Great Hymns Albums Released in the Last Few Months

I swear, I’m having to write these kinds of posts more often.  The hymns/rehymn movement continues to strengthen and expand.  Here are some great new albums that I’ve been enjoying and appreciating.

Sojourn Music, A Child is Born

Some very creative rock tunes, great guitar work, unconventional and delightful production choices.  Some traditional tunes reworked, some originals.  Sojourn is always on the upper side of the art spectrum.

High Street Hymns, On Winter’s Night

A great Advent/Christmas EP from our friends out east.  They venture into new territory here, incorporating hip-hop in tracks like “Hark! A Thrilling Voice is Sounding” and “O Come, Emmanuel.”  There’s a nice re-tuning of “Come Thou Long Expected Jesus,” too.

Castle Island Hymns, Christmas

A very hip indie Christmas record.  Unconventional, quirky, orchestral, and ambient, in a Radiohead-meets-Sufjan kind of way.

Cardiphonia, Songs for the Supper

Evangelicals are thirsty for this, perhaps without even knowing it.  Because I am an evangelical, I’m very aware of our impoverishment of language and expression for the Lord’s Supper.  This isn’t just an album of good Communion songs; it’s a signpost pointing to brighter pastures for evangelical Eucharistic celebration.

Chicago Metro Presbytery Music, Proclaiming the Bridegroom Near

An advent album of folk and classical orientation and instrumentation with some beautiful arrangements of traditional hymn tunes.  It’s a great example of how several churches can partner on a successful project.  Check this album out for some lesser-known hymns.

Leigh Nash, Hymns and Sacred Songs

This is a great album.  The production is superb, professional, and creative (one of Matt Redman’s producers, John Hartley).  The singing is unique, original, and stylized, and the texts can’t be beat.  There are some great hymn re-tunings that worship leaders shouldn’t overlook for congregational material.

 

Zac Hicks + Cherry Creek Worship, In a Byre Near Bethlehem

Of course, I had to throw in our random single.  We didn’t write this song; we just recorded it so others could hear this great text and tune.  It’s a modern Advent/Christmas hymn from the Iona Community in Scotland.  It makes the incarnation tangible.

Shai Linne, The Attributes of God

Right, right.  It’s not a hymns album.  It’s probably better.  It has more densely-packed theological muscle in each track than Charles Finney’s entire Systematic Theology (I know…not saying much…but it was a good joke).  The rapping is stellar, not second-rate.  Very sophisticated, very poetic, very clever, very artistic.  And, the production is solid.  There are some very thoughtful beat- and color-choices.  This album rocks, er, raps, my face.    

Sovereign Grace, The Gathering: Live from WorshipGod11

This really isn't a hymns album, either.  But Sovereign Grace does modern worship like no one else is--Gospel-centered, Christ-exalting, theology-rich...all combined with some nice, driving rock.

Want to Be a Better Worship Songwriter?

I love it when I find a good online destination that “free-sources” quality material to the public.  Last week, I highlighted Fernando Ortega’s post calling out modern worship to embrace a more lofty vision for songwriting.  If you are or aspire to be a songwriter, and if you agree with Ortega’s assessment and admonition, I can think of no better site that will serve as a resource for you than My Song in the Night.

Its masterminds are Bobby & Kristen Gilles, a husband-wife, songwriter-singer combo, who know well the sometimes disconnected worlds of songwriting, recording, writing, and church music.  It’s not easy to find individuals so evenly informed in all these areas.  Bobby & Kristen are part of Sojourn Community Church’s dynamic arts team in Louisville, KY.

BUT…the site is actually much more robust.  Bobby describes its goal as six-fold:

1.  Teach people how to write and share their testimony. I’ve also included Sojourn’s guidelines for writing the salvation testimonies that we share at our baptism services. 

2.  Show the ways in which I work with Sojourn Pastor Daniel Montgomery and his pulpit team to encourage interaction among our members with our sermon series, vision campaigns, scripture memory challenges and more.

3.  How we use social media, the arts and amateur photography at Sojourn to tell the story of our community, as a small part of God’s story.

4.  How your church members can use the Psalms as models for telling the story of God at work in their life, and express their longings, questions, and pain. 

5.  Show the ways in which I work with Sojourn Worship Pastor Mike Cosper to help our people see the full gospel in our weekly worship service liturgy, and their place in the gospel story.

