The Real Story Behind Tasha Cobbs Leonard's "Break Every Chain"

This is where the story surprises people.

'Break Every Chain' was written by Will Reagan — a worship musician based in Knoxville, Tennessee who was part of a collective called United Pursuit. The song appeared on an album called In the Night Season, released in 2009. United Pursuit was not a mainstream gospel act. They were an indie folk worship collective, rooted in a community house in downtown Knoxville where a group of friends had gathered to worship and build something together. Their sound was acoustic, unhurried, far removed from the polished production of mainstream gospel.

The song sat within that small community for a few years. Jesus Culture covered it in 2011, which introduced it to a broader contemporary Christian audience. But it had still not found its largest moment.

That moment was waiting for Tasha Cobbs.

A Small Town, a Bishop Father, a Hidden Battle

Natasha Tameika Cobbs was born on July 7, 1981, in Jesup, Georgia — a small town that most people outside the American South wouldn't be able to place on a map. Her father was Bishop Fritz Cobbs, the founder of Jesup New Life Ministries. Her mother, Lady Bertha Cobbs, was a pastor in her own right. Tasha grew up inside the church the way some children grow up inside a family business — it was everything, everywhere, all the time.

She didn't sing in public until she was fifteen, and even then only out of necessity: she was directing a community choir when the scheduled soloist didn't show up. The moment she opened her mouth, something became clear that changed the trajectory of her life.

In 2006, she left Jesup for Atlanta, joining the dReam Center Church of Atlanta under Pastor William Murphy. Murphy became a spiritual father figure to her in ways that mattered deeply. He would introduce her publicly, saying 'This is my daughter, Tasha Cobbs, and she's a bridge to the nations.' She didn't fully understand what he meant. Not yet.

What was happening underneath the surface during those years, mostly hidden from anyone outside her inner circle, was a battle with depression and anxiety so severe that it reshaped how she understood herself and her faith. In 2016, Cobbs Leonard publicly revealed that she had been diagnosed with depression in 2007 — the same period when she was faithfully leading worship every Sunday, managing the Worship and Arts Department at dReam Center, and appearing by all external measures to be thriving.

That is the hidden layer beneath this story. A woman standing before congregations week after week, leading people into the presence of God, while privately drowning.

The Car Ride That Changed Everything

In 2012, Tasha Cobbs was travelling with her ministry team when 'Break Every Chain' came on — Will Reagan's version, the one recorded three years earlier in Knoxville by a worship collective most of her audience had never heard of.

She has described what happened next in her own words, on Sadie Robertson Huff's podcast: 'I was just in this season — it was a very, very dark season for me, just struggling with depression and anxiety really, really, really bad. And I remember this song came on and the first words — There is power in the name of Jesus to break every chain — and I felt like my spirit just began to receive these words and walls started to crumble that I had built up over the years.'

That moment in a moving vehicle, somewhere on a road in America, with a song playing through a speaker — that is the moment the song became what it became. Not when it was written. Not when it was recorded. When Tasha Cobbs heard it and her walls came down.

She decided to record it.

Grace and the Grammy

The album Grace was recorded live on June 14, 2012, at Northview Christian Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It was produced by VaShawn Mitchell and released through EMI Gospel in February 2013. 'Break Every Chain' was the lead single, featuring guest vocals from Timiney Figueroa of Hezekiah Walker's Love Fellowship Crusade Choir.

The song spent seven weeks at the top of Billboard's Gospel Airplay chart. It went platinum. It reached number one on the Hot Gospel Songs chart. Grace itself climbed to number one on the Top Gospel Albums chart and crossed over to number 61 on the broader Billboard 200 — a rare achievement for a debut gospel project from a largely unknown artist.

At the 56th Annual Grammy Awards in 2014, Tasha Cobbs won Best Gospel/Contemporary Christian Music Performance for 'Break Every Chain.' She became, almost overnight, one of the most recognised voices in gospel music. JET Magazine. Radio stations across the United States. Churches that had never heard her name twelve months earlier were now building entire worship sets around her song.

