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. 

David Ackles, Chris Bell, Bryan MacLean

My latest article for Seen and Unseen is entitled 'Rock ‘n’ roll’s long dance with religion'. The article explores how popular music conjures sacred space through a survey of inter-connections between faith and music.

The article includes a link to my Spotify playlist 'Closer to the light' which includes a wide selection of the music I mention in this article. 'A day, night and dawn with Nick Cave’s lyrics' is a review of Adam Steiner’s Darker With The Dawn — Nick Cave’s Songs Of Love And Death in which I explore whether Steiner's rappel into Cave’s art helps us understand its purpose.

My co-authored book The Secret Chord explores aspects of a similar interplay between faith and music (and the Arts, more broadly). Posts related to the themes of The Secret Chord can be found here.

Check out the following too to explore further:

• God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You
• Jesus Music - 1 & 2
• The Jesus Rock Revolution and the Jesus Movement
• When Jesus Met Hippies
• A Rough Guide to Christian Art
• Looking down the wrong end of a telescope
• Pop's holy rollers
• Perhaps the most underrated band ever
• Rock gets Religion
• Ed Kowalczyk and Scott Stapp: Angels on a razor
• Hidden Gems - Bill Fay & Michael Morley
• Salt and Sweetners
• The mystery at the heart of music - 1 and 2
• Inspiration from the Psalms
• 'Tryin' to throw your arms around the world' click here - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I've received some interesting feedback on the article which has flagged an artist whose music I hadn't explored previously and whose music has then reminded me of two other musicians that I briefly mentioned in the article.

David Ackles was a musician who has been described by Rev Jim Friedrich as: "a lifelong Christian, deeply spiritual and theologically astute, an authentic and generous man. And though some of his songs revealed a profound empathy with the suffering of displaced souls, there was an essential core in him—a comedic faith in resurrection—which survived the harrowing descent of the artist into the nether regions of the human condition."

"Ackles recorded three albums for Elektra – his self-titled debut (1969), ‘Subway To The Country’ (1970), and probably the most famous of all, ‘American Gothic’ (1972), the last of which was recorded in England, and produced by Bernie Taupin, the lyric writer for ...Elton John." Then, "What should have been the fourth album in a long and illustrious career, in retrospect turned out to be Ackles's swansong. Five & Dime may not be as tightly-knit as American Gothic, but as a many-colored patchwork of varied songs, the album has few rivals."

Kasper Nijsen writes that: "Ackles was a versatile and accomplished composer, drawing inspiration from disparate sources including Broadway composers, vaudeville and music hall tradition, French chansonniers, Nashville country music, American jazz and spirituals, Los Angeles surf music, and classical music."

"He was called a genius, one of the best that America had on offer (Elton John, Reuters obituary, March 1999), and was said to have forged an utterly unique and unrivaled sound (Collin McElligatt, Stylus, 09-01-2003). His masterpiece album was hailed as the Sgt. Pepper of folk (Derek Jewell, Sunday Times, 1973) and called a work of pure poetry, theatrical, witty and sublime (Robert Cochrane, Culture Catch, 03-30-2008). It was also said that Ackles could have been another Randy Newman or Leonard Cohen (Reuters obituary, March 1999) and his music has been compared to Weill and Brecht and even Richard Wagner (Bernie Taupin, blog entry, 12-3-2008)."

Michael Baker concludes the story: "Brutalized in a near fatal car accident in the early eighties, the weakened Ackles found time to raise a son, maintain a successful marriage, work for bigwig philanthropic organizations, write an occasional score for a made for TV movie, and work on an operatic treatment of Aimee Semple Macpherson ... who became L.A.'s leading religious leader and basked in world wide celebrity ... Tough, individualist, and savvy, she most certainly would have been a formidable opponent, for Ackles wanted if not clarity about faith and individual works of grace at least a reconciliation between a cold world that dumps slag on top of children and an uncommunicative God. This reconciliation, man's major intellectual achievement, is both disconcerting and liberating. And Ackles knew full well that the balance between conventional and conservative faith and yearning, narcissistic, seductive art is the greatest of musical aspirations."

