Haley Morgan came home from Nashville convinced the dream that had carried her there was over. After years spent chasing a recording career, the Signal Mountain native returned to Chattanooga determined to leave the music business behind.
Music remained woven into who she was, though, and she eventually found her way back to the stage – not as a performer chasing a record deal but as a worship leader.
Morgan joined the staff at Silverdale Baptist Church, where she spent the next 13 years pouring herself into ministry, eventually leading worship at the church’s Creekside campus.
She married, started a family and found fulfillment serving her church. As the years passed, the ambitions that had once taken her to Nashville began to feel like they belonged to someone else.
Then she met a soft-spoken drummer working behind the scenes in the church’s maintenance department.
Dell Sartin also had spent time in Nashville before returning to Chattanooga. Reserved by nature, he rarely talked about his musical past. One conversation led to another, then to songwriting sessions as the two musicians discovered a creative chemistry.
Those sessions eventually became Natural State, a Nashville-based Christian rock band that now tours nationally, has collaborated with members of Disciple and has carved out a distinctive voice in the genre.
But before they found that sound, both Morgan and Sartin first had to rediscover why they wanted to make music at all.
Rediscovering a calling
Morgan’s musical talent became evident early on.
Growing up on Signal Mountain, she started writing songs as a teenager and was making regular trips to Nashville by age 13. After graduating from Red Bank High School, she enrolled at Belmont University, convinced she was on the path God intended.
“I was talking with a few labels at the time and had big dreams of getting signed,” she says. “I thought, ‘If God called me to this, then I’m going to get a record deal. My songs are going to be on the radio.’”
At 19, Morgan left school and began touring professionally, writing songs and taking meetings with record labels. Like many young artists, she believed talent, hard work and God’s calling would naturally open doors.
Instead, the business side of music slowly drained away her joy.
“The industry is a hard place to be, especially as a teenage girl,” Morgan says. “There were so many voices telling me who I was supposed to be. Eventually, I burned out. I thought, ‘I’m done with the music industry. I’m done with being an artist.’”
But instead of marking the end of her musical journey, Morgan’s return to Chattanooga became the beginning of a different one.
At Silverdale, Morgan initially worked in student ministry before moving into worship leadership. There she experienced music from a different perspective.
“I loved leading worship,” she says. “It shifted my mindset from performing to leading people into His presence. I realized people weren’t responding to me – they were responding to what God was doing.”
Those years restored something Nashville had nearly taken away.
“I feel like God rebuilt my understanding of what it means to have the gift of singing,” she says. “He restored my purpose and refocused me on why He called me to do this.”
The quiet drummer
Sartin’s story followed a different route but arrived at a similar destination.
The son of a pastor, he grew up in Arkansas surrounded by church life. Music was woven into his family’s ministry, and he gravitated toward the drums almost before he was tall enough to reach the pedals.
Just as influential was watching his father approach ministry with humility.
“One thing he always modeled was a servant’s heart,” Sartin says. “It taught me how to engage with people and serve others.”
When Sartin later joined Silverdale’s maintenance staff, he wasn’t interested in talking about his musical background. Morgan only discovered it through a mutual acquaintance.
She introduced herself with a simple question.
“You play drums?”
When he answered yes, she followed up.
“Are you good?”
His response was characteristically self-effacing.
“I hope I’m decent.”
While Sartin’s response still makes Morgan laugh – friends have nicknamed him “Eeyore” after the sullen donkey in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, she says – the two became fast friends. Soon, they were writing songs for Landers Music, the family worship band that featured Sartin on drums.
For Morgan, it marked her first serious songwriting in nearly eight years.
“My husband and my mom kept telling me, ‘You need to write,’” she says. “Looking back, I feel like God used Dell to slowly lead me back to it.”
Their partnership worked because each brought lessons the other understood. Morgan had learned how easily ambition could eclipse purpose, while Sartin had learned that ministry begins with serving people.
Those shared convictions soon became the foundation of their songwriting.
A new beginning
Morgan and Dell didn’t immediately form Natural State.
Rather, Morgan joined Landers, which was named for the Arkansas road where Sartin’s parents live. The original lineup consisted of Sartin, his brother and his sister-in-law. The group soon gained momentum, touring with contemporary Christian artists Colton Dixon and Manic Drive in 2019 while preparing for an even bigger year.
Then COVID-19 brought touring to a halt.
At the same time, Sartin’s brother and sister-in-law stepped away to focus on family and their businesses back home. The remaining members suddenly faced a choice: quit or start over.
Morgan’s husband encouraged her to keep going. As she and Dell prayed about the future, they realized a fresh start required more than replacing band members – it needed a new identity.
That identity came from an Arkansas roadside.
While driving from Tennessee to Arkansas for a show, they passed a highway sign welcoming travelers to “The Natural State.”
For Morgan, the phrase carried a deeper meaning.
“We believe our purpose is to love God, love others and live that out wherever He’s placed us,” she says. “That’s our natural state. Sin pulls us away from that, but Jesus restores us to what we were created for.”
