Kim Hill and Paulette Wooten Left Christian Music When They Found Each Other. Now, They’re Back
The sapphic duo have released a new album as Wooten Hill.
Lesbian musical duo – and couple – Kim Hill and Paulette Wooten, known as Wooten Hill, are opening up about falling in love and leaving Christian music as they release a new album, “How Did We Get Here.”
Hill, 62, is a Grammy-nominated and Dove Award-winning singer-songwriter. And Wooten, 53, is an award-winning film composer and musician.
When they fell in love, “they fell out of Christian music,” People magazine writes.
“We disqualified ourselves from Christian music,” Hill told the magazine. “When we got together, we knew we had to leave Christian music. It cost us relationships with long, lifelong friends. It cost us our careers in that genre. It cost us all kinds of stuff with our families. And so, it was like moving to another world.”
That was 16 years ago, and now they are ready to step back into the music scene.
“We’ve spent a lot of time doing a lot of work internally and changing our life and rebuilding our life,” says Hill. “And we finally feel like we’re ready to say something.”
People reports that their album is a mix of gospel roots tunes with lyrics about Southern life and the issues they had to face as queer women.
“I left Nashville thinking I’m done with music,” Hill said. “I’ve had my dream come true. I had a great career. And personally, I became the black sheep as opposed to the hero in my family. It opened our eyes to all the other injustice that we’ve been blind to in our privileged, kind of white, Christian world.”
In the time away from the music industry, the couple opened a creative retreat center, but eventually the call of the stage and studio came back.
“We tried to build a different life outside of music,” Wooten said. “But ultimately, we just felt this call and this urge and this feeling that it is time for us to speak up and show up and, and represent, you know?”
They said their silence felt like they had something to hide. The new album is about them stepping out proudly, they say. That’s especially true on one song on the album called “Rise.”
“We were told we were broken,” Hill said. “We were told we were all kinds of negative things if we chose to be together. So, this song allows us to take that back and own it and say, ‘No, we’re not broken.’”
As they release new music, they are also relishing the opportunity to be doing what they love together.
“It’s been a hard road in a lot of ways, but also, to be together and to feel peace and to feel love, even in the grieving and the loss of all the things that we’ve had to traverse,” Wooten said. “It’s worth it. We honestly have zero regret.”
