2012 was enjoyable for me because of opportunities to correspond with (and on occasion perform with) several poets.
Tim Cunningham has been called the poet of good endings and his apposite phrases
serve to illuminate the everyday encounters which characterise his
poetry. Analogy is the clue to Cunningham’s experience of faith. It is
in the connections between ordinary existence and the Christ event that faith
becomes real. A friend “a mere unlucky Thirteen years” collapses at play, dies
and is lifted up across a wall into the garden that becomes the parent’s
Gethsemene, the wall shaping their pieta. The statue of the Virgin “looks down
at the girl stanching tiny / Dams of tears, the girl whose secret was not /
Whispered by an angel in her ear.” The final poem in Kyrie finds Cunningham mute
in a church that, apart from God and he, is empty. He is on hold, his turn
missed at the exchange, but, he reasons, God will perhaps call him back, after
all God has his number. The wry humour of Cunningham’s experience and verse
reveals faith.
Jane Grell discovered the power of storytelling as a teacher of bilingual students. For her storytelling, she draws heavily from the African-Caribbean Oral Tradition of her childhood. She has worked extensively as a poet and storyteller in teacher training establishments as well as primary and secondary schools in Britain. She was a teacher-secondee to BBC School Radio as an adviser on the multicultural content of its output. While at the BBC, she also wrote and presented stories for schools' programmes. Jane has publications in Hawthorn Press, Scholastic and many poetry anthologies.
Cambridge poet, priest and singer-songwriter Malcolm Guite is Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. A performance poet and singer/songwriter, he lectures widely on poetry and theology in Britain and the US and has a large following on his website, www.malcolmguite.wordpress.com. In Sounding the Seasons, Guite transforms seventy lectionary readings into lucid, inspiring poems, for use in regular worship, seasonal services, meditative reading or on retreat. Already widely recognised, his writing has been acclaimed by Rowan Williams and Luci Shaw, two leading contemporary religious poets. Seven Advent poems from this collection will appear in the next edition of Penguin's (US) Best Spiritual Writing edited by Philip Zaleski, alongside the work of writers such as Seamus Heaney and Annie Dillard.
The sacred, the profane and the prophetic come together in the work of Tamsin Kendrick. In Charismatic Megafauna Kendrick ponders the romantic potential of Peter Pan and Captain Hook, liberates Mr Tumnus from his snow-bound Narnia, composes urgent communiqués from a post-apocalyptic city, and documents the struggle to find love. Kendrick’s unique poetry is characterised by vivid, surreal imagery, brimming with references to myth, legend and pop culture, and underpinned by a genuine, if fraught, search for the divine.
Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at University College Falmouth, and the editor of Stride and With magazines. He is the author of many books of poetry, including A Conference of Voices and Boombox, as well as several collaborative works; he also paints small abstract paintings. His latest publication, The Tower of Babel, is a limited edition hand-stamped book-in-a-box edited by Loydell, including a set of 24 original print postcards, an essay, and an anthology of poems.
Steve Scott is a British writer, poet, and musician whose songs have been recorded by artists including the 77s and Larry Norman. His musical and spoken word projects include Love in the Western World, Lost Horizon, Magnificent Obsession, More Than a Dream, The Butterfly Effect, Empty Orchestra, We Dreamed That We Were Strangers, and Crossing the Boundaries, in conjunction with painter Gaylen Stewart. In 2012, his songs became available on MP3 format, coincident with the release of a limited edition CD, Emotional Tourist: A Steve Scott Retrospective. He writes and speaks often on the arts in the UK and US, and is the author of Like a House on Fire: Renewal of the Arts in a Post-modern Culture and Crying for a Vision and Other Essays: The Collected Steve Scott Vol. One.
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Steve Scott - No Memory Of You.
