Friday Listen: “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” – Jason Mraz (2026)

There are songs you go looking for. And then there are songs that find you anyway.

Jason Mraz’s latest release, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” landed in my feed last week ahead of his upcoming album Grandma’s Gospel Favorites (out May 8). I almost didn’t press play.

An old gospel hymn? From an artist I haven’t closely followed in years? It didn’t exactly feel like something that would fit where my head has been lately. While I’ve always loved powerful gospel voices—Aretha Franklin immediately comes to mind—I tend to connect more with music that leans spiritual than explicitly religious. I’ve said before that I’m more drawn to the idea of a “gnostic” Jesus than the Sunday school version. So, this one didn’t feel like it was for me.

But then again… music has a way of ignoring those assumptions.

Before getting into Mraz’s version, it’s worth knowing that “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” isn’t just any song. Written in 1905 by Civilla D. Martin with music by Charles H. Gabriel, it’s a hymn rooted in quiet resilience. The lyrics were inspired by a woman living with chronic illness who, despite everything, expressed a deep sense of peace. That origin matters—it gives the song a kind of lived-in authenticity that has allowed it to endure for over a century.

Over the years, it’s been carried forward by some of the most powerful voices in music- Whitney Houston, Mahalia Jackson, and even the Steel Drivers and more. Each artist reshaped it slightly, but the core remained the same: reassurance in the middle of uncertainty.

Still—I wasn’t expecting much when I hit play (especially because I knew none of that beforehand...I had never heard of the song before)

And then I had one of those days.

You know the kind. Where your brain decides to go somewhere uninvited and just… stays there. For me, that’s been happening more lately. I turn 50 in a few months, and I didn’t expect that number to land the way it has. But it has. It’s shifted something—quietly, persistently—and I’ve been trying to make sense of it.

So there I was, in that headspace, and this song started.

And it stopped me.

Mraz’s voice—something that originally drew me to him back in the early 2000s when I saw him live at the 20th Century Theater, then again at Bogart’s (with Maroon 5 opening), and later at the Taft—still carries that same fluid, almost improvisational quality. He’s always felt like an artist who could bend a melody in real time, who treated songs like living things. That looseness, that sense of presence, is what made him compelling to me in the first place.

Here, though, it’s more restrained—but not in a limiting way. It feels intentional. Grounded. The phrasing, the voicings… they don’t push the song somewhere new so much as they let it breathe. They are so intentional...and you can feel it.

And somehow, that’s what got through. I played it again. And again. And again.

Not because I suddenly connected to the theology—but because I connected to the feeling. The steadiness. The reminder, however you interpret it, that you’re not just floating out there unnoticed.

That’s the thing about songs like this. At their best, they aren’t about belief systems. They’re about interruption. They break into whatever loop your mind is stuck in and gently redirect it. They create space where there wasn’t any.

I didn’t expect that from this song. I definitely didn’t expect it from this project.

And yet here we are.

It also made me realize something about revisiting artists over time. My relationship with Jason Mraz hasn’t been consistent—I was all in early on, then gradually less so with each album. That happens. Tastes change. Life shifts. But every now and then, an artist you’ve drifted from circles back into your orbit at exactly the right moment.

This was one of those moments.

Now I’m curious about Grandma’s Gospel Favorites. Cautiously optimistic, maybe. Part of me still wonders if this track is the outlier—the one that just happened to hit at the perfect time. But another part of me is genuinely excited to find out.

Because what if it’s not? What if there are more moments like this waiting in that album?

Either way, this one already did its job.

It met me where I was—somewhere I didn’t even fully understand—and helped shift me out of it, if only for a few minutes. And really, that’s all you can ask of a song.

That’s the magic.