AMY TURNER

There’s something every songwriter chases: the instant a familiar story turns sideways and suddenly means something new. For Tribute Quartet’s Josh Singletary, that came while thinking about the stone in front of Jesus’s tomb, and just how little that stone actually mattered.

The group already has a mountain in its catalog of songs. “Halfway Up the Mountain” climbed to number one on the Singing News chart, the kind of song that becomes a signature. So when Tribute Quartet went looking for another mountain image, Singletary knew comparisons were inevitable. He also knew the new song had almost nothing in common with the old one.

“The great thing about this song, compared to Halfway Up the Mountain, is just the concept of it was a stone that rolled away,” Singletary explains. “It was a stone that was in front of the tomb. It could have been a mountain in front of the whole of that tomb, and it wouldn’t have mattered. It still would have moved.”

That idea became “It Could Have Been a Mountain,” a title that flips the usual mountain metaphor on its head. Where “Halfway Up the Mountain” is about the climb, the new song is about the size of the obstacle not mattering at all. Scale a mile high, seal it shut, do whatever you want to it; the resurrection happens anyway. The lyrics lean hard into that contrast, pairing images of the tomb sealed and guarded with the plain fact that none of it held. The hook repeats like a testimony being worked out in real time: it could have been a mountain, but it still rolled away.

There’s also a second layer built into the song, one that pulls the story out of scripture and into the pews. Verses about facing “a night” where “hope is failing,” about feeling “buried in your fear,” turn the empty tomb into a template for whatever mountain a listener happens to be carrying. It’s a familiar move in southern gospel writing, taking a doctrinal moment and making it personal, but Singletary’s framing gives it a sharper edge than most: the size of your mountain was never really the point.

Singletary himself is something of a study in scale versus substance. He was born in Raiford, Florida, a town small enough that it barely shows up on a map, and there’s nothing small about what he’s built since. As Tribute Quartet’s baritone and pianist, he’s also become one of the genre’s steadier utility players, working as an arranger, producer, and studio musician on projects well outside his own group’s output. He now lives in Lebanon, Tennessee, with his wife, Kahlie, and their dog, Hovie, close enough to Nashville’s session rooms to keep that side of his career humming alongside the road schedule.

That dual life, road quartet member and behind-the-scenes producer, tends to show up in the songs he helps shape. “It Could Have Been a Mountain” has the structural instincts of someone who thinks about arrangement as much as message: a repeated hook built for a room to sing back, a bridge that widens the story from history to personal application, an ending that just keeps rolling the phrase away until it feels less like a chorus and more like a release.

Whether it reaches the chart peak “Halfway Up the Mountain” did remains to be seen. But for Singletary, the comparison was never really the goal. The whole point of the new song is that the mountain, and the number attached to it, was never the thing that mattered.