By Rev. Devlyn Brooks
ST. JOSEPH, Minn. -- Let me introduce you to the soon-to-be next most influential media mogul in the Christian music industry.
Because I want you to remember that when you heard the name Lilly Goyah, you heard it here first.
Goyah, a senior in her waning months at the College of St. Benedict -- just outside of St. Cloud, Minn. -- is building what could be the next big thing in Christian music streaming. And she's doing it all by herself, bootstrapping the effort from the ground up, albeit with tons of advice and guidance from a number of media, digital and academic experts along the way.
And you could be known for helping this new adventure get a foothold so it can help faithful people -- especially young people -- find Christian music that correlates with the moods they are feeling, in addition to helping many under-the-radar music artists that the competitive recording industry overlooks in its chase for the biggest profits.
Goyah has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to help raise the capital needed to build her music app known as ANP Streaming. And you can get a taste of what’s to come on the website: ANPstreaminginfo.com.
Her fundraising campaign’s goal is to raise $50,000 to help pay for the work to complete the development of the site, which is way beyond just a concept at this point. Now she just needs the financial push to help get the platform built.
In her own words, ANP Streaming -- which stands for “A New Psalm Streaming -- “is a Christian music and podcast streaming application,” in which “users will have the unique ability to search for music and podcasts, based on their current emotional needs.”
Goyah says her mission is to “inspire personal relationships with God by weaving human emotions and trials into audible testimonies of the goodness of God,” in addition to “showcasing the diversity of cultures and experiences by highlighting Christian content from various backgrounds. This includes contemporary worship, hymns, and all kinds of Christian music. We want to represent the full spectrum of Christian music, ultimately showcasing the glory of God among all people.”
However, while the storyline about this 22-year-old entrepreneur’s startup business is impressive, it’s the personal story and faith struggle that make Lilly Goyah the treasure that she is: An ardent, young Christian woman, whose overcome a mountain of adversity, only to find peace, resiliency, a hopeful outlook on the future.
And to tell this story, we need to step back a lot further in time …
Coming to America
That story begins in 1998 when Lilly’s mom, Cynthia Lavall, escaped Liberia, a country on the western edge of Africa that suffered back-to-back civil wars, first in 1997 and second in 1999.
Once in America, like many poor immigrants, Lavall struggled to find a financial footing. She found herself in Rhode Island, scratching together a living as best as possible. And it was during this time, she met and married Lilly’s father.
In 2002, Lilly, the focus of our story, was born. And Lilly’s birth was quickly followed by her brother Eden’s birth in 2003.
Unfortunately, that same year would serve up another milestone that continues to impact Lilly and her family to this day: her parents divorced the same year.
For the next four years, the small, single mother-led family moved around the East Coast, living with friends, in government housing and in homeless shelters. And Lilly shares that life in that environment was filled with difficult challenges.
“I had grown up in an extremely unstable environment. I was raised by a strong, immigrant, single mother who struggled to provide for her kids in an unknown country,” she said. “As a result, we found ourselves living in every form of housing: homeless shelters, cars, friends’ homes. And not only were we without a home, but we often found ourselves relying on food and clothing drives for our basic needs.”
While a struggle, Lilly says that not everything about this period of her life was bad. She said that in the daily struggle, her mom did find a group of other single mothers who grew to become a sort of family structure, with both the women and children growing close.
“I called them my aunts and cousins; it was a tribe of single women,” Lilly said. “She had other women in her life, and faith was important to them too.”
Amid this urban version of an extended, non-traditional family, faith became a core value. And Lilly said it wasn’t uncommon for their family and others to spend three to four days at a time in a church setting, praising, singing, praying, fasting.
Her mom and her friends were big into Christian music, and so Lilly found herself surrounded by Christian music much of the time, which may have proved formative so many years later in her life.
But you also can’t grow up in a petri dish of poverty and chaos without some struggles.