6.  Songwriting instruction, from how to write simple scripture memory songs to the poetry mechanics behind hymn-writing, and how I’ve worked as a songwriting workshop coordinator to foster collaboration & community and train songwriters in the Sojourn Music community. 

Finally, the site has a theme song, recorded by the Sojourn band, based on a sermon by Charles Spurgeon and centered around Psalm 42:8, which says: “By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me—a prayer to the God of my life” (niv).  You can get it for free through NoiseTrade.

The State of Worship Music Today

Mike Cosper, Pastor of Worship at Sojourn Community Church in Louisville, KY, is interviewed briefly by Bob Kauflin on the state of worship music today.  Note what this pastor-theologian-musician is and is not focused on.

Click to read more ...

Review of The Water and the Blood, by Sojourn Music

The folks at Sojourn Music continue to lead modern church music down a different path.  Each album seems to be more aggressively their own, pushing outward the narrow boundaries of contemporary/modern worship by experimenting with new and old sounds and styles.  The Water and the Blood was produced with a different set of values than the industry standard—in analog, as a whole, and with a vinyl option.  Producer Mike Cosper explains,

While still reflective of a variety of moods and styles that occur at Sojourn gatherings, it’s a recording with a sound, a sense of space, something that’s meant to be listened to as an album, as a whole. It’s meant to be a listening experience, and vinyl, with its added depth, warmth, and presence, has a way of conveying that experience like nothing else.¹

The album was recorded largely in Bloomington, IN, with Paul Mahern, who has worked with Over the Rhine, The Fray, John Mellencamp, and others.  Tracks were laid down on tape, not bits and bytes, trading digitized perfection for human warmth.  Herein lies another subtle challenge to the value-system of contemporary/modern worship.  It makes a theological statement about authenticity, humanness, imperfection, and grace.

The Water and the Blood is installment number two of their ongoing quest to re-give the hymns of Isaac Watts to the Church.  The first installment, Over the Grave, was a masterpiece, as well.  “The Water and the Blood” appears to be a phrase codified over time in English hymnody.  It is perhaps most famous in Augustus Toplady’s “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me,” whose opening verse reads, “Let the water and the blood / from Thy riven side which flowed / be of sin the double-cure / cleanse me from its guilt and power.”  But the lesser-known hymn of Watts, “Lord, We Confess Our Numerous Faults,” which, adapted, appears as the title track, contains the phrase which predates Toplady.  Ultimately, the wording belongs to Scripture (1 John 5:8), but English hymn-writers have given this pairing a strong significance.  And, now, so has Sojourn Music.  We might consider “the water and the blood” poetic shorthand for the entire gospel story, and, given the album’s content, it is a fitting title.

SUMMARY

Musically, The Water and the Blood is superb.  Its production is fresh and original, and its diversity of style is so off the grid of a typical “worship album” that it seems other-worldly.  Textually, one simply can’t find fault with lyrics that pull from Isaac Watts, one of the most formidable theologian-pastor-songwriters of all time.  Sojourn could spend the rest of their musical years retuning Watts’ texts, and the Church would be incredibly blessed for it.  In my opinion, not every song is fit for congregational singing, but the two I’d be especially inclined to bring into my local church’s repertoire are “The Water and the Blood” and “Let Your Blood Plead for Me.”

MUSICALITY

If you have narrow tastes and appreciations, this album is not for you.  If you’re looking for modern worship’s standard sound, this project will be a disappointment.  If, however, you have a taste for blues, folk rock, country, bluegrass, soul, and Americana, you will love The Water and the Blood.  The album bears the hand-print of Mike Cosper’s subtle, soulful, and artistic guitar style—especially electric and lap and pedal steel, though he plays dobro and mandolin as well (!).  The guitar solos throughout aren’t necessarily always flashy, but they are thoughtful, melodic, and musical.  I am thinking particularly of the three songs I will mention next.

One of the first things to note is the album’s use of blues to convey confession and lament.  I have longed to see the intersection of this genre with this biblical expression.  Blues is uniquely suited to convey the hope-tinged anguish of the lamentations of David and Watts.  From the recurring electric line (and complementary bass line) in “From Deep Distress,” to the descending tremolo guitar line and soulful vocals in “Deep in Our Hearts,” to the heavy joy of “Death Has Lost its Sting,” Sojourn shows how powerful a song can be when music and text are so thoughtfully wedded.

