Feature Interviews, Past the Press Release

An Interview with Joshua Tomlin

Daniel J. MountFebruary 27, 2026

Meet Joshua Tomlin, Joseph Habedank’s pianist, in this thoughtful and wide-ranging conversation.

Show Notes

Joshua Tomlin
Cumberland Thunder
Joseph Habedank

Songs Discussed:

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Transcript

Lightly edited for clarity.

Daniel Mount
Welcome to Southern Gospel Journal. My name is Daniel Mount. I have the privilege today to be joined by Joseph Habedank’s pianist, Joshua Tomlin. How are you doing this evening?

Joshua Tomlin
I’m great, I’m great, Daniel. How are you?

Daniel Mount
I’m doing great also. So if you don’t mind, let’s start with your background. Where are you from, and what’s your testimony?

Joshua Tomlin
I’m from a little town in Kentucky called Danville, Kentucky. A lot of Southern Gospel fans will know that as the hometown of Larnelle Harris. He’s also from there. That’s kind of one of our claims to fame. I grew up there pretty much all my life and met the love of my life there. We got married I moved to a little town called Russell Springs, hometown of Kevin Williams. Another little bit of Southern Gospel trivia.

Daniel Mount
You got the connections going!

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah, and that’s where I currently reside.

You asked about testimony. I was raised in a Christian home, very privileged to have Christian parents. I know that a lot of people don’t have that blessing, and I was very thankful to have that and still do. They run a private Christian school, so education was something that was very, very important growing up. I was a homeschool kid. So maybe I was a little weird, a little different, but that’s okay.

I got saved as a teenager, was in music for pretty much most of my life. I was always around music and was called to preach as a teenager as well. And it’s actually something I did before going on the road. I was a pastor for a couple of years. Some people don’t know that or don’t realize that.

Daniel Mount
Interesting! Well, let’s touch on that for a minute, and then we’ll go back to the music. What did you love about the pastorate? What were the challenges? And I think, whether now or we can loop back to it, it’ll also be interesting to hear how God moved in your heart to nudge you toward a road ministry at the season of your life.

Joshua Tomlin
As a pastor, the best and worst parts of being a pastor, I think, is the people. And that’s not a shade to the people at all.

The church that I was at was a small country church in the rolling hills of Kentucky, just outside Somerset, Kentucky.

I’ve said this before: probably the most loving congregation that I have ever come across. And they welcomed a young preacher and his wife with open arms.

I walked in there. They had given me a call. I didn’t know that they didn’t have a pastor. I didn’t really know anything about the church. And they had given me a call and said, “Can you fill in for us this Sunday morning?” And I said, “Sure, I’ll come fill in on a Sunday morning.” So I went, and they said, “Hey, can you come back tonight?” And I said, “Yeah, I don’t have anything going on tonight.” And then they said, “Can you come back next week?” And it was then I thought, I see, I see where this is headed.

And I had not really given a thought to pastoring until that point, but I did it for about two years. And honestly, my wife, Abby, could probably speak a little better to this even than I could because she saw it from the outside, you know, just in me personally looking in. She told me that I became a much more empathetic and compassionate person in those two years, which is some growing that I think I needed to do.

We were a church that was still Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night. So, I mean, you’re in the Word. You’ve got to be in your Bible if you’re going to be standing in front of a congregation three times a week. So it helped me grow not only deeper in my faith, but I think it helped me deepen connections with people and my brothers and sisters in Christ around me. And I’m forever grateful for that.

Daniel Mount
I would like to talk about how God nudged you to be on the road full time. But before we do that, let’s maybe circle back a little bit on the musical side of things.

And by the way, I was homeschooled too. So we have that in common, and Christian parents too. So it’s definitely a blessing.

So did you grow up around musical instruments? Was that something your parents were really into, or was that something that was just an independent interest of yours?

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah, I was always around music. My mom and dad can both play a little bit. My mom can play some piano. My dad can play some guitar. But really, my grandpa on my mom’s side, I still kind of call him my favorite singer. I have recordings of him going back, I think, to the 60s or 70s. I have some recordings of him and some of my cousins in a garage. They got a hold of some recording equipment and they were playing some old gospel music, and I cherish those. And I’m blessed to still have him here in my life and still living.

So, you know, he played guitar. He would always sing in church.

And my sister, there were just two of us. I’ve only got the one sibling. She is eight years older than me, and so she took an interest in music at a pretty young age and started taking some lessons in guitar and piano. And as I grew up around that, I realized, this is getting her attention. Like people are seeing her as a young person, whether it be in church or somewhere in a public space, and they’re going, “That’s cool. That’s really neat.”

And as the little brother, can’t have that. You know, like the attention cannot be drawn off of me. So I said, “Hey, teach me a couple of chords on the piano. Teach me a couple of chords on the guitar. Let me see. Let me see what you’re doing there.”

And we had about the patience for each other for one lesson. And I said, “Okay, now you go away. I’m going to go sit and figure this out.” And it was a lot of trial and error, and a lot of hours locked in my room. And then it turned into, well, I got bit by the bug, and I couldn’t get away from it.

The best gift I think that my parents ever got for me: I had a little four-track. I still remember getting it for Christmas. It was a four-track Tascam cassette recorder with a microphone and headphones, and I could…

You know, that was back in the days you could go to the dollar store or Walmart and buy the little four-pack of just blank cassettes. I haven’t looked. I don’t know if you can still do that anymore. Maybe.

But you know, I remember those days. Put that in that little recorder and, you know, you have four tracks to work with. So I learned how to multitrack record. I would lay down a guitar part or a piano part and put my vocal on it.

