mitchell Binder of King Baby Studio. The metal that once represented violence now rests against his chest as the object he values most.
“I couldn’t really believe it at the time,” LaBelle said. “You really melt bullet metal into a cross?”
He lifted the piece while talking, surrounded by other jewelry but leaving no doubt which item mattered. The copper remains visible inside the silver. Nothing about its origin has been concealed.
“It felt like salvation,” he said. “It literally felt like the most redemptive part of my story.”
The shooting was only one event in a compressed and brutal period. LaBelle also survived a fiery crash and the Nashville tornado before receiving a cancer diagnosis. Catastrophe had already arrived from the road, the sky and another person. Cancer was different. This time, the danger was inside him.
That was when he finally asked why.
“Strangely, I didn’t ask the question after the car crash or the tornado,” LaBelle said. “But it was the cancer. It was when it was inside of my own body—there was destruction.”
The answer he believes he received was short: “You are going to be okay.”
There is no attempt in LaBelle’s telling to make the sentence more ornate. He trusted it. Treatment and survival followed, adding another incident to a biography that can sound improbably severe when compressed into a few minutes onstage.
The bullet-cross prevents that history from becoming abstract. It can be touched. It catches the light. The object does not erase what happened; its meaning depends upon the damage remaining recognizable.
Two people in the room
LaBelle’s transition into Christian music did not begin on a festival stage. He spent a summer traveling with Community Worship Nights, visiting roughly 50 churches and learning how radically attendance could fluctuate.
Some nights brought 250 people.
Others brought two.
He performed anyway.
“We were just worshiping in God’s house to God’s people,” LaBelle said. “It didn’t really matter who was there. What mattered was that we were spreading the message.”
That experience offers a useful counterweight to his history on prominent stages. At the Bluebird, a songwriter can feel the pressure of every chair. A festival audience stretches past the immediate conversation. A nearly empty church provides nowhere for performer or listener to disappear. There are no crowd numbers large enough to validate the evening and no roar capable of disguising whether the song means what its singer says it means.
LaBelle’s career now contains all three rooms.
LifeLight gave him another: an open-air Christian festival where people arrive for music, ministry, food and the easy accessibility of a free event. Some listeners come prepared to worship. Others simply come close enough to hear.
“Hey Jesus” makes room for both. Its history remains audible even without knowing the original title. The song still uses the direct language of someone addressing a beloved, but the need underneath it has been reassigned. LaBelle did not destroy the old love song. He admitted it had been aimed at someone who could never carry everything he had placed upon her.
One changed name, and the rest of his catalog began turning with it.
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