Gospel artist Kelontae Gavin uses his voice to tell everyone what God has done for him.

The 24-year-old South Carolina native embodies joy, wisdom, and perspective grounded in his walk with the Lord. Almost a decade after going viral for singing the Rev. Paul Jones classic “I Won’t Complain” in his high school cafeteria, the vocal talent continues to sing with an understanding that only comes from singing about what he’s lived and an authority that is only given by the Holy Spirit.

After releasing his debut album, The Higher Experience, in 2018 and his sophomore album, The N.O.W. Experience, in 2021, Gavin returns with his third album, Testify, to continue telling the story of God’s faithfulness throughout his life. The album opens with a powerful intro by Tasha Cobbs Leonard, followed by eleven beautifully constructed musical numbers with three intimate spoken testimonies interwoven throughout.

BET spoke with Gavin about the inspiration behind the project, the importance of resting in God, sonoluminescence, and more. Read below.

BET: Your new album is called “Testify,” and it is a project where you share your testimony through story and song. What inspired your decision to go with that theme? What made you realize that now was the time to tell this part of your story?

I absolutely love that question. Testify is an album that I wanted to be very intentional, not just to name it Testify, but you’ll see in the album where there are actual real testimonies from real people who serve a real God. The Bible says in Revelation 12:11 “We overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony.” I’m 24 now and growing up in church, seeing a shortage of testimonials. Whether it’s going from trauma to triumph, breaking out of addictions, blessings, or increase, the list goes on and on. They used to have testimony service and we don’t have that anymore. I wanted to do something a little different that pulls people to testify about what God has done for them. One of the title tracks on the record is called “Testify” and I wrote that song because someone told me that a story that I shared about being healed from my childhood trauma helped them. In Gospel music, we don’t just sing from what God has done but we sing from what we’re having to go through. I said in the song, “I’ve seen too much, been through too much, He’s done so much. I’ve gotta testify.” So, Testify is an album to share with people to have some guts and tell somebody about the God you serve.

BET: The album opens with the great Tasha Cobbs Leonard referencing the story of Paul & Silas. She talks about the sound that sets prisoners free and says people will be set free through the voice of a man of God, Kelontae Gavin. How did this idea of freedom through sound influence your choice of lyric, instrumentation, production, melody, etc. in the creation of this project?

I absolutely love that Tasha used the story of Paul and Silas in the book of Acts. They were literally in a prison and most of the time, if we’re in prison, I don’t think we’re going to think about singing or praising God. If we’re real, our humanity sometimes overtakes our divinity. Sound is frequency. Paul and Silas are in jail, and they make a conscious decision to testify because they have experience with God. Anybody that is a believer and believes in Jesus Christ, has had an experience. Whether emotional or someone inspiring you to believe or to claim your salvation and audibly say out of your mouth what you believe. When we believe in Jesus, there is something attached to the relationship that makes it worth it and it’s something that we call worship. Worship is frequency. It is sound. We say that we believe that if we sing, God moves. We believe in the power of music. The story of Paul and Silas is the story of two men who make the decision to use their voices to have thanksgiving even in the midst of their traumatic experience of being in prison. I think that is powerful, even with this record. There is a scientific term called sonoluminescence and it says sound doesn’t convert into light, but sound produces light. I believe anyone who takes the initiative to worship creates an environment where God lives. The Bible says, “He inhabits the praises of His people.” Genesis 1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…And God said ‘Let there be light.” He said something, so the sound is frequency. It creates, it moves. I always wanted to be an initiator but also an igniter through my music to tell people, “Don’t let life take your voice. Make a sound.”

BET: Sticking with this theme of freedom through sound, when you look at all the tracks on this project, what was the most liberating song for you to create on this album & why?

The most liberating song for me to create on this album is called “Change.” You hear a lot about the Jesus that walks on water but not a lot about the Jesus that’s 30-something years old and He’s in the Garden of Gethsemane before He’s about to be crucified. Aka, that song talks about my humanity more than it talks about my theology. I get that Jesus is a way maker, a water-walking God, He heals the sick, raises the dead, gives sight to the blind, He’s a friend, He’s close. But what about the seasons when I feel He’s not as close? “Change” is a song that talks about the necessity of transforming or transfiguration. We go through seasons of transition that are not for our defeat and even if we lose people or lose things, it’s not a loss, it’s a lesson. We go through development. I wrote that song and hopefully people hear the lyrics. People come, people go but it’s called change. It’s necessary for our lives and for us to grow.

BET: This album has songs and contains spoken testimonies from three of your family members interwoven throughout. Having these personalized stories brings so much power to this album.  What was your process of selecting who you wanted to testify on this album? How did you place them strategically throughout the project to tell a fleshed-out story?

