Kirk Franklin's single with Karen Clark Sheard is Thank You For Everything

Kirk Franklin and Karen Clark Sheard have made a record together, and the title is Thank You For Everything rather than the shorter version the early write-ups carried. SoulTracks published it as a First Listen on 18 September.

Franklin wrote the song and co-produced it with Adam Blackstone. The lyric is built on two passages, Romans 8:28 and 1 Thessalonians 5:18, which between them instruct the listener to give thanks whatever the circumstances, on the grounds that everything works to the good of those who love God and are called to his purpose.

The arrangement is a Franklin arrangement in the way that phrase has meant for thirty years, with him working call and response against his choir and driving the room from the front. It is the thing choirs and worship teams have been performing his songs for since the early 1990s.

Sheard arrives in the second half and takes it somewhere else. Her section is a testimony about faith in God's power to heal and deliver carrying her through, delivered in the full-force register that made her name, and it is where the record stops being a praise song and starts being a personal one.

The pairing is less obvious than it looks on paper and more logical than it sounds. Both artists built careers on using the production language of secular rnb-soul, funk and hip-hop to carry an uncompromising message, and both can also stand in front of a choir and sing a straight gospel song with nothing underneath it. Sheard came up in The Clark Sisters before a long solo run, and Franklin has spent three decades adding to the canon.

No album, label or wider release has been attached to the song, so for the moment it is a single and a first listen. It sits with the rest of the week's gospel releases on the release calendar. Gospel has had a strong year elsewhere too, with Lisa Knowles-Smith and Darrel Walls leading the 2026 Stellar Gospel Music Awards winners and Fivio Foreign crossing into the form on a new song.