And I’m like, you know, I’m nine, ten years old at this point, so it’s not great, but I was learning: this works with this and this doesn’t work with that. And so I got a love for not just music, but then also what goes into music production.

And so that was a great gift, and it’s still somewhere. It might be still at my mom and dad’s house, but it’s still functional, if you could find the cassettes for it. But that kind of fueled my love for that.

You know, my dad had a big music collection. He had, still has, totes and totes of cassettes and CDs. And I was kind of, still am to some degree, an insomniac. And so, as a child, to go to sleep, I would just put music on.

And I remember that there were kind of four cassettes that were in rotation. They would be the Hinsons’ Lift the Roof Off live album, the Perrys’ Out of This World album, the Booth Brothers’ This Stage Of Grace, and then the Bishops’ Great Things. And so those four would pretty much stay on rotation. And I went back and listened to, I think it was maybe the Bishops’ album, I went back and listened to for the first time in probably 15 years the other day. And I started hearing things. I was like, “Oh, I do that.” Like it suddenly clicked: the things that I was learning without even realizing I was learning it.

Daniel Mount
That’s really cool! So was the Blakey Quartet the first group that you toured with?

Joshua Tomlin
So before that, my sister and I were in a bluegrass Gospel group called Still Voice that traveled locally. There was a great fellow by the name of Randy Douglas. Still sings. He pastors now actually. But he was a songwriter, and he was somebody that encouraged both my and my sister’s love of music.

And so I did that for a few years as a teenager. And then when I turned 18, joined the Blakey Quartet, based out of just down the road from where I’m at now in Jamestown, Kentucky. And that was my first, first experience being on a bus.

So they taught me a lot about being on a bus. Their schedule is a lot busier than anything we were doing probably. You know, for a regional group, pretty busy. I would say 80 to 90 dates every year.

Daniel Mount
That’s busy.

Joshua Tomlin
And just kind of Kentucky, Tennessee, occasionally Georgia, mostly in Kentucky. But stayed there for three years, and they taught me a lot about what it meant to be a musician, work with other people. I learned a lot in those three years.

Daniel Mount
So I saw, I was trying to find a little of their music on YouTube to just listen to it. And I saw a professionally recorded video they did of their 30th anniversary concert. Is that something you were on? Or was it on the piano, right?

Joshua Tomlin
It is, yeah.

So I did a little bit of piano. I was kind of a utility musician. That was my job with them, was utility musician. So I’m in the back. I would play mostly electric guitar. I played a little acoustic on that, a little mandolin. And then I would come up, our piano player would go up and sing several songs. So I would come up and play while he was singing.

And that was a fun night. It was a really fun night.

It was my first experience with a lot of that. How old would I have been? That was in 2015, so I was about to turn 20. I was 19 years old, yeah.

Daniel Mount
So then, though, was Cumberland Thunder the next group you were with?

Joshua Tomlin
It was.

So Josh Carey is a great friend of mine. He had traveled with the Blakey Quartet as their piano player for several years prior to the time that I joined. And he left around the same time I joined, but we’d stayed good friends. He was one of the people that, you know, when you find another young person that likes Southern gospel music, you tend to stick together. If you’re in the same area and you go, here’s another young person who likes what I like.

So we remain good friends. And when I left the Blakeys, we kind of co-founded that group. My wife was part of it, his wife part of it, and had a couple other musicians who would come and go. But yeah, we did that.

We started that 10 years ago and still do things occasionally to kind of keep it up and see each other, and we enjoy getting to do that. We’ll still post things that we do on social media. And I think we’re going to have like a 10th anniversary concert this year, to just celebrate all the memories that we’ve had together.

But for the first while, I mean, we were in a van and trailer for the first five-ish years doing like 80 dates a year, 70, 80 dates a year, and keeping the roads hot, and loved it. Those are some of my fondest memories, being stuck on a six-hour car ride with my best friends. You know, it was great.

Daniel Mount
How would you describe the style of the group? Because there’s enough of a spectrum to the songs you did that it’s not just Southern Gospel, the progressive Southern Gospel. There’s a little more to it. And I wasn’t quite sure how to describe that style.

Joshua Tomlin
There is.

You know, that’s something we struggled with ourselves. Definitely the harmony was very Southern gospel inspired because we were very meticulous about that three-part harmony. We wanted it to sound tight. That’s what we were going for.

Musically, we had influences from all over the place. So, for example, my wife, who played bass and then later stepped up to sing the alto part, she came from a Southern gospel family as well. You know, her family were big Cathedrals fans, but then her dad was also a huge Stryper and Petra fan. So, yeah. And so we got a little of that influence. Like she introduced me to Petra.

And the thing I loved about Petra was, regardless of style, which I like the style, but regardless of that, all of their songs I could look at the lyrics and pinpoint the Bible verse that it came from, and I loved that. Loved that so much from a writer’s standpoint.

And so, you know, we kind of had that influence. And then we all, you know, we enjoyed the oldies influence. Our first drummer, Evan, came into it knowing absolutely nothing about Southern Gospel music. Like nothing. Elvis was probably the closest that he knew. And so he brought his own influence to it and it helped us kind of get out of the box.

So really, to describe our sound, my best answer is: we just wanted to play what we liked, and we hope that people liked it.

Daniel Mount
Yeah, because those, just in the songs that were on your group’s page, I think the website is still live. The songs on that page have quite a spectrum.

But I think my favorite was actually not on that page. It’s something just a fan recorded, a live version of “John Saw” that starts almost a cappella. I mean, that arrangement… I hate to say this, and this might be almost blasphemy for Southern Gospel fans: that arrangement might be cooler than the original. It was a really cool arrangement.

