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I had never cried off of hip hop before--then Lecrae.  The 33-year-old rap star had just gotten hype at the McDonald's Inspiration Celebration concert in Maryland, performing his Christian-message hits, jumping higher than any Que Dawg, and getting the crowd dancing like it was Friday night (instead of a Thursday evening). But for his final song, "Just Like You," Lecrae cut the music. We stopped dancing. We just listened. He started rapping about a drug-addled father who was never there and the Father who always was, who changed him, and whom he now lives to be "just like." And we started worshipping. 

Teens, young adults, even older attendees who had only come to see Tamela Mann and veteran gospel artists John P. Kee, Vickie Winans and Smokie Norful, were on their feet, hands in the air, thanking God. As the spirit in this song filled me up, gratitude spilled out of me, too, for the obvious gift God had given to this artist to speak words that touched us all in different ways and for different reasons, but ended with the same result: total praise. Lecrae is a man on fire, unashamed and on a mission.

Just before he blew us all away, I caught up with the married, father of three--with six albumsto his name--backstage to talk about the message behind the music, those persistent Jay-Z rumors, and the pressure of fame and faith.

Lecrae: "Gravity" really represents the falleness of this world and the weight and heaviness of it all. And no matter how much power, pleasure, or possession you can acquire, there's still that weight. You can be the richest person in the world, it's not going to stop your mother from passing away. Pleasure is just this endless chase. [I'm] just saying that we all want to be free from the gravity, everyone is looking for that and [with this album] I just tried to give some dialogue about what it looks like, to be free from the weight of this world.

Lecrae: Yeah, you know, as I've gotten a little more acknowledgement in mainstream music, one of the things I've noticed is that there are so many stigmas attached to names. And I think my music comes with a message that I want everybody to hear and I don't want a stigma to keep a person from hearing the message. I will obviously never deny being a Christian, that's my faith, my identity. But I don't want my music to be categorized with a presupposition. So sometimes people hear a term and they say, "Aw. I don't like it." Before they even give the music a chance. My big thing is just getting rid of all of the presuppositions so people can just sit with the music and allow it to speak to them.

Lecrae: No, no, no. If you're swimming in the deep end of the spiritual pool, so to speak, you're farther along in your faith, I think the music is still very rich. There are a lot of parables in there, a lot of depth that you would have to come through to really grasp the message.  [You may hear] cliché terms like, "Don't live for this world." They're cliché terms but when you  start unpacking that and what that looks like in song and story, I think that really helps a more mature believer say, "Man, that's deep. That's enriching and fulfilling."

Lecrae: It gets to a point where, anything that is not just blatant, if there's any kind of symbolism, it just gets equated as negative or it's demonized. The Bible uses plenty of symbols so I think symbolism is not bad. There are symbols all throughout the video. There's a wolf, which symbolizes the predatory nature of us (humans), we just want and want and want and hunger. There's color schemes where one young lady is wearing green to show the pursuit of wealth and there's a deer head in there because it's a wealthy party because if you go to any wealthy person's house, they're showing off their accomplishments. So it's really just a lot of that kind of symbolism. None of it was intended for evil.