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World premiere video: Chris Tomlin's 'Home'

Cindy Watts
The Tennessean

With more than 7 million albums and nearly 9 million digital tracks sold, multi-platinum selling Christian singer Chris Tomlin is one of Christian music’s biggest stars.

Chris Tomlin

He’s collected 15 No. 1 singles, a Grammy Award and Time called him “most likely the most often sung artist anywhere” with more than 40 million people singing them each week. Tomlin’s songs have been translated into Hindi, Indonesian, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Afrikaans and Mandarin. CEO of Christian Copyright Licensing International Howard Rachinski said Tomlin is “the most prolific songwriter in the United States now, in this past decade.”

Even with such a large song catalog to his credit, Tomlin said filming cinematic, storytelling videos is a rarity for him. He said most of his songs are best conveyed with life performance videos, but that he felt his new single Home --  which debuted today on www.tennessean.com and www.usatoday.com -- begged for story-telling treatment. The singer aligned with director TK McKamy and the men collaborated to create the cinematic clip that is set in the time frame that’s after death but before heaven.

Cherubs running around on clouds is some graphic designer’s idea of Heaven, he said. On earth, Tomlin said, Heaven is reflected in homes as they’re meant to be – warm, full of love, acceptance and freedom.

“I just love the power of the word home and when I’m speaking of eternal life, I want to portray heaven that way,” said the Nashville-based Christian singer.

The video shows Tomlin running through a dead trees toward a brightly lit, sparsely decorated house. When he reaches it, the front doors swing open on their own and he hesitates before walking inside.

McKamy wanted to avoid overused clichés in the video so he approached it with nuance and subtle messaging. He points to an over-turned hour glass with sand balanced on each side, mimicking the infinity symbol. There’s a compass spinning out of control to indicate different physical perimeters in earth and heaven. And, fire in a glass house is McKamy’s nod to biblical references of the holy spirit as a fire.

“I wanted to create a video that had a mysteriousness to it and allow the viewer to fill out the mysteriousness with their own perspective,” he said.

“How do you make a visual out of Heaven?” Tomlin said. “No one has ever seen it. The Bible does describe it but you can’t get your head around it in some ways. All I kept coming back to is light, it’s filled with light. So we set out on this path to make this video that tried to capture a little bit of the emotion of going to a place called home.”

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