Joshua Tomlin
So, okay. So there is: we did that arrangement on a live album that’s not available anywhere online. There’s like a thousand CDs in a garage somewhere. But one of these days I’m going to put that album up online because we were really proud of it when we did it.

But we opened the album with that arrangement of “John Saw.” I think it was my wife who suggested that we do the song. And you know, she was listening to the Gold City version, and she’s a big Gold City fan, as am I.

And so we knew that we liked it, and then we decided we were going to open the live album with it. So we wanted something when we got introduced. I said, “When we get introduced, I want the singers, I want us as singers to be able to walk out after we’ve been introduced, but there not to be a lull in what’s happening.”

I told Evan, our drummer, “Can you just do something that will just kind of keep people engaged, get them clapping, and then we can get out there?” I think my suggestion was, “Make it sound like the jungle.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I think I could do something like that.”

And so that’s where he got that little drum thing. And we walked out and did that little a cappella intro and then went into it.

Daniel Mount
Okay.

Joshua Tomlin
So I appreciate you saying that. I’m glad that somebody else noticed.

Daniel Mount
Cool! And your group didn’t just tour in small churches, because I saw there was at least one appearance you had at the Ark Encounter, which is a pretty substantial and important venue in that area.

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah, yeah, we did the Ark Encounter. We did the outdoor stage one year, and then the next year they invited us to come back and do their big Answer Center there, which was just awesome.

Yeah, we did a few of those bigger events. We did the Gospel Music Festival that they did at the Loretta Lynn Ranch. We did that one year. That was really awesome to go to.

Yeah, there was a period of time there that we were going pretty heavily. We would go Kentucky, Ohio, Tennessee, a few Georgia trips, a few North Carolina trips, you know, just kind of stay within that region. Yeah.

Daniel Mount
So the origin of the group name, by the way, I meant to ask about that earlier. You’re not terribly… where you were probably wouldn’t have been too far from the Cumberlands, or maybe the foothills of the Cumberlands?

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah, so where we actually, where I live now in Russell Springs sits on the banks of Lake Cumberland. And so Lake Cumberland is… more people are probably familiar with Somerset, Kentucky, as maybe being like the home of Lake Cumberland.

Technically, in Russell Springs and in Jamestown, we’re closer to the lake than Somerset is. They just have a better PR team than we do. But yeah, so we’re here on the banks of Lake Cumberland, and that’s really where the name came from. We were just sitting around one night tossing things [around].

Daniel Mount
So it’s more of the lake than the mountains.

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah, it is.

Daniel Mount
Cool!

So moving then a little forward, I’d love to hear about the start of your interest in songwriting, but framing it in a perspective that I thought was really interesting. You were actually writing songs with Joseph Habedank before you came on the road with him as pianist. “Liar Liar” is an example.

That’s really interesting. You don’t often see somebody’s writing with somebody, then joins the group. Now it’s happened: Ernie Haase and Wayne Haun wrote songs together and then Wayne went on the road with Signature Sound for a while. It’s not that you never see it, you just don’t see it often. I thought that was really interesting.

So what’s the origin of the interest in songwriting?

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah.

So some of that goes back to my sister a little bit. She would write some songs that she would sing in church or that she would sing out with the bluegrass group that we were traveling with. And again, little brother said, I could do that.

And then I tried my hand at it and realized it was a whole lot harder than what I had thought.

Even as a small child, my parents could tell you, I remember going down the road on the way home from church, we would be… you know, I would be riding in the back of the car, singing nonsense at the top of my lungs, just stringing words together that sounded like church words, you know, four or five, six years old.

And I remember the first time I rhymed. I think it was something to the effect of, “It’s been kind of rough with mountains and stuff.” And I thought, ooh, that’s good. You know, again, probably six years old.

And so I kept trying my hand at it. And eventually, I think around the time I was 18, there was a song that I wrote called “Tears.” That was one of the first songs that I remember going, this sounds like a song I would hear on the radio.

And then another song I wrote called “From the Pew to the Altar.” And both of those songs I wrote when I was around 17, 18 years old. And those kind of gave me the confidence to say, I can do this, and push further with pursuing that craft.

Daniel Mount
Cool!

So how did you connect to write with Jason Cox and Joseph Habedank and perhaps other writers you might have written with along in that time period?

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah.

So, well, the connection with Joseph actually started… my very first job was in Christian radio. When I was 15 years old, I got a summer job working for a Christian radio station. And then that kind of, as I graduated high school, that became my full-time job. I did that till I was 21 years old.

And so while I was there at the radio station, Joseph had just come out with Welcome Home. And I think maybe he was in the process of working on writing and recording Resurrection. And I’d been a fan, loved his music. I’d been a fan since the Perrys days. Definitely loved it when Welcome Home came out.

And so I reached out and asked if he wanted to do an interview for the radio station. And I said, “Hey, this number, we’ll, you know, do a phone interview.” And he said, “Actually, I’m going to be coming to Somerset on such and such day,” which is just about an hour away from the radio station. And he said, “Why don’t I just drop by the studio the day before and we’ll do it in person.” I said, even better!

And so we just kind of developed, I guess, a friendship that day, really. And he was so incredibly kind to me, who he didn’t know from anybody. I just randomly reached out to him, but he was very kind. Invited me to his event the next day. Showed up the next day and he remembered my name and remembered my wife’s name, and I was like, my goodness, this guy actually cares about people.

And from that point on, I think we exchanged numbers and just kind of stayed in touch over the years. And he had done a few concerts with our group, with Cumberland Thunder. We invited him to do that and we did a couple of things together. So he had heard a few of the songs that I’d written.