Lilly, said that even as a young girl of 6, she became fiercely protective of her brother, Eden, who had a lisp, which drew the attention of a lot of bullies. And, at one point, she actually beat up someone who had bullied her brother on the playground, and she was expelled for the incident.
“The primal sense was very ingrained in me,” says Lilly in a reflective moment.
The incident helped contribute to her mom deciding in 2008 that it might be better for Lilly and Eden to move to Minnesota with their father. After all, her father had remarried and was more settled in a new state.
And for a time, Lilly herself thought this might be the change she and her brother needed.
However, in a cruel turn, almost immediately after moving in with their father, their step-mother started verbally abusing Lilly and Eden, and they experienced other emotionally scarring events, says Lilly, without further explanation.
Only God knows, of course, but maybe the move was the catalyst that drew their mom from the East Coast to live in Stillwater, Minn., that same year, which meant that the kids lived with both parents, traveling back and forth to both homes.
But, even with their mom’s move to be closer, the circumstances didn’t improve at their dad’s house, and so during one decisive exchange of the kids, Lilly made a decision on behalf of both her and her brother.
They were moving from car to car, during one of the exchanges, and she was sitting in the front seat of her dad’s car, when she decided she couldn’t take it any more. She got out of the car, opened up her brother’s door, and told him to get out. They weren’t going with their dad.
“I decided on behalf of my brother and I that it was better that we move back in with our mother, however chaotic it was,” says Lilly, who adds that her mom had moved into a shelter known as Peace House when she arrived in Minnesota. “At least she exhibited that she loved us. At that moment, I could no longer take it. I decided I would rather be in an unstable situation with my mom than live in a place where I wasn’t loved. I made the decision for my brother, and there have been times I’ve wondered, ‘Did he resent that?’”
A time fondly remembered
During the next seven years in Stillwater, the little family lived in government housing again, and eventually an apartment that Lilly’s mom secured. And this time too, would be a pivotal period in her life, says Lilly.
They were surrounded by a community of folks from Chicago, Africans and some poor white neighbors like themselves. But she also attended a Catholic school as a youngster with other families who were wealthy from another part of town, which opened up her eyes to the fact that not everyone lived the same.
“I lived in two different worlds,” she said. “During this time, it was the first time that I became aware that my family was poor. And it was the first time I met other people who were living in an opposite way than we were.”
All in all, though, Lilly said that while she was growing older fast, living in the “ghetto,” helping to care for a younger sibling and uncovering truths about life as only a quickly maturing youngster can, she now looks back on this point in life very fondly as a time of peace and discovery.
“I really enjoyed those years, to be honest,” she said.
It was also during this time … Lilly’s sanctuary became music.
While she had grown up on a healthy dose of Christian music -- in fact, it was the only kind of music her mother allowed the family to listen to -- there was a fateful moment that introduced her to the world of music outside of Christian music too, a moment Lilly chalks up to helping her explore the complex ties between various music and corresponding emotions.
Because of her love for music, like every other youngster around her, she wanted an Apple iPod in the worst of ways. In fact, she wanted one so badly that she used cardboard and markers to make one of her own until the day she might own an actual one.
Then, one day in the store, while her mom couldn’t afford to purchase a brand new iPod, the sales clerk said that he’d sell them the store display model at a discount. And while their family didn’t have the money to purchase new music to download on the device, Lilly was fortunate that the store display model contained a number of secular songs.
And that was where Lilly’s passion for music and its healing properties began.
“This is when music became such a huge emotional aid for me,” she said. “When I was going through depression, it was hard to listen to Christian music; hard to connect. But secular music helped me find a way to connect to other emotions.”
It was a “clutch” toward healing during a time when she needed one, Lilly said.
A move to the city
In 2016, the family moved to Champlin, Minn., and into the home of an acquaintance of their mom’s.
Lilly said after the seven years in Stillwater, her mom’s mental health was deteriorating because she wanted out of the “ghetto.” She was done living in government housing.