The vocals are likewise remarkable.  I sense some different hues of control and expressiveness in Rebecca Dennison’s voice, especially on “The Water and the Blood,” which is a favorite track of mine.  The fact that six additional vocalists (Jamie Barnes, Rebecca Elliot, Kristen Gilles, Brooks Ritter, Megan Shaffer, and Chad Watson) sing on the album is a testimony to the vision of community music-making and anti-rock-star vision for artistry that Sojourn has grown to champion.  (Though not every church has the human resources to do this, I would add.  Sojourn is very blessed in this regard.)

One of the marks of creativity in songwriting for the local church is in the careful balance of innovation and singability.  “Compel My Heart to Sing” is a great example of this.  The melody is melismatic and easy to sing, and the music beneath is far from bland.  The chorus’s progression (C, C/E, Fm, Bb, Eb, Ab, G) is beautiful and different.

“Let the Seventh Angel Sound” is a fun arrangement that sounds like it came from the brains of Paul Simon and James Taylor.  The organ is calibrated to a mellow, almost whistle-like setting.  The clean, loose guitar playing, coupled with Barnes’ smooth vocal style, is engaging.  I wonder, though, how fitting the text’s intensity is with the song’s easygoing nature.  I’d love for Barnes to comment and bring insight to that.

Brooks Ritter has written a beautiful new setting of “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”  The music brings out certain hues from the text absent in its more triumphant (and equally beautiful) setting (“St. Anne,” by William Croft, 1708).  Ritter’s tune is a soulful country ballad that highlights the comfort Watts probably intended to evoke in his beloved text.

Some might think that the musical setting of “Let Your Blood Plead For Me” is too playful for the gravity of its content, with its on-beat, honky-tonk-style piano and interlude progression (I, III⁷, vi, I, IV, II⁷, V, V⁷).  I find its light-heartedness an interesting take on the hymn (see comments on the text below).  The Scriptures speak about the human response to salvation being our “skipping like calves” (Malachi 4:2), and this music surprisingly and tastefully colors the text in that direction.

THEOLOGICAL CONTENT

As noted above, the first thing that one should notice about this album, textually, is the amount of verse devoted to the under-used biblical expression of lament.  Verse 1 of “Death Has Lost Its Sting” cries:

My God, how many are my fears
How fast my foes increase
Conspiring my eternal death
They break my fleeting peace

The first verse of “From Deep Distress,” in keeping with the anguish of the opening lines of Psalm 130, records:

From deep distress and troubled thoughts
To You, our God, we raise our cries
If You truly mark our faults
No flesh can stand before Your eyes

I have now heard many a worship theologian proclaim that the church’s song really does shape the church’s spiritual health. Unfortunately, because evangelicals have little vocabulary for lament, when suffering comes our way, we have no theological and spiritual categories to handle it, and we question our faith, God’s goodness, or even His existence.  Lament teaches us to suffer rightly.  Sojourn has given a gift to the church by bringing this to the fore.

The second thing one should notice is the album’s gospel-saturation.  Time and again, the source of delight in the texts is found in the meritorious work of the life and death of Jesus Christ.  “The World Will Know” praises:

Our faith adores Thy bleeding love,
And trust in one that died
We hope for heav’nly crowns above
Redeemer crucified

The world will know the righteousness
Of our incarnate God
And nations yet unborn profess
Salvation in His blood
Salvation in His blood

The chorus of “Deep in Our Hearts” testifies:

Oh gracious God, You’ve heard my Plea [notice the capitalization]
A once cursed pris’ner, now released
Those dreadful suff’rings of Thy Son
Atoned for sins that we had done

The gospel is the motivation of all our worship, as “Compel My Heart to Sing” intones:

Jesus, my God and King
Thy wisdom is a boundless deep
What wondrous love has purchased me and
Compels my heart to sing

Sojourn and I share a passionate desire to see modern worship embrace a richer vocabulary of the gospel in our song.  If there continued to be progression in even that one area in contemporary Christian music, the Church would be tremendously blessed.

There are two songs, though, that stand out in their weaving of text and music.  “The Water and the Blood” is the first:

Lord we confess our many faults
And how great our guilt has been
Foolish and vain were all of our thoughts
No good could come from within

But by the mercy of our God
All our hopes begin
And by the water and the blood
Our souls are washed from sin

It’s not by the works of righteousness
Which our own hands have done
But we are saved by our Father’s grace
Abounding through His Son

It’s a simple song of confession, but the words are crafted so carefully and beautifully.  The verses center around minor tonality, and the choruses switch to major, with a lift in the melody to a new tessitura.  It’s all just very well put together.

