I’ve known Monty G a long time. Sat in the studio with him, watched him build songs from scratch, and played every project he’s put out. So when Life Faith Love, Vol. 1 landed, I figured I’d like it because he’s never given me a reason not to.
I didn’t expect it to catch me the way it did. Tracks like “Dream Bigger,” “Jah Alone,” and “Dusty Bibles” found me right where I am in my life right now, needing those exact reminders.
And that’s exactly what a good gospel record is supposed to do. I’m not a huge fan of being Preached AT, which was perfect, because the way Monty G presents Christ’s message is far from preachy. The album itself is full of conviction, but none of the messages feel like a condemnation or a lecture. He shouts to you, not at you. He makes loving Jesus feel cool, and that’s a message I can get behind.
Turns out, that message of grace is not an accident. It’s a philosophy he’s thought through all the way. When I asked where the boldness comes from without it ever tipping into a lecture, he put it plain: “You may shout to them to show them the direction, but you’re not going to shout at them. You could chase them away, and that makes them more lost.” The conviction is real. The door stays open.
He can write it that way because he’s been on the other side of that door. “It’s easy to tell a person who they’re not when you’ve never been where they’ve been,” he told me. “It’s better to tell them who they can become, because you know where you came from.” The God he met when he was down, he says, didn’t condemn him. He embraced him. So that’s the God in these songs. And they reached Monty before they ever reached me. “They were written through me, for me,” he said. “The songs affected the writer first.” Whatever “Dream Bigger” did to me on a hard day, it did to him first.
He’s also too good at this to bore you into belief. He compares it to the Flintstone vitamins, sweet enough that the kid actually takes it, with everything the body needed hidden inside. Put a groove on a person and the message rides in underneath. It’s why “Liv Christ,” his record with Papa San, could pass for a secular party song until you catch what he’s really saying.
That’s one of twelve, and the twelve are just the start. Monty spent a year recording and walked away with more than fifty songs, enough that he split the best of it into a trilogy. Vol. 1 is the gateway, the reintroduction, with two more volumes going deeper behind it. He sequenced these twelve like a road you walk, he says, from waking up and dreaming bigger, through getting lost in worship and being called back to your feet, all the way home. “The work was done as an entire body, not fragments,” he told me. “Like a puzzle, so people get the full picture listening in order.”
One of the best things about this album was the collabs. I know from experience how much Moty values collaboration. This album is proof of that. He managed to get big dancehall names like Papa San and Marion Hall. Hall, who the world knew as Lady Saw when she ruled dancehall at its rawest, famously gave it all up for the church. Getting both of them on one gospel record is a statement, but Monty talks about Hall like a friend, not a trophy. “Meeting her now is night and day from the woman you think you know”, he says: a beautiful soul, dead serious about the work, and funnier than anybody expects. “As hard as she was on the other side, she’s as dedicated on this side.” Closer to home, he reached past his usual circle of collaborators for Twindem, two unmistakably Bahamian voices, because he wanted the taste of home on a record going out to the world. And the woman carrying the hook on “Wanna Be More” is Regina Wingate, sampled off a gospel reggae song he loved coming up, when the genre was just breaking. None of it is solo work, and he won’t pretend it is. “Jesus needed twelve disciples, and he’s Jesus,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing has to be bigger than you.”
Underneath all of it is a bigger inheritance. Reggae, Monty reminds me, is the king’s music, spiritual down to its frequencies, and he’s carrying that forward while building something of his own on top of it, conscious music driven by grace instead of guilt.
Even the title is doing work. Life, then faith, then love, in that order and for a reason. “Everything starts with life,” he said. “Meaning begins with faith. And love is the thing that drives all of it. Not the last. The greatest.”
I came to this album expecting a good Monty G record, because that’s all he’s ever given me. I left it carrying something I didn’t walk in with. Stream it. It got past my guard. It’ll get past yours.