Lilly doesn’t know much about the circumstances of her mother’s relationship with the man whom they moved in with. But he offered them an actual house in which to live, and that seemed to be enough.
And for about six months, Lilly says it was a glorious feeling to be living in a house of their own.
“A generous man offered to allow us to stay with him until he found new housing, and he would give his home over to us,” Lilly says. “(At the time) those were the best three to six months of my life, as it was our first time living in a real house.”
However, kind of like a supernatural “taunt,” not long into their stay at the house, one day they arrived home from church to find that they had been locked out of the house.
The family would eventually learn that the landlord who owned the house, had evicted the family for squatting, and on top of evicting them, had given away all their belongings as well. The only possessions they had left was a bag of white clothing that had just come from the laundromat.
“We were back where we started, but there was something about this time that was terrifying,” Lilly said. “It was like life was taunting us with the reality that we were never going to amount to anything.”
Her mom did eventually find them a place to land: a women and children’s shelter called “Mary’s Place” in Minneapolis, where Lilly, a teen of only 14, began to severely suffer from depression and began to think of a suicidal plan during a “cold time in my life.”
“At this point, I was barely making it through life; it was a really rough time.” Lilly said.
Here she was just a young teenager, helping to care for her younger brother and sister, living through the experiences that came as a direct result of her mother’s chaotic lifestyle choices.
She would help care for her siblings at the shelter, try to go to school, and the school would send home food with her in her backpack. And the years of insecurity, instability and chaos had taken its toll.
“And I know that my depression had been building for a long time, but we were living in the shelter. And we didn’t have the chance to be emotional because we were just surviving,” she said. “And this is when the tension began to grow with my mom. I no longer trusted her decisions. I felt very alone and isolated. At home, at school, and at Church.”
In her own words, there was a lot going on at this formative period of a young teenage girl’s life, and she was struggling. She found herself stuck in this rut of going to school, going home to baby sit and then doing homework. There didn’t seem to be a way out.
And one of the most triggering issues, she says, was the absence of her father in her life.
“I felt like if he was there, things may have been different in my life,” she said. “This made me wonder, ‘Will anyone ever love me? And it led to me feeling insecure in my life in many ways.”
This was the low point, Lilly says.
“While in Mary’s Place, my world turned bleak. I remember thinking the worst possible things about myself, but those thoughts felt more like damning facts,” she says. “I was poor, dumb, homeless, fatherless, and incapable of advancing in life. The thoughts grew ominous and loud, until I decided the only way out was to kill myself. It was settled in my heart, and I didn’t tell anyone about my plans.”
Like an angel
Much to Lilly’s surprise, despite it feeling like there were years in which God had forgotten about her, it turned out that God was waiting for the right moment. An intersection of faith and healing at the perfect moment in Lilly’s life.
All this time in the shelter, faith had remained an important part of the family’s life. They were very involved, even though Lilly herself felt like a fraud because she had long ago become disconnected from God.
In the summer of 2017, her mom decided that the family was going to join a group from their church which was trekking 16 hours east to Maryland for a church conference. And it was the last place that 15-year-old Lilly wanted to be.
“I was very disconnected with the folks at church because I didn’t feel that God had much impact in my life,” she said. “I became very angry and cynical, and I didn’t want to go on this 16-hour trip. ... But it saved me.”
As Lilly describes it, one night during the church retreat, there was a talent show, and the dance team performed an interpretive dance to a song by Kirk Franklin named “My World Needs You.” In that dance, there was a young boy who struggled with suicidal thoughts and was about to commit his final act when an angel prompted him to stop on account of his praying mom.
“Of course, the dance was touching, but the music. The music spoke directly to my soul,” Lilly says. “Every note felt like a hug; only it penetrated deeper than any hug had. It was the first time I had heard a Christian song like that, and the first time in a long time that I saw light.”