“Let Your Blood Plead for Me” is the other outstanding song.  It is a song of testimony:

Lord, how secure my conscience was
And felt no inward dread
I was alive without the Law
And thought My sins were dead

My hopes of heaven were firm and bright
But then Your standard came
With a convincing power and light
To show how vile I am

This testimony is starkly (and without much transition) contrasted with the chorus:

Let Your blood plead for me
Let Your blood wash me clean
I believe, Lord I believe
Your blood has covered me

It is a song that aptly exegetes the oft-used phrase (it appears in various forms), “The bad news is I am more sinful and broken than I dare imagine, but the good news is, in Christ, I am more loved and accepted than I dare hope.”  The Law rightly condemns me, but, through Christ, the Father justly pardons me.  This is the essence of the song.  And it’s powerful!

Both for its text and its music, I heartily recommend The Water and the Blood as a fresh and timely work.  I look forward to what’s next from Sojourn Music.  They’ve quickly become leaders in a new kind of evangelical modern worship, and I welcome it!

The Latest Developments in Thoughtful Worship

This blog is dedicated to discussions surrounding worship, church, theology, and culture.  A subtext of that agenda is to encourage Christian (and particularly evangelical) worship along its trajectory toward more thoughtfulness, biblical reflection, theological awareness, and historicity.  A sub-subtext of that subtext is to encourage this growing movement of folks dedicated to the setting of old hymns to new music.  I do this not because hymns are the be-all and end-all of the deficiencies of modern worship, but because this one practice embodies so many of the subtext's aforementioned values.  Many hymns are thoughtful.  Many hymns are soaked in scripture.  Many hymns are written from a fiery theological heart.  And all hymns except current-day ones force the Church to reckon with the fact that she is a body rooted in history--a history of God's past worth celebrating. 

So, people might get tired of me barking about this very specific thing called the "hymns movement," but they must remember that this movement is a herald of the shifts taking place with these bigger, more fundamental issues in American/Western Christian worship today.

I am therefore excited to share a brief "status update" of the movement.  More rumblings, more exposure, more buy-in.  The hymns movement continues to affect and infect the Church with greater potency and wider distribution.  Four things stand out.

Less than 48 hours ago, the 2011 Gospel Coalition Conference kicked off with none other than a hymn sing, gathering together and exposing before a new generation of eager, cross-denominational, Gospel-loving evangelicals some of the heavy-hitters in the hymns movement: Kevin Twit and Indelible Grace (Sandra McCracken, Matthew Smith); Mike Cosper and Sojourn Music.  As Cardiphonia likewise reported, Noisetrade is giving away a free sampler of these artists.  One more indicator that the next generation of pastors and church leaders care about deep, substantive worship, exemplified in hymnody.

Seven days ago, High Street Hymns released their third major hymns album, Hearts and Voices, centered on hymns for Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.  It is available at a very affordable price on bandcamp.

In less than two weeks, Sojourn Music will release another album, The Water and the Blood, a second installment of an ongoing project to reshape the hymn texts of Isaac Watts for new ears.  As will be explained in my upcoming review, Sojourn continues to push out the narrow musical boundaries of contemporary/modern worship, forging ahead while reaching back hundreds of years into the vault of Christian hymnody.

In five days, an album will be released which features a bunch of well-known mainstream modern worship leaders headlining re-tuned hymn-texts of Charles Wesley.  It is called Love Divine.  I have already spoken about what a significant mile-marker this is, notwithstanding the fact that it will probably go unnoticed (though I hope not).

A little over two weeks ago, a unique conference took place in St. Louis.  Hymns movement leader Bifrost Arts hosted a gathering on "Liturgy, Music, and Space."  The average age was interestingly young, given that the topics discussed at the conference were ideas that contemporary worship used to say that only "older people" cared about: liturgy, history, aesthetics, theology, inter-generationalism, etc.

Folks, there's no organizing force behind the coincidence of these things...at least no human one.  This can be characterized as nothing short of a movement of the Spirit through renewal of the worship of God.  All this is very significant.

