The Delirious? guys have been around for so many years and so incredibly busy during those years, it’s hard to imagine going to a major christian music festival and them not being there. But it was something that doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Stewart Smith (drums) left the band earlier this year to spend more time with his family and all the others have families as well – it must be hard to lead a normal family life when you’re touring for several months of the year.

I believe that no other band has influenced me more in my development as a christian, by showing that worshipping God through song doesn’t have to be dull and boring. Without their songs, I probably wouldn’t be a worship leader today. Many of the songs they wrote will still be sung many years from now, by people who probably won’t even know who Delirious? were. And I will always remember the countless times I saw them perform live, from one of their first appearances at the Christmas Rock Night here in Germany back in 1999 to the Frenzy Festival in Edinburgh just a couple of weeks ago. But although this website is about the lyrics more than about the music, the one truly unforgettable moment for me will always be the 20 minutes of instrumental worship during their Soul Survivor 2005 worship session.

It is with great respect that I report on what really is the end of an era – may we still enjoy their songs for a long time afterwards and give glory to God with words and melodies that they have written.

Technorati : Delirious, band, christian music, music, worship

Technorati : CSE, Google, ccm, christian, lyrics, music, search

Last month, thanks to a gift certificate from my domain registrar, we were able to run a little 10 day Google Adwords campaign to drive more traffic to the site. Many of these visitors seem to be returning on a regular basis now because the pageviews haven’t dropped as much as I would have expected after the end of the campaign. These campaigns are expensive, so unless I get another gift certificate, there won’t be another adwords campaign anytime soon (of course if you want to make a contribution toward this, feel free to use the Paypal link in the sidebar) – this site isn’t making any money except for the little bit that comes in through advertising and isn’t even enough to pay for hosting and domain registration yet (which isn’t a big deal because making money is not what this site is about).

There are two things we need at the moment: links from other websites, so we can improve the page rank of this relatively new site and drive more traffic to it – and comments. If you can provide either of the two, feel free to do so. I would love to see some discussions and feedback on the articles, they will make the site feel more “alive”. And maybe if I see you have something to say, you might be invited as a guest author in the future. If you want to link to the site and use a logo with it, I suggest you use this logo – it’s ok if you use it from your site, no need to copy it to your own server. If we ever change it, we’ll make sure that the URL remains the same.

Again, thanks for visiting – seeing the number of readers and subscribers grow is one of the things that motivate me to sit down and write new articles even when times are busy (like they are going to be in the next few weeks, when I’ll be away a lot). Without you, this site would be like a radio station that nobody listens to…

Technorati : adwords, ccm, lyrics, news, subscribers, website

Some years ago, it must have been around the year 2000, some friends and I were running a christian website in German (it’s still around, but hasn’t been updated for two years). We were thinking about new features to add to the site and a lyrics search engine sounded like something that we couldn’t find (at least for CCM lyrics) on the internet yet. So the initial idea was to start something like that as part of the existing website. A while later, the ccmlyrics.com domain was for sale and just for fun, we put a very low offer in and to our surprise it was accepted and we even got ccmlyrics.org and ccmlyrics.net with it as well. That’s when we decided that we were going to turn this into a separate project, also because it had a much wider potential audience than a german website.

My friend Tobi and I started developing the backend technology in 2001 (he’s also the one who did the initial design of this site and I hope I can convince him to update it later this year). It took us about a year to get the search part close to where we wanted it to be. At that point, it was able to do a full text search on all the lyrics in our database (we had added about 1000 songs as test data), fuzzy match even misspelled words, assign a statistical rank to the results and make suggestions similar to Google’s “are you searching for xyz?” feature. It was also reasonably fast and we were ready and willing to add more lyrics to our database, in preparation for a possible launch later that year. In the meantime, I had moved to the UK for two years, so all our work and communication was via email, whereas in the past we had actually been in the same city… that sure slowed us down a bit.

Anyway, as we were getting closer to the launch and started signing up volunteers who were doing data entry, we suddenly realized that we had never really looked at the legal implications of running such a website. Until then we had assumed that while MP3 files and even chords were a clear no-go area, lyrics were a bit of a grey area where we could get away with publishing them on our site as long as we didn’t make any money. But just about that time a few lyrics collections on the net started receiving friendly letters from lawyers, asking them to take certain lyrics down, so we looked into the issue a bit more and came to the conclusion that the only safe way to be able to do what we were about to do was to properly license all the lyrics we wanted to publish. Since we had no intention of making any money with the site, we had no budget for licensing and all our enquiries about free licenses remained unanswered. We still believe that christian artists with a message should have an interest in having their lyrics widely distributed, but unfortunately most of them are bound by contracts with record companies, publishers and other entities who often have different interests. So while we were waiting, still hoping for a solution to this problem, maybe a corporate sponsorship, we slowly became busy with other things…

…and that’s pretty much where we were at for a long time. Earlier this year I decided that as I was paying registration fees for all those domains, I might as well do something with them. The idea for a blog was born, where I and possibly others as well could write about lyrics that have something to say. It took quite a while for it to actually happen, but here it is. I hope you enjoy this as much as you would have enjoyed the original idea. Please come back here or subscribe to our feeds or email updates and tell your friends about this site as well. Thank you for your patience, sorry if this is not what you hoped for it to be. I hope it will still bless you in unexpected ways.

Technorati : CCM, christian, lyrics, music, search

So what is this site about then? It’s not the lyrics search engine we set out to create years ago and one of the first stories here will explain why. What you will find here are not only reviews of the latest and greatest in christian music, but especially featured articles on the lyrics of many of the songs that have a message for us. So often we focus on the music alone, but there are tons of songs out there that have something to say, so we’ll point you to those gems and also invite you to use the comment function (one of the reasons this is in the form of a blog) to discuss, agree or disagree, share how the songs have blessed you in your pesonal life. And there will be a chance to get involved in other ways, by writing articles and reviewing CDs, soon. As the editor of this site, I hope you enjoy what has been put together and do come back often.