Newsboys - Symphony Lyrics

Video

Newsboys - Symphony (Official Lyric Video)

Meaning & Inspiration

I’ve spent a lot of evenings sitting on my porch, watching the light fade, running my fingers over the worn leather of an old hymnal. My hands are stiff now—arthritis has a way of claiming the tools you once used to build things. I listen to Newsboys, and I’m struck by how different their noise is from the slow, steady dirges that marked my own early faith. There is a lot of kinetic energy here. It’s loud. It’s urgent.

"What good is a heart kept within a cage?"

That line caught me off guard. When you’re young, that sounds like a rally cry, a reason to jump and shout and make sure the whole world knows you’re alive for God. But when the arthritis sets in and the world narrows down to the size of a room or a hospital bed, a "caged" heart feels a lot more like a reality than a choice. I think about Paul, sitting in a damp cell in Rome. He wasn’t exactly free to be a symphony for the masses. He was shackled. Yet, he wrote about being poured out like a drink offering.

Is a caged heart useless? The song pushes for an outward, loud expression of glory. It demands that the drums be played. But what happens when the drums are silent? What happens when you can’t carry a tune anymore, or your body refuses to move in time with the rhythm?

I wonder if we focus too much on the "symphony"—the big, orchestral, collective noise—and forget that some of the loudest praise I’ve ever heard happened in the quiet. It happened when a friend, dying of cancer, simply whispered "Holy" through cracked lips. That wasn't a symphony; that was a solitary, struggling note. But it felt more like the sound of heaven than anything I’ve heard on a stage.

Perhaps the "cage" isn't the problem. Maybe the cage is just the vessel that keeps the music from dissipating into the air too quickly. When I look at my own life, the moments where I felt most "caged"—by grief, by failure, by the simple fading of my own strength—are exactly where the melody became true. It stopped being about the performance of a life and started being about the endurance of one.

I’m not sure I agree with the idea that we’re wasting our joy if we’re not loud. Sometimes, the most honest thing you can do is just sit still and wait for the breath to come back. God doesn’t just hear the thunder; He hears the hitch in the breath, too. If my life is meant to be a melody, I suspect it’s a bit more ragged than this track suggests. But that’s all right. I think He likes the cracks in the voice.