Warren Barfield Returns With First New Music in 14 Years After Choosing Family Over Fame

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FRANKLIN, Tenn.
After stepping away from the spotlight at the height of a successful Christian music career, singer-songwriter Warren Barfield is returning with new music shaped by seven years of family, faith, and farming. His first new music in 14 years, “The Kind of Love We Never Want to End,” releases Friday.

Barfield, known for his radio hits “My Heart Goes Out,” “Mistaken” and “and the marriage anthem “Love Is Not A Fight” featured in the film Fireproof, walked away from touring in 2017 with offers still on the table and another arena run being negotiated.

“My strongest conviction was no longer chasing that music thing,” Barfield said. “I was on stage every night talking about family and fighting for your marriage while I was away from my wife and kids. I had to ask, ‘Shouldn’t I go home and be the man I’m singing about being on stage?’”

Barfield left the road, moved his family to a neglected 100 acre farm, and spent years clearing land, building a barn and house, and raising pigs, chickens, and cattle. Guitars went to a friend’s house. Awards and photos stayed boxed away. For nearly seven years, he didn’t play shows and only picked up a guitar to teach his kids to play.

“It wasn’t so much that I was walking away from something,” he explained. “I felt like I was supposed to go toward something else—even though I didn’t know exactly what that was. I wrote in my journal, ‘You don’t have to know where you’re going to know you can’t stay where you are’.”

A Stirring to Create Again
The shift back toward music began quietly in a basement room of the family’s new home. Barfield hung a few guitars on the wall, opened an old email account he hadn’t checked in years, and began reading thousands of messages from listeners whose lives had been marked by his songs.

One message in particular, from a woman urging him not to abandon his calling, stayed with him. When he replied, explaining his decision to stay home and raise his children felt like the greater calling she responded that modern technology would allow him to do both.

Around the same time, a friend handed him a Charles Spurgeon devotional for farmers. One passage challenged him deeply.

“Spurgeon was talking about people God has gifted who are just using their talents for themselves,” Barfield said. “Then he goes further and says it’s even worse to have those talents and not use them at all. That one cut me.”

Another line stayed with him even more:

“He wrote that if you have a light, you should shine it—even if it’s a glowworm’s light—in a world as dark as this,” Barfield recalled. “He said if you have a syllable of divine truth to speak in a world full of falsehood and error, you should speak it. I thought, ‘Okay, I can be a glowworm. I can be a syllable.’”

That conviction led Barfield back to social media, where he committed to posting daily for a year, dusting off his songwriting muscles and sharing fresh songs from his basement—without a label, without A&R pressure, and without critics in the room.

“For years I wrote with all the industry voices in my head—radio expectations, label expectations, critics,” he said. “When I quit, I trained myself to shut every song idea down until they just stopped coming. In 2024, I decided every idea that showed up, no matter how simple, I would water it and finish it—like tending soil that’s been resting for years.”

From Arena Tours to 100 Seats in a Barn
As Barfield reconnected with listeners online, he and his wife Megan had a simple idea: invite people to their farm.

Megan pulled out a calendar and found one open December weekend that didn’t compete with the family schedule. Barfield posted a simple announcement on social media: 100 tickets, one night only. Within minutes of the link going live, the show sold out.

“People bought tickets from California, Oregon, Michigan, New York, Florida—all over the country,” Barfield said. “We set up 100 folding chairs in the barn, borrowed a little pop-up stage and some speakers from friends, and had a Christmas concert.”

The pattern has repeated with every date since. Each barn concert sells out, with fans flying or driving long distances to experience an evening of songs and stories in a family farm setting.

“By industry standards, it’s small,” Barfield said. “By our family’s standards, it’s overwhelmingly beautiful. If you told me I could sell 1,000 tickets to one show or do 10 nights in my barn with 100 people each, I’d take the 10. I step off the stage around 9 p.m., and I don’t leave until the last person in line has shared their story—sometimes 1 a.m. I can’t do that in a larger concert setting. This is special. It makes me cry almost every time.”

The events are a family affair: his son parks cars, his daughter runs the merch table, and Megan greets guests at the door and points them toward the coffee. There is no backstage. The same man on stage is the one shaking hands in the gravel driveway when it’s over.

“I hold all that old industry stuff really loosely,” Barfield said. “There’s still not a single plaque or picture from my career hanging in our house. For my kids, this barn season is the first time they’re really seeing that part of my life. It’s like we’re all getting to meet that version of me together.”

New Music, Same Conviction
Out of the daily posts, basement demos, and barn nights, Barfield has begun carefully selecting songs to officially release—his first new recordings since his 2012 independent album Redbird.

“Social media has changed since I left the road and signed off in 2017,” he said. “Back then, you mostly talked to people who already followed you. Now, any post can go out to anybody. I realized I could be faithful to the conviction to stay home with my family and still share songs from our little farm.”

While the learning curve of recording himself in his home studio delayed releases he initially hoped to share in 2025, Barfield says the extra time has only deepened the material.

“Everything has a cost,” he said. “Walking away from music meant there were relationships I never got to make. But it also let me go deeper with my wife and kids. Now I’m in a place where I can do both—be present at home and still connect with people through songs. That’s what these new recordings and these barn concerts are about.”