Top Ten 2024

This is the music, in no particular order, that I've most enjoyed listening to in 2024:

‘All God’s Children: Songs From The British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967-1974’: "‘All God’s Children’ assembles the best of the British Christian acts, including such respected names as Out Of Darkness (and their earlier incarnation, garage R&B act The Pilgrims), Parchment, Whispers Of Truth and Judy MacKenzie. It also features the secular alongside the sacred, including the likes of Strawbs, Moody Blues, Amazing Blondel, John Kongos and Medicine Head – bands who, though theologically shyer than their more overtly Christian contemporaries, all wrote songs with a strong spiritual message." "Mr. Wells and Grapefruit Records have outdone themselves with their detailed research, their ability to find tracks both profound and disturbing, and providing liner notes worthy of the Encyclopedia Britannica. This set is not just for the Jesus freak, but for anyone who is interested in how movements of all sorts find their voice through popular music."

'Question of Balance' - The Moody Blues: "In the liner notes to the CD of Question Of Balance Hayward speaks of how Question was a protest song about the wars of the day but also a response to the breakdown of the sixties and the loss of the dream of the time. There is no doubt that this lyric shows a band reaching beyond what the hippy can achieve in the resources of humanity and seeking a transcendent power to bring the miracle that is recognised as crucial to some answer to our question of meaning and to our satisfaction of soul ... bass player John Lodge ... said, "In the '60s we were all looking for something. If you did a gig you'd spend hours afterwards meeting people, talking about religion. I grew up through an evangelical church, and the more I talked to people, the more I realized all the things I'd learned at church were relevant--and what everyone was looking for" ... His words are proven in a later song on the same album as Question. I remember listening to Minstrel, down the years, and thinking that I could see Jesus in the words ... For Lodge, the answer to his band mate Justin Hayward’s Questions was the Jesus of his upbringing and continuing spiritual journey. Right in the middle of their questioning album there is a quiet answer."

'Abracadabra: The Asylum Years' - Judee Sill: "Although much of Sill’s recorded output is loaded with images and symbology from Christianity, you won’t hear her songs played on your local devotional radio station or covered during youth services on Sunday nights. For one, she was just as fascinated with the occult as with Christianity. But her relationship with faith, however one wants to define it, was idiosyncratic and unique to her and her art. She sang longingly for something, anything, beyond the physical world, throwing open her arms to its chaotic uncertainty, ascribing holy meaning to everything—from being betrayed by a lover to seeking God—in her visions of ghosts that haunted early 1970s Los Angeles. In a 1972 Rolling Stone interview, she said that though her religion is “unspeakable, it’s not unsingable.” In other words, Sill’s belief in a higher power is intensely personal and intuitive. It might not make sense to others, but it doesn’t have to. Her eclectic religious and allegorical evocations allow her to peer through these impenetrable symbols and images that are as omnipresent and intangible as air to probe their human dimensions. But her music also revels in the beauty that arises from living in and with such uncertainty, a beauty which has taken years for me to appreciate."

'#1 Record' - Big Star: "It’s remarkable–arguably the “hippest” American band of the 70s (certainly the one that indie rockers love to name-drop the most) made music that, especially on their first record, bordered on proto-Christian rock. Much of this was due to the influence of the overtly Christian Chris Bell, the co-leader of the band who in recent years has become something of a poster boy for tragic indie artistry. And indeed, if his songs are anything to go by, the guy was tortured. But first, the Christianity: a few sample lyrics of Bell’s song “My Life Is Right” off Big Star’s debut #1 Record, “Once I walked a lonely road/I had no one to share my load/But then you came and showed the way/And now I hope you’re here to stay/You give me life”. Borderline mega-church stuff, if it weren’t for all the chiming power chords and gorgeous Beatle-esque production."

'Songs from the Rain' - Hothouse Flowers: "Gone is the awestruck gusto and frantic overdubbing of People. Gone are the guest musicians and backing vocalists of Home, as well as the lush arrangements and over-production, which gave that album its ripe sound ... In their place is a sound more pastoral, with even more of an ethereal beauty. The mix is sparse, capturing the band's live sound in a way the preceding albums have not done ... The songs have also encapsulated the band's inherent spirituality - both in sound and in lyric. Some are heavily immersed in gospel, with big choral crescendoes. Where before choirs and guest vocalists were used, the backing vocals here are distinctly those of Hothouse Flowers themselves - and the harmonies are used to great effect ... Songs from the Rain is a tender and uplifting album, exploring the band's soul while reaching outward and imploring its listeners to do the same. It is a sublime creation." 'Thing of Beauty' "is ‘truth sight’, seeing things as they are in all their imperfect splendour, their ‘broken holiness’ and knowing deeply, intuitively, that all is beautiful, glorious."

'La Vita Nuova' - Maria McKee: "It's loud with emotions, deafening emotions, sweeping emotions, cathartic revelations that inspire and transfix. While earlier albums have had decades to work on me, this one had the same sort of effect instantly. Intensely personal and blissfully broad in tone, nearly every composition here rings with the kind of heart-on-the-sleeve generosity that McKee used as a performer on earlier records. She can sound like she's spinning near the edge of a cliff, about to throw herself over, and then she pulls things together and roars back into our orbit. La Vita Nuova is an extraordinary album, and the sort of thing I want to play as loudly as possible even as it seems like the world's ending around us."

'Grace Will Lead Me Home' - Angeline, Cohen & Jon: "This project, which commemorates the 250th anniversary of the writing of the hymn [Amazing Grace], has new songs to explore the dichotomy between the song and the sometime trade of its writer. It is heady stuff." "All credit, then, to Jon Bickley, for pulling all this together, he being a poet, folksinger, radio and podcast producer from Bucks, instigator of the Invisible Folk Club, a virtual folk club, wherein he often explores, often in cahoots with academics and historians, the backgrounds of and to our folk traditions. Here his cahoots include no less than Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, each fast staking claims in the annals of a black Britain hitherto undiscovered or forgotten, together for Morrison’s ‘The Sorrow Songs’ and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as part of Reg Meuross’ ‘Stolen From God’ project."

'Stolen from God' - Reg Meuross: "... in Stolen From God, he has unquestionably written his masterpiece in a song cycle that turns an unflinching eye on the toxic legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, especially in his home in the South West of England. Shocked by his realisation of his ignorance of British Black History, of the Empire and how so many of the nation’s grand estates and lauded figures were tainted by the stain of slavery that had served as the foundation for their wealth and public acclaim. Embarking on four years of in-depth research into family trees, church records, and oral histories passed down through generations and uncovering many uncomfortable long-hidden truths in the true tradition of folk music, he has turned these into songs about seafaring, war, class, politics and social history with subjects that range from how naval legends like Sir Francis Drake and John Hawkins who helped to establish the transatlantic slave trade, how it underpinned the British economy of the17th century, the first petition to abolish slavery that originated in Bridgwater and Edward Colston, the Bristol merchant, entrepreneur and philanthropist finally revealed as being involved in the forcible kidnapping and transportation of some eighty thousand Africans."

'The Other Side' - T Bone Burnett: "The Other Side, could, perhaps, be seen as a companion piece to that self-titled triumph [T Bone Burnett] as it contains many of the qualities Jon Young and Brad Reno have identified in the earlier album i.e. a sparse, largely acoustic country affair with songs that tend to be more personal than preachy. Paradoxes are never far away in Burnett’s world and we are treated to a particularly compelling list in ‘Everything and Nothing’ including: Everybody wants to know the truth but nobody wants to hear it. / Everybody has to face the end but nobody wants to get near it. / Everybody wants peace but nobody wants to surrender. / Everyone lives in the past but nobody seems to remember. Burnett has spoken of a dystopian dream he has had repeatedly over the years which shapes his understanding of societal trends and digital developments in particular. The paradoxes he notes are one of the ways in which he describes societal challenges, at the same time that he writes characters seeking renewal, restoration and reconciliation in the midst of a cruel world."

