It Is Well

Kristene DiMarco’s “It Is Well,” released in 2015 on Bethel Music’s You Make Me Brave, is a different kind of hymn recording than either of the other two covered today – it isn’t primarily a performance of Horatio Spafford’s original text so much as a new song built around it. DiMarco wrote new verses drawn from her own experience of feeling overwhelmed while searching for a home for her young family, framed around a recurring image of Jesus calming a storm, and interpolated Spafford and Bliss’s 1876 refrain – “it is well, it is well, with my soul” – as the song’s anchor point. Spafford and Bliss receive posthumous co-writing credit for exactly that reason: enough of the original survives, structurally and lyrically, that the song is legally and editorially still a version of their hymn, even though most of what’s actually sung is new.

The reinterpretation earns its own place rather than just borrowing the original’s built-in weight. DiMarco’s verses are personal and specific in a way the 1876 text, for all its power, was never trying to be – Spafford wrote for anyone carrying grief, DiMarco writes about one particular kind of everyday anxiety, and the song is stronger for choosing a lane rather than trying to cover both. It’s also a real commercial success on its own terms: a No. 27 peak on Hot Christian Songs and a platinum certification, evidence the reinterpretation found its own audience rather than just riding the hymn’s reputation.

7.9/10 – less a cover than a new song in conversation with an old one, and confident enough in that distinction to work as both.

Hero image: Single cover: “It Is Well” (Radio Mix), Bethel Music & Kristene DiMarco (2015, Bethel Music). Used under fair use for editorial review.