Elle Limebear used to have a hard time describing her dad’s job. When classmates asked what he did, she’d say he was in a band, then that it was Christian music, then that it was sort of rocky, and then she’d watch the conversation go nowhere. Some days she wished he were “just a plumber dad.”
Her father is Martin Smith, the frontman of Delirious?, the British band behind “History Maker” and “Did You Feel the Mountains Tremble?” and one of the defining worship bands of the late ‘90s and 2000s. She remembers touring the US as a kid, on big tour buses, with people lining up for photos with him. Back home in their English village, “no one really cared.”
Limebear now lives in Brighton with her husband, Tom, and their three young children, and the song she’s best known for is one almost every British adult has sung. “Give Me Joy,” released in July, reworks the hymn “Oil in My Lamp.” It debuted at No. 1 on the Official UK Christian & Gospel Singles Chart and has held the top spot for nine weeks since. Decca Records, which announced her signing the same month, calls her its first contemporary Christian artist.
The hymn was a fixture of British school assemblies, whether or not the school was religious. “If you sing ‘Oil in My Lamp,’ probably everyone will know it,” Limebear told RELEVANT. “It’s in our childhood. It’s in our bones almost.”
She started slipping it into her live sets a few years ago. The reaction surprised her. “There was this eruption of, I know this. I remember being a kid singing this,” she said. “People just belted it, absolutely belted it.” Her husband suggested she rewrite it for people who never grew up singing it. Her first reaction was that the song was already a banner. “What a challenge.”
She wrote new verses and melodies and kept the heart of it. When her new label asked whether she had anything to lead with, she figured the answer was no.
“It’s a British kind of hymn-like thing,” she said. “Not super cool.” Then she played it for the team, a room of people who, in her words, don’t know Jesus. “They absolutely loved it and it brought them alive. They’re like, I remember singing this song.” The song was only a chorus and a verse at that point, and the response is what pushed her to finish it.
Limebear never planned to be a songwriter. At 20 she was set on photography, which felt safe.
“I could contain it, control it,” she said. Then she felt God tell her, clearly, to do music. “It didn’t feel like my thought.”
She says fear kept her from believing she had anything to bring, and she didn’t know how to write songs. “Back then I was definitely hesitantly walking through these doors full of fear. Now I feel like I’m skipping through them.”
The version of England she’s skipping through is a different one from the England she grew up in. She was the only Christian in her whole school, she said, and her youth group “saved my life.” Lately she hears from friends and church leaders across the country about people walking into church out of plain curiosity about Jesus. “There’s this thing called the quiet revival that they say is going on,” she said, “where people are just finding him in all sorts of places.”
She remembers being the weirdest person in the room for it. Now, she says, people are discovering that “actually, being a Christian isn’t that weird.” Her takeaway for believers is the same one. “I think we should all be more curious, even as Christians,” she said. “Get more curious. Ask more questions.”
Asked what’s behind it, she didn’t pretend to know. “I don’t know is the answer.” She pointed to decades of quiet prayer, from older women in church prayer meetings to families praying at home for relatives to come to faith, and added: “God hears every prayer, doesn’t he?” and “nothing’s wasted.”
She also described the last few years in the Church as “good, sad, confusing,” with “lots of walls” coming down, and says she senses something being built back up that looks different from before.
She says the change shows up in the music too. “I wish I had so many of these artists to share when I was at school as a way in of a conversation,” she said. “Like, have you heard this?”
She calls this an exciting time to be a Christian, and she wants believers to bring whatever they’re good at. “Every gift that God’s given you, whether you’re amazing at sewing, bring it on,” she said. “If you’re great at baking, come on, let’s partner with the Holy Spirit.”
The chart run has been a family event. “Give Me Joy” got to number two on the UK iTunes chart, she said, and her dad noticed. The last time he downloaded a song to push it up the charts was back in the Delirious? days. This time he did it for his daughter.
“This full circle moment,” she called it. “The UK felt like it rallied round to get a Jesus song in the charts, and we did it. A Jesus song wedged in between Sam Fender and Olivia Dean. I’m like, brilliant. Let them hear it, Lord.”
The label side is a shift her dad finds hard to believe. In Delirious?’s early years, she said, the band was “banging down doors” at mainstream labels. When she signed, the label reached out to her.
“The tides have really turned,” she said, describing his reaction. People are hearing music made out of faith “and not being offended by it, not wanting nothing to do with that.”
Next on her list is a new album on Decca, which would be her fourth overall. She started writing in September, with new collaborators, around the school run and the porridge every morning.
She says it’s been a while since she wrote seriously. “I need to learn how to do this again,” she said. “How do you write a song?”