'Wild God' - Nick Cave: "His latest album reminds me of Julian of Norwich’s work; baffling, subversive, mystical, rooted in a truth that can’t be proven. A truth he wouldn’t be interested in proving, anyway. It, too, swerves ‘rightness’. It, too, refuses to dilute the oddness of faith. It, too, is irresistibly intense ... This is not a casual album. Any true Nick Cave fan would scold me for ever expecting it to be. The album is a ten-track-long ode to a Wild God who has met Nick in the darkest of places. Places, I’m sure, he never wanted to go. Places, I’m sure, he will never fully leave. Such a wild God is a challenge to a culture that has enthroned comfort. We’re too easily spooked. But Cave, through a combination of circumstance and intentionality, appears to have entirely shunned comfort. And so, he’s in prime position to introduce us to a God who will confound us. Julian of Norwich’s book and Nick Cave’s album are centuries apart – yet, somehow, it feels as though they have been made from the same materials: profound discomfort and raw wonder."

My previous Top Ten's can be found here - 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.

My co-authored book ‘The Secret Chord’ is an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. Order a copy from here.

My music-related articles from 2024 include: Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion; A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics; Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us; Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs; James MacMillan’s music of tranquility and discord; Belle and Sebastian's suffering singer on the struggle and the hope; Emotive Beats; Pure Gospel/Mavis Staples; and Gospel Hopes.

My music-related posts from 2024 include: Methuselah, Amazing Blondel, Tom Yates; David Ackles, Chris Bell, Bryan Maclean; and Jesus Music - 1 & 2.

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Hothouse Flowers - Thing Of Beauty. 

International Times: Gospel Hopes

My latest review for International Times is on T Bone Burnett's 'The Other Side' and Peter Case live in Leytonstone:

'This sense of emerging from the troubles of life into a space and place where love is both the road and destination is a perception and goal that Case shares with Burnett, as both draw deeply on roots traditions that tap Gospel hopes of coming home and being found on the other side.'

For more on T Bone Burnett, see here, here, here, here and here. For more on Peter Case see here, here, and here.

My earlier pieces for IT are an interview with the poet Chris Emery, an interview with Jago Cooper, Director of the the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, plus reviews of Helaine Blumenfeld's Together exhibition, 'Giacometti in Paris' by Michael Peppiatt, the first Pissabed Prophet album - 'Zany in parts, moving in others, you’ll be hard pressed to find a more unusual, inspired & profound album this year. ‘Pissabed Prophet’ will thrill, intrigue, amuse & inspire' - and 'Religion and Contemporary Art: A Curious Accord', a book which derives from a 2017 symposium organised by the Association of Scholars of Christianity in the History of Art.

Several of my short stories have been published by IT including three about Nicola Ravenscroft's EarthAngel sculptures (then called mudcubs), which we exhibited at St Andrew's Wickford last Autumn. The first story in the series is 'The Mudcubs and the O Zone holes'. The second is 'The Mudcubs and the Clean-Up King', and the third is 'The mudcubs and the Wall'.

My other short stories to have been published by International Times are 'The Black Rain', a story about the impact of violence in our media, 'The New Dark Ages', a story about principles and understandings that are gradually fading away from our modern societies, and 'The curious glasses', a story based on the butterfly effect.

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Peter Case - Have You Ever Been In Trouble?

Love Life Live Lent

Here's the sermon that I've shared at St Catherine's Wickford this morning:

It's a funny thing about humility
as soon as you know you're being humble,
you're no longer humble
it's a funny thing about life
you've got to give up your life to be alive
you've got to suffer to know compassion
you can't want nothing if you want satisfaction

it's a funny thing about love
the harder you try to be loved,
the less lovable you are
it's a funny thing about pride,
when you're being proud
you should be ashamed
you find only pain if you seek after pleasure
you work like a slave if you seek after leisure

Some wise words there from the singer-songwriter, T. Bone Burnett, which quote one of the things that Jesus said in today’s Gospel reading (Mark 8: 31-end). Whoever loses his life will find it or you’ve got to give up your life to be alive.

Much of what we do in life is actually about saving our own lives – all the time that we spend thinking about our comfort, security and pleasure and all the time we spend accumulating money and possessions for ourselves. We all do it because it is our normal way of life – scientists such as Richard Dawkins explain that we are born with selfish genes that get us ready to live in a world that is about the survival of the fittest while the Bible speaks about being slaves to sin and doing the things we hate. In different ways, the same thing is being said; that our gut instinct is to look out for ourselves, to look after No. 1.

Jesus turns that way of thinking on its head by saying those who want to save their lives will lose them and that those who lose their lives will save them. He fleshes out that thought by asking does a person gain anything if he wins the whole world but loses his life. We think immediately of the story Jesus told about a farmer with a bumper harvest which he immediately stored so that he could live off it in plenty for the rest of his life and who then died that same night without enjoying any of it. That story was told again in our newspapers a few years ago in the story of a man who had a special coffin built so that he could be buried together with his collection of pornographic magazines. What use they will be to him as both the magazines and his body decay is anyone’s guess!

So, seeking to save your own life doesn’t help you when you are faced with death and it doesn’t deliver what it promises in life either. Since the Second World War, economists tell us that in this country our GDP (or Gross Domestic Product) has shot up by leaps and bounds while the happiness of the population has stagnated. Despite economic growth, happiness in the West has not grown in the last 50+ years. All that seeking after material pleasures and possessions, all that looking after No. 1, is not actually making any of us any happier. As Jesus said, whoever wants to save his own life will lose it.

If Jesus is right about that half of the equation, then maybe he’s also right about the other; you've got to give up your life to be alive. After all, that is what he did for each one of us by going to the cross. He gave up his own life in order that we could get out of slavery to sin and really live. This is what he began to teach his disciples at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading; “The Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected … He will be put to death but three days later he will rise to life.”

Peter was like us he couldn’t see it. It sounded like Jesus had got things all the wrong way round. Peter didn’t want Jesus to die and so he rebuked him. But it was Jesus who actually understood the right way of living life – that we come alive when we give ourselves away – and so he rejected Peter’s arguments as coming from the Devil himself.

What is life like when we give ourselves away? What is life like when we lose our life for Jesus and the Gospel? One way of thinking about those questions might be to look online for the Church of England’s 'Love Life Live Lent' booklets. These are a past Lent initiative but the booklets are still available. The initiative was based on the idea of Lent as a time to step back from daily life and think about bigger things. The Live Lent Booklets help us turn towards God's love and kingdom. The booklets help us change the world for the better during Lent one small action at a time!

They do so by giving fifty suggestions for actions people can take during Lent, including ideas for environmental conservation and improving personal relationships. They encourage us to reject consumerism and materialism and instead embrace generosity and kindness, for example by leaving money in shopping trolleys, giving people hugs, giving up a place to someone who is in rush in traffic or a queue and doing chores for others.

The booklet was originally produced by the Diocese of Birmingham where 70,000 copies were given out. Commending the booklets Archbishop John Sentamu said; “I would urge as many people as possible to join in with the proposed programme of generous actions that encourage kindness to ourselves, our neighbours and our planet. Recent research has shown that generosity is a key ingredient in making neighbourhoods flourish and I think this Lent programme could help us become a more generous church – individually and as the body of Christ. The programme will not be easy but it will be fun and I am sure it will start to change our lives as God calls us onward in a corporate pilgrimage of faith, transforming us and building his kingdom of love, peace and justice.”

Living life by giving yourself away, by losing your life, is a wonderful thing. There is nothing to be ashamed of in a lifestyle like that. It makes sense in a world where the problems caused by a ‘me first’ attitude are becoming all too apparent. It is about really loving life and living it to the full by overflowing with generosity and kindness. It is to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, to live out his new way of being human, and to make an evolution against evolution. “If anyone wants to come with me,” Jesus said, “he must forget self, carry his cross, and follow me.” We have often thought about that in terms of self-denial but what ‘Love Life Live Lent’ helps us see is that it is actually about generosity, giving ourselves away. If you are not sure whether you can make that change wholesale, why not look at the booklet, try out some of the suggestions for a day at a time and see if they don’t seriously affect you and the world we live in.

