Using her gift

Caroline Royston stayed up the night of Sept. 6, anxiously awaiting the opportunity to spend 99 cents on a new song.

That song, “My Lips Will Praise You,” was her own. And naturally, she wanted to be the first one to purchase it after it was released digitally at 11 p.m.

But someone beat her to the punch.  

“I was staying up so I could be the first one to buy my own song, but my sister Yulisa actually bought it before me,” Royston said. “She’s the one that screenshot it and sent it to me. I’m like, ‘Are you serious?’ I was hoping I’d be the first one.”

It was the first song Royston — a 2017 graduate of Hewitt-Trussville High School and sophomore at Jacksonville State University — had ever written. She held a release party that evening and awoke the following morning to dozens of messages from friends and family.

“It was a cool day,” she said. 

Royston has helped lead worship at her home church, First Baptist Church Trussville, since she was in ninth grade and now does the same with the college ministry at First Baptist Church Jacksonville. She’s also in the show choir at JSU. 

She had never considered attempting to write a song until Carson Bruce approached her earlier this year. Bruce also helps lead worship at FBC Jacksonville and has released two praise and worship albums of his own.  

“I was like, ‘I’ve never done this before, I don’t even know where to begin,’” Royston said.

After the month of March, which included a tornado that impacted Jacksonville State’s campus, the cancellation of the show choir’s big spring performance and little in the way of productive songwriting, Royston was unsure of what would come next.

“I didn’t know for a long time what I wanted to do with it,” she said. “I had different ideas, because we had the melody and the tune. But the Lord revealed it to me.”

One night in Jacksonville, Royston came across Psalm 63, a Bible passage she said she had read “over and over before.” This time, it struck a chord and became the driving force behind the words to the song.

“When I got back to my dorm, I just wrote out the verses and the choruses, and it was really cool,” she said. “I met with Carson the next day and was like, ‘I got it.’ We wrote it in like 20 minutes.”

She performed the song for the first time at the Word Alive church in Oxford in May, and the live track from that night was used to produce the single.

Royston would like to be able to put together an extended play (EP) at some point. Although music is a vital part of her life, she said it’s not what she believes she’ll ultimately end up doing. She is a special education major and hopes to pursue that career following her college days.

“I don’t know what the Lord has in store for me, but this has been a really cool experience and a cool opportunity that I wouldn’t mind to keep going,” she said.