So when I approached writing with him, he was all for it, and it worked out. He brought Jason in. And so “Liar Liar” was the first thing that we wrote together. “Liar Liar” was the first song that I wrote in an Asheville writing room. And the fact, when he said, “They’re going to pick this to be the single…”

Probably, we wrote it in February of 2020, like right before everything just nosedived. And so it was probably a year… I don’t remember when they even recorded that, but it was like a year or two after that that it got released.

Daniel Mount
That’s cool. What a start. I think that it was released in ’22.

Joshua Tomlin
Okay. So I think I knew at some point in ’21 that they were getting ready to record it. And he said, “Hey, they’re going to record the song.” Great. The fact that, you know, a top-tier group is going to record this song, amazing. And then he said, “Hey, they’re thinking about releasing this as the first single.” That’s amazing.

And then, you know, I watched it climb the charts, and they did that fan video, which was so awesome, and got to see how much people loved it.

And I texted Joseph at the time and I said, “Hey, you have helicoptered me in at the top of the mountain. I’ve not had to scratch and claw my way up for this thing.” And so I’m very grateful to him and Jason and, of course, Brian Free and Assurance for recording it.

Daniel Mount
Yeah.

Do you remember if you were the one who brought the idea for “Liar Liar” or whose idea it was?

Joshua Tomlin
It was Joseph’s idea, the hook. The hook was Joseph’s idea. He had the “liar, liar, headed for a lake of fire.” Then past that, we all just kind of built on top of it.

Melodically, to that song, I think I brought more melodically even than I did lyrically, especially that little chromatic thing in that intro. That it does, or just kind of walks down those half steps. I said, “How about we do this?”

And I’m always searching for something that’ll make people turn their heads and go, “That’s odd,” or even say, “That’s not Southern Gospel.”

Daniel Mount
Cool.

When I had talked to you about if you’d come on to do the episode, I didn’t know you were a co-writer in that song. It was only as I started to dive a little deeper and do my research, I was like, wow, well I got to ask about this one. Because it’s one of the catchiest Southern Gospel songs of the last few years. I mean, it might be one of the catchiest Southern Gospel songs ever. That chorus is hooky. It’s hooky as hooky gets.

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah.

It was after we recorded it, you know, Joseph did a work tape for it, which I brought home, let my wife hear, and I would find myself for weeks after that… or, well, when the world shut down in 2020, I would find myself stuck at home with that stuck in my head.

And I think, well, surely somebody’s going to record that because if it’s stuck in my head, it’s going to get stuck in theirs too.

Daniel Mount
Yeah.

Yeah, it came out at a fun time because when it came out, my children were like around two, two or three, and just like starting to talk.

Two things. One is I actually had to stop playing it so much after a while because we started to get concerned as they were repeating it so much that they were just going to break out, “Liar, liar, headed for a lake of fire,” in the wrong context! If you bring that up in an argument with another kid or something, that could be bad!

But the other fun one was my son, he was probably around two at the time. You know, children learn language deductively just by listening to what’s around them. And then they start repeating it back. And if it makes sense and people affirm it, they keep going.

Okay, so learning language deductively, there’s this line in the song, “ain’t nothing but a bunch of noise and…” But the way Brian Free and Assurance sang it, they don’t have the D hard at the end. It’s like, “ain’t nothing but a bunch of noisin'”

Well, somewhere like a couple of weeks later, he had just started saying, “noisin'” as a word for like people are making noise. They’re “noisin’,” which deductively makes sense. And I was like, where did that come from?

And then I was playing “Liar Liar”: “ain’t nothing but a bunch of noise and…” And I’m like, that’s where he got “noisin'” from.

Joshua Tomlin
Well, I have something interesting to add to that. So if you look at the lyric video, if you look at the official lyrics, it says, “Noise and.”

I specifically remember in the writing room that day, it was Jason. Jason, we were looking for something to rhyme with “poison.” And he said, “Is ‘noisin” a word?” And we said, probably not. We don’t know.

And I think we Googled it. In my copy of the song on my computer, it is still written as N-O-I-S-I-N apostrophe.

Daniel Mount
That’s exactly what our kid was saying. That’s fun. That’s fun.

Joshua Tomlin
There you go.

Daniel Mount
Before I talk about your run with Joseph specifically, any other songs you’ve had, any other co-writes you’ve had to get cut? What might some of those be?

Joshua Tomlin
There aren’t any nationally yet that people would know. I think there are a few that are floating out there. You know, my group recorded a few back when I was with the Blakeys. They recorded a few. But there are definitely some that I am hoping get cut.

Just wrote with the wonderful, wonderful Sue C. Smith just a few weeks ago.

Daniel Mount
Cool.

She’s amazing.

Joshua Tomlin
And she was fantastic. I hadn’t written with her before, but there was a song that came out of that session that I’m really proud of. And so I’m looking for that to be on the horizon soon.

Daniel Mount
She is so thoughtful in her craft. Every syllable has a purpose. Every note has a purpose.

You know, there’s a place for people who write songs and let it rip. And it might not be as precise. You know, Gerald Crabb might be the best example of that. And his songs have a certain raw power and energy that’s wonderful.

But as somebody who myself is interested in songwriting, I just look at Sue’s songs and just the craftsmanship, where everything’s honed to perfection. I just love her songs.

Joshua Tomlin
They are, they are.

You were talking about that kind of raw power in songwriting. Another name that comes to mind for me is Ronny Henson, who is just huge.

One of my favorite lyrics, I’m pretty sure it’s a… I don’t think it’s a Kenny lyric, I think it’s a Ronnie lyric. It’s from the song that the Hinsons did. And sorry, this is a tangent. This whole part’s free for everybody.