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T. Bone Burnett - Trap Door.

The Jesus Rock Revolution and The Jesus Movement

Next month Cherry Red Records releases ‘All God’s Children: Songs From The British Jesus Rock Revolution 1967-1974’, a 3CD Box set.

Introducing the collection, they write:

‘During the late 60s and early 70s, the restless, questing nature of the Woodstock generation and the horrors of Vietnam saw the pop scene add a new spiritual element. Many young people embraced Christianity, viewing Jesus as the prototypal long-haired hippie, persecuted by the establishment of the day while dispensing peace and love to a troubled, cynical world.

The American branch of the Jesus movement effectively started in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, but there was also a parallel development in the UK that slowly evolved from beat groups performing in church coffee-bars. By 1971, leading British Xian rock band Out Of Darkness were appearing at notorious countercultural gathering Phun City, while Glastonbury introduced a “Jesus tent” that offered Christian revellers mass and holy communion twice a day.

‘All God’s Children’ assembles the best of the British Christian acts, including such respected names as Out Of Darkness (and their earlier incarnation, garage R&B act The Pilgrims), Parchment, Whispers Of Truth and Judy MacKenzie. It also features the secular alongside the sacred, including the likes of Strawbs, Moody Blues, Amazing Blondel, John Kongos and Medicine Head – bands who, though theologically shyer than their more overtly Christian contemporaries, all wrote songs with a strong spiritual message.

A 3CD, four-hour set, ‘All God’s Children’ – which takes its name from the gorgeous Kinks’ ballad which is included in the set – is a fascinating look at an under-documented phenomenon and unexpected by-product of the hippie era.’

In an excellent review for International Times, Rupert Loydell explains why, in the main, this collection is not an anthology of Jesus Rock, but more a compilation of music from the period that includes references to Jesus. Loydell also shares memories from that time and summarises the development of British Jesus Music.

For more of Loydell’s reflections and memories of this period see ‘Looking down the wrong end of a telescope’ where the writer and poet looks back to the collaborations and collisions between church culture and the wider culture in the 1970s and 80s, with a cast including Jesus Rock Music, the Greenbelt festival, Mary Whitehouse and musicians such as Larry Norman and Steve Fairnie of Writz.

‘All God’s Children’ can also usefully be set alongside ‘Lysergic Saviours (A Psychedelic Prophecy! The Holy Grail Of Xian Acid Fuzz 1968–1974)’ and ‘The Rock Revival’, the latter of which documents the early Jesus Movement in the US while the former includes rare tracks from both sides of the Atlantic.

While ‘All God’s Children’ may not be a particularly full collection of British Jesus Music, its focus on secular music that references Jesus demonstrates something of the wider impact that the Jesus Movement made. While there was a particular focus around this period, Jesus has consistently been referenced in Rock and Pop music from early days of Rock ‘n’ Roll onwards as the ‘Rock of Ages: Jesus in Popular Songs’ website demonstrates. This is a constantly-updated, searchable database of 500+ secular songs in which Jesus shows up by rock stars, rappers, singer-songwriters, country stars, and hardcore punks.

The recent film 'Jesus Revolution' has been described as telling ‘the story of a young Greg Laurie (Joel Courtney) being raised by his struggling mother, Charlene (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) in the 1970s. Laurie and a sea of young people descend on sunny Southern California to redefine truth through all means of liberation. Inadvertently, Laurie meets Lonnie Frisbee (Jonathan Roumie), a charismatic hippie-street-preacher, and Pastor Chuck Smith (Kelsey Grammer) who have thrown open the doors of Smith's languishing church to a stream of wandering youth. What unfolds becomes the greatest spiritual awakening in American history. Rock and roll, newfound love, and a twist of faith lead to a Jesus Revolution that turns one counterculture movement into a revival that changes the world.’ The film is based on the book 'Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How He Can Do It Again Today' by Greg Laurie and Ellen Vaughn.

The Jesus Movement birthed two major new groupings of churches/denominations. The first being the Calvary Chapel movement, the story of which is told in ‘The Jesus Revolution’, the second – The Vineyard Fellowship - emerging from Calvary Chapel at a later point. Lonnie Frisbee was influential in the early stages of both developments. However, the Jesus Movement as a whole did not arise solely from Calvary Chapel, as, for example, the story of Arthur Blessitt’s ministry demonstrates - https://blessitt.com/new-jesus-movement/.

All these strands of the Jesus Movement used Jesus Music within their churches and ministries. The LA Times has described how Frisbee and Chuck Smith transformed Calvary Chapel into a haven for touched-by-the-spirit bands such as Love Song, Gentle Faith, Blessed Hope and Children of the Day. Half-a-dozen Calvary Chapel bands united in 1971 to create “The Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert.” Released on Chuck Smith’s new Maranatha! Music label and costing about $4,000 to produce, the album went on to sell more than 200,000 copies. A film called ‘The Jesus Music’ tells the story of this strand within Jesus Music and examines how the spirit of the times, a rush of faith-filled creativity and the emergent “Jesus People” movement begat a multimillion-dollar industry fuelled by devotees eager to support their blessed messengers. The documentary includes interviews with Girard and his Love Song bandmate Tommy Coomes; contemporary Christian stars Amy Grant, Kirk Franklin, TobyMac of DC Talk, Lecrae and Michael W. Smith; and volumes of archival footage.

Blessit worked with musicians such as Eddie Smith, Andraé Crouch, Sharon Peck and the Sunshine Sisters, Charles McPheeters, and The Jimmy Owens singers and others as well as preaching at mainstream rock festivals such as like the West Palm Beach International Rock Festival, where his ministry’s band ‘The Eternal Rush’ also played.

Explo '72 was an evangelistic conference sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ which has been called the most visible event of the Jesus movement, and came to be associated with the same, even though its primary attendees were not directly involved in that movement. Billy Graham spoke on six occasions during the event including the final event which was a public, eight-hour-long, Christian music festival on Saturday, June 17, 1972. Dubbed "The Christian Woodstock", the event drew an estimated attendance between 100,000 and 200,000. Newsweek described the crowds as being "militant Christians." Featured artists were Love Song, Larry Norman, Randy Matthews, The Archers, Andrae Crouch and the Disciples, Children of the Day, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson.

The first local Vineyard church began when Kenn Gulliksen brought together two Bible studies, both meeting at the houses of singer/songwriters: Larry Norman and Chuck Girard. This was in West LA in 1974. Later, three members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue – T. Bone Burnett, Steven Soles and David Mansfield - attended the Vineyard Fellowship. John Milward notes ‘T-Bone [Burnett] was the first one to go through this [born again] experience and Steve [Soles] sort of followed him, and I eventually did too,” said David Mansfield.’ Christianity.com says that ‘Burnett attended the Vineyard church during or just after the Rolling Thunder Revue tour ended in 1976. Around this time, he had a spiritual reawakening some sources reported as his conversion. He described it to Gallagher as more of a reconnecting with God: “when I was 11, my needs were very different from when I was 28 or so. At different times in my life, I met God from a different point of view.”’ The three played together as The Alpha Band, their second album being 'humbly offered in the light of the triune God'.

In 1978 Bob Dylan followed, ‘taking a three-month, four-day-a-week course at the Vineyard Fellowship.’ The result was his Gospel-influenced albums from ‘Slow Train Coming’ to ‘Infidels’ and a subsequent strengthening of the religious and Biblical imagery and influences which had always been a feature of his work. As a result, the Jesus Movement claimed its highest profile convert while pissing off thousands of his fans who wouldn’t fully appreciate what he was doing or the wonderful music he was making until the release in 2017 of ‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981’.