Thursday, 3 January 2013
Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now
“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.” Matthew 6. 34 (Text for 2013 - St John's Seven Kings)
This is important because so much of our sense of dissatisfaction with our lives and the complaining we do about other people stems from our own worries and anxieties rather than what may or may not have happened or what others may or may not have done. Instead of focusing on other people and what we think they should or should not do or have done, we need to begin with ourselves and our relationship with God by giving our entire attention to what God is doing right now, and not getting worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. Then God is able to help us deal with whatever comes up, whether hard things or blessings, when the time comes.
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The Killers - Be Still.
Simon Small writes in ‘From the Bottom of the Pond’ that: “Our minds find paying full attention to now very difficult. This is because our minds live in time. Our thoughts are preoccupied with past and future, and the present moment is missed.”
But, he says, “Contemplative prayer is the art of paying attention to what is”: “To pay profound attention to reality is prayer, because to enter the depths of this moment is to encounter God. There is always only now. It is the only place that God can be found.”
This is very much what Jesus seems to be saying to us in our Text for 2013 (Matthew 6. 34) and in his teaching on worry and anxiety found in Matthew 6. 24 -34.
When we are preoccupied with what might happen in the future, we are not living fully in the present and may well misunderstand or misinterpret what is actually going on. Jesus encourages us to live fully in the present because, as Simon Small says, that is where we encounter God.
When we genuinely encounter God in the here and now we know that his love and forgiveness surround us and that his Spirit fills us. As Jesus prayed in John 17, he is in us and we are in him. When we know this in our hearts in the here and now, we can relax because whatever happens to us we are accepted, forgiven, loved and gifted by the God who created all things and who will bring all things to their rightful end. We are held in the palm of his hands and, as Julian of Norwich put it, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”.
Even in the difficult times, we can still know that this is true because, as our Text for 2013 puts it, God will help us deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.
Jesus is saying that the more we live in the present and the more we encounter God’s love in the here and now, the less we will be anxious or worried. Prayer is able to help us do both things and therefore helps us to reduce our sense of anxiety or worry. Not because we have listed all our worries to God and believe that he will solve them all for us, but instead because, through prayer, we have encountered more of God’s love and, as a result, trust that he will be with us whatever comes our way.
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The Killers - Be Still.
How music makes us feel (2)
This morning I took the funeral service of a parishioner who had been an active member of the Michael Ball fan club and, as a result, incorporated the titles of many songs recorded by Michael Ball into the tribute I gave as part of the service. This was appreciated by many of those present, including other fan club members, who not only recognised the songs this lady loved but also the connections with her own life story.
All this was a reminder to me that people can identify very deeply with songs. We see this in the way that people choose particular songs to mark major milestones in their lives (like weddings or funerals). We see it in the way that teenagers will play one song over and over and over again and we see it in the way that concerts can become corporate singalongs as the crowd knows all the words and takes over the singing from the band.
We do all this because there is something in the combination of the music and lyrics that connects deeply with what we are thinking and feeling at that time. When that connection is made the link can stay with us for a lifetime. Great songs therefore are not propaganda or sermons they are essentially about empathy and making emotional or intellectual connections that reveal to us something about ourselves and our world. In other words, the best songs are like epiphanies; moments of revelation in ordinary life which reveal something of either the wonder or the depravity of life.
For more on epiphanies and music, try reading 'The Secret Chord', the book I have co-authored with Peter Banks.
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Michael Ball - Bring Him Home.
All this was a reminder to me that people can identify very deeply with songs. We see this in the way that people choose particular songs to mark major milestones in their lives (like weddings or funerals). We see it in the way that teenagers will play one song over and over and over again and we see it in the way that concerts can become corporate singalongs as the crowd knows all the words and takes over the singing from the band.
We do all this because there is something in the combination of the music and lyrics that connects deeply with what we are thinking and feeling at that time. When that connection is made the link can stay with us for a lifetime. Great songs therefore are not propaganda or sermons they are essentially about empathy and making emotional or intellectual connections that reveal to us something about ourselves and our world. In other words, the best songs are like epiphanies; moments of revelation in ordinary life which reveal something of either the wonder or the depravity of life.
For more on epiphanies and music, try reading 'The Secret Chord', the book I have co-authored with Peter Banks.
