The Psalms have shaped the prayers of God’s people for thousands of years. One of the early church fathers described them as a school for learning how to pray. Another called them a gymnasium, a place for spiritual workout. Graham has always loved setting the Psalms to music, drawn to the way they give language to experiences that can otherwise be impossible to articulate. There is something about entering a Psalm, he says, that takes you in and gives you a framework to express where you are, even when you are not entirely sure where that is.

Psalm 25 begins with one of the most direct and vulnerable movements in all of scripture: “To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.” It is an act of trust and surrender in a single line. What strikes Graham about the Psalms is that you do not always need to know what you are feeling before you begin. The words do the work. They shape your thoughts, order your prayers and draw you toward God through language that has carried people through exactly these moments for centuries. Ancient words, but never distant ones.

To You O Lord came from one of those private moments of simply opening the Psalms and setting the words to music, wrapping his heart around them rather than composing in any formal sense. Graham is honest that this kind of improvised engagement with scripture rarely produces a song that lasts. This time it did. The result is a setting of Psalm 25 that stays close to the original text while carrying the emotional weight of someone genuinely praying the words, not performing them. It is a song for anyone who has ever needed to lift their soul somewhere beyond themselves and found they needed help with the words.