But these are just the things that I think about that I find really interesting from a songwriting perspective because I like a song that pulls you in and hooks you, makes you go, what?

For example, when I first heard Joseph, the first time I ever heard him or knew who he was was with the Perrys. And it was at NQC at a DJ breakfast. And they stood up and he opened his mouth and sang, “I walked by the tomb of Buddha,” and I said, “Do what now?”

So one song that has to go for about four lines before it actually makes sense is the Hinson song “Beyond the Shadow of a Doubt.” And the opening line is, “What are friends for, if you haven’t already? You may live long enough to really find out.”

It makes sense after you’ve heard all four lines, but when it’s sung, you go, “What are friends for? If you haven’t already,” that doesn’t make sense.

But “What are friends for?” Well, “if you haven’t already, you may live long enough to really find out.”

But for some reason, the way that song is written, I’ve always thought was brilliant because it just pulls you in. Because now as soon as that’s done, then you’re listening to every single word that comes after that.

And anyway, that’s just my songwriting two cents.

Daniel Mount
That’s cool! I’ve heard that song, but it’s been long enough I can’t play it in my head. I need to go back and re-listen to that one.

You know, I’m staying on the tangent because why not for a minute? It’s cool that as Ronnie has kept writing through the years, he has work that kind of spans the spectrum of… maybe some of his early work and even some more recent stuff is more “let it rip” full throttle.

But one of my favorite of his songs he ever wrote was a song he wrote called “The Dove” that the Hoppers recorded right about 2007 or 2008. And that song is, it could be a Sue C. Smith song. Every syllable is perfect. It’s one of those songs that somebody who’s studied and mastered the art of craftsmanship has written. And it’s fun to think about how his songs span that spectrum, where some of them are just the full throttle lead-out rip and some of them are… he’s refined the syllables on that one for a while.

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah, I’d forgotten all about that song.

Daniel Mount
Yeah.

Joshua Tomlin
One of those, it was very thoughtful of his, an older one. Do you remember “The Journey”? It’s a slower song. It has no chorus; it’s a lot of verses and kind of ends in a chorus, but it doesn’t repeat.

I think the first lyric is, “Let me take you on a journey,” but it’s about a tour through a sinner’s heart, basically.

And the last line, Kenny sings it, is something about there’ll be no souvenirs or no gift shop at the end of this tour, something like that, because the only thing worth taking is the blame. And that’s the last line of the song.

Like, it’s a bit of a downer, but it’s very, very thought-provoking.

So yeah, yeah, check that song out. It’s very thought-provoking.

Daniel Mount
Wow. That’s one that I’m sure I’ve heard, but it’s been long enough. I need to go back and give that another play.

All right. So then I guess that’s probably just as good a point in the conversation as any to move on to coming on the road with Joseph.

Now, am I tying the chronology together correctly that you went from being a pastor to going into Joseph’s band? And we were starting to talk about how God changed your heart. It helped you build more empathy through your time in the pastorate.

So can we kind of pick back up there and talk about how He started nudging you to be comfortable with and feel confident that now’s the time to go on the road full time.

Joshua Tomlin
Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

There was a period of time where I… It’s funny now that as I meet people out on the road, sometimes I wonder if some of them remember me from years ago. If a group posted an audition, I sent a demo in. I tried to beat every single door down for a lot of years.

And there were some that were, I mean, just very close. Some that were almosts that just for whatever reason or another it didn’t happen.

And so there was a lot of… not necessarily rejection, but just a lot of disappointment on my part.

And I remember feeling so discouraged from trying to do this thing that I thought was my dream for so long and not really seeing any results for it.

And I can still remember where I was. I was sitting at a stoplight here in Russell Springs, and I just remember God impressing on me: what if I have something better for you? What if My plan’s better?

And of course I know God’s plan is the best plan, but in my mind I thought, but this is what I want.

And in that, at that point there had been another church that had actually reached out to me about pastoring. They had taken on another pastor. And because I had briefly thought, well, is that what I’m supposed to do? And I thought, well, that can’t be it, God, because they’ve got a pastor now.

And He said, “What if my plan is better?” So I thought, okay.

And I finally let go of not my hopes and dreams, but just personal will and personal ambition, and said, I’ll trust you for this.

And that’s when that door to the church opened up, started to grow in that.

And then, you know, along about a year and a half, two years into that, just randomly one day got this text from Joseph. “Hey, don’t know if you’d be interested. This is what I’m looking at doing. How do you feel about that? Pray about it.”

And I realized in that moment that God needed me to just submit, just surrender. It needed to stop being the end-all be-all for me to finally achieve that dream.

And my biggest concern at that point then became: I don’t want to disappoint the people in this church because I love them so dearly. They’ve been so kind to me and my family.

And there was a period of time… Joseph didn’t need an immediate answer. I think I did say, I think my first text back was something like, “Well, I’ve prayed about it and it’s a yes.” But in all seriousness, you know, I think he knew what my desire had been and what my heart had been.

And so then my prayer became: okay, how do I navigate this with the church? How do I transition into this?

And so there was a period of actually a few months where I was praying about it and having other people pray about it with me.

And there were some details on Joseph’s end that had to be worked out because they didn’t have the bus yet. They were still working on securing the bus, and there were some problems there, and they were trying to get all that figured out. I was trying to sort everything out.

And finally, I remember very clearly there was a point where I thought, well, it might not happen. Am I going to be okay with that? If it doesn’t happen, what do I do?

And we were leaving church one evening, and my wife and I were just kind of riding down the road together. Had barely pulled out of the parking lot, and I said out loud, I wish God would just drop the answer in my lap.

And I think the words I said were, “I’m too stupid to figure this out myself. I wish He would just drop it in my lap.”