While the family was still living in the shelter at the time, and things didn’t improve immediately, Lilly says that God experience was a turning point.
“Life didn’t become magically perfect after that, but I didn’t need it to be,” she says. “I found something special that made enduring the darkness worth it.”
Lilly says the first aspect of her life that God helped heal was this longing absence she had for a father figure, a recurring issue that resonated throughout her life since she was young.
And she said that she remembers this experience at the church retreat helping her to realize that she actually does have a father figure in God. And this helped her to learn to love herself and open her up to be loved by others.
This was just a first step, of course, she said. But it was enough to help her keep holding on. While she still struggled with other emotional issues, for now, this was enough to move beyond the thoughts of suicide.
She said that while she was ready to give up that one hurt in her life, she wasn’t ready to give over all the hurts to God that summer. And so this would become a healing process that would take several more years, and several more turns in her story.
“We put Christ in a box and we only give them some of our hurts,” she said about coming home after that initial encounter with God at the 2017 summer church retreat. “While I now felt like I had found my father, I still had feelings of unworthiness. I wasn’t ready to heal in all my areas.
And this is when substances -- smoking and drinking -- became a Holy Grail of emotional outlet to me.”
In Lilly's junior year, she met a friend she thought was her “soulmate,” and this friendship would take her down a path that was detrimental to her own mental health and the relationships in her life. Unfortunately, as a young person just looking for an emotional outlet, she allowed that friendship to become her identity. And with it came some very unhealthy habits: both drinking and smoking.
“These were my emotional outlets,” she said, adding this “soulmate” friendship then led to inclusion in a small group of tight-knit friends, who became her tribe, “and if I had to smoke (to fit in), then I’d do it. This group was full of people who were like me. Fatherless, trauma, instability."
By her senior year in 2020, Lilly had hit a bad slide. She was already struggling to attend school and to care, and then with the pandemic shutting down schools, it gave her an easy out to skip online classes as well.
But thankfully, through school there were several teachers who noticed her potential and wanted to help her escape the downward spiral she was in. And so, during an especially challenging time during her senior year when she wasn’t attending any online school, her teachers made her a deal: Complete this one assignment and they’d count it for all her classes.
And so, thanks to some caring high school teachers, Lilly did graduate.
Zig, then a zag in college
A high school guidance counselor who had herself graduated from the College of St. Benedict had tried in vain to get Lilly to apply and attend her alma mater. But being headstrong and convinced that her “soulmate” friend was the most important influence in her life, she decided to follow her to Augsburg University in Minneapolis.
Her counselor had tried to convince Lilly that the physical distance between St. Joseph’s and the Twin Cities would be good for her, but also give her the opportunity to remain fairly close to her family.
Lilly says it wasn’t a good sign that before she even attended one class that fall at Augsburg, that she and this “soulmate” friend had a terrible falling out and weren’t even speaking on the first day of class, which made for an inauspicious beginning to college. There she was alone, depressed, without her high school support network … and attending college during the pandemic when physical distance was at its peak, and now she was without this friend.
The two would eventually patch things up part way through the fall semester, but the friendship was never the same, Lilly says. She realized she wasn’t the friend she thought she was. So come spring semester, she moved back home -- which now was Big Lake, Minn., where her family had moved -- and took classes fully online for the semester.
It was during this time, living and attending school at home, that Lilly says she returned to God.
She said she fell hardcore into the spiritual practices of fasting and praying. She ended up breaking up with her high school boyfriend, and she gave up on the bad decisions that had defined high school. “I knew those bad decisions weren’t who I really was,” she says, “but they were making my issues.”
During this very intense period of self examination, Lilly said she also discovered an entrepreneur group on Instagram, in which she became very involved. And from those like-minded folks, she learned how to be a leader, about healthy living, about how to create schedules for the day, about how to write out goals, and about self affirmation.
She said this new combination of spiritual cleansing, healthy living and personal growth was what she had been asking God for for a very long time.