That vision of restoration became the thread running through their songwriting, molding the themes and message of every song.
Finding their sound
Rebranding in 2020 proved beneficial.
With touring paused, Morgan and her husband moved back to Nashville. Once Sartin joined them, they immersed themselves in Nashville’s songwriting community, writing with a wide range of collaborators.
The experience sharpened their craft but also exposed an ongoing tension.
Industry professionals encouraged authenticity while simultaneously advising them to write songs tailored for Christian radio.
“We were trying to figure out who we were as artists because my voice naturally leans toward heavier rock than the typical female contemporary Christian sound,” Morgan says. “But the labels wanted us to write a radio hit, and radio has a very specific formula. We know we’re never the smartest people in the room, so we’ve always been willing to take advice – and we did our best to make it work.”
Their early songs reflected that balancing act. “Steady,” released during the uncertainty of 2020, grew out of personal upheaval, the pandemic and the tornado that struck Chattanooga.
“It was born out of all that chaos,” Sartin says. “We wanted to write about how, even in the middle of it, God was steady.”
While the song was meaningful to them, its pop-oriented sound didn’t reflect the music they heard in their own heads. That changed when they met Josiah Prince, a guitarist for the Christian rock band Disciple.
Morgan and Sartin had grown up listening to Disciple and Skillet. Sitting down to write with Prince felt surreal, but the chemistry was immediate.
“Something clicked,” says Morgan. “Josiah is a rock-and-roll kid through and through – real rock, not pop rock.”
Their first session produced “Make It Make Sense,” a straight-up rocker that kicks off with a punchy guitar riff before Morgan’s voice cuts through with a desperate plea. “Another night praying for sleep / Nonstop thoughts inside my mind / Enemies haunting my dreams / Rinse, repeat a thousand times / I wish I could make it make sense.”
When the chorus hits, Morgan turns the repeated phrase “Wish I could / Wish I could / Wish I could make it make sense” into an infectious hook that pairs the song’s tight guitar work with an appealing melodic core.
With “Make It Make Sense,” Natural State found its sound.
Later sessions with Prince yielded “Losing It” and additional material.
“It was instantaneous,” Morgan says. “We were like, ‘This is us.’ We stopped chasing what people thought would work on radio and started writing the kind of music we’d actually listen to.”
That authenticity soon received unexpected validation.
After hearing “Losing It,” Prince floated the idea of adding Disciple front man Kevin Young to the track. Morgan and Sartin assumed it was a long shot, but Young immediately agreed.
Later, when both bands performed at Kingdom Come Festival in Indiana, Young surprised the audience by joining Natural State onstage for the song.
“I fangirled a bit,” Morgan laughs, recalling the duet – a moment that felt like confirmation that years of uncertainty had finally led somewhere meaningful.
Honest songs for difficult seasons
Although Natural State’s sound has evolved dramatically, its message has remained consistent.
Their songs rarely ignore hardship or offer simplistic answers. Instead, they return again and again to grace, perseverance and hope.
“When we first started writing, we wanted to be real,” Morgan says. “We’ve both been through difficult things. We want people to know life is hard, but hope is still possible.”
Those themes grow out of personal experience. Morgan, for example, describes much of her youth as marked by insecurity.
“I put my hope and trust in things that were never meant to satisfy,” she says. “I’m thankful the Lord redirected me to put my hope in Him.”
Sartin sees perseverance as equally central.
“We know we’re called for a purpose,” he says. “That doesn’t necessarily mean material success. Sometimes you need grace because of your own mistakes. Sometimes you need grace because life is hard. Either way, you need God’s grace to keep going.”
That perspective explains why the band’s music acknowledges pain before pointing listeners toward hope. The optimism is earned.
More than music
Despite building a touring career, Morgan and Sartin still spend part of each month driving back to Chattanooga to lead worship at RockPoint Church.
Asked how they hope to represent their faith in today’s culture, neither mentions evangelism or influence. Instead, they talk about serving people.
“From the moment we walk into a venue, our priority is to serve,” Morgan says. “The promoters, the church hosting the event, the people who come – that’s why we’re there.”
Sartin traces that philosophy to Galatians 5:14: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
“When people are indifferent to our message, love always lands,” he says. “It’s not a superficial love, but the kind that puts someone else ahead of your own comfort.”
Those convictions reflect the experiences that shaped both musicians. Returning to Chattanooga from Nashville with broken dreams, followed by years of leading worship, taught Morgan that music was never meant to revolve around the performer. Sartin’s upbringing taught him that ministry begins with humility.
Morgan and Dell later distilled those lessons in Natural State’s “This Time”:
“This time, if the answer doesn’t come / And my story’s left undone / I will trust You with all the faith that I can find. / This time, even when my spirit aches / And the pain won’t go away / I will praise You with this broken heart of mine.”
Natural State continues to release new music and expand its touring schedule. For Morgan, however, the most important milestone came long before the festivals and collaborations.
It happened in Chattanooga when she realized she hadn’t stopped loving music after all. She’d simply remembered why she loved it in the first place.