Bob's bloggery

Numen by Phil Keaggy and Kyle Jones

2011-07-21T09:07:00.003-04:00

Phil Keaggy has been recording albums on his own or with others for about forty years now. He has something like 70 albums in his catalog. So how do you make that much music and keep it fresh and creative? Phil does it by looking for new collaborators. Just over the past few years he has worked with Randy Stonehill, Jack Giering and John Sferra (known as the Phil Keaggy Trio), Jeff Johnson, Mike Pachelli, and Glass Harp in addition to a steady stream of solo albums. These collaborations have paid off. His album with Jeff Johnson, Frio Suite, is one of my favorites and is still in heavy rotation on my playlist. His Phil Keaggy Trio album, Interdimensional Traveller, is a lot of fun. Both of these albums stand out as being something quite different from the stuff Phil does on his own and have encouraged him to stretch out in new ways.

His latest album, Numen, is a duet album with percussionist Kyle Jones. Jones is a percussionist who uses lots of non-Western instruments and techniques. He brings these world-music sensibilities to this instrumental album giving it an Indian feel that is a welcome addition to Keaggy’s sound.

The album starts out with the sound of the tabla and acoustic guitar in “Ebullince,” a fine opening to the album (and one of my favorite tracks) that sounds different than anything Phil has produced before. The Indian percussion that Jones brings to the sound of this album has inspired Keaggy to go to places he usually doesn’t go on his own. There are some moments where it is obvious that you’re listening to a Phil Keaggy album – the tapping in “Ruach,” the electric riff in “Ziggarat” or the acoustic opening to “Dia Logos” for example – but then there are moments just a few minutes later where it is hard to give examples of similar playing in any of his other albums.

Clocking in at nearly an hour, this album might be a little too long, especially the nine-minute track “Kahawa” that appears near the end of the album and, generally speaking, I like the tracks that sound more composed as opposed to improvised but that may only be my interpretation of how they came about. It sounds to me like many of these tracks happened because Keaggy and Jones sat in a room together, played what they felt and then created fully produced tracks after the fact (something that Phil did to good effect on his Roundabout album.) This gives a sense of adventure to the album – you can hear the fun that they had at times as they found new things - and Keaggy’s innate sense of melody makes even improvised things interesting. The addition of electric guitar and even violin on some tracks makes for good variety.

Numen is a fun album and it is great to see Phil Keaggy still exploring and finding new things to play even after all these years. This album has not seen wide distribution (I don’t think it is on iTunes or Amazon, for example) so look for it at PhilKeaggy.com.

Memorable McCartney Solo Songs

2011-06-24T11:56:00.004-04:00

Earlier this week I stumbled across this article about Paul McCartney’s 12 Most Memorable Solo Songs and thought the list was interesting. There were a number of things on the list that I would not have included. The deal is to pick

McCartney’s best recordings without the Beatles or Wings or the Fireman. Granted, this is a bit artificial since Paul’s input on the Wings stuff is so strong that it could be thought of as solo work but, whatever … this puts the emphasis on his work credited to just “McCartney.” So that means his first two albums (McCartney and Ram) and then everything from McCartney II on except the Fireman stuff.

I thought the list on the aforementioned website was quirky and that my list would be different so I could not resist the challenge. The hard part for me is to keep it to just twelve. I will also admit that the popularity of a song tended to work against its inclusion in the list. No good reason for this except that familiarity breeds contempt. So hits tended to not get on here with a few exceptions that I just could not resist. So here are my admittedly quirky picks presented in no particular order, along with my list of honorable mentions.