“It was what I had been asking for, a new start,” she said. “I came back to the dream of becoming a musician. And after six months home, I felt like I could make this new start.”
The following fall, with just a week before school was to start, she made the life-altering decision to transfer to St. Benedict’s.
“I was going to fight to win, or fight to die,” Lilly said about her decision to forge her own new path, alone. “St. Ben’s represented that for me. I was going to put myself into a situation where I could succeed.”
She transferred schools, and poured herself into the St. Ben’s music program, aiming to become a Christian music artist. She even landed a job in the music school. And in her own words, she “Worked there; went to class there; lived there.”
So convinced that she was going to be a Christian music artist, she created her own LLC so that she could eventually own her own royalties.
One more detour
But, as God will do, Lilly says her plans were upended one more time on this journey of growth.
After a year in the St. Ben’s music program, Lilly created A New Psalm, a music publishing company, which she planned to use to market and sell her own Christian music so that she could retain all of her own royalties.
She had done enough research to realize that artists who gave up their music rights didn’t make a whole lot, and she wasn’t going to make that mistake.
All this fueled her entrepreneurial fire even more, but then she discovered St. Ben’s E-Scholars program in a college marketing club meeting, and she knew that she had to get enrolled in it. The program only accepted one cohort every year and a half, but then would provide substantial academic, financial and mentoring resources to help the seriously invested students bring their entrepreneurial dreams to fruition.
“I really wanted to get in that program,” Lilly said. “But they had already picked their cohort for the year. And so I went to the director and begged him. He said put in an application, and let’s see what happens. Pretty soon, another student dropped out, and so I got in, which really changed the trajectory of school and my life.”
She poured herself into the research about what entrepreneurial product she was going to produce while supported by this program. And she found out pretty early on that while being a Christian music artist was a dream, it was a long and difficult road, with no guarantees of a return.
However, through a ton of research, what she did find out is that there was a substantial need for teenagers who need help with mental health, and coincidentally, she also found out there are a lot of Christian artists who don’t get air play because their sounds -- much like her musical sound -- weren’t Christian contemporary enough.
Throughout the spring of 2023, she met with record studio owners, music therapists, app developers and music publishers as part of her E-Scholar program at St. Ben’s, and all the while she kept taking what she learned to shape what eventually would become her digital brainchild: ANP Streaming.
That summer, a school grant allowed her to produce a prototype and proved how ANP would provide services for the artists she signed.
In August 2023, she said she had a breakthrough, when based on even more research, she realized that what she was creating actually was ANP Streaming, not a Christian music career, nor a record label.
“The origin of what I wanted to do, business-wise, was I wanted to be a Christian music artist,” she said. “But my music wouldn’t have been mainstream, not Christian contemporary, and there’s not a lot of support if you’re not a Christian contemporary artist.”
Lilly described her music as more Christian urban, but she said through interviews, she learned that the Christian music radio stations target white women who are about to start families or have young families. And, essentially, there is one major Christian record label from where they buy their music.
“Only targeting white women leaves out a whole lot of people who are Christians out,” she said. “I wasn’t crazy; I paid attention and found out that I wasn’t crazy. My music wasn’t going to get played.”
So instead, she decided that she would take the Christian artists who don’t get airplay and help them get their music into people’s heads.
Combine this new knowledge with the fact that starting a record label required two things she didn’t have -- a lot of money and a vast network to help the artists you sign -- this is when she started to realize that her big business idea actually was the creation of a streaming platform!
She said that in her research, she found that she could solve two problems at once: help people start a conversation with God through her music app, and help artists get noticed too.
“That’s how I know God was involved.” At every turn there was someone there to say, “This is a great idea. Once I hit the smooth sailing, I knew God was involved. I came to this revelation that this platform makes sense.”
Ever the entrepreneur, Lilly course corrected, recreated her major at school to get the business classes she needed; began developing her associated business website; and started her business social media channels.