Fun fact about that. I was actually surprised by my manager with the testimonies from my mom, my cousin, and my uncle. When I got the record to listen through, he surprised me with my mom testifying about me experiencing seizures from birth to two years old that I forgot about, my cousin Ashley being a sibling to someone and being the perfect match to give a kidney away, and my uncle experiencing grief and finding out through grief that that’s the price you pay for love. So I have to give credit to my business manager, Marquis Boone.

BET: A standout track on this album is “Take Rest” where you say, “Like the woman at the well, I have a need. When the Healer’s in the room, take rest in me.” As someone that has dealt with sickness and brokenness but has been healed, how did resting in God help you get through those times?

I realized rest wasn’t just a day or a time frame, it’s an awareness. When you have a revelation of rest, you realize it’s not just about where you sit but how you sit. In scripture, it says, “In Him, we live, we move, and we have our being.” God took six days to create the world that we live in and took one day to rest. Yet we are distressed through the times of storms and sickness for months and years and feel like rest isn’t necessary. From the workaholic to the single mother, rest is a practice. If reading my Bible and having communication with God, aka prayer, is important, then that rest that’s also important has to be practiced. If not, you’ll run on fumes. Particularly with this song, I felt the need from the writer, my brother Quatez Blount. He wrote this song in 2017 and his father experienced a stroke that almost took his life, and he is still alive today. That was a huge transition for my brother. For him to write that in 2017, that truth still stands today that rest is just as important.

BET: The last spoken testimony shared on this project is “Adrian’s Testimony,” where he talks about experiencing a lot of loss/death in his life and felt like God was trying to teach him through that loss that his life needs to be lived. Following that testimony on the album is the song “Live Again”  written by Jekalyn Carr. In your own life, what is the greatest thing that had to die in you for you to be reborn or “live again”?

I think my disappointment in my biological father not being in my life. Recently, an impact from a shot hitting something else caused pellets to get in my father’s eyes which left him legally blind after forty years of being able to see. My biological father who wasn’t in my life, I got a phone call to go and see him. It was development for me. I went to the hospital and when I got there, it was like a spiritual bomb went off in my life. God was like, “Sometimes I will take your eyesight to give you insight,” because my father not experiencing his sight didn’t mean his life was over. We still laughed, talked about God, our relationship got stronger. In my uncle’s testimony of experiencing loss and grief, I got a revelation that sometimes we grieve not people that have left our life or earth in the physical form, sometimes we will grieve the little boy or little girl in us that craves the attention or relationship of somebody that wasn’t there. That changed my life. I grieve, I can go visit a tombstone. But what if I grieve somebody and I can’t even see anymore? I’m 32, but I can see 13. “Live Again” being that staple song at the end of the record is saying, after all you’ve been through, God wants you to live through it and know that you will live again. Keyword “again” means something happened. After you get over that hurdle, just put a smile on your face. Hopefully the people that listen to the song will be blessed and encouraged to live.

BET: The word “testify” is defined as “to give evidence as a witness in a law court” or “to serve as evidence or proof of something's existing or being the case.” Let’s say you’re in a court of law presenting evidence of God’s goodness to a jury of nonbelievers, but you can only pick one song from this album as evidence. What song are you picking and why?

“His Record Is Good.” I love that. The first lyric is “His train fills the temple.” The Bible says in Isaiah, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up. His train filled the temple.” It’s not talking about a choo-choo train, but it’s talking about in those days, kings wore robes. The robes that they wore had trains and the length of the train showed how many battles that king had won. And so, we look at God in our lives and our personal relationship with Jesus, when we look back at the receipts of all that He has done, we say “I am not where I want to be but I’m definitely not where I used to be.”

BET: Lastly, this album testifies from the perspective of being on the other side of the storm, the rebirth after death. What words of encouragement would you give someone still in the middle of that dark season where their testimony is being written?

If their testimony is being written, that means the evidence is being worked out. Whether somebody commits a crime, or you’re going through a court case, we see how important evidence is. Evidence can shape the core of that case because it can prove if a person is innocent or guilty. If a person is in a dark place in their life feeling like God is not there, He is actually closer than He’s ever been because it is in darkness that light is seen the most. If He doesn’t change their situation, that means He’s trying to change how they view their situation. Everything may not change, they may not get healed, they may not see a different side of the person they want to change. God is telling them to change their perspective. Darkness is the first place that God ever moved, yet we judge when He doesn’t come through for us in the midst of our darkness. If you want your life to change, you have to change the words that you say.

You can listen to “Take Rest” by Kelontae Gavin and more of the newest Gospel, Christian R&B, Christian Hip-Hop, and Afrobeat on BET’s “Pulse of the Kingdom” Playlist, now streaming on Spotify.