Charles Wesley Godwin

Venue: Orpheum

Live Nation presents Charles Wesley Godwin: The Christian Name Tour

For Charles Wesley Godwin, music – and more specifically, songwriting – has forever been a direct reflection of what lies on his heart. 2019’s Seneca is a young man’s reflection on place, on upbringing, on a way of life that is and always will be his native West Virginia. 2021’s How the Mighty Fall is a treatise on mortality and the contemporary, commonplace entanglements that threaten to derail us. 2023’s fan-favorite Family Ties is an equal-parts tribute to and dissection of complex, albeit achingly beautiful familial dynamics. And now, with Christian Name, Godwin’s much-anticipated fourth full-length studio LP, the musician returns with his most vividly compelling, stunningly sincere, and spiritually profound collection of songs yet.

In 2024, Godwin and his wife, Samantha, suffered an unthinkable tragedy when their third child, Samuel, was stillborn. “To put it simply, my heart was broken,” Godwin says quietly. “It took me a few months to get myself back up off the ground, so to speak, and get back into the game and to write songs again.” And while the human instinct following such loss might be to turn away from the divine, Godwin says the devastating experience recommitted him to God and firmly cemented his faith. “Coming out of that, I recommitted to my faith in God more so than I have at any point in my life. It really changed me,” he says, speaking to not only his personal transformation over the past few years but also to how this distinctly spiritual quest is reflected in Christian Name. “The point of this project was to point to God,” Godwin continues, “and let people know he’s really helped me through this time in my life.”

So did songwriting: Godwin says that while music had always been a form of therapy for him, recommitting to his craft in the wake of such a trying time was more therapeutic than ever before. “These songs really meant a lot to me,” he says, explaining how the 12 songs that comprise Christian Name are, in many ways, snapshots of his passage towards sacred absolution. “There’s parts of me and parts of the things that I’ve gone through in the last couple years that are in each and every song on this album.”