Review of The Mercy Seat / The War by Jamie Barnes and Brooks Ritter

Jamie Barnes, The Mercy Seat
Brooks Ritter, The War (split EP)
Released: February 22, 2011

There is something very special going on in Louisville, and my writing a review about this “happening” is kind of like the woman who was straining just to get a finger on the hem of Jesus’ robe—just a touch is all I ask.  God has gathered a whole lot of young talent and put it under one ecclesiastical roof.  This is the best summary I can give for what is happening with Sojourn Music.  Sojourn Community Church is a multi-site community with a strong vision for how the arts are a part of God’s kingdom-restoration in the community.  You don’t see too many churches out there with this vision.  But before I heap accolades on the music of two incredible singer-songwriters, Jamie Barnes and Brooks Ritter, for their latest split EP, The Mercy Seat / The War (read Sojourn's description here), let me begin by commenting on something rather unrelated to the music itself.

Jamie Barnes and Brooks Ritter are humble, generous men of God.  I met Jamie several years ago when my wife and I took a field trip out to Sojourn in the summer of 2008.  I met Brooks just over a year ago at the Calvin Symposium on Christian Worship in Grand Rapids.  I was flying solo, and Jamie took the time to single me out and invite me to a few social gatherings where I got to hobnob with Keith Getty, Kevin Twit, Mike Cosper, and other heroes of mine.  Jamie’s hospitality in that act meant a lot to me and spoke volumes about him.  Brooks engaged me in a bunch of conversations, and he always exhibited the uttermost kindness and humility, even as I told him that he had an incredible, one-of-a-kind voice.  These two are men of character, and that is perhaps the most important thing I could say about them.

OVERALL COMMENTS

The album itself is just incredible.  It is true artistry, which does not kowtow to simplistic pop sensibilities.  It is a “split EP” in the sense that it is a full, ten-song album split down the middle.  The first five are Barnes’ songs; the last five are Ritter’s.  All songs are either explicitly based in old church hymns, or else they are haunted by the spirits of the great English hymn writers.  But this is not a “worship album.”  It is definitely solo material, some of which can be (and has been) transposed into the context of corporate Christian worship (e.g. “The Mercy Seat” and “Absent from Flesh”).  Recorded live at the 930 Art Center in Louisville, KY, the stylistic diversity in these ten tracks is astonishing.  Jazz, gospel (black and white, mind you), blues, grunge, soul, country, rock—they’re all here.  Yet this smorgasbord is no hodgepodge.  The cohesion comes from its production, themes, and the souls of the singers themselves. 

If you can’t afford the whole album, you must at least get Barnes’ “Absent from Flesh” and Ritter’s “The War.”  In my opinion, they are the best songs on the album.

Theologically, the album is rock-solid.  Texts which are based in time-tested hymns from greats like Isaac Watts are nearly always a slam dunk in the Department of Biblical Conformity.  Barnes and Ritter write the kinds of songs that will last in Christian hymnody. 

THE MERCY SEAT  |  JAMIE BARNES

Barnes says, “If we’re being honest, we all have this longing for an advocate, and a lot of the songs on my side of the EP have this hint of desperation in them.”  That’s a great summary statement of the textual trajectory and musical edge which unify the five songs.  Musically, Jamie provides an aural feast.  His songs keep his voice in a modest vocal range, and his smooth, simple singing style perfectly fits the “longing” and “hint of desperation” he intends.  My favorite feature of his music here are the use of horns, sergeantly peppered throughout the EP.  The slippery, jazzy “Dark Passenger” has some moments of tight ensemble, especially among the horns.  There is an exquisite moment, just around 3:44, where the vibrato between two instruments locks into eerie symmetry.  Verse two is powerful:

Why do these hands withdraw from worship,
And battle your embrace?
They clinch in anger far too often,
And seldom stretch in faith.

“Jealous Arm” contains a haunting chord progression at the front-end that moves from the major tonic chord to the minor.  The ghostly, Coldplay-like piano line accentuates the tense nature of revelry in the jealousy of God.  The first verse:

Is this the way we repay our God?
Who among us has he not made?
Forsaking His face for the sculpted things
We have shaped with our evil hands.
And where are they now, our silent golden cows?
His swift and jealous arm has thrown them down.

The choice track, however, is “Absent from Flesh”—roomy drums, earthy claps and slaps, and wailing horns make this an exquisite, original, and inspiring piece.  Co-writers Barnes and Watts, though separated by nearly three hundred years, together celebrate the eschaton:

Absent from flesh, O glorious day!
In one triumphant stroke
My reckoning paid, my charges dropped
And the bonds ‘round my hands are broke.

