Music Anchor

There’s a version of Madison Ryann Ward that could have been a Rick Rubin secular darling — the viral Aretha cover, the Division I volleyball star turned soul singer, the Beyond Me EP with its stripped-back R&B cool. That version never fully materialized. Instead, Ward took a different path: independent, faith-forward, and increasingly comfortable in her own lane. Get Up Again, her January 2026 single, is a small but telling dispatch from that journey and one of the more honest things in the Christian music space right now.

The track leans into Ward’s natural strengths: warm, unhurried vocals that carry weight without announcing themselves, a production palette that nods to gospel without getting swallowed by it. There’s a blues-tinged soul underneath the arrangement that feels earned rather than aesthetically borrowed. Ward grew up absorbing Billie Holiday and Al Green in her father’s Oklahoma BBQ restaurant, and that lineage still shows up in the way she phrases a line, slightly behind the beat, never overselling the emotion.

Lyrically, Get Up Again operates in familiar resurrection-metaphor territory, but Ward sidesteps the triumphalist clichés that plague the genre. The song isn’t about bouncing back victorious. It’s about the slower, more honest process of simply choosing to stand.

There’s a weariness in the verses that gives the chorus its credibility. When the lift comes, you believe it because she’s let you feel the weight first. That’s a craft choice a lot of Christian pop refuses to make, and it’s why Ward consistently sounds more trustworthy than her peers.

Where the track stumbles slightly is in its production finish. For an artist whose voice carries this much texture, the mix occasionally feels a bit too polished, the edges smoothed out in ways that dilute the rawness that makes Ward compelling. Her Purified Love album showed she could marry sonic warmth with spiritual depth. Get Up Again gets close but plays it a little safe in the final stretch.

Still, at a moment when Christian music is flooded with stadium-ready anthems that confuse volume for sincerity, Ward’s quiet insistence on emotional truth is worth paying attention to. Get Up Again isn’t her ceiling, and it might not even be her best work of the past year, but it’s a reminder that she’s one of the few artists in this space who treats her listeners as adults.

She got up. And it sounds like she means it.