Maybe I should review the entire album “five score and seven years ago” at some point, but today I’ll just focus on the one song that really means a lot to me. “Come right out and say it” is about honesty. It’s also about a friendship that’s breaking up. Could be the sad end to a romantic love story… but it doesn’t have to be. It could happen between friends… unfortunately I know what I’m talking about. So one of them “beats around the bush”, never quite saying what it is that’s going on. And the other one notices. People are that way. Sometimes it’s hard to even say what it is that’s bothering you. It can seem so insignificant that you’d feel strange even mentioning it. Or it can be that big, life-altering secret that is getting between you and the other person, but you don’t want them to know. You may want to keep the friendship going, but it’s the silence that destroys more than it preserves. “Thought you were being so kind by keeping your mouth sealed shut rather than just opening it up” - it often doesn’t work that way. When it last happened to me, it didn’t work. I knew that something was wrong, long before it even started getting close to the surface. I started to try and figure out what it was - if I had done something wrong, if it was anything that I could fix. “And I try to guess what goes on in your head. Cause in your mind I just might find all those things you left unsaid“.
Sometimes it’s better to just come out with the truth - I know I was hurt way more by the silence than by what came out many months later. At least now I knew… some things I could do something about, others were completely outside of my control. It really wasn’t my fault after all, but I spent months thinking it was. This song got me through some of that time… more than once I wanted to sing it out loud to the other person: “Why don’t you come right out and say it. Even if the words are going to hurt we’re better off this way. Why don’t you come right out and say what I know you’re thinking anyway“.
Song: Come right out and say it
Artist: Relient K
Album: Five score and seven years ago
Technorati : CCM, christian, friendship, honesty, lyrics, music, truth
Wow, the CD containing this song hasn’t even been released and I’m already writing about it - after several months of silence, mostly due to too much other work. But “East to West” really caught my attention. I had the privilege of hearing Casting Crowns perform this song live back in June at the Frenzy festival in Edinburgh/Scotland and now that they released it as the first single from their new album “The Altar and the Door”, they put it up on their MySpace page for people to listen to it. It’s fantastic and I like the music just as much as I like the lyrics.
The song addresses something that I know quite well - a disconnection between knowing and feeling. I know Jesus died for me and I know that through Him I am without sin. But it’s often seems like such an impossible thing that my feelings can’t quite keep up with my knowledge. And so there’s always the fear of backsliding into old ways, where the “old man” that has died in me comes back to life because it seems impossible for my heart to understand the magnitude of what He has done. “But today I feel like I’m just one mistake away from you leaving me this way…” is a feeling I know all too well. Don’t get me wrong, being a little bit careful and trying not to sin is a good thing - but being scared of making just one mistake is something that clearly Jesus doesn’t want us to be. “Can’t live by what I feel, but by the truth Your work reveals…” - that’s what it’s about. Our emotions and feelings are more often than not of very little help when we want to follow Jesus in every situation of our lives. “Time and time again your truth is drowned out by the storm I’m in” - if we believe the feelings that overwhelm us in the storm, then it gets a lot more difficult than it should be.
So what can we do? Nothing! We can’t do anything - but Jesus can. We know that He has removed our sin from us “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12) and all the song is really asking for is for Jesus to show us just how far that really is. We need to understand that we cannot easily be reached by our old sin - it’s gone and Jesus hung on the Cross to get between us and that old sin. Because that’s how far the east is from the west: “from one scarred hand to the other”!
Song: East to West
Artist: Casting Crowns
Album: The Altar and the Door
Technorati : CCM, Casting Crowns, East to West, Jesus, christian music, lyrics
It’s been a while since I found the time to sit down and share my thoughts about a song with you and I’m sorry about that, but life just got in the way. Anyway, yesterday something reminded me of a song that seems like a good match for this week leading up to Easter, as we remember the suffering of Christ in the days before He gave His life for us on the cross.
Ginny Owens’s “This Road” is a song that first and foremost reminds me of a very lonely time. Back in 2003, when I was living in London, part of a team where I was the only male single under 50 (and I was under 30 back then), I often felt “a million miles away from anything familiar”, so that opening line of the song touched me very deeply. The first verse quite accurately sums up my feelings of loneliness and the question in the chorus, although I knew the answer in a way, was my question at times as well - “Why this road, why this way and this load?”. And as I was still thinking this is the perfect song to nurture my self-pity, the second verse hit me right where it hurts. Ginny Owens so perfectly puts all that into perspective as she forces our eyes away from ourselves and to Christ and His suffering - and the loneliness that He felt. Wheneever I hear this song, it reminds me that whatever I go through, whatever I experience, be it good or bad, He already knows and He has done it before me.
