Nichole’s passion is country-Christian music, which finds a home on her 11-track debut album, Jesus Changed My Life. The video for the title track shows her in a western setting, surrounded by cacti, as the boots-wearing Nichole testifies about Christ’s grace. A second song from that album, the country-pop tune Please, touts God’s rescuing power. It rose to No. 18 on the Billboard Hot Christian Songs chart. A third song, God Is In This Story, was No. 1 for three weeks.

“I love country music and I have always,” Nichole told Christian Headlines. “I was singing in bars and coffee shops and all kinds of stuff when I was first starting out doing music.”

When she was 16 or 17, she says, she played the ukulele and sang folk-style country music. That was prior to her entry into Christian music. It also was around the time she considered ending her life due to a battle with depression and a series of surgeries that left her in a dark season. Nichole was born with congenital scoliosis, which causes a curving of the spine. Later, she was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic disorder that can cause pain all over the body.

“For about three years in between surgeries, I was very depressed,” she told Christian Headlines. “… There was a day that I really couldn’t do it anymore. And I picked up that bottle of pills, and I took it to the bathroom with me. And in that moment, I looked down at them, and I really considered just being done. And in that moment, I somehow dropped that bottle of pills — I still don’t know how it fell out of my hands. It wasn’t like I tripped or anything. And it wasn’t like they slipped out of my hand.”

“And for me, that was just kind of like an awakening moment where I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m not supposed to do this.’ Because I felt the Lord was saying to me, ‘Hold on. I’m not done yet.’… And so that kind of allowed me to hold on until I finally did see that miracle and had that encounter with the Lord and it changed the course of my life.”

Nichole still battles joint pain. Her spine is still curved. (At one point, she believed she was healed, but she now says the curve has returned.) It is about a 30-degree curve, she says.

“My orthopedic doctor right now tells me, ‘Well, I’m not that concerned. So you can just live your life and as long as it’s not bothering you, then we won’t really have to intervene,'” Nichole said. “… I’ve lived with a curve in my spine through my whole life. So I don’t really notice it.”

She hopes that her music encourages those who are going through trials.

“The reason why I named the album Jesus Changed My Life was because I really wanted people to know that all the songs have a theme about Jesus changing my life,” she told Christian Headlines. “And it’s just the different ways that He’s come through, whether it’s forgiveness, whether it is healing, or whether it is His mercy in my life. He has come through in so many different aspects of my life.

She added, “Jesus really turned things around for me.”

Nichole is on a 30-city tour with CAIN.

Photo courtesy: ©Photo by Erick Frost/Centricity Music, used with permission.