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Michael Ball - Bring Him Home.
Prayer for mission and unity
Following the recent vote in General Synod on ‘Women Bishops’ in November the Bishop of Chelmsford, Rt. Revd Stephen Cottrell is calling the Diocese of Chelmsford together for a Day of Prayer on Thursday 10 January 2013 for the Mission and Unity of God’s Church.
Bishop Stephen says, “There are important lessons to learn from what has happened and the first of these is trust. We must trust God; he loves his church and will lead us to find the right way forward. And we must trust each other, looking for ways to live together with our disagreement. Jesus prayed for unity so that the world may believe”.
Bishop Stephen invites the whole diocese to join together for this Day of Prayer; whether it is praying in the Cathedral, in our parishes, or at our places of work, the invitation is to stand together in prayerful solidarity.
Bishop Stephen says, “I hope many people will come to the Cathedral to pray, but of course many won’t be able to, and so I am also issuing a prayer, and asking everyone in the diocese to say it at least once on the day wherever they are”.
O Holy Trinity,
three persons but One God,
open our minds to know your will;
open our hearts to receive your peace;
open our hands to do your work;
give your church the unity which was Christ’s prayer;
help us live with conscientious difference;
forgive us when we gain the world and put our souls in danger.
You know what is good for us:
come by your Spirit and change us,
let your church reflect the beauty, diversity and
hospitality that we see in you,
lead us to a place of graceful concord:
a self-forgetful love,
a turning back to Christ:
for with your grace to help we can be one,
and in your strength can strive to serve and bless,
and by your will can see your kingdom come.
Use us to the full;
and when we are empty, fill us afresh.
We know you love your church,
help us to love each other.
Unite us in the effervescent joy of your declaring,
but not just us – we ask it so the world may believe.
And in these days of uncertainty, we ask it in the name of him
who is our foundation, our salvation and our end,
even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
At St John's Seven Kings we will be having two hours of prayer from 12 noon to 2.00pm. We will organise this time in half hour blocks with a variety of prayer styles and opportunities so people can come and go for as short or long a time as they can manage. We also intend going to the Eucharist that Bishop Stephen will celebrate at 7.30pm in St Margaret's Barking.
Other Deanery Eucharists and Prayer Gatherings in the Barking Episcopal Area include:
- Epping Forest Eucharist at Waltham Abbey 8.00 pm
- Harlow Prayer for the Deanery with Heart4Harlow at Harlow Town Centre St Paul 8.00 am
- Followed by Celtic Prayer for Mission and Unity at St Paul’s 9.00 am
- Eucharist at 12.00 pm and Compline at 7.30 pm – all at St Paul’s
- Havering Eucharist at Harold Wood St Peter 7.30 pm Bishop David presiding
- Newham Eucharist at Stratford St James 7.30 pm
- Ongar Prayer at Chipping Ongar St Martin including Morning Prayer 8.30 am & Evening Prayer 5.00 pm
- Eucharist Fyfield 12.00 midday
- Redbridge Eucharist at Ilford St Margaret 10.30 am
- Waltham Forest Prayer at Walthamstow St Mary 9.00 am [20 mins]
- Prayer at Walthamstow St Michael and All Angels 12.30 p.m. [20 mins]
Mark Heard - Rise From The Ruins.
Wednesday, 2 January 2013
The Secret Chord: Update
The Secret Chord is now available as a paperback from Amazon, as well as via Lulu. This means that purchase options are now as follows:
The Secret Chord, co-authored with Peter Banks, is an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life, written through the prism of Christian belief. Covering a range of musical styles and influences, from gospel music to X Factor, The Secret Chord conveys enthusiasm for music and its transformative powers.
A sample chapter can be read by clicking here, look inside the book by clicking here, reviews can be found by clicking here.
