LUFKIN Former Odessans Tyler and Kelsie Hendricks had been planning on eventually releasing their debut single when the time was right.
However, a painful and stressful experience last year when first born daughter Mia was born three months premature pushed them to tell their story.
The Hendricks, who have lived in Lufkin for the last six years after moving from Odessa, welcomed their daughter into this world on St. Patrick’s Day last year, weighing only one pound and 13 ounces.
Now, one year later, Mia is doing well and will be able to celebrate her first birthday. To mark the special occasion and reflect on what they’ve been through, Tyler and Kelsie will be releasing their debut single “Say You’ll Stay” on March 17.
The song can be downloaded on all streaming platforms including tinyurl.com/5hcfjxbv.
It’s the culmination of work that the couple has been doing with writing and compiling a collection of their own original music. They knew one day they were going to want to share it with the world and as Tyler said “put the fire and resources into recording it the right way.”
“For us, really, when we brought Mia home, it just added new fuel to the story,” Tyler said. “Stories matter. Stories change the world. We have a few things that we’re responsible for stewarding during our time on the earth. We get to decide how we invest our time. We get to decide how we invested our testimony.”
For them, bringing Mia home added new purpose.
“We just held on to hope the whole way through,” Tyler said. “Being able to come home with her helped us to put a period on that sentence and say that hope doesn’t disappoint. It’s hard to hold onto sometimes but it’s not going to disappoint. Once we brought Mia home, we just added new intentionality and focus of being able to share that story, specifically through the music.”
After she was born, Mia had to spend 110 days inside the NICU at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston.
For Tyler and Kelsie, hope carried them through.
“We are Christians,” Kelsie said. “We’re believers. … In addition to faith, hope is the thing that carried us through and made us know we were going to be ok. It was the most difficult thing I had ever gone through. Somehow, simultaneously, just having Mia is the most wonderful thing I’ve ever experienced. She’s the best. The days at the hospital were long. The nights with the monitors going off and very little sleep for three and a half months were very long but just the hope to know that we will get to the other side of it and come home was there.”
Tyler grew up in Odessa, attending Permian High School.
He met his soon-to-be-wife when they both attended South Plains College in Levelland.
Both attended school for music.
“I was going for vocal performance and he was going for recording engineering,” Kelsie said. “We met there, doing music together. We’ve been doing music since then, both on our own as far as just writing and then playing at restaurants and weddings and things like that in addition to our jobs.”
After working for several years as worship directors at Crossroads Church in Odessa, the couple moved from one side of the state to the other, relocating to East Texas.
They both now work at Timber Creek Church where Kelsie serves as the Worship and Media Director while Tyler works as the Next Steps Director.
During the 110-day period last year, they both heard back from friends and families here in the Permian Basin.
“They reached out to us,” Tyler said. “We had tons of people from the church community and family reach out to us. My parents got on a plane multiple different times to come to Houston. Even if I wasn’t there, my mom got on a plane to go to Houston just to be with Kelsie while I was at work. The West Texas community extends so deep and it extends across the state. That’s the heart of the place I grew up. The people of West Texas were amazing for us during that time.”
“Say You’ll Stay” features resonant cello and harmonies with Kelsie as the lead vocalist.
“It’s a love song at its heart,” Tyler said. “It feels like a wedding song. It has a foundation of resonant cello and my wife’s vocal is a big part of what made me want to do music my whole life. … We were able to take Mia into the studio with us and had her on the microphone. It’s being released on her birthday and she’s on the track. The chorus is ‘say you’ll stay because time with you is sweet’.”
Most of the song was originally wrote back in 2019 while Tyler and Kelsie were on vacation.
“We were on a back porch and it was time to leave,” Kelsie said. “Tyler and I thought it was our invitation to stay and spend a few more minutes together. … We sat on the back porch a few more minutes and this song was born there.”
Tyler then picked up his guitar and started playing what’s now the chorus while Kelsie started singing the lyrics.
“That’s how it got started,” Kelsie said. “We’ve sat on the song for a few years now and let it marinate. We knew that one day that would be a song that we would want to share.”
After going through last year’s situation, they knew it was time to share it with the rest of the world.
“Once we saw that it was a song we wanted to share, we went into studio in Nacogdoches and recorded the guitar, vocals and cello,” Kelsie said. “There’s also some light drums and light cymbal work. We got that recording done just over the last few months and preparation knowing that this is part of the way we want to tell the story and release it on our daughter’s first birthday.”
As Tyler and Kelsie approach their daughter’s first birthday, they reflect back on the emotional roller coaster they felt over the last 12 months.
“It’s been the fullest year in every possible way,” Tyler said. “The time in the hospital was one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to go through. But it just increased our capacity to experience all of it. It’s been filled with hope and joy in a new way. Being a parent has been the best thing. The hospital part was the hardest thing. But we had a great team there in Houston. The doctors and nurses were amazing. From the day we brought her home, she’s been one miracle after the next. It’s been fun to be her parents.”
