After more than 14 years in the spotlight, award-winning musician Brooke Fraser has ticked a lot off her bucket list.
Platinum-selling albums and number-one singles? Check. Moving from her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand and touring internationally? Check. Supporting some of the biggest names in music (à la David Bowie and John Mayer)? Check. Becoming one of the most acclaimed Christian songwriters in the world? Check.
So what’s next for this gifted muso? Family has always been important in her life (her father was All Blacks rugby player Bernie Fraser), and in the past few months she and her husband Scott Ligertwood have welcomed their second child into the world. Naming her Rooney Ives, she completes what Brooke calls her ‘girl gang’ and joins older sister, Dylan Wilde.
In addition, the Kiwi was recently granted her US green card, allowing the family to make a permanent home in Los Angeles. Between this, her music career, their burgeoning family and her role on the leadership team at Hillsong Church LA, Brooke is one busy woman. And this is why she feels it’s more important than ever to stay grounded in what matters the most: her faith.
“All the decisions that I make are rooted in God, also what really helps me is that I am plugged into a local church, which is community,” she shared with Billboard magazine.
While Brooke was born in 1983, she considers her real birthday to have taken place in 1999—the year she became a Christian. Struggling as a teenager, she doubted her self-worth and felt the world would be “better off without [her]”. Yet she found purpose when she sat alone in her bedroom with a Bible and, as she says, “met Jesus”.
“I realised [Jesus] was acutely familiar with everything about me and inside of me and that, rather than responding to this with repulsion….his response to me was love and an invitation to love him back,” she wrote in an article for Soul Purpose magazine.
Today, this sense of purpose shapes every facet of her life. On a larger scale, she is an artist associate (ambassador) for World Vision and named her second album Albertine after a child she met while travelling across Rwanda. She has also fundraised for Charity: Water and joined NZ band The Flight of The Conchords in recording a Red Nose Day single in 2012.
At home, this purpose also permeates her day-to-day activities. Raising a family in the US weighs heavy on her shoulders, in light of the nation’s political upheaval, and she is committed to not only being a positive influence personally, but teaching her daughters to do the same.
“As I watched the Vice News piece on Charlottesville and fed my baby and cried, I asked God how we raise these American daughters of ours in a social climate like this,” she shared on Instagram. “By the grace of God we can protect and condemn acts and ideologies of hate whilst loving and praying for the broken people who perpetrate and perpetuate them.”
It is not always easy to navigate life and all its complexities, yet Brooke shows that by giving every facet of it to God we can truly make a difference. That being said, it makes sense that she names The Salvation Army’s founder William Booth as one of her heroes.
Recalling a story where William told his son he had vowed that “God should have all there was of William Booth”, she is adamant that she will live life the same way.
“I too, have invited God to have all there is to have of Brooke Fraser,” she wrote in Christian youth magazine Soul Purpose. “And I’m not taking it back.”
Brooke Fraser gives her all to God