Baker suggests that "Ackles regarded the message from Ecclesiastes as gospel: "Who gathers knowledge gathers pain."" He expands by noting that Ackles and his vignettes of dispossessed personae: "set the stage for blurred epiphanies, an ironic fusion of baseless ritual and superficial decorum. These pockets of darkness contain paralysis, vagueness, and thwarted ambitions. The only thing holding the center is the voice, a voice of grandeur, tenor resonance, and declamatory power. Never comfortable simply crooning, and forsaking a kind of blues/soul aesthetic that would have diminished his uniqueness, Ackles uses his booming, cajoling voice to proclaim truths from the center of town. It is a convincing voice of reason in the re-created scenes of missing emotions. Although the narratives are uncertain with action deferred or muddled, and the characters are inarticulate carnage of that universe, Ackles retains dignity for himself, his characters, and their landscapes, by renouncing censure. We are all flawed; we have all fallen."

This seems to me to be an accurate description of Ackles' storytelling songs which demonstrate a incarnational 'being with' approach to his characters ("We are all flawed; we have all fallen."), while the cumulative picture painted is of the bleakness of a world which has, as with the stunning 'His name is Andrew', lost its connection with God.

Look out for the forthcoming biography of David Ackles by Mark Brend, which is due in July 2025. 

The short-lived Memphis power-pop pioneers Big Star from the 1970s have been referred to as “the greatest American cult rock band this side of The Velvet Underground”. Given this, it is remarkable, as David Zahl has noted, that they "made music that, especially on their first record, bordered on proto-Christian rock". "Much of this was due to the influence of ... Chris Bell, the co-leader of the band" with Alex Chilton.

Zahl quotes by way of example the following lyrics from 'My Life is Right': “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”. Zahl notes that "Bell’s talent came with its fair share of personal demons" including drug addiction and clinical depression. As a result, songs like 'Try Again' are "anguished first-person prayers":

"Lord I’ve been trying to be what I should Lord
I’ve been trying to do what I could
But each time it gets a little harder
I feel the pain
But I’ll try again

Lord I’ve been trying to be understood
And Lord I’ve been trying to do as you would
But each time it gets a little harder
I feel the pain
But I’ll try again"

After the first Big Star album #1 Record "failed to achieve commercial success ... Bell left the band in 1972." "He struggled with depression for the rest of his life." "Bell concentrated on solo work after leaving Big Star" but it was only 14 years after his death that "the songs from his Car Records single and several of his other 1970s recordings were released on 1992's I Am the Cosmos full-length CD on Rykodisc." "Many of the songs reflected his embrace of Christianity."

John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about one of the songs from that album says that: "

"Better Save Yourself," opens jarringly with organ and a huge, minor-key guitar-god riff.

I know you’re right
He treats you nice
It’s suicide
I know, I tried it twice

We have it from David Bell that his brother had, in fact, tried suicide. In the throes of whatever drove him to it, he found Jesus and became a devout Christian, further complicating the psychological picture of his post-Big Star years. In "Better Save Yourself," he goes on to sing "You shoulda gave your love to Jesus/Couldn’t do you no harm.""

There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and The Rise of Big Star by Rich Tupica is the principle source of information about Chris Bell.

Similarly, the life of Bryan MacLean is, as Jon Cody has written, "a story of extremes; missed opportunities, addiction and family dysfunction alongside critical acclaim, reconciliation and redemption".

MacLean was a member, with Arthur Lee, of the Los Angeles rock band Love. Love's drummer, Michael Stuart-Ware, in his 2003 autobiography, Behind the Scenes on the Pegasus Carousel, describes MacLean's contributions to Love's music: “Bryan’s contributions to the first three Love albums spoke to his talent. My favorite of his compositions has always been ‘Softly To Me,’ but all of Bryan’s songs demonstrated a mystically unique lyrical and musical phrasing quality that defies category, but is at once, both emotional and powerful.”

"MacLean was offered a solo contract with Elektra after the dissolution of Love, but his demo offerings were rejected by the label and the contract lapsed ...

Around 1996, MacLean's Elektra Records demo tapes were discovered by his mother Elizabeth in the family garage, and after two years of persistent shopping around to record companies, a deal was struck with Sundazed, who in 1997 released the CD Ifyoubelievein. In the album's liner notes, Rolling Stone's David Fricke wrote that the collection was, "in a sense, the Love record that never was: solo demos and home recordings of fourteen original MacLean songs, all written in the earliest and most vital years of Love and all but three virtually unheard in any form since MacLean wrote them"."