It might have been the same breath, but definitely within the same minute, Joseph sent a text and said, “Can you start May 6th?” And I thought, well, that’s pretty obvious. Message received, message received.

So I went in the next week, announced it to the church. I was able to give the church about a month, month and a half, I think, that we could transition.

And so I preached my last message on a Sunday night, and then that Tuesday or Wednesday left for the road. Yeah.

Daniel Mount
So because of your relationship with Joseph, I guess you didn’t really have to audition necessarily. Like he already seen you play here, or did you audition?

Joshua Tomlin
I didn’t. He already knew.

Truth be told, I don’t think he would mind me saying. I think he said this before: Nobody currently in the band really has ever auditioned. Not that we wouldn’t audition somebody because we definitely would. But as far as the people that are in it now, it’s all because of connections that we’ve had. He’s heard us play.

Now there were definitely, you know, like the guys that are in the band now came out for a weekend and played with us on stage. But the amount of trust that he puts… we had never rehearsed.

I can clearly remember that very first weekend. We started up in… it was either Indiana or Illinois. We hit both that weekend. Whichever church that we were at, we’d never played the set with him before we hit the stage that night, which is insane.

I am a rehearse and rehearse often type of person. But he just put a lot of trust. He said, “Hey, do you know the songs? Have you practiced the songs? Do you know them?” “Yes.” “All right. Play them.” And that’s just kind of the way we roll.

Daniel Mount
That’s cool!

Do you know what? Has Joseph ever said… I’m not asking you to like brag or anything, but just curious from a musical standpoint, Has Joseph ever said much about which songs he heard you do, perhaps with Cumberland Thunder, that stuck in his mind that he was like, you know, this is the kind of person I want playing with me?

Joshua Tomlin
There is one song that he mentioned, which I think is the reason that he probably agreed to co-write even the first time.

There’s a song called “Good News” that Cumberland Thunder recorded that I co-wrote. It was on an album that we did called Lost All Control. It’s out there. It’s on Spotify, Apple Music. But yeah.

The song “Good News” kind of has this very 70s slash 80s feel to it and melodically went to a place that I thought, and he thought, was interesting. And he would reference that song a lot in those early days when he’d say, “Hey, that song, that’s a good song.” So yeah, that one.

Daniel Mount
So, as I understand it, Joseph really had a soundtrack-only ministry up until you joined, and the rest of that initial lineup of the band joined.

And you know, not that he didn’t play anything. I do remember seeing the video of him proposing to Lindsay and learning at least enough acoustic guitar to get through that song. But on stage, he’d just be one person with soundtracks.

So I’m curious what it was like for you to lead and be a part of the transition from a track-only soloist ministry to live music. And as a part of that, there’s anything you did differently in songs, you know, like now that we’re doing this live, we’ll do this or that a little different.

Joshua Tomlin
Absolutely.

Well, as a testament to Joseph as, I believe, one of the most effective communicators in our industry, you know, it’s very difficult in Southern gospel to be one person on a stage by yourself and hold an audience’s attention. But his testimony, his stories, his songs captured that so well and definitely took some of that pressure off when we came along as the band.

And there is a song called “Going With Jesus” that on the album it is really just piano. But doing that live was something that we were able to kind of let breathe.

We’re not really doing it on this tour, but about the first year and a half we were doing it every night. And watching that moment, as it was just him, just his vocal, and then me at the piano, and just kind of watching the effect that it would have on the audience when he would sing that song because it’s a very personal lyric to him. And he would always share a story afterwards about what it meant to him.

And then we would kind of transition out of that song and he would do a chorus of “Gratitude” and lead the audience in that, and kind of being able to make that transition with those two songs. Whereas, you know, with a track, you’re kind of locked into it one way and one way only.

But watching the audience respond to that and then being able to respond back to them, just beautiful, beautiful.

And it’s those moments really, I think, where he enjoys having the band, we enjoy being the band. When he’ll lead the audience in a chorus of “There’s Just Something About That Name,” or when he’ll lead them in singing “Gratitude,” or anything like that, it’s just so beautiful to watch.

Because I think corporate worship is something that we’re missing these days anyway in church, and watching him be able to lead a congregation in that is just beautiful to watch.

Daniel Mount
Yes.

All right. Down a bit of a different track: I’m curious, you know, the day before he messages you with interest in joining the group, you know, up to that point, what were your favorite of his songs, be it Perrys songs, songs he’s had recorded by other groups, or his own solo songs?

And then now that you had the chance to tour with him, I’m curious if those favorites have changed.

Joshua Tomlin
Favorites of his that he recorded up to that point… you know, I was a big fan of the Welcome Home album when it came out. I still beg every tour for “Beggin’ for Change” to be added back into the set list. It’s going to happen one of these days. I’m holding on to that hope.

But you know, pretty much anything off of that album I loved. And Resurrection both, I think, are absolute masterpieces.

Of course “Here He Comes,” and we have to do “Here He Comes” every night because…

Daniel Mount
Yeah. That song blew my mind when I first heard it.

Joshua Tomlin
It’s crazy. It’s unlike anything, you know, in the best way possible. It’s unlike anything.

Sure, there’s some orchestra in there. There’s some electric guitar in there. I’ve had the privilege… now I have the multitracks to that whole thing, which is crazy. Like as a fan, I now am able to look and see all of the different things that were a part of that session.

And the other day I was looking at that and just hearing some of the guitar parts soloed. It’s things that you don’t hear, but it works so well.

And yeah, “Here He Comes,” definitely a favorite.