I go where God and glory shine,
To one eternal day
This failing body I now resign,
For the angels point my way.

Hearing the unparalleled hymns of Isaac Watts so beautifully re-dressed and re-given to the modern church simply makes me want to dance naked in the streets. 

THE WAR  |  BROOKS RITTER

Many singers, including myself, shake their fists toward the heavenlies that they were not graced with the golden voice of Brooks Ritter.  No joke: the first time I heard his voice, I pegged him for a fifty-year-old, black Mississippi Delta bluesman.  This twenty-something has all the soul, presence, and maturity of a voice twice his age, and he stewards his gifts well throughout this EP.  “The War,” a grungy blues tune, introduces Ritter with a punch to the belly, and the left-hand-calloused fingerprints of Neil Robins’ axe-work (of Dirt Poor Robins and No More Kings) are all over this number.  It’s reminiscent of Soundgarden at the height of their music-making.  The text of this song’s chorus characterizes the posture of the whole album—centered upon the gospel of the finished work of Christ:

Though the scars of my sin run deep
They’re washed in the flood brought from Calvary
Remind me O Lord in my hour of deed
The war won  for the redeemed!

“Good Day” takes a stylistic leap in a different direction.  It is a black gospel number, through and through, full of clever colloquialisms fitting to the genre.  This song rocks:

Well, hey, Jesus the God man came to the Earth
He opened his arms to the children of dirt
He was singing a new song, “Child come on I’ll show you the way”
It was a good day when the Lord came
You know it was a good day

My Jesus came through the desert
He walked on the sea and died on the hill of Mount Calvary
He went to the grave but checked out on the third day
It was a good day when the Lord came,
It was a good, good day.

I love the thought that Jesus “checked out” of the grave on the third day like it was a hotel room.  The ease with which Almighty Christ sealed His victory over death is worthy of such a thought.  The next song, “Waters of Forgiveness,” is a soulful white gospel number that one could hear arranged for an all-male quartet.

In the words of Barnes: “This record, it’s more than just making music for our local church.We want to be a community of artists…So it’s important to us to publish music and to publish books and things of that nature…These songs are just a way for us to point to truth.  Hopefully that’s what good art will do, point to a good God who’s the author and creator of everything.”  God has given the Sojourn community a unique call with the provision of unique resources.  The Mercy Seat / The War is proof that these artists continue to steward such gifts well.  A while back I posted on why worship leaders should be theologians and theologians worship leaders.  Barnes and Ritter are worship leader-theologians par excellence.  Go get this album, people. 

Hip-Hop Worship, Eschatology, and Aesthetics

This jazzes me on so many levels.  Check out this footage from a recent worship service at Sojourn Church in Louisville, KY. 

The rapper is Shai Linne, whose blog called "Lyrical Theology" shows that hip-hop and Christian thought/worship aren't antithetical.  These videos conjure several stream-of-consciousness observations:

• Check out the cool way the medium of rap allows for creative twist on a traditional "call and response"...that's ancient future liturgy at its finest!
• Check out how into it the whiteys are (hey, I'm a whitey...I can say it).  Hip-hop worship doesn't have to be only for the African-Americans.
• Check out the glimpse of the eschaton--when people of every tribe, tongue, and nation, will be gathered together worshiping around the throne.  Some people would look at that video and say that it's appalling, even blasphemous.  I say: that worship is more heavenly than a lot of the stuff out there.
• Check out the generous spirit of some seriously gifted artists.  In video #1, you've got an amazingly talented singer and artist, Brooks Ritter, on the far right on the stage.  That guy has a golden voice.  And yet, he's open enough to clap and dance and join in an art form from a different world than his own.  In video #2, the guy in the glasses in the back is Mike Cosper.  That guy is a phenomenal guitarist...and yet, he gives it up for Shai Linne.