No, my loneliness didn’t go away when I listened to this song. But still it made me feel better because it reminded me that I’m not the only one who experiences loneliness. And it reminded me that I have a God and Savior who know exactly what loneliness is like. Not a distant being, but a God who came down to this earth to live as a human being, capable of all human emotion and willing to go through everything that I could ever imagine. What is a little loneliness compared to that? And yet I know it matters to Him, as it did back then. “I don’t have to understand to believe that You know why…” - that helped me then and it still helps me now when I face situations I find hard to understand. So far, looking back at the situations I didn’t understand in the past, they all make sense now. And I know that I can simply trust Him to know why in the future as well… because who knows when He will send me onto the next road “a thousand miles away from anything familiar”…
Song: This Road
Artist: Ginny Owens
Album: Something More
Technorati : CCM, Christ, Easter, Jesus, loneliness, lyrics, suffering
I must begin this article with an admission: I have never heard the original song. The only version I know is the much debated SmashUps version where it was mixed with DC Talk’s “Jesus Freak” (I think it’s excellent, but others disagree). But this is about the lyrics and not about the music anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if I have heard the original song, a remix or even just read the lyrics somewhere.
What is the topic of the song? There are a few options and I am not sure what the original intention was when it was written. It could be about an ex-boyfriend or about someone who has been a bad influence on someone else’s life. It probably is about all those things, but for me it’s a song about how the power of the devil has been broken and how that changes everything.
“I know everything about you” - yes, the devil has been revealed and his disguises no longer work. We are better off without him - he’s been dismissed. Through Jesus his power has been broken and he can no longer hold us in slavery. He will still try to “hold me with a lock and key” and to deceive me and “cover my eyes so I cannot see” - but we already know that in Jesus there is victory and we don’t need to be afraid anymore. And when we are facing temptation, that knowledge is something we can hold on to in the face of adversity. We don’t need to be afraid - the devil may be strong, but Jesus is stronger and his victory cannot be reversed. And that’s why the devil is so “over, over, over…”.
Song: Dismissed
Artist: Zoegirl
Album: Life
Author: ?
Technorati : Jesus, Zoegirl, christian, devil, dismissed, lyrics, smashups, song
When I was in England last week, I picked up a copy of this year’s Soul Survivor live CD. Unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to go there myself this year, it’s an event I very much enjoyed last year, but the timing this year just didn’t work out. Anyway, “Love Came Down” is the traditional music CD recorded at this event and this time it leaves me with a rather mixed feeling.
There are a number of new songs on it that I’m sure I will enjoy not just listening to, but also singing and playing with the band I happen to lead. But as an album, this year it feels a bit too polished and seems to have lost some of the “live” feel that the previous Soul Survivor recordings had. The fact that for the first time, they saw the need to record overdubs in a studio, may well be part of the reason for that.
Worship leaders this time are Tim Hughes (well known from previous recordings and a lot of songs he wrote), Lex Buckley and Ben Cantelon - it’s nice to hear a few fresh voices. I really like the new songs - “Celebrate” and “Join With The Angels” really stand out for me. When I saw that “Saviour” was a version of Tim Hughes’s “When Silence Falls” together with 29th Chapter, I thought it was an accident just waiting to happen, but it is in fact a lot nicer than I thought it would be. And of course, a lot of what’s special about Soul Survivor is in the spontaneous songs, one of which is also the last track on the CD - too bad I had to wait this long for a glimpse at the live atmosphere.
Can I recommend it? Sure I can, otherwise I think I wouldn’t be writing about it. Just don’t expect too much live atmosphere and you will get a great CD with a number of new songs and some good recordings of old ones. And a good laugh when you listen closely to Ben Cantelon’s version of “From The Inside Out” and realize that every time, he sings “you glory goes beyond all phase” instead of “all fame”… if you can make sense of it, let me know. I wonder why they didn’t fix that when they did the overdubs…
Technorati : Ben Cantelon, Lex Buckley, Love Came Down, Soul Survivor, Tim Hughes, christian, live, music, worship