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- Paperback: Lulu - http://www.lulu.com/gb/en/shop/peter-banks-and-jonathan-evens/the-secret-chord/paperback/product-20492394.html; Amazon - http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-Chord-Peter-Banks/dp/1291083790/; and ATF - http://www.80f.co.uk/shop/index.cfm/fa/shopdetails/Product_ID/160;
- Kindle: Amazon - http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Secret-Chord-ebook/dp/B009OG5790/ref=tmm_kin_title_0.
Even if you do not have an actual Kindle you can download free viewing Apps for PC, Apple Mac, iPad, iPhone and Android devices including smartphones here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/feature.html/ref=kcp_ipad_mkt_lnd?docId=1000425503
The Secret Chord, co-authored with Peter Banks, is an impassioned study of the role of music in cultural life, written through the prism of Christian belief. Covering a range of musical styles and influences, from gospel music to X Factor, The Secret Chord conveys enthusiasm for music and its transformative powers.
A sample chapter can be read by clicking here, look inside the book by clicking here, reviews can be found by clicking here.
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Tuesday, 1 January 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, 30 December 2012
Recent exhibitions: Kindred Spirits and Dora Holzhandler
Kindred Spirits was an exhibition by Natalia Dolgova and Peter Whiteman at The NorthLight Gallery featuring their highly accomplished paintings rich in mythology and spiritual landscapes. The NorthLight Gallery has a mission:
Peter Whiteman is best known for his work creating costumes and items in films such as Harry Potter, Gladiator, Braveheart and The Mummy and for his designs for stage and exhibitions. Here he returned to his first love, painting, presenting some 40 works embodying the spirit of music. Each piece is inspired by different music and the "spirit" may be seen as a physical presence in the piece or as an atmosphere visible in the painting.
Sylvester Fine Art recently held a solo exhibition by Dora Holzhandler featuring oils and works on paper.
The exhibition was in association with The Goldmark Gallery and was opened by David J Glasser, Chairman of the Ben Uri Gallery.
Dora Holzhandler, born in Paris in 1928, is acclaimed in Britain and overseas for her enchanting, richly decorative paintings of everyday, often specifically Jewish, life. Rooted in a mystical perception of reality, her pictures are non-academic in perspective and depict the timeless Jewish world, her own childhood in Paris and London, and more general celebrations of humanity: lovers embracing, motherhood, religious contemplation.
Sparkling with innocent humour, her paintings draw no distinction between the sacred and mundane and are renowned for intricately detailed patterns - typically squares and floral motifs - which are reminiscent of Polish folk-art, Persian miniatures and Byzantine mosaics.
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Jeff Tweedy - Be Not So Fearful.
- To encourage and celebrate creativity, hospitality and the Christian faith.
- To provide a welcoming space to enrich friendships, families and to develop community.
- To encourage learning and enjoyment through, the arts and heritage.
- To honour the original vision for the charity as established by William Brooke in 1912.
Peter Whiteman is best known for his work creating costumes and items in films such as Harry Potter, Gladiator, Braveheart and The Mummy and for his designs for stage and exhibitions. Here he returned to his first love, painting, presenting some 40 works embodying the spirit of music. Each piece is inspired by different music and the "spirit" may be seen as a physical presence in the piece or as an atmosphere visible in the painting.
Sylvester Fine Art recently held a solo exhibition by Dora Holzhandler featuring oils and works on paper.
The exhibition was in association with The Goldmark Gallery and was opened by David J Glasser, Chairman of the Ben Uri Gallery.
Dora Holzhandler, born in Paris in 1928, is acclaimed in Britain and overseas for her enchanting, richly decorative paintings of everyday, often specifically Jewish, life. Rooted in a mystical perception of reality, her pictures are non-academic in perspective and depict the timeless Jewish world, her own childhood in Paris and London, and more general celebrations of humanity: lovers embracing, motherhood, religious contemplation.
Sparkling with innocent humour, her paintings draw no distinction between the sacred and mundane and are renowned for intricately detailed patterns - typically squares and floral motifs - which are reminiscent of Polish folk-art, Persian miniatures and Byzantine mosaics.
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Jeff Tweedy - Be Not So Fearful.
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