She went to the Grammy ceremony without her father.

The Last Conversation

Bishop Fritz Cobbs died in 2014, just days before the Grammy Awards ceremony where his daughter was nominated for the first time.

In the weeks before he passed, knowing he would not be well enough to travel to Los Angeles, he told her: 'Daddy's not going to be with you in LA, but I want you to go anyway.'

She went anyway. She won. She stood on that stage holding a Grammy, with her father's last words in her ears and his absence everywhere around her.

Years later, that conversation became the seed for her first book, Do It Anyway: Don't Give Up Before It Gets Good, published in 2024. The title comes from what he said. The book opens up about the depression, the anxiety, the years of private struggle, and the miscarriage she and her husband Kenneth Leonard experienced after they married in 2017. It is a record of someone who kept going not because the circumstances were manageable, but because she had decided — as an act of will, not of feeling — to do it anyway.

What Came After

Tasha Cobbs Leonard's career after 'Break Every Chain' is, statistically, extraordinary.

Five of her projects have reached number one on the Top Gospel Albums chart. Her 2017 album Heart. Passion. Pursuit. made history in its first week, generating more streams than any gospel album in history to that point — 3 million streams in seven days. It became the longest-running number one gospel album for over three years. She has won 3 Grammy Awards, 12 Dove Awards, 16 Stellar Awards, and 3 Billboard Music Awards.

She co-pastors The Purpose Place Church in South Carolina with her husband. She mentors 2,000 people through her iLead Escape ministry programme. She adopted a son, Asher, in July 2021, adding to her blended family of six children across four.

In 2025, she released an album simply titled TASHA — featuring collaborators including John Legend and Lecrae — a project that marked another chapter of creative expansion, following the rawness of writing and releasing a memoir, stripping back the carefully managed public image and letting people see the full picture.

The Song Keeps Going

'Break Every Chain' is one of those songs that has outgrown any single version of itself.

It began as Will Reagan's quiet, acoustic declaration in a Tennessee worship community. It was covered by Jesus Culture and carried into contemporary Christian spaces. Then Tasha Cobbs heard it in a car during her darkest season and recognised something in it that the rest of the world needed to recognise too. She recorded it with full gospel production, put it in front of an audience that had never heard it, and watched it become one of the defining worship songs of the 2010s.

The song has been translated into dozens of languages. It has been sung in prison chapels, hospital wards, recovery groups, and cathedral services. It played in churches during the COVID-19 pandemic, when congregations were desperate for any language of breakthrough that still felt true.

The reason it keeps working is the same reason it worked for Tasha Cobbs in that car in 2012. It doesn't promise that the chains are already gone. It declares that there is power to break them — which is a different thing entirely. It is a song for people who are still in the middle of something. Which, at any given moment, is most of us.

What This Story Is Really About

There's a version of this story that focuses on the Grammy, the chart positions, the streaming numbers, the sold-out venues. That version is accurate but incomplete.

The fuller version is about a bishop's daughter from a small town in Georgia who spent years leading worship publicly while privately fighting for her mental health. Who heard a song in a car that cracked something open in her. Who recorded it not as a career move but as a testimony. Who lost her father days before the biggest night of her professional life and went to the ceremony anyway because he told her to. Who spent the next decade being more honest — incrementally, painfully, publicly — about the gap between what ministry looks like from the outside and what it feels like on the inside.

Tasha Cobbs Leonard has 3 Grammys. She has a platinum single that has played in churches on six continents. She has a memoir about depression and miscarriage and choosing to keep going.

Of everything on that list, the memoir might be the most important. Because the song broke chains. But the story behind the song tells you that the person singing it was in chains too — and that is exactly why it hit as hard as it did.

The most powerful worship comes from the most honest places. Tasha Cobbs Leonard has spent a career proving that.

Where were you the first time 'Break Every Chain' really got to you? And did knowing Tasha's story change the way you hear it? I'd love to know in the comments.