by James Webb
There’s been a long pause between these posts, but I thought it might be time to resurrect this series. Lockdown makes me think strange things, you see.
Today I shall be highlighting the merits of the song ‘Invert’ by the Swedish band Blindside. Read more
It’s been a while since I wrote anything about music, so here’s another one of my worship picks. The song is ‘Everlasting’ and the band is Juggernautz.
I hope you’re in the mood for some electropop. This one is by Joy Electric and is called ‘I’m Your Boy’.
The album version of this track isn’t available on YouTube (not in the UK, at least) so I’m having to post a live version taken from a festival, which is somewhat at odds with what the song means for me, as I’ll go on to explain.
Anyway, the band is Selfmindead and the song is called ‘Always’. Read more
Thank you for your patience. Here’s another little glimpse into my musical tastes.
‘Dancing in Concert with the Infinite’ by DigHayZoose.
My friend Terry writes a blog and has been doing an enjoyable series of posts on Christian albums that have had an impact on him over the years. I’ve been thinking of doing something similar myself for a while, mostly as a follow-up to my own post from last year, but I didn’t want to just copy Terry. That’s not cool. So, instead I thought of something completely different and totally not related in any way to what Terry has been doing. Read more
Sometimes a song or a story or a poem will generate a powerful emotional response in me by putting into words something that is buried deep within, something I haven’t really given shape to myself yet. This is what art does. Why just the other day I was listening to someone explain how he had been left shaken by listening to a short story that somehow managed to encapsulate his own experience of childhood. Read more
I am not musical but I love music; it’s such a clever idea – noises that sound good. Also, I like it when people put words to the backdrop of said music. I believe that they’re called ‘songs’.
Like most people, I have my own personal taste in music, but it’s a taste that seems to put me at odds with the Christian majority, a fact I find hard to believe. Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks that most church services could be improved by the introduction of some Dubstep?
When I was a teenager in the 90s, the Christian music I was familiar with didn’t do anything for me. As for the lyrics? Well, let’s just say that I felt more of a spiritual kinship with someone like Kurt Cobain than I ever did with Matt Redman or Martin Smith. One of the best things that ever happened to me at university was meeting Terry Wright. During Fresher’s Week, Terry sat next to me in a chapel service purely because I looked like the type of person who was into the same music as he was. He was wrong, but only because I had never heard anything like it before. Terry had an extensive knowledge and collection of alternative Christian noise from such labels as Frontline, R.E.X. and (my own personal choice of the mid to late 90s) Tooth & Nail. It was a revelation to hear these bands playing music more to my tastes, and singing about their faith in a way that resonated with my bruised and growing soul. Take, as a random example, a simple verse from The Prayer Chain‘s song, Dig Dug:
Can you hear my heart beat?
Do you even know my heart?
When I hold the doubts of Thomas
As hard as I hold your promise?
I never heard anything like that sung on a Sunday morning, but it was exactly the sort of honesty that I was desperate for at the time. Although I am no longer the angsty teenage nightmare that I was then, I know that a lot of the music I listened to during that time has supported me through my difficult journey over the years, and still provides the foundation for my own personal expressions of worship. I might write a bit more in the future about specific albums and songs that have been meaningful to me (hopefully with fewer distracting hyperlinks…), but I’ve wanted to write something like this for a while; partly to share something that has been influential and might give a bit of insight as to why I write the way I do, plus also as a belated thanks to Terry for first exposing me to those particular noises that sounded so good.
We had nice weather last Friday. It was somewhat glorious, to be able to collect the children from school without needing to wear a coat. Spring is at hand, despite the best efforts of the weather system known as The Beast from the East, who has been trying to prolong winter. Winter, I think, is always trying to hold back spring. It won’t work though. You can’t stop the changing seasons.
Easter is also at hand. If you listen, you can already hear the Palm Sunday crowd, its praises echoing forward through time. The Pharisees tried to stop it, their own little Beast from the East tantrum, but that didn’t work either. It’s no wonder that we can hear it all, two thousand years later. Jesus himself said that if the crowd didn’t get it out of their system then the stones themselves would have to take up the song; it’s just that powerful.
Later that week, there was more music, though it was more muted. After their last meal together, Jesus and his friends sing a song before heading towards the garden. A glimpse of spring on the darkest night of the year. Winter tries its luck again: “The one I kiss, he’s the one that you want.”
And it seems to work. The friends scatter. Jesus is tried by a kangaroo court and nailed up to die.
But you can’t hold back the changing seasons, and you can’t hold back the magic of Easter song. Even in the darkness of Gethsemene night; the darkness of that Friday eclipse; the darkness of the tomb, we know what’s coming.
The ice is thawing, the green shoots are peaking through. For us, spring will turn into summer and summer into autumn and autumn back into winter, but as far as Easter is concerned, winter is behind us and always will be.
When it comes to me, most worship leaders are up against it from the start. I have no musical talent myself, and therefore little appreciation of the skill required to play the handful of chords that most worship songs seem to employ. Neither am I a big fan of the contemporary worship style – on the whole, I like my music to have a little more edge. Furthermore, I’ve suffered over six years of formal theological training, so find myself hyper-critical of and disappointed by the content of most lyrics. Finally, many more years of hard yards in following Jesus, and trying to help others to follow Jesus, has resulted in me having nothing but contempt for the shallow, I-feel-pretty-good-about-God-right-now sentiment of many worship songs.
However, whenever I find myself drifting too far down the path of seething rage, I remember what C.S. Lewis said. He too struggled with the church music of his time, considering it fifth-rate poetry set to sixth-rate music, but he also wrote, “I realised that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.”
Hard as it is to believe sometimes, not everything is about me.