Maybe I'm Amazed (McCartney) – perhaps is best ever solo song is from his first solo album. The album itself is quirky and uneven but it has a couple of fabulous songs on it – three of them made my list!
Pipes of Peace (Pipes of Peace) – McCartney is not only a very good writer but the man knows how to make records. The arrangement of this song is just spectacular.
Every Night (McCartney) – the second song on my from the first solo album is another prime example of a great tune and a fine recording.
Tug of War (Tug of War) – This was McCartney’s return to making a fully produced album with George Martin after Wings ended and his McCartney II experiment. At the time Rolling Stone called it his masterpiece. It’s one of his great albums and the title song is just great.
Through Our Love (Pipes of Peace) – I am a sucker for the big ballads that McCartney often puts at the end of his albums. This is one of my favorites.
Junk (McCartney) – another wonderful song from his first solo album – this one comes in two flavors, with or without vocals.
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey (Ram) – A song made up of lots of snippets that somehow hangs together and works. A big hit besides.
Waterfalls (McCartney II) – This is a wonderful song which needs a better recording. McCartney even mentions that in the book that comes with the new deluxe edition of the remastered version of the album. But even without a nicely orchestrated version this song is very good.
Wanderlust (Tug of War) – This is a pretty obscure song which features one of McCartney’s favorite gimmicks – countermelodies that are introduced separately and then combined near the end of the song. (See “With a Little Luck” for another example.)
Beautiful Night (Flaming Pie) – another great piano ballad. This one sat in his archive for a while until he rerecorded it for Flaming Pie. The earlier version (available as the b-side of one of the Flaming Pie singles) is not nearly as good – apparently he knew there was a good song in there and that the first recording didn’t quite get there.
Back Seat of My Car (Ram) – an early version of the big piano ballad – this one from Ram.
Once Upon a Long Ago (All the Best) – this one was a single in the UK and we in the US only got it when All the Best came out but it’s a great song and worth finding if you don’t have it.

The Honorable mentions

Too Many People (Ram)
Only Love Remains (Press to Play)
Motor of Love (Flowers in the Dirt)
Coming Up (McCartney II – although I prefer the live version that is on the US release of All the Best)
C'mon People (Off the Ground)
The Song We Were Singing (Flaming Pie)
Calico Skies (Flaming Pie)
Your Loving Flame (Driving Rain)
English Tea (Chaos and Creation in the Backyard)
Average Person (Pipes of Peace)

Country Music

2011-06-21T19:43:00.004-04:00

This spring I’ve flirted with listening to country music. This is something that is a bit of a surprise to me since I’ve been a pretty serious non-country music guy for a while. The vocal style got to me and I had a prejudice against the music that made me resist it. But I had a long appreciation for 70’s country rock (early Eagles, Poco, Flying Burrito Brothers) and I’ve reacquainted myself with Poco lately so I was in a mood to appreciate it. I actually owned a couple of actual authentic country recordings – one Dixie Chicks album (Home), one Little Big Town album and a couple of Allison Krauss albums. But I considered them anomalies – ones that, for some reason I could enjoy despite my dislike for the genre as a whole.

But then last spring I stopped in Nashville for a couple of hours on a spring break trip and had a great time. I enjoyed touring the Ryman Auditorium, visited Gruhn Guitars and walked up and down Broadway where I heard six or seven bands each of which impressed me. I’d go there again in a minute.

So that left me thinking about why I don’t listen to this stuff – the players are great and there are some cool songs there. Meredith had sent me the latest Carrie Underwood album (Play On) so I listened to that and I realized that she is a wonderful singer – really good. So I decided to dig in a little bit more. Our local library is part of the “Freegal” system allowing me to download songs legally from the Sony catalog so I did some research and discovered a couple of albums that were highly reviewed. I then started listening to country music.

I started with Revolution by Miranda Lambert, the album of the year for many in the country genre. I also got albums by Sara Evans (Stronger), Allison Krauss (Paper Airplane), Taylor Swift (Speak Now), Brad Paisley (This is Country Music), Court Yard Hounds and Carrie Underwood (Carnival Ride.) Here is what I learned.

1. I still have some issues with some of the vocal styles. The ones I like best are the ones that are least “twangy.” I am a huge fan, though, of Carrie Underwood’s singing. She appeared alongside Steven Tyler at they ACM Awards and and sang “Undo it” and “Walk This Way” and they brought down the house. Watch it here .

2. There are amazing musicians who play on these albums. And Brad Paisley is a great guitar player.

3. The themes in country music still surprise me – lots of good ole’ boy talk with drinkin’ and hard livin’ right next to sappy songs about home and Jesus.

4. Novelty songs appear more often on country albums than they do on rock albums; “Camouflage” by Brad Paisley, “White Trash Wedding” by the Dixie Chicks, “Only Prettier” by Miranda Lambert to name three off the top of my head.

5. There are some really good writers in Nashville.

6. Sometimes country music is basically pop music with fiddles