The best-selling and most-awarded female gospel artist of all time, CeCe Winans has long since cemented her status as one of the most accomplished and celebrated women in modern music history. She has released a myriad of solo and collaborative albums that crossed genres and influenced generations of gospel and secular vocalists.
Winans spoke with rolling out about her accomplishments and her single titled, “Believe For It.”
How does it feel being the best-selling and most-awarded female gospel artist of all time?
I’m honored and surprised, but humbled by it as well. It’s hard to put into words how you feel when people acknowledge your music and when you’re acknowledged by your peers. It just says a lot. It encourages me to keep doing what I’m doing and it humbles me because it’s a great opportunity to be able to sing gospel music, to be able to share what God has meant to you through music, and then to know that it touches people’s hearts and uplifts them and gives them what they need at the moment. It’s just a humbling experience. So, I am honored by all the nominees, all the awards because we don’t do what we do for those things. It’s like a by-product of things that have happened because of what we do and I’m humbled by it.
Tell us about your single “Believe For It.”
Recording the record during the pandemic and everybody going through what they were going through, the producers and I talked about writing the song or needing the song on the record that would encourage people to believe. When they started writing this song, they sent it to me and I was like, “Yes, this is it. We need this.” We had the whole record finished and we felt like we needed another song. When you think about timing, we were supposed to put is record out at the beginning of 2020 and because of the pandemic, we had to cancel the live record experience. When we rescheduled it for the end of the year that’s when we wrote: “Believe For It.” If we would have put it out at the beginning of the year, we wouldn’t have had that song. That song ended up being the title of the record. It’s just another example of just trusting God and his timing, and even when things don’t look like they’re working out for our good, they are. That song was the last song that was written and we just felt like people needed to have faith again, people needed to understand that even though we were experiencing hard times, God was still with us and that we were going to get over to the other side. It has been a wonderful testimony of God’s goodness and hearing the testimonies from this song has been very encouraging.