As I was growing up, my dad always said (probably tongue in cheek) that rap wasn't music.  I disagreed then, and I disagree now.  Like any art form, you have to understand its rules and paradigms.  Then you discover, as is the case for a lot of things which people broad brush as "not art," that there are expressions within the art form that excel and expressions which fail.  There's good rock and bad rock.  There's good hip-hop and bad hip-hop.  There's good contrapuntal writing and bad contrapuntal writing.  Of course there are transcendent, objective aesthetic values rooted in the being of God, but we must also account for the fact that there is a "relativism" to aesthetics that bids us understand a piece of art within its context.  What are the "rules" of a given art form? And how does a given artist interact with those rules?  Those are the kinds of questions we must ask in our evaluation.  If we did, I think we might find a more generous church toward seemingly "deviant" expressions such as hip-hop in the context of worship.

iworship hymns...c'mon, let's think differently about how to "redo" hymns

Check out the album. If you've been checking me out, you know me by now.  You know that I'm an odd lover of traditional hymns and modern worship.  So I usually pick up anything that says "hymns" on it and looks remotely modern, to see what kind of work is going on in that field.  I therefore picked up "iworship hymns" from Integrity music.  They've been putting out this iworship series for a while now, and they're latest issue is an album dedicated to hymns.  It is a compilation of previously-recorded, previously-released tracks from great Integrity artists like Paul Baloche, Gateway Worship, Hillsong, New Life, etc. The album is a good one.  It's a great listen and has great production.  The texts of the songs are wonderful, and the worship leaders are all great, authentic people, passionate about God's glory.  But I'm discouraged about what's going on in modern worship with regards to "resetting" hymns, and this is a prime example.* I'll begin my analysis with a vignette of a typical conversation I often have with people when I tell them about what I'm trying to accomplish with The Glad Sound. I'm sure my friends at Indelible Grace, Red Mountain Church, and Sojourn Community Church have had similar dialogues. Person:  So what's your project about? Zac:  We're taking the texts of old hymns and setting them to new music...new melodies, chord structures, and instrumentation. Person:  Oh, I LOVE that!  I love it when we sing "updated" hymns in our church. Zac:  Tell me about that a bit more. Person:  You know, when they take an old hymn and "jazz it up" by adding drums or guitars or something.  They just make those outdated hymns contemporary. Zac:  Oh, cool.  (sigh...)  [the conversation continues as I try to explain how what we're doing is different, and hopefully better] I don't know how many times I have had this conversation.  People don't understand that when we're "resetting" hymns, we are not keeping the music, at all.  We are not "updating" or "jazzing up" the melodies and chord structures.  It's as though we're taking a written poem and setting music to it for the first time.  The old tune and the new tune have nothing to do with each other, except that they can be affixed to the same text. I'm not completely against this type of re-hymn setting.  I think in some cases it works and sounds great (for some reason, I've felt that songs in 3/4 and 6/8 work better for this).  But more often than not, it sounds forced, canned, and a bit artificial.  There's a good reason for this.  The music was composed in a different style and genre (often block chord writing) that doesn't easily and naturally import to modern styles (melodies with fewer chord changes between).  Often, I feel that the original composers are rolling over in their graves when their music is bent out of shape.  (Again, I'm not totally against it...I plan on at least attempting to jam the plainsong chant melody of "Of the Father's Love Begotten" into a modern groove on our next album...traditionalites, don't shoot me, please). These types of conversations, and these types of "updated hymns" albums like "iworship hymns," betray a myopia quite pervasive in mainstream evangelical music: the only way to do hymns in modern worship settings is to take the original melodies and affix a new instrumentation, syncopation, and beat to them.  Friends, THERE IS ANOTHER WAY!  And this other way is something that's been going on for centuries (see my previous post on this for more detail).  For centuries, musicians have sought to re-clothe an old hymn in the current musical vernacular.  Almost any time you look in a hymnal and see a text written in one year and the music written much later, that's usually the case. Why is it that we only think we have one option here?  Why is it that new modern worship "hymns" projects deliver to us the same thing again and again?  Please don't take me as complaining about these projects.  I'm more observing and lamenting the fact that there aren't more who are "updating" hymns in ways which feel more natural to everyone.  In conversations where I'm talking to a lover of old hymns who actually gets what I'm doing, they're appreciative, not only that I'm giving modern worshipers a taste of old hymns, but that I'm not tampering with the musical integrity of the tunes previously used for these hymns. I just know that there is so much more to be done in re-setting hymns, but every time I pick up a new "hymns" album, it's just the same old concept, recycled.  There are SO many hymns to be brought back to the church, and there are SO many great songwriters out there!  Step up!  You can have so much more freedom with these hymns than you might realize! Peace, love, dove. *One mild exception to my discussion on the iworship hymns album is "When I Survey," by Kathryn Scott, re-set to the tune to "O Danny Boy."  It's actually a beautiful setting and brings out some different nuances of the text that I'm interested in exploring.

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