The music emerging from the Jesus People USA Christian community in Chicago, most notably the Resurrection Band and its founder Glenn Kaiser, should also be noted. ‘Resurrection Band, also known as Rez Band or REZ, was a Christian rock band formed in 1972. They were part of the Jesus People USA Christian community in Chicago and most of its members have continued in that community to this day. Known for their blend of blues-rock and hard rock, Resurrection Band is credited as one of the forerunners of the Christian metal genre. Christianity Today called them "the most influential band in Christian music history." Following their debut in 1978, the band's greatest popularity was during the early 1980s, but later in the decade they received some crossover success when they had two music videos featured on MTV. Led by the husband-and-wife team of Glenn and Wendi Kaiser, the band sought to evangelize using Christian rock, and addressed a variety of social ills in the lyrics of their music. While the group is officially disbanded, they played several one-off dates at the now defunct Cornerstone Festival, which members of the band helped establish. Currently Glenn Kaiser has an established solo career as a blues musician and is also a speaker on various spiritual issues to youth and adults.’

From its beginnings, the Jesus Movement has included a range of controversial characters and events. The movement has been criticised, by Reformed Christians in particular, for being un-Biblical, particularly in its focus on signs and wonders. The Calvary Chapel movement and Vineyard Fellowship have been particularly wedded to ‘End Times’ thinking of the kind made famous by Hal Lindsey’s book ‘The Late, Great Planet Earth’. Dylan was particularly influenced by these teachings in his Gospel period. Key Calvary Chapel pastor Chuck Smith predicted that the “rapture” – when, in this interpretation of the Book of Revelation, all true believers in Jesus Christ will suddenly be raised, leaving cars and buses driver-less, and plane’s pilot-less (described by Larry Norman in the song ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’) - would happen in 1981. His ministry was somewhat discredited when this prediction did not occur. Additionally, and unacceptably, as with all the mainstream Christian denominations, the movement has had to face examples of abuse that occurred within its churches.

Two of the most controversial but central figures within the movement were Larry Norman and Lonnie Frisbee.

Kelefa Sanneh has written of Larry Norman that:

‘Many historians trace the birth of Christian rock to the release, in 1969, of “Upon This Rock.” It was an inventive concept album, by turns fierce and sweet, that was the work of a stubborn visionary named Larry Norman—the founding father of Christian rock. Norman, who died in relative obscurity, in 2008, has often been viewed as a tragic figure: a gifted and quirky musician who inspired a generation while alienating his peers and, at times, his fans. In “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?,” the first biography of Norman, Gregory Alan Thornbury tells a more triumphant story, portraying Norman as a genius and a prophet, clear-eyed in his criticism of what he sometimes called “the apostate church.” …

Norman grew up in the Bay Area, and dedicated his life to Jesus when he was five—purely on his own initiative, he later remembered. He discovered a talent for singing and songwriting when he was in high school, and soon joined a local band called People!, although he quit after one marginally successful album. (There were religious differences: most of the other band members were Scientologists.) Norman moved to Los Angeles and made his solo début with “Upon This Rock,” which attracted a small number of buyers and, in time, a large number of acolytes. Over the next few years, Norman came to seem like less of an outlier, as the Jesus Movement went from a fringe pursuit to a national obsession. Time put a Pop-art picture of Jesus on its cover in 1971 (“the jesus revolution,” it said), and the next year hundreds of thousands of young people gathered in Dallas for Explo ’72, a weeklong revival that was widely described as the Christian Woodstock. In retrospect, the event marked the moment when the Jesus Freaks began to shed their freakiness: Norman was one of the headliners, but so was Billy Graham, the embodiment of mainstream Christianity …

Like many rock stars of his generation, Norman was proudly antiestablishment, which meant that the increasing popularity of his chosen field presented something of an existential crisis. By the nineteen-eighties, Norman had grown contemptuous of the Christian music business that had sprung up in his wake. According to industry conventions, Christian bands were expected to eschew profanity and any drug stronger than caffeine. They were also expected to proclaim their faith in Jesus—although the necessary frequency and clarity of these proclamations were the subject of much debate. Norman hated the idea that his faith should dictate or limit his subject matter. (He once said that, because he was a Christian, all of his songs were necessarily Christian songs, no matter what they were about.) In some cases, the contempt was mutual. Thornbury reports that, in the nineties, when a Norman tribute album was arranged, he was so controversial within the industry that some Christian-music stars “had to get permission from their pastors” before they would agree to participate.’

'Lonnie Frisbee was a young hippie seeker fully immersed in the 1960s counter culture when he claimed to have experienced an encounter with God while on an acid trip. This event so transformed him that Lonnie became an itinerant Christian evangelist, something of a John the Baptist of Southern California who compelled thousands of fellow spiritual seekers to make a profession of faith in Jesus Christ. During the 1970s Lonnie Frisbee became widely known as California's "hippie preacher," the quintessential "Jesus freak" whose pictures frequented such magazines as Time and Life as the media told the story of a burgeoning "Jesus movement." Lonnie Frisbee provided the charismatic spark that launched the Calvary Chapel church into a worldwide ministry and propelled many fledgling leaders into some of the most powerful movers and shakers of the evangelical movement. During the 1980s Lonnie was at the centre of the "signs and wonders" movement, one that focused on reviving the practice of spiritual power through diving healing, speaking in tongues and other demonstrative manners of manifesting the power of God. But besides his influence and beyond the miraculous stories that swirl in the wake of his life, what makes the story most fascinating is that his call into the ministry came while deeply involved in the Laguna Beach homosexual scene. Treated with contempt by the ministers whom he helped establish, Lonnie has been written out of their collective histories. He died as a result of the AIDS virus in 1993.'

Frisbee has been reinserted into the story of the Jesus Movement by the documentary film ‘Frisbee: The Life and Death of a Hippie Preacher’ and the ‘Jesus Revolution’ (although the latter glosses over what are understood to be the controversial aspects of Frisbee’s life). However, it is fundamentally the lack of inclusion shown to the LGBTQIA+ community by the Jesus Movement as a whole that is the real tragedy in the story of Frisbee.

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Out Of Darkness - On Solid Rock.

Top Ten 2021

This is the music, in no particular order, that I've most enjoyed listening to in 2021:

Bob Dylan - Springtime in New York, The Bootleg Series: Springtime in New York represents a significant re-evaluation of a period of Dylan's work which had largely been written off (Shot of Love and Empire Burlesque) or thoroughly misinterpreted (Infidels) by those who wanted back the Dylan that they thought they had possessed rather than the Dylan who was actually evolving in front of them. Dylan left classic songs such as Caribbean Wind, The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar, Angelina, Blind Willie McTell, Foot of Pride, and New Danville Girl off these albums. While each album included other classics such as Every Grain of Sand, Jokerman, I and I, and Dark Eyes, had the songs left off these albums been included the reaction to the albums as a whole would have been enhanced. In addition, these dense, wordy yet illuminating songs would have made it clearer that, in this period, Dylan was moving away from the simplistic and direct expression of faith that characterised the Gospel albums to songs where his exploration of faith was both more allusive and open. Springtime in New York reveals the inadequate nature of much initial response to a complex changing artist like Dylan while also showing that such initial misunderstandings of his work by becoming the standard response actively prevented understanding of the work until challenged by unreleased songs the quality and spirituality of which could not be denied.

Piers Faccini - Shapes of the Fall: 'In Shapes Of The Fall Piers Faccini has created a masterpiece – cerebral, thought-provoking, but above all, musically, an intensely enjoyable listening experience.' 'As he explains, “The fall is what we’re already living through, there is a kind of collapse happening already. And alongside that, I wanted to play around with the myth of the Garden of Eden, as if it were today.” The exhaustion of the planet’s resources and ongoing environmental catastrophes and loss of bio-diversity evidenced first-hand in his witnessing trees dying and birds disappearing within his locality leads him to pessimistically question man’s relationship with his environment whilst ruminating upon any possible resolutions. Thus hope and desperation, destruction and rehabilitation are parallel dichotomies that run like threads through the album.'