And in September 2023 ANP Streaming was born.
“While reflecting on my life story, and the knowledge I accumulated, I realized that there was another gap within the Christian Music industry. A lack of access to diverse sounds, a lack of promotion of diverse sounds, a place where listeners needed a personal place to feel and discover. Artists needed a space that was catered to them specifically,” she said. “It was the first time I looked back on my testimony, and I realized there was something there I could lean on. I was the girl who beat depression with God’s help. God made me come to this realization up here; I needed to rethink who I am.”
The past year has been a whirlwind of classes, business trips to meet with executives and app developers -- even in Vietnam! -- and student entrepreneurial competitions from the Twin Cities to Florida.
The list of places and people Lilly has pitched her streaming platform is dizzying, and it leaves one wondering when this talented soon-to-be media mogul has fit in her senior year of school.
Which leaves her with one last step: Securing the funds necessary to help her finish the creation of ANP Streaming.
The week of Thanksgiving, Lilly launched a crowdsourced fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to raise the final $50,000 she needs to complete production and give her a marketing head start. You can help Lilly with her goal by donating here.
“As I stand on the brink of launching the app, I am filled with a sense of hope. The idea of connecting with even more extraordinary people on this journey is extremely inspiring. This experience has grown my aspiration to become a leader within our community, who offers valuable support and resources,” Lilly says. “Every time I've stepped outside my comfort zone, I've been met with priceless rewards, whether in the form of newfound knowledge or deepened connections with others.”
Not the only gift
After another recent, long interview session discussing her life’s journey and how her app came to be, Lilly reflected upon her burgeoning entrepreneurial success as well as her family’s journey.
“God has helped heal me; helped me become calm,” Lilly says. “I am grateful for what I went through, and I wouldn’t change a thing. I thrived more when I lived in chaos. I felt like I grew up in a jungle. You never knew what was going to hit you next. The chaos of my childhood prepared me for the chaos of entrepreneurship, and I believe God was very strategic in allowing me to go through those different experiences.”
And, in a way, she says her family’s journey prepared them all.
You see, not only has God helped Lilly to heal over these past couple of decades, the rest of her small family -- including her mom, Cynthia; her brother, Eden, now 20; and her sister, Victoria, now 14 -- has also healed and God has delivered them from their years of journeying in the desert.
While Lilly is finishing her senior year of college, and embarking on her entrepreneurial music dream, the others in her small family are doing well too.
Eden, whom Lilly so fiercely defended in her earlier years, went to work out of high school, is in the Minnesota National Guard and lives in New Hope, Minn.
Victoria lives with their mom in Big Lake, Minn., attends high school and is “a little sass and lives a big life,” Lilly says with a smile.
And as for Cynthia. She has a second marriage with more children now too, in addition to the Goyah children, and eventually finished her college degree at Bethel University in 2014. She now teaches special needs children. “She had a lot of perseverance,” Lilly says.
Lilly saves her deepest reflections for her mom, whom she admits to having a complicated relationship with all those years as a youth.
“It took me a while to understand her. She didn’t want to talk about it. She just really had a lot on her mind,” Lilly said. “When I got older, I got more in tune with the factors that shaped my mom. I gained a deeper appreciation for her.”
And now she said the entire family has grown from their experiences. While they were living through the most difficult of times, they were only surviving, she said. So, they weren’t a very expressive family. They didn’t have the mental room, nor the time to have a lot of conversation about emotions.
“Now we don’t get off the phone without saying we love each other,” she says. “I talk with my mom every day, and I see my family often.”
What advice does this burgeoning music mogul have for others who may find themselves in troubling and challenging times:
“Anyone can get through anything if their mind is set up the right way. You’ve got to find a sense of agency for yourself; it’s critical,” she says. “Life is fair because really it’s unfair to everyone. We have a lot of power in our circumstances. Once you get over the hump that there is pain in life, you can make the decision to take ownership.”
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