“The end of last year was about as low as I’ve ever been in my life,” Big Daddy Weave frontman Mike Weaver reveals as he calls in from his sister-in-law’s house in Navarre, Florida, right down the street from where he and his brother, Jay, grew up. The visit to his hometown is bittersweet. Weaver is there to attend his niece’s graduation, an occasion the family is happy to celebrate. Yet, they also can’t help but acknowledge the elephant in the room. Tomorrow, when his niece walks across the stage to receive her diploma, there will be an empty seat in the stands.
Following years of health challenges, Jay went to be with the Lord in early 2022, leaving behind a wife and kids, Weaver and his family, and a host of bandmates that felt like they lost a brother, too.
As Weaver sits in a sunlit home office sharing about the family milestone, both laughter and tears fill his eyes. You’d never know that just months ago, he was barely making it from one day to the next.
“I felt like I was dying. It was a very terrible time,” the singer confesses. “Every night I was going on stage and bleeding on people. It wasn’t sustainable.”
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In the final months of 2024, the weight of grief he had been carrying for years finally caught up to him. Prior to losing his brother, Weaver had also lost both of his parents. Intrinsically responsible for those around him, he was not only guiding his band, he was also leading his family. To cope, Weaver was putting on a front, trying to be strong for everyone else…until he, himself, eventually broke.
“I was trying to say the right things; I was trying to do the right things. I didn’t even know myself,” he admits.
A series of life-giving moments slowly rekindled the flame that once burned inside of him. But first, he wouldn’t be human if he didn’t contemplate throwing in the towel. “After 25 years, I was looking for a way out, man,” he says of the band that’s defined his life for more than two decades. “But if I don’t do this, what do I do? I don’t know how to do anything else.”
After Weaver and his bandmates — Jeremy Redmon, Joe Shirk, Brian Beihl and newest member Raul Alfonso, who now helms bass — made the decision to move forward together, the frontman says he started asking different questions; and that was, possibly, the genesis of his ongoing journey toward healing.
“Why? I just found that to be, very quickly, not a productive question. Because I’ve never known anybody, thus far, who’s had a good answer for that,” he remarks. “So, instead, I started asking, ‘God, what are You doing right now?’ And then, all of a sudden, I could see Him everywhere.”
Even though his spiritual eyes were wide open, that didn’t mean the pain instantly went away. It did help Weaver, however, to anticipate good things every day. This extended into the band’s current tour in support of their ninth studio effort, “Let It Begin,” across which “The Truth” singer Megan Woods and rising singer-songwriter Ben Fuller are providing direct support. Fuller’s presence on the road has been something of a Godsend for Weaver.
“Ben Fuller is a walking revival,” Weaver says, with an unconscious grin spreading across his face. “Ben is just burning up for God. He’s kicking tail and taking names for Jesus — not just at the shows, but, literally, all day long. If you don’t want Jesus, you don’t want to be anywhere near Ben Fuller.”
Witnessing Fuller’s unabashed enthusiasm and passion for God reminded Weaver of his old self — the part of him that died with his brother.
“Sometimes when you’ve been through pain, you get accustomed to living a certain way; and I was going through the motions. But when I got out with Ben, and we began to minister, and we began to see the Lord move, man, it dawned on me, wait a minute, this is all muscle memory now,” he says. “And that just progressively began this explosive thing inside of me. Glory to God, I felt like I got a new heart; and I started to get excited about still getting to do this.”
He also stepped back into a routine of early morning walks at a park near his house — a park where he used to walk in the months before he met his now wife. When he’s restless, the singer says he’ll wake up at 4:15 a.m. and eagerly lace up his sneakers for some one-on-one time spent with the Lord in prayer. His soundtrack for these early morning walks is routinely “Fountains” by Josh Baldwin; but it was in traversing those long-forgotten, yet familiar, paths that Weaver began to release some of the tension he was holding.
“The Lord gave me permission to let go. I really feel like God spoke to me and said, ‘You only have to concern yourself with what I’m doing right now. You have permission not to worry about anything else,’” he says of what he learned as he turned down the noise. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know how to do that well yet, but man, that changed something in my life. Now, I catch myself in the middle of worrying about something and go, wait a minute, I can bring this to Jesus. He said I don’t have to worry about this.”
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The recording process for “Let It Begin” also became an instrumental part of Weaver’s catharsis. When he couldn’t find the words to articulate his emotions, the Lord would send friends with songs they had written, many of which made the final album. “It was so neat. It just felt like so many other artists in the greater Christian songwriting community came running, because they knew we were hurting; and they know how to turn pain into a song,” Weaver shares of outside contributions he received, like Zach Williams’ cut, “Stranger No More,” and the group’s chart-topping duet with Katy Nichole, “God Is In This Story.” “I’m reading the lyrics of these songs, but these songs are reading me somehow,” he adds.
One of those songs arrived in the form of the project’s anthemic title cut, penned by Matt Maher and GRAMMY®-winning songwriter Emily Weisband. “Matt Maher is such a leader in the greater Christian community. He has such a great way of saying things. I could never have said it like that,” Weaver says of the lyrical twists and turns that comprise “Let It Begin,” “but when I sing it every night, I find out it’s more true every time I sing it.”
Surprisingly, as Weaver was choosing tracks for the new collection, he also uncovered some timely gems from his archives. One of those is a selection called “Constantly,” which he wrote with Bernie Herms before Jay passed. Yet, it wasn’t until recently that he actually started living one of the original offering’s most pivotal lines: “You’re the song that rises up in me when hope has all but died.”
“I wrote that before I even stepped into the depths of darkness that I’ve known,” he attests, “but there’s hope at the bottom of every song.”
“Let It Begin” might not be void of sorrow, but it’s a real-time picture of a band who’s healing one day at a time. “When you suffer loss, it’s just going to take a minute sometimes. But that doesn’t mean Jesus has given up on you, even though you feel like giving up,” Weaver says. “We can trust Him, knowing He’s holding us even when there are so many things we don’t understand.”
Now that these songs are officially in the hands of the fans, it won’t be long before the healing multiplies. Yet, despite his hopes for the record and the collective’s rigorous touring schedule for the remainder of the year, Weaver says the sum of his band’s story will never add up.
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For starters, the K-LOVE Fan Award-winning group just closed a six-year gap between albums. “Everything in the music industry is held by some kind of metric. You count it, and you measure it; but the Lord doesn’t work that way,” Weaver contends. “Jesus will leave the 99 for the one. That’s a bad business decision by Nashville industry standards, but that’s the heart of Almighty God.”
Weaver also can’t make sense of the math when he reflects on Big Daddy Weave’s career, decorated with shared experiences, once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, chart-topping hits and a shelf of awards. “We never should be here this long. God has sustained us for 25 years with a stupid name like Big Daddy Weave,” he laughs. “We should not be here right now, except for the fact that Jesus just makes a way.”