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis - Carnage: 'Carnage comes after a remarkable trilogy of Bad Seeds releases, in which Cave and his band—among the fiercest animals in rock’n’roll, when they want to be—approached total stillness.' 'The story they tell is a version of the one Cave has spent his whole career telling, before and after the tragedy that ruptured his personal life—about our equal capacities for cruelty and love, and the flickering possibility of salvation in a brutal world.' 'As ever, Cave uses overtly religious imagery in ways both subversive and devout. The “kingdom in the sky” first appears in the album’s opening lines, where the foreboding music suggests we are doomed never to find it. Its final recurrence comes near the album’s end, in the dreamlike “Lavender Fields,” where a choir urges Cave’s narrator to have faith despite his loss: “Where did they go?/Where did they hide?/We don’t ask who/We don’t ask why/There is a kingdom in the sky.”'

The Alpha Band - The Arista Albums: 'Originally T-Bone Burnett, Steven Soles and David Mansfield met when they worked together in Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder review backing band. When the wheels fell off the bus of that particular tour at the end of 1975, the trio were immediately signed by Arista with big things predicted. They recorded three albums - 'Interviews', 'Spark In the Dark' and 'The Statue Makers Of Hollywood' - before sadly quitting as a band in 1979. Despite the high expectations and critical acclaim poured on the band, they failed to convert their talents into record sales so despite being fine albums, these remain cult classics. In hindsight, perhaps The Alpha Band were just too good or just ahead of their time. Mixing a myriad of Americana and world music influences together, they manage to sound spookily contemporary to 21st century listeners.' Robert Christgau writes of The Alpha Band as 'a country-rock band shocked by city living into a credible, slightly surrealistic nastiness, rather than the usual sleazy lies.' 'This unholy trio's second album is "humbly offered in the light of the triune God," but T-Bone Burnett still sounds like a helluva monad to me.' 'Now I learn that my man J.H. Burnett really is a born-again Christian, which must be why he feels so strongly about money changers and temples. Nonbelievers consider him shrill, but I find something sweet and reflective right beneath his cool, caustic self-righteousness.'

Our Lady Peace - Healthy in Paranoid Times: 'Deeply motivated by today’s social climate, Our Lady Peace finds a smooth balance between enjoyable music, and deep-thinking lyrics. This is surely one of the most mature albums that the group has made to date; and stands quite strongly in the post-American Idiot world of politically-minded rock records. The album opens with the punchy “Angels/Losing/Sleep,” and is represented on the airwaves by jaunty first single “Where Are You.” Highlights include the darkly played track “Wipe That Smile Off Your Face,” U2-tinged “Boy,” and the gorgeous, subdued album closer “Al Genina (Leave A Light On).” Sung with such passion, and child-like hope (choked with cynicism); it is truly a gorgeous tune.'

Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus - Songs of Yearning: 'The revival of Revolutionary Army Of The Infant Jesus that began in 2015 with the Dostoevsky-quoting Beauty Will Save The World has culminated in two new albums – Songs Of Yearning plus companion, Nocturnes. Just like Beauty…, the songs here are friendlier on the ear than the experimentalism of their youth, new players (including children of the original members) bringing fresh impetus. True, a still-intense album of neo-classical 4AD-style ambient folk featuring six different languages and a cover of Ave Maria might not sound that friendly but this is beautiful music built on a relatively unchanged sonic aesthetic that still works after nearly four decades – delicate, plaintive, swelling, and with a never-ending yearning for a half-forgotten past.' 'RAOTIJ may be destined to be remain one for the Godspeed-cum-Gorecki fans but Songs Of Yearning is far purer of spirit and intent than ever before – one for the heart not the heads.'

Valerie June - The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers: 'The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers is an unusual record, one that draws together a diverse array of influences – guided meditation, Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, Memphis soul, racial oppression, pedal steel and Tony Visconti among them, and somehow weaves them into one of this year’s most exceptional offerings.' 'The Order Of Time was an intimate, half-conversational affair, that voice muted and meandering, but oddly all the more heart-rending for its new restraint. The album drew wide critical acclaim and the admiration of Bob Dylan. The Moon And Stars feels a more fully realised project, more wide-ranging and self-assured than its predecessors. Its 14 tracks offer a loose lyrical narrative of the path of the ‘dreamer’ – the conjuring of self-belief, the setbacks, the sorrows, the strength to rise again. In and between, June introduces moments of sonic contemplation that on first listen prove unexpected; it is a brave album that follows its opening track with a 55-second wordless meditation – a wind-chimed, otherworldly deep breath before the heart-thumping, percussive scurry of “You And I”.'

Mica Paris - Gospel: 'the British soul icon returns to her roots with Gospel, her first studio release since 2009’s Born Again. The scope is fairly liberal: Paris tackles traditional gospel (‘Oh Happy Day’, ‘Amazing Grace’), African-American spirituals (‘Go Down Moses’, ‘Motherless Child’), contemporary anthems, perhaps with a latent religious subtext (‘Something Inside So Strong’, ‘I Want To Know What Love Is’), and two originals which, though secular in content, have a clear church influence (‘The Struggle’, ‘Mamma Said’).' 'in many ways this is the album a lot of Mica Paris fans have been waiting for: Songs which allow Paris’ marvellous voice, and all its colours and textures, to shine. Her instrument, which drew comparisons to Anita Baker when Paris first came on the scene in the late 1980s, has deepened beautifully with age. And there are some rousing vocal performances. She allows her voice to shred as she catches on a high note, opting for impassioned imperfection over polish. The heaviness and depth to Paris’ vocal imbues spirituals ‘Go Down Moses’ and ‘Motherless Child’ with a conviction and confident storytelling. Flecks of bluesy guitar swirl around Paris on original song ‘The Struggle’, where she sings of the challenges of navigating this world as a Black woman.'

Deacon Blue - Riding on the Tide of Love: 'Deacon Blue’s new album was never meant to be but, as Covid has bent lives and livelihoods out of shape, doors close, plans change and opportunities arise. With no option to tour their 2020 City of Love album, the band chose to mine the spirit of that record in other ways with their second album in less than 12 months. Riding on the Tide of Love is a continuation, featuring three tracks recorded during the City of Love sessions and others polished up incrementally, with each musician heading into the studio to record their part in isolation. The result is a mellow companion piece, gentle, unhurried, simple, effective and, given its piecemeal gestation, admirably cohesive. The opening title track combines a number of Deacon Blue signatures – a swagger to the rhythm, an ache to the vocals, an uplift to the arrangement – with the bonus feature of Ricky Ross intoning on the verses like a Caledonian Leonard Cohen warming to the theme of love in the time of adversity. Next comes love in a cold climate. She Loved the Snow is a winter song to snuggle up with, a comforting, cosy, breathy duet with Lorraine McIntosh. The easy rapture of their intertwined voices recalls the languid atmosphere of their 2009 McIntosh Ross album, The Great Lakes, recorded in the US with the cream of Americana players. This album is buffed up with more of a pop sheen, but the beguiling spirit remains the same, with a laidback southern soul feel to Send Out a Note. This last number is a call to call out in times of trouble, while there is further empathy in Ross’s beseeching falsetto assurance that “there’s nothing to be scared of, no reason to fear” on Nothing’s Changed. In a year where everything changed, Deacon Blue are determined to be a safe haven.'