And of course the song that he did about his grandmother, “One More Reason to Go.” That came out just after my wife’s grandmother had also passed away. And she was someone that had kind of welcomed me. And you know, I wasn’t an in-law. I was as much family. And she was as much family to me as anyone.

And so that was really special, hearing that song and having that experience. Felt like a shared experience, as many others who have heard that song probably feel as well.

So those were definitely some favorites.

I also really enjoyed two songs that he co-wrote that were recorded by 11th Hour: “Room with a View,” “He Sees What We Don’t.” Those two are great, great songs.

And then, “Whenever I Hear His Name,” recorded by the Hoskins Family, if I’m not mistaken. That’s a great, great song. Like the chorus: “I hear the sound of chains falling down as another soul walks away free.” So good.

And if I could say one more, “That’s Why I Call It Home” that the Inspirations recorded. When they would stage that live, they would do it a cappella, and I just always thought it was a great, great song.

Daniel Mount
“Room with a View,” he co-wrote that with one of my songwriting heroes, Dianne Wilkinson. And I had the privilege of working with her on her autobiography. And I think she had just written that with Joseph if I recall correctly. I think they had just written that when I did that. So it was really fun to talk to her, get her perspective on that song, too, because they co-wrote some good songs together. One of my favorites, “Footprints on the Water,” that Gold City recorded. That song had the groove to it and a great lyric, too.

Joshua Tomlin
Yes. Fantastic.

He was in great Gold City songs. “Footprints on the Water.” There’s the one that Gold City did just shortly before, which we’ve done this tour with them now, but shortly before I joined Joseph, I went and heard them and they did “Not Anymore,” which he also co-wrote, which I didn’t realize at the time. And I loved that song. Another good one.

Daniel Mount
Very cool!

So shifting gears to totally different gear. I’m curious, we kind of talked about this a little bit, but as you both as you were first learning piano, besides your sister, but also as you’ve grown as a pianist through the years, I’m curious who your piano and other instrumental influences were.

Joshua Tomlin
When I was very young, we had the Homecoming at the Ryman video. And so, of course, Anthony Burger, he was it. He was the man. And most Southern Gospel piano players are going to reference him in some way. And so I would watch that and just be amazed at what he could do and the talent that he had. So certainly he was probably one of the earliest.

The first concert that I ever attended, that I can recall though, not very vividly, was the Cathedrals on their farewell tour. I was about three years old. And so, of course, Roger Bennett. It was at Rupp Arena in Lexington, Kentucky. And so, of course, Roger Bennett, another early influence.

When I started really trying to be serious and pursue music, I was very much watching Matthew Holt and watching the things that he would do both with the Perrys, with the Vocal Band. I remember the Perrys recorded the “Live at Oak Tree” album and there were videos of that on YouTube, and there were some great shots. I learned by ear. I don’t read music. I can’t read notes. And so, you know, I learned by hearing and watching.

And so there were great shots of Matthew’s hands in that video where I would put it in slow motion and go, “Okay, now he’s doing this and he’s doing this. Okay.” And I would try my best to replicate. So yeah, he was definitely a big influence in those years as well.

Daniel Mount
I’m grateful that the era when I was blogging every day overlapped with the era when Joseph and Matthew were together on the Perrys bus. Because the Perrys were such… they’re still great. But in that era with Matthew on piano as a live pianist, Joseph writing one hit song after another for them, Tracy’s still there on bass, Libbi, and then Nick Trammell and a couple other baritone singers through the years. They were a sight to behold live.

Joshua Tomlin
They really were. They really were. Absolutely.

Daniel Mount
Okay, so piano from a different standpoint. If you could play piano for a different group every decade, going back however many decades you like, who would those dream groups be to have played piano with? And you can go back two decades or eight, all the way to World War II, I don’t care, however far back you’d like to go.

Joshua Tomlin
Wow.

Wow. I love all things gospel music, and I just love music in general. But so I’m certainly appreciative of all those things.

There are some that I wouldn’t dare to sit behind the piano just because…

Of course when it comes to harmony and how you’re supposed to do harmony, I mean, if we want to go back this far, in my opinion, nobody did it better than the Statesmen when it came to arranging true four-part harmony.

And you know, and I love the era of… If I sing, I’m usually naturally a baritone, so I love a good baritone singer. So like…

Well, saying your favorite Statesmen lineup is like, you know, what’s your favorite attribute of God? But the season where you had Rosie, you had Jake, you had, of course, Big Chief, and then Doy. I think Doy had to be my favorite. That specific lineup was my favorite, with Doy Ott, Hovie Lister. So yeah, I would love to be, even if not sitting on the piano bench, a fly on the wall.

Daniel Mount
How about this: let’s just say for this hypothetical exercise that you don’t have to kick Hovie off in this time travel. Let’s just say he had a kid’s wedding and he had to miss a day and you’re filling in. So who do you like to fill in for a day with if you feel a little better about that? Maybe that feels better.

Joshua Tomlin
Yeah. Okay, yeah.

You know, if we’re going that far back, I’d go Statesmen. And we could say, you know, that’s what, 50s, 60s, depending on which era we choose.

If we’re talking 70s, 80s, no question in my mind, it would be the Hinsons. The Hinsons.

In my opinion, the Hinsons had the tightest band in all of gospel music that has ever been seen. And there have been some really, really great ones. You know, people talk about the Kingsmen band. In recent years, the Crabb Family band was fantastic.

Something about those Hinsons arrangements and the way that the band would play off of each other and their dynamics. So I think Hinsons.

Definitely, you know, in the 90s or late 80s era, Cathedrals.

Early 2000s to mid 2000s, I mean, that Loren and Joseph era of the Perrys. Just that wall of sound, you know? Fantastic, yeah.

