Dennis Quaid’s debut gospel album, including songs he beautifully played at the SiriusXM studios, is now No. 1 on the Top Christian/Gospel Albums chart!
The 69-year-old actor known for films like Innerspace (1987), The Parent Trap (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), and A Dog’s Journey (2019) recently released Fallen: A Gospel Record for Sinners. Titled Fallen: A Gospel Album for Sinners, it’s a spiritual journey from your lowest place to heaven, made up of seven hymn covers and five original songs.
Dennis joined host Olivia Lane in the SiriusXM Nashville studios for an exclusive interview on The Message, where he detailed his own experience with religion, how spirituality helped him out of drug addiction, and what his songwriting process looked like.
Dennis shared that he’s been a musician since his grandfather bought him his first guitar at age 12. “Immediately, I started songwriting because I realized I was never going to be able to shred a guitar, so it was kind of a defence,” he said. “But I just kind of naturally felt myself doing that. It’s an affliction. It won’t go away.”
Although he grew up in the Baptist church, it was around that same age that Dennis found himself getting “disillusioned with ‘church-ianity,’” as he called it. But at 17, the book Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse helped Dennis realize he was more of a “seeker.”
“I always identified as a Christian, but from there, I read The Dhammapada, I read The Bhagavad Gita, I read the Quran, I read the Bible cover-to-cover,” Dennis said. “I fooled around, and then I started looking to fill that hole in other ways. Got into, in the ’80s, got into cocaine and all that stuff. Then it was fun, and fun with problems, then just problems.”
It was back then that his rock band, The Eclectics, were playing the Palace Theatre in Hollywood with record companies in the audience when they got their first record deal — only to immediately break up because Dennis was “out of control,” as he described. This inspired his own “white light experience,” where he realized he was going to lose everything important to him if he didn’t change.
He went to rehab (which he called “cocaine school”) for a month but still felt there was something missing in his life. It was while re-reading that Bible that he was struck by the red words of Jesus and now regards his personal relationship with Jesus as the thing that filled up that hole for him.
“It does answer a lot of unanswerable things,” he said.
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