Cody writes that MacLean "was one of the very first from the L.A. music community to embrace Christianity". "Intra Muros (the title translates as “Inside the Wall) was his ‘real’ solo album, a collection of 14 worship-oriented songs". He said that "Intra Muros is what I care about. It’s who I am" and "My deepest longing is that Intra Muros touches lives and changes them." His mother, Elizabeth McKee, described Intra Muros as "Bryan’s masterpiece". "MacLean described the absolutely unique blend of gothic rock and jazz as “spooky worship music.”" Part of the uniqueness of his music, including his worship songs, derives from the "Broadway influence that permeates his entire catalogue ... with many of the songs sounding like show stoppers from another era".

In his last interview, he said "My goal from the beginning writing music was to be timeless, to transcend age or style and to enrich peoples' lives, to make them feel better about life in general".

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David Ackles - Berry Tree.

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.

American Music

"Do you like American music?" the Violent Femmes asked on their fifth album, Why Do Birds Sing?. Well, do you? The Femmes answered in the affirmative - "We like all kinds of music but I like American music best, baby" - but the reason they gave seemed a pretty wierd one: "every time I look in that ugly lake it reminds me of me".

The idea of American music as a lake reflecting an ugly self isn't the only strange definition that's been given though. This is the picture of traditional American music conjured up by Bob Dylan in 1966: "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy."

Greil Marcus has pointed out that this 'traditional music' - the ancient ballads of mountain music, songs like Buell Kazee's East Virginia, Clarence Ashley's Coo Coo Bird or Dock Boggs' Country Blues - are what Dylan and the Band tapped into when recording The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band, music which Marcus describes as a "kaleidoscope of American music". "The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music"", says Marcus, "is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back." Or a lake that reflects an ugly self?

But maybe that's only one half of the picture. Anything that comes from bibles and where swans turn into angels can't be all void and ugliness, can't be all bad. In 1985 Dylan expanded on the fundamental impact of the Bible on America and on his work: "... the Bible runs through all U.S. life, whether people know it or not. It's the founding book. The founding fathers' book anyway. People can't get away from it. You can't get away from it wherever you go. Those ideas were true then and they're true now. They're scriptural, spiritual laws. I guess people can read into that what they want. But if they're familiar with those concepts they'll probably find enough of them in my stuff. Because I always get back to that." Maybe what you get in traditional American music is that combination of sin and salvation that Peter Case said characterised his debut album.

Dylan maintained back in 1966 that this kind of American music was not going to die so where can we find it today? There are a loosely affiliated group of bands and songwriters - T.Bone Burnett, Peter Case, Mark Heard, The Innocence Mission, Maria McKee, Julie & Buddy Miller, Sixteen Horsepower, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, Victoria Williams - for whom fear and threat, mystery and enamour - the twin poles of American music - again and again show up in their music and in relationships. The affiliations between these artists branch out in a way that cries out for a Rock Family Tree mapping production, songwriting and session credits together with personal relationships.

In this way too they take us back to Dylan, The Band, The Basement Tapes and Greil Marcus' surely incomplete statement that they show "the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back". The whole point about The Basement Tapes was that a bunch of mates sat around making the music they loved the way they loved it and when they liked. If Dylan was staring into a void then he wasn't doing it alone. And wasn't this true too of the music that they drew on, that it was more the music of a community than of individuals. We talk more about Appalachian traditions or the bluegrass Bristol area of Tennessee and East Carolina than we do about Dock Boggs or Clarence Ashley. A relational approach to work and life seems important to Williams, Burnett, Heard and the other musicians that share their musical vision and this is so although their relationships feature brokenness, pain and loss. Relationships and a community of music makers seem a vital part then of this tradition of American music.

So there we have it. Fear and threat on the one hand, mystery and enamour on the other - the twin poles of American music. Legends, bibles, plagues, vegetables and death, roses growing out of people's brains, lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're all in the mix. These are songs of sin and salvation as sung by the wild, unshod, soot-covered orphans of God.

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16 Horsepower - Black Soul Choir.