And then probably somewhere in there, throw in a Gold City and Legacy Five, because why not?

Daniel Mount
Sounds good!

All right. Now you’ve mentioned a couple of times you play by ear, and I didn’t want to wrap up without asking about your piano course and give you a chance to plug it.

And one question about that is: It’s a characteristic, I think, of most people who play piano by ear tend to focus on teaching themselves. Because you’re making a course for people who are oriented around teaching themselves, I’m sure you’ve put some thought into: how have you oriented this course to help people who play by ear do what they do better?

Joshua Tomlin
Absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, so with this course, I knew what worked for me. And I say pretty early on in the videos in the course: How I am teaching you is not the way. I’m simply teaching you a way. It’s a way that worked for me. And so hopefully if it made sense to me, it’ll make sense to somebody else.

My goal in the course was to give people the tools that they needed to be able to equip themselves with those tools to dig deeper and hopefully find some knowledge that they hadn’t had before.

One of the most important things that we as musicians have, especially if we’re going to be playing with other musicians, whether that be in a band or in a praise team, you need a common language.

And of course for your orchestra musicians and for your classical musicians, that common language is notes on a staff and all of the language that goes with that. And for someone that that doesn’t necessarily work for, you need a language then to be able to somehow communicate those ideas.

And so I dive into that idea, and also into the Nashville Number System, which has been just… I learned that when I was traveling, when I was 18 years old, traveling with the Blakeys. They taught me that. And that has, in just a short period of time learning that and the concept behind it, I think can take a mediocre musician into a very well-versed musician.

Daniel Mount
It can help with songwriting too.

Joshua Tomlin
It absolutely can, absolutely.

Those times in the writing rooms in Nashville when a songwriter will say, “Should we throw a two in?” or “Should we… maybe it should go to the six here?” Because you then start to develop that language and you learn as a songwriter what kind of helps lift a song or give it that momentum to move it from place to place.

Daniel Mount
Exactly. What does it cost? Where do people go to get it?

Joshua Tomlin
Yes, so it can be found on joshuatomlin.com. If you go there, there’s a link at the bottom of the page and at the top of the page that’ll take you there.

You’ll click on that link, create a login, and it’ll prompt you for payment.

I have said that it costs $149.99. I’ve marked it off a couple of times for different things. I marked it off for Christmas to $99 and I’m going to keep it that way for a while, especially here while we’re still in the beginning-ish of the year, depending on when this comes out. I’ve got it for $99 for people that may want to start something new in 2026.

And so that’s the cost. It’s a one-time cost. It gives you all the video lessons. There are some materials, both printed materials that you can print off yourself, and there’s some audio files as well. Just some things that will help you learn.

And like I said, hopefully provide you with those tools that you need to take your next steps and grow as a musician.

Daniel Mount
Cool!

Do you have any favorite memories, whether that be a funny memory or a more serious ministry-oriented memory, and that can be going all the way back to the Blakey Quartet or Cumberland Thunder or with Joseph Habedank. Do you have any favorite road memories?

Joshua Tomlin
There are, yeah. There are a lot of memories. I’m trying to think of a good one that comes to mind.

There were definitely those van and trailer days with Cumberland Thunder. I remember, you know, just a lot of late nights. You see… if we’re talking funny memories, you see some crazy things at three o’clock in the morning going down the road. I remember seeing an old 70s model Cadillac, decked out in lights from top to bottom with a lift kit, just bouncing through the drive-through as we’re just trying to go through McDonald’s to get something to eat, trying to get home or maybe get to a hotel. And their music’s blasting. And for some reason at three o’clock in the morning, that’s pretty funny. And we laughed about that for a long time.

You know, there have definitely been moments at NQC this past year. It was a special memory and a lot of fun because we presented… we had been doing the “Hits and Heritage” tour with the Hoppers and Gold City. And so the Hoppers took their set one night and just presented a kind of an abridged version of that tour for the people.

And so standing on main stage, I was actually playing guitar because Terry with Gold City, he was at piano, so I was at guitar. We had a whole stage full of musicians. And I was sitting there playing guitar and Gold City singing “Midnight Cry” and the Hoppers are singing “Shoutin’ Time in Heaven.”

I’m there on stage while it’s happening, and I’m looking around and thinking, if I could just go back five years, ten years, and tell me about this.

The same for really my first weekend with Joseph. I don’t know that I even shared this at the beginning of the interview. He was and is my favorite artist. He’s who ultimately I wanted to work for in all those years of knocking down doors.

I never once attempted to be like, would you give me a job? Because I think I respected him too much to even dream of bridging that question.

But the fact that he reached out… and then my first night, I sit there playing those songs the first weekend. We were up in Wisconsin with Legacy Five and Poet Voices, and like Phil Cross is standing over there.

And then I go and I sit down at the piano and I’m thinking, what is this? What is life? What’s happened?

And so definitely a lot of those pinch-me moments like that.

Daniel Mount
That’s really cool!

All right, so just in closing, I want to tell your story as well as I can. Are there any questions I didn’t ask, but should? Anything else you’d like to mention? Tell people about yourself.

And of course, in conclusion, you can mention your website again and anything else you want to promote.

Joshua Tomlin
Hmm. I appreciate that. No, I think you’ve covered it. That’s about all there is.

Daniel Mount
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time! Thank you for coming on. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, getting to know you, and I’m sure the listeners will enjoy the chance to listen.

Joshua Tomlin
Awesome.

Daniel Mount
Thank you.

And to the listener, thank you for listening to Southern Gospel Journal. Keep up with the latest episodes on YouTube, Facebook, your favorite podcast platform, or on southerngospeljournal.com.

Thanks for listening.