Mike: When I first encountered you, it was as a singer with your husband. And you mentioned meeting Michael Omartian and marrying him. When was that?

Stormie: We got married in '73 and we started working on the debut album that same year. So I think it came out in '74. I had been working and singing on TV and when I first met him, it was on a Christian record session. He and I had both been singing and he had been playing piano on that session as well. When the singers came in he sang with them too and that's how I met him. In fact the girl that led me to the Lord introduced me to him. And so that's how I met him and began to know him. I was a writer back then too but I wasn't published. I'd written some songs and a lot of different things that I'd written. But we started writing songs together right after we were married and so all those albums were songs that we had written together. And that's how we started working together. It really was a blessing from the Lord. Neither one of us was into touring though. That really wasn't very good. It's not good to put out an album and not tour. Once we started having children we just realised we couldn't tour at all. We took our kids. It was horrible to take them, it was horrible to leave them home. It didn't work for us. I think some people can't figure that out. They didn't have fancy buses and stuff that they do now. We didn't see anything like that. So it was hard taking our kids. It was just too hard on them and us; so we stopped doing it.

Mike: The early albums that Michael and Stormie recorded were groundbreaking. Were you aware at the time what high quality material you were producing?

Stormie: My husband was more aware than I was, because he had been a believer longer than I had been. So I didn't even know much about Christian music and the industry or anything like that. The difference was that we were assigned to a secular label, ABC Dunhill, which was one of the biggest labels at that time, to do his debut album. He chose to do a Christian album on it. And so that is why we had such a big budget to do it, and you could afford to do things. Plus he was a very extremely gifted musician and writer so that's why we were able to do things that were more cutting edge. We had the money to do it, and the ability to do it as well. That was the advantage we had. God had just worked that out, because ABC Dunhill didn't really want a Christian album!

Mike: You kind of sneaked it in then?

Stormie: Yes. That's why the lyrics are very subtle, we couldn't be real blatant about it, we had to really get the message across without being blatant about it otherwise they wouldn't have put it out at all.

Mike: With your background, was it intimidating for you working in music. Because it's a place where if you have any insecurity in you at all, it shines a spotlight on it.

Stormie: It was more so before I became a Christian. After I became a Christian I began to really hear from God about what I was supposed to be doing and what I wasn't. It wasn't long after that that I stopped doing the TV shows I was doing, I stopped doing the commercials, because I was getting calls to do things that I just couldn't - back then there were cigarette commercials, alcohol commercials. Things like that that I just couldn't do now that I was a Christian. And that was fine with me. I was glad to give it up and find out what God really wanted me to do.

Mike: The last album that I'm aware of that you did together was the mainstream album in '83? So why did you stop making albums?

Stormie: For the reason I mentioned earlier. We just couldn't tour and neither one of us wanted to be a star. You know that wasn't why we were doing what we were doing at all. We did it because we really enjoyed being in the studio, we loved writing the stuff. Really we worked well together. It seemed we were more bonded when we were working together actually. And so we loved doing that; we loved the creative part of it. The thing is we didn't mind being on the stage and doing it,. But we just hated the travel part. We hated being gone from home. When we had our kids, they came right away. It was just too hard. I think it's because we are not performers. So I think that's why we ended up stopping that.

Mike: Was it hard making a transition from singing into being an author?

Stormie: I was always a writer, so I was always writing. I mean I always had a pencil or a pen and I always had paper and I was always writing from the time I could hold a pencil. That was something I always did. I was in a group where we were writing music together before I met my husband. So I was always writing. So when we decided to stop making albums and stop even trying to tour, I was still writing. And I had written a book for the same company that we'd done the 'Mainstream' album and it was a health book. Because I was really into health eating and exercising.

Mike: Was that when you recorded the aerobics records?

Stormie: Five aerobics records! I had the only Christian aerobics albums and they went gold. The first album I think in that industry to go gold like that. And they were successful albums. So I wrote a book to go along with it. It's a health book called Greater Health Gods Way and it did well and those albums sold really well and so that was the transition. So then I was approached by another company to write another book. That was Harvest House. And so that's where the book Stormie came. Then I began writing books on emotional healing and just finding the wholeness that God has for us, and finding the will of God for our lives. Then writing books about prayer. Because I began holding all of these prayer groups in our house. We had a prayer group to pray for kids. We had another prayer group to pray for marriages. Another prayer group to pray for our ministries. All of us in ministry had a prayer group. So all these prayer groups and I saw all these answers to prayer and just the power of it. And that's where all these books came from.

Mike: It has been the books on prayer that have really impacted the most people and it seems like the first one Praying Wife was the first one that really registered for me.