For most of her life, Tori Kelly was taught to think about success as something just over the horizon.
The pop singer-songwriter signed her first record deal at 12. As a teenager, she heard the same promise over and over from people in the industry: You’re just one hit away. Success always felt like the next song, the next album, the next breakthrough.
Now, after more than two decades in music, Kelly says she’s finally stopped measuring her life that way.
Her latest album, God Must Really Love Me, arrives during one of the happiest seasons she’s ever experienced. Becoming a mother has reshaped her priorities, deepened her faith and unlocked a creative freedom she didn’t expect. The songs are among the most personal she’s written, but what surprised her most wasn’t the subject matter. It was realizing she no longer needed her career to tell her who she was.
“My definition of success… I honestly don’t know if I ever had one,” Kelly tells RELEVANT. “I’ve been doing what I’m doing now in my career for a pretty long time.”
Growing up in the spotlight made it easy to believe success was something that could finally be achieved if she just worked hard enough.
“I was, you know, 12 when I got signed,” she says. “When I was a kid, because I was in the industry, I would have a lot of people say, you know, ‘You’re just one hit away,’ or they would just promise me the world basically. And as a kid, when that doesn’t happen, it’s like, ‘Okay, I’m a failure now because they said this would happen. So it must be something wrong with me.'”
Looking back, Kelly says that mindset quietly shaped how she viewed her career for years.
“I think at one point maybe I thought that there was this arrival of making it,” she says.
Ironically, it wasn’t until she’d already accumulated Grammy Awards, platinum records and years of commercial success that she realized none of those milestones could provide the security she’d been chasing.
“I think at this point in my career, I’ve done a lot of things that I would consider myself successful,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s because of what you see on paper.”
The shift came gradually, but motherhood accelerated it.
Kelly expected having a baby would slow down her music career. Before giving birth, she rushed to finish songs and even shot her album artwork while pregnant because she wasn’t sure what life would look like afterward.
“I was thinking when I have this baby, I have no idea what kind of drive I’m gonna have,” she says. “Will I even want to do music anymore? Am I gonna be struggling with the balance of this? … Maybe so much time is gonna go by and I’m not gonna feel inspired anymore.”
Instead, the opposite happened.
Just 10 days after her son, Zaydan, was born, melodies started flooding into her head. She found herself singing ideas into her phone while nursing him. By the time he was two months old, she’d gone into the studio and finished the album in a matter of weeks.
“I was trying to force this feeling that I didn’t know yet,” she says. “I was pregnant so I had feelings about being a mom, but there was no way for me to complete it until he was born.”
The experience convinced her that the best songs come from living honestly instead of trying to predict what people want.
“I feel like I’m the type of artist that has to write about whatever season of life I’m in,” she says. “Motherhood… just unlocked this kind of new piece of my songwriting.”
That season also inspired the album’s title.
Driving to a writing session one afternoon, Kelly found herself overwhelmed by gratitude.
“I was literally driving and just, you know, looking up… I’m feeling so grateful and I just said out loud, ‘Wow, God must really love me.'”
The phrase became the title track and eventually the album’s central idea.
“I was looking at all the songs and kind of stepping back, I’m like, ‘What is the theme? What am I trying to say here?’ And that song title was just right in my face,” she says. “I really think that’s the theme of this album… just that overall sense of gratitude and feeling so loved by God.”
Motherhood didn’t just change what Kelly wrote about. It also changed how she understands God.
“If anything, I think it’s made me more aware of not only His presence but I think little ways that He shows His love,” she says. “I feel like I’m just more aware of those things.”
Watching her son discover the world has become its own form of spiritual formation.
“I think I’ve just been in this state of awe,” she says. “Everything that he does now… he’s starting to notice his hands… and I’m fascinated by his reaction.”
That slower pace has also reinforced one of the album’s recurring themes: surrender.
“I think whether you’re a parent or not, we naturally want to hold everything tight and try to control things,” Kelly says. “That’s where my faith has really been tested… I think I would just go crazy if I tried to control every little thing.”
Instead, she returns daily to the lesson behind one of the album’s standout tracks.
“I think once we are actually able to exhale and shake those things off and actually give them up to God… it makes things a lot easier for me,” she says. “It’s still hard to do. That’s why I write songs called ‘Control.’ Every time I sing it, I’m like, ‘Okay… gotta.’ It’s a daily thing really.”
For Kelly, that same surrender eventually extended to her career.
One song on the album, “Smooth Landing,” reflects on spending nearly her entire life in the public eye. Today, she says she’s learned to separate what she does from who she is.
“I still love what I do, but it’s not my identity anymore,” she says.
Then she poses a question she asks herself often.
“If you took away my voice… if something happened, would I be okay?”
Her answer comes without hesitation.
“I think the answer is yes, but simply because of my faith and knowing where my identity is,” she said. “It makes being a singer just one of the many things that I am. It makes me a lot of peace because it’s not like if I have a bad show, or if something goes weird with my voice, or maybe I put out a song and people are not liking it… now my identity isn’t based on other people’s opinion of me.”
Success, she says, hasn’t become less meaningful. It’s simply been redefined.
“All this is nice. This is all great. And there’s so much good in it,” she says. “But at the end of the day, I want to make sure that I’m landing in a place where I could feel peace, I could feel love, I can be who I truly am.”
After years of chasing whatever came next, that’s become the destination she’s been looking for all along.
