At the beating heart of Nashville band Judah & The Lion is a story of a deeply loyal chosen brotherhood, dating back to 2011 when Judah Akers and Brian MacdDonald became band mates in college. Judah & The Lion’s newest and sixth album,I Am A Prism, came after a period of soul searching, and in the midst of a welcome joyous new life milestone: Brian becoming a father again. The last three albums had documented some personally heavy topics – mental health and depression (2019’sPep Talks), heartbreak and divorce (2022’s Revival), and charting the stages of grief (2024’s The Process). On the other side of this trilogy of hard times and heartbreak, Judah & The Lion was at a creative crossroads. They took sometime off, parted ways with their management, and asked themselves some tough but necessary questions.
Judah explains, “We wanted to get really honest with ourselves about those kinds of deep internal questions. What do we bring that no one else brings? Why do we wanna make another record? Not like we were wanting to quit, but it was just like, let’s get back to the “why” of when we first started making music together. We do it because we want to help people. That’s the heart behind this.”
“We use our music to propel us through hard things in life and shoot us forward into a more hopeful space, without ignoring the really tough hard parts of being human, and I think that is why our fans relate to it.,” Brian adds. “And I think defining why somebody is connecting relating to the music that we’re putting out was a really important thing for us to discover before we went into making “I Am a Prism.”
Case in point, Judah & The Lion fans will likely recognize two songs on I Am A Prism from the band’s live shows last year-lead single “Maybe The Best Is Now” and the album’s midpoint track “Gravel Roads”.
“Maybe The Best Is Now” is a callback to a song from their last album, 2024’s The Process called “The Best Is Yet To Come”. It was introduced into their set last Spring as an encore, and Judah began teaching the chorus to their audience. While the crowd was singing along to“Maybe The Best Is Now”, the tape was rolling. Judah and Brian knew that when they got to the studio later that summer, they wanted to incorporate the voices of their fans into the studio recording. The work of exploring ways to ground their next album in what mattered most to Judah & The Lion had begun, finding the continuums that would celebrate their growth and evolution.
“A lot of this record is trying to connect the thread between our beginnings and this point,” Judah says. The album opener “I Am A Prism” is a powerful example, with multiple links to the opening track of their 2022 album Revival called, “Open Your Eyes”. “I Am A Prism” not only represents Judah’s personal transformation, but the transformation of the album itself after its title track was written, as well as who it was written for.
After so many years writing and recording music thatspoke to Judah’s personal battles, family hardships, grief and loss, Judah’s older brother Eli finally revealed that he had struggled to listen to any Judah & The Lion’s albums because the lyrics just made him too sad. After this illuminating conversation, Judah sat alone at his piano and wrote “I Am A Prism”. This revelatory and honest moment between brothers had crystalized what this album wanted to become, who it was for, and how to get there.
