Gospel icon, singer-songwriter and producer Israel Houghton is sharing a new live album today, Feels Like Home: The Quarantine Worship Experience, recorded with his band New Breed at Houghton’s family home in November as an archive and extension of his initiative to bring his community safely online over the last year. Starting first with the #WorshipWednesdays series nearly a year ago, Feels Like Home has grown out of the natural sense of innovation and evolution that Houghton has carried through his career for over twenty years now, adapting the electricity and inventive spontaneity of his gospel performance to an at-home format.“NewBreed celebrated our 20th year together in 2020.” Houghton explains. “Though the entire landscape changed with how we do concerts and touring, we knew it was still very important to come together. I’m grateful for the sacrifices made by everyone on our team to carefully come together and participate in this offering. Truth be told, it’s one of the most rewarding worship experiences I’ve ever been a part of.”
Feels Like Home was streamed live from Houghton’s family home in New York last November with an impressive group of musicians both familiar and new to New Breed, all of whom agreed to quarantine and test for COVID-19 prior to gathering. Performing the entire show facing each other in a circle, the improvisatory looseness and sheer inspiration of the session is a warm and glowing reminder of gospel’s intimate roots as a communal religious celebration and experience. Digging deep, Houghton’s performance leading the group alongside his wife Adrienne is inspired and inventive while the fly-on-the-wall perspective highlights the lyrical comfort of the supporting musicians and numerous special guests who take an easy grip of the performance during their features.
Feels Like Home, and its #WorshipWednesdays roots, are a monument of Houghton’s career-long inspiration to explore and reinvent the possibilities of group worship dynamics even as communities started reforming online throughout the ongoing pandemic. Since the release of his first studio album in 1997, Houghton has looked to the live performance format as a means to that very end, including 2004’s Live From Another Level and 2005’s Alive in South Africa, the latter of which won the GRAMMY® Award for Best Traditional Gospel Album. Houghton would later take home three awards for Best Pop / Contemporary Gospel Album and eventually a Best Gospel Album award for 2015’s Covered: Alive In Asia, his most recent live archive prior to Feels Like Home. In addition to his 6 GRAMMYs® Israel Houghton has also been honored with 16 GMA Dove Awards.
Feels Like Home: The Quarantine Worship Experience is available to stream or purchase here.
