Granger Smith didn’t take his big life change lightly.
In an interview with ET Canada’s Carlos Bustamante, the singer and preacher opened up about his decision to retire from country music to focus on his ministry.
Smith announced his retirement earlier this month in an Instagram message, explaining to fans, “Being a musician was never a prison, but this is a new passion, a new focus, a new direction that I believe is going to allow me to focus more on individual people and their lives, which is ultimately why I started music touring in the very beginning.”
In his conversation with ET Canada, Smith said that despite personally feeling the need to give up music to serve God, he did have financial concerns for both himself and his band.
“I’ve done this a long time, and not just me paying the bills, but there’s 14 guys that travel just in the in the road crew and the band. And some of them have been with me 13, 14 years and they have families,” he said.
“So it’s like, you know, ‘We’ve got busses and a semi-truck and all this gear, and you’re telling me, Granger, just because you got this feeling, you’re going to cut all this off, you’re going to tell all these families, they got to go find another job just because you have a feeling? Because you’re saying you can’t reconcile something?'” Smith continued. “That will drive a man insane through a lot of sleepless nights, knowing that that announcement was coming.”
Smith also had kind things to say about his record label, BMG, who have supported his decision to retire, particularly after he and wife Amber lost their 3-year-old son in a drowning incident in 2019.
“They saw it coming,” he artist said. “Since since we lost our son, they saw a change in me and a change in direction, a change in purpose and what I wanted to accomplish from my platform. So they let me go.”
After leaving music, Smith is also opening himself to new opportunities, including becoming an author with, with his first book coming in August, and a publishing deal for four more after that.
“What if the whole back half of my life is, instead of writing songs for albums, it’s writing books and then going on on speaking tours and supporting those books and hearing people story and diving in and maybe focusing more on their stories so that I could write something in that area,” Smith said. “I think that’s an interesting side of the back half of my life.”