Chrissie Hynde - Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan: A mini-genre of music has emerged in recent years: Bob Dylan tribute records from excellent female singers. Joan Osborne, Bettye LaVette, and Emma Swift have all made great contributions since 2017, but Chrissie Hynde, with her new album, Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan, may have achieved mastery. Made with Pretenders bandmate James Walbourne, via text messages during the pandemic lockdown, Standing in the Doorway is a rich experience of emotional and intellectual profundity. The eternal truth and power of Dylan’s lyrics, full of ancient wisdom and poetic dexterity, resonate with dramatic force. It is as if these songs are the chorus parts in a classical Greek tragedy, observing the consequences of human folly while also signifying the potential for deliverance. All four of Dylan’s recent celebrants demonstrate why his songs deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature.' 'The restraints of the lockdown work in her favor, as limited accompaniment — acoustic guitar, piano, mandolin, slide guitar — give the nine songs a hypnotic cohesion. Her curation is also inspired. There is not one “hit” on Standing in the Doorway. Instead, Hynde deftly leads her listeners through unique renditions of some of Dylan’s best and most obscure songs.' 'Standing in the Doorway: Chrissie Hynde Sings Bob Dylan rises out of the conditions of disease, chaos, and deprivation to document and exercise aesthetic and philosophic beauty. That’s one definition of hope.'   

My previous Top Ten's can be found here - 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 and 2012.

In January I'll be talking with Delvyn Case about rock and pop songs for Lent, Easter and Christmas. The latest series of Jesus Is Just Alright for HeartEdge will look at rocking the Church calendar. Register for the series here. 

My co-authored book ‘The Secret Chord’ is an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life written through the prism of Christian belief. Order a copy from here.

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The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus - Songs of Yearning.

The upside-down Kingdom of God

At my first training weekend as a curate the then Bishop of Barking, David Hawkins, performed a handstand to demonstrate the way in which Jesus, through his teaching in the beatitudes, turns our understanding of life upside down. As opposed to the survival of the fittest or looking after No. 1, the Kingdom of God, as it is described in the Beatitudes, is a place of happiness for those who know they are spiritually poor, a place of comfort for those who mourn, a place of receptivity for those who are humble, a place of satisfaction for those whose greatest desire is to do what God requires, a place of mercy for those who are merciful, a place in which God is seen by the pure in heart, a place in which those who work for peace are called God’s children, and a place which belongs to those who are persecuted because they do what God requires.

I've been reminded of this by a post at The Jesus Question about an artwork called Jesus Striped and Stripped by Cedric Baxter.

Victoria Emily Jones writes that, 'Every year since 2008 (excepting last year, due to ministerial transitions), Catherine Czerw has curated a Lenten art exhibition on behalf of Wesley Uniting Church in Perth, Australia, called Stations of the Cross. She selects fifteen Australian artists to participate, each one choosing a station to depict. Jesus Striped and Stripped was Cedric Baxter's 2011 contribution for Station 10, traditionally articulated as "Jesus is stripped of his garments."'

'Baxter's tenth station captures Jesus mid-tumble, naked and abused and down on his way to death, but what Christians know and glory in, especially during the Easter season, is that he's circling back. He's turning a cartwheel! The upside downness of Jesus in this image challenges us to look at Passion Week with the right perspective: as a journey that brings Christ low only to raise him up.'

Baxter's image would have been perfect for a short liturgy which I prepared a while back for the Barking Area Team meeting and subsequently used at a Deanery Synod and at St John's Seven Kings. This liturgy began with an opening reflection taken from St Francis of Assisi by G. K. Chesterton:

'[Saint] Francis, at the time … when he disappeared into the prison or the dark cavern, underwent a reversal of a certain psychological kind … The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again … He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands … If a man saw the world hanging upside down, with all the trees and towers hanging head downwards as in a pool, one effect would be to emphasise the idea of dependence … It would make vivid the Scriptural text which says that God has hanged the world upon nothing.'

This image of coming out of a cave walking on our hands was used by Mumford & Sons in their song entitled The Cave. I adapted this to form the opening response:

May we come out of our cave walking on our hands and see the world hanging upside down. May we understand dependence when we know the maker's hand. Amen.

The prayer of penitence began by borrowing some phrases from Donald B. Kraybill: Jesus, you startle us as paradox, irony and surprise permeate your teachings flipping our expectations upside down: the least are the greatest; adults become like children; the religious miss the heavenly banquet; the immoral receive forgiveness and blessing. Things aren’t like we think they should be. We’re baffled and perplexed; uncertain whether to laugh or cry. Again and again, turning our world upside down, your kingdom surprises us and so we pray now to see your world and our lives as you see them.

I put these together with some of T. Bone Burnett's lyrics from Trap Door. The responses were:

Lord, forgive our knowingness, our grasping, our comfort and our self-satisfaction.

Lord, forgive our attempts to be loved, our pride, our pleasure-seeking and our leisure-seeking. As we turn to you, turn our lives upside down and bless us with poverty, with grief, with meekness, with hunger, with mercy, with purity, with peacemaking, with persecution and with your upside down kingdom. Amen.

The prayers of intercession were as follows: 

God of Israel, the God of the Exodus, you hear the cry of slaves and deliver true liberation. New regimes which leave the old order in place, the bullies in power, the greedy with their unjust gains, and which have nothing to say to the oppressed are not good and are not news. Having heard the subversive nature of your kingdom announcement, we pray for an upside-down kingdom that will deliver true liberation.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

It is the humble poor who know their need of you and those who have nothing who know they need everything. So we pray for those moments when we and others become poor in spirit, bereaved, meek, hungry, thirsty, and turn faces to you looking for salvation. Open doors in us and others that gain and comfort have locked tight.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

The Gospel announcement, your salvation, is truly comprehensive, is truly for all, because it is offered to losers, by circumstance or choice. The poor have no means of becoming rich but the rich have within themselves the possibility of becoming poor. There is nothing that we don’t have that will bar our entry to this upside-down kingdom and so we pray to be rid of what we do have that your kingdom may truly come to all.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and for ever. Amen.

The liturgy ended with Gerard Kelly's Let Your Kingdom Come.

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T. Bone Burnett - Trap Door.

Robert Plant on The One Show

Thanks to my nephew, Paul Loftus, I saw Robert Plant on The One Show on Friday. Plant is a great collaborator and makes stunning music in a variety of different styles when, as he says in the interview, he experiences a communion of souls. I particularly loved the albums he made with T Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller but his new album, though very different, sounds equally wonderful. Seeing him perform and talk, his enjoyment of the music and where it takes him is just massively evident.

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Robert Plant and the Sensational Space Shifters - Rainbow.

Pacing the Cage: Bruce Cockburn

Harper Collins are to publish Pacing the Cage: A Memoir by Bruce Cockburn. Their publicity states:

 

"Since 1970, with over 30 albums and numerous awards to his credit, Bruce Cockburn has earned high praise as an exceptional songwriter and pioneering guitarist, whose career has been shaped by politics, protest, romance, and spiritual discovery. His remarkable journey has seen him embrace folk, jazz, blues, rock, and worldbeat styles while travelling to such far-flung places as Guatemala, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and Nepal, and writing memorable songs about his ever-expanding world of wonders. Having been asked to write his memoir many times over the years, now is the moment when he will open up about his Christian convictions, his personal relationships, and the social and political activism that has both invigorated and enraged his fans over the years.

Born in 1945 in Ottawa, Ontario, Bruce Cockburn began his solo career with a self-titled album in 1970. Cockburn’s ever expanding repertoire of musical styles and skillfully crafted lyrics have been covered by such

artists as Jerry Garcia, Chet Atkins, Barenaked Ladies, Jimmy Buffett, and K.D. Lang. His guitar playing, both
acoustic and electric, has placed him in the company of the world’s top instrumentalists.Cockburn remains deeply respected for his activism on issues from native rights and land mines to the environment and Third World debt, working for organizations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, Friends of the Earth, and USC Canada."

Rated “rock’s last great obscurity” by Melody Maker Cockburn has quietly made a living as a singer/songwriter since 1970 and his self-titled debut while never going all out for fame and fortune. As literate a guitarist as he is a lyricist he fuses sparklingly complex jazz/rock rhythms with metaphor loaded lyricism, as often spoken as sung – “sometimes things don’t easily reduce to rhyming couplets”. Forty plus years of consistent, intelligent exploration of the personal, political and spiritual, often within the same song, is no mean achievement. When combined with both an honesty about his own relationship and faith frailties and a willingness to campaign with the likes of Oxfam raging against US and IMF oppression in the two-thirds world, you have to give the man respect.

 

Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws showcased the mysticism which, as Vox said, he seems to understand better than anyone not named Van Morrison. His Christian faith developed from an experience of God’s presence during his marriage ceremony and was given wings through the writings of C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Creation Dream opens this album and is worth quoting both as a wonderful depiction of God at his creation-work but also as a picture of what the Christian artist aims to imitate:

 

            Centred on silence, counting on nothing,

            I saw you standing on the sea.

            And everything was dark except for

            Sparks the wind struck from your hair.

            Sparks that turned to wings around you,

            Angel voices mixed with sea bird’s cries.

            Fields of motion surging outwards,

            Questions that contain their own replies.

 

            You were dancing, I saw you dancing,

            Throwing your arms towards the sky.

            Fingers opening like flares,

            Stars were shooting everywhere.

            Lines of power bursting outwards

            Along the channels of your song.

            Mercury waves flash under your feet,

            Shots of silver in the shell-pink dawn.

 

World of Wonders kicks off, by contrast, with the “you don’t really give a flying fuck about the people in misery” of IMF. Here Cockburn marries the energy of the music with the anger of the lyric, something he failed to do on the earlier Stealing Fire where he flirted with Dire Straits territory while unleashing the most un-Knopfler-like sentiments – “If I had a rocket launcher I’d make somebody pay” (Rocket Launcher). He hymned the absence of both God (Lily of the Midnight Sky) and his lover (See how I miss you) while celebrating the dawn of revolution (Santiago Dawn) and tropical partying (Down here tonight).

 

Nothing But A Burning Light was the first of two T-Bone Burnett produced albums, with Dart to the Heart being the other. Michael Been and Sam Phillips also contributed. The burning light of the album’s title is the Bible, an image taken from Blind Willie Johnson’s Soul of a Man which Cockburn covers here. Cockburn’s work is shot through by the illumination of that burning light. In a world where there are “Not many answers to be found” and where “We’re faced with mysteries profound” human love is one of the best of those mysteries (One of the Best Ones) while the very best is the redemption that “rips through the surface of time/In the cry of a tiny babe” (Cry of a Tiny Babe).

 

In 1992 in a song, Closer to the Light, written following the death of Mark Heard, Cockburn wrote the line - "There you go/Swimming deeper into mystery” – which seems to sum up the direction in which Cockburn’s work has been heading over the past forty plus years.
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Bruce Cockburn - Pacing The Cage.

Under-appreciated songwriters

One of the great pleasures of 2012 for me was discovering the music of Bill Fay through Life is People. 

Fay's songs are simply astonishing - simple and melodic yet with unusual imagery and insights (both whimsical and surreal bearing comparison with Syd Barrett and Nick Drake) delivered with gravity and grace. 'Cosmic Concerto (Life Is People)' is a highlight from a collection of stand-out tracks; a celebration of the miracle of ordinary life, the infinite variation in each human face, which stirs his soul. I'm currently absorbing his classic Time Of The Last Persecution; empathy in the face of apocalypse. Humility seems to run throughout his music; both in his low-key, almost hesitant and weathered delivery and in lyrics such as "The never ending happening / Of what's to be and what has been / Just to be a part of it / Is astonishing to me" ('The Never Ending Happening') and "I don't ask much, for myself / But for the one's I love" ('Thank You Lord').

Following on from that discovery, here are some other stunning songwriters who, like Fay, have not achieved the attention that their work actually merits:  

Michael Been, The Call's singer/songwriter, was born in Oklahoma City but migrated to California before forming The Call with Scott Musik. Sin and salvation are staples of the diet that The Call served up. Been thought that every fault in the world was within him and said that he had had "hundreds of born-again experiences" needing them because he was dead a lot of the time: "I believe in truth. Whatever is necessary for a person to experience to find the rock bottom, to know the darkness of his life, that's right. A lot of our music is confrontational, it deals with the dark side of life because that teaches us something." Red Moon and Reconciled represent the peak of The Call's work combining literate lyrics with powerful anthems and genuinely encompassing despair, ecstasy and the stages in between.

T. Bone Burnett creates ridiculous satirical morality tales - the marijuana smoking computer operator paying through the nose for free love (The Sixties), the millionaire buying culture in massive fashionable chunks (A Ridiculous Man) and the émigrés selling soft sentiment and soft porn to children (Hefner and Disney). Burnett knows though that judgements are precarious - that what we think we know and what we actually know are often in opposition - so he balances his tales on the jerky, anxious, angular rhythms of his rock 'n' country hybrid, almost like stiltwalking.

Peter Case neatly summed up the dual strands of American music when he wrote in the sleeve notes to Peter Case that he didn't know any songs about America but that these songs were about "sin and salvation". Like Bruce Springsteen, Case has an ability to speak in the voice of those people struggling for a nickel, shuffling for a dime who find themselves caught in relationships that have ensnared them. Theirs is the voice of hope deferred - to someone else (Turning Blue), and the voice of harsh experience - "You don't know it but it's plain to see/You can't tell when you're workin' for your enemy" (Workin' For The Enemy). His eye for colourful detail authenticates his character's tales and adds extra layers of meaning - "So we made love in that place out in back/The last time that we took off our clothes/We took other things and took more than that/I took off with my clothes in a sack and I froze"

Rated "rock’s last great obscurity" by Melody Maker Bruce Cockburn has quietly made a living as a singer/songwriter since 1970 and his self-titled debut while never going all out for fame and fortune. As literate a guitarist as he is a lyricist he fuses sparklingly complex jazz/rock rhythms with metaphor loaded lyricism, as often spoken as sung – "sometimes things don’t easily reduce to rhyming couplets". Forty years plus of consistent, intelligent exploration of the personal, political and spiritual, often within the same song, is no mean achievement. When combined with both an honesty about his own relationship and faith frailties and a willingness to campaign with the likes of Oxfam raging against US and IMF oppression in the two-thirds world, you have to give the man respect. In 1992 in a song, Closer to the Light, written following the death of Mark Heard, Cockburn wrote the line - "There you go/Swimming deeper into mystery" – which seemed to sum the direction in which Cockburn’s work has headed over the course of his long career.

Like Gordan Gano of the Violent Femmes, David Eugene Edwards has a preacher in the family - in Edwards case, his Nazarene preacher Grandfather. Edward's songs not only oscillate around the twin poles of sin and salvation but use the language of the King James version as they do so. If any current music fully inhabits the Southern mindset then surely it is this. 16 Horsepower released their debut album Sackcloth 'N' Ashes in 1995 and, after the eventual demise of 16 Horsepower, DEE continued in similar vein with Woven Hand. As he has said: 'The myths of our country are in the songs. The untold stories and gaps in history books are in the songs – our recollection is preserved in this music. Those songs as well as the stories that my parents told me, the bible and the books I read, all this is the foundation of my imagination of America.'

Formed in 1982 and discovered by Chrissie Hynde busking outside a Pretender's gig, the Violent Femmes were among the first to combine punk's frenzy with country's resignation and gospel's jubilation. That full on clash of contradiction is the raison d'etre of the band (and something they were into long before the idea featured in U2's third coming). "That's the thing about this band," said Gordon Gano their singer/songwriter, "in the songs, in the whole performance of them, there's all different levels of total contradiction going on at the same moment where we are serious and as far from being serious as possible, it's important and also far away from being important". It's also part of the "American tradition" - "Country music has a long tradition of singing horrible songs about drinking and sinning and then doing some sincere gospel numbers". This is where 'Country Death Song' gets its dark inspiration from - "I even think 'Country Death Song' is happy because all the awfulness of the song, it came out of my love for country music and I feel happy when I sing it. I must have a different perspective".

Mark Heard wrote, in 'I Just Wanna Get Warm', "The mouths of the best poets speak but a few words/Then lay down, stone cold, in forgotten fields" - in retrospect that seems prophetic. Just a glimpse into the soul of a man known by so few and yet so deeply missed by so many. The liner notes from the tribute album say it best: "Mark Heard left behind a legacy of music that will undoubtedly impact the lives of many, just as he has impacted the lives of the artists who participated in Strong Hand of Love. The testimony of his brilliance as a poet and artist is undeniably evident throughout this inspiring tribute."

Los Angeles group Love were, in the words of David Fricke, 'the bi-racial folk-rock pirates who made Love and Da Capo in 1966, then the silken psychedelia of Forever Changes in 1967.' 'Although Arthur Lee was the main writer, [Bryan] MacLean contributed some fine songs, including Orange Skies, Old Man and the haunting Alone Again Or, with its flamenco-style guitar and dramatic trumpet flourishes.' ifyoubelievein is a collection of MacLean's music written when he was in the band and written with Love in mind. 'After an aborted attempt at a solo career ... [MacLean] joined a Christian Fellowship Church called the Vineyard ... During Friday night Bible stints [MacLean] took the concert part of the session and was so amazed at the reaction he gradually assembled a catalogue of his Christian songs.' Taken from the Latin and literally meaning 'within the walls', Intra Muros is the album of "spooky" Christian music MacLean was completing at the time of his death. Due to 'the great strength of songs like the amazing Love Grows In Me and My Eyes Are Open', Intra Muros 'stands as fine testament to the ability of a great songwriter.'

Michael McDermott's trademark embrace is "of faith and hope in the face of adversity." His lyrics are "uniquely evocative" as he "sings in poetry", his tunes being "literate story-songs." Stephen King wrote of him: “Michael McDermott is one of the best songwriters in the world and possibly the greatest undiscovered rock ‘n’ roll talent of the last 20 years.” In “Mess of Things,” McDermott sings, “the trouble with trouble is that it sometimes sticks/plays tricks with your mind while it gets its kicks/And slowly there’s a momentum shift/And the weight becomes too great to lift.” McDermott sings about a world where “everybody is bleeding, or everybody is filled with doubt,” and yet he sings, “say the word/And I shall be healed.”

'After the Flood' from Lone Justice's debut album neatly fits Maria McKee's description of country music - "originally Country music was very raw and very spiritual and very gut-level". With a half brother (Bryan MacLean) from seminal 60s LA band Love and Victoria Williams as a next-door neighbour growing up ("she taught me my first guitar chords", McKee has said and they sang briefly together before their separate careers took off), the emphasis was always likely to be on the raw, spiritual and gut-level rather than the country aspect of the definition. By the time McKee recorded her second solo album You Gotta Sin To Get Saved, with a band that included Jayhawks, Gary Louris and Mark Olson (then Williams' husband), she felt she was standing still, merely reprising her work with Lone Justice. She responded by recording the critically acclaimed album Life Is Sweet. Here she felt her songwriting becoming "crystal and dramatic ... this larger-than-life grandiose thing, sort of riding the fine line of bad taste". Grunge based and coruscating on tracks like 'Scarlover', Life is Sweet sounds a far cry from the cow-punk of Lone Justice but it remains "very raw and very spiritual and very gut-level". At the end of the day that's what matters.

Julie Miller writes nakedly emotional songs which in their aching beauty combine perseverance and faith with sorrow and heartache. Her songs have featured in her solo work, her husband Buddy Miller's solo albums and on several jointly recorded albums. An early song reflecting on the crucifixion asked, 'How can you say No to this man?' The same question can be asked of Miller's confessional work - how can you say no to the grace and openness found therein?

Neal Morse is a US prog rocker who first made his mark in the band Spock’s Beard and then formed the prog-rock supergroup Transatlantic. Following his conversion to Christianity in 2000, he left both bands and has since produced a substantial and well-regarded body of solo work exploring different aspects of his faith. His fourth solo album Sola Scriptura, across four tracks and 76 minutes (this is prog rock we’re talking here!), tells the story of Martin Luther and the Reformation. Morse says, “The point of it is to point us … toward the light of God's truth which is laid out wonderfully before us in the scriptures. Of course, this is a lofty goal for a mere CD, but, with God anything is possible!”

Over The Rhine's Linford Detweiler and Karen Bergquist say: "... we try to write music that in little ways helps to heal the wounds that life has dealt us or the wounds we’ve dealt ourselves. We try to write songs that can hum joyfully at the stars when something good goes down. We try to write tunes capable of whispering to a sleeping child that in spite of everything, somehow, all is well. We try to write words that help us learn to tell the truth to ourselves and others." “We’re really only reflecting what we’ve already heard,” Detweiler explains, “a mix of all the music we grew up with and were drawn to: old gospel hymns, the country and western music on WWVA, the rock and roll records the kids at school passed around, the symphonic music that my father brought home, the jazz musicians we discovered in college, the Great American Songbook performers that Karin’s mother loved, and of course the various singer-songwriters that eventually knocked the roof off our world. But when this music is reflected back to the listener through the filter of our own particular lives, hopefully it becomes a much different experience (maybe even somewhat unique) for those with ears to hear.”

The Innocence Mission hail from Lancaster, Pennsylvania and own up to a "religious upbringing where our parents lived out their faith rather than evangelised". They formed in 1982 and initially attracted the support of Joni Mitchell and her then husband, Larry Klien. Mitchell called Karen Peris "one of the most interesting  singer/songwriters around at the moment", while Klien produced their first two albums (The Innocence Mission and Umbrella). Peris summed up the band's approach when she said "I saw something in a book Float Planes. In the beginning there's a quote from a hymn that said, "When I die hallelujah! Bye bye I'll fly away ..." and that's exactly what I think we want to say." In 'Wonder of Birds', from the first album, they talk of building homes with windows to fly through and this is an apt description of their songs. 'Bright As Yellow' for example, from their third album Glow, is a joyful celebration of that open-handed, open-hearted approach to life, as exemplified by Peris's mother. Peris writes conversational songs that draw significance from the everyday while the band on the earliest albums set these to a swirling, chiming, transcendent version of the 'big' music.

Leslie Phillips sang in Sunday School with Maria McKee and recorded several albums for the CCM label Word before a name change to Sam, a marriage to T-Bone Burnett and a series of critically acclaimed albums often produced by Burnett. Phillips combines a cool pop sensibility with razor-sharp lyrics. A mix that finds her ethereal voice, tinged with melancholy, soaring over like a seagull skimming waves.

Jim White inhabits a world where the natural and supernatural are intertwined and where the ordinary slips seamlessly into the extraordinary. White says in 'Still Waters', "Well, don't you know there are projects for the dead and projects for the living?/Though I must confess sometimes I get confused by that distinction". White's characters have ghosts in their homes, curse ships which promptly sink and serenade the dying ('Still Waters').

Victoria Williams has a naive, folky style which uses images and characters that would not be out of place in a painting by Marc Chagall. This style, however, conceals a great subtlety of approach and a willingness to experiment with musical form in a similar to fashion to that of Van Morrison. Williams builds songs that are not simply a melody running through verses and chorus but which, in tandem with the lyrics, veer off in directions that are consistent with the emotional ebb and flow of the song as a whole. She sees the divine through the local, the ordinary, the common-place, and the natural finding the wind of the Holy Spirit blowing through the building of a raft and duets with a fellow-traveller on the New York underground ('Holy Spirit').

I write more about some of the above in my co-authored book 'The Secret Chord'.

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Bill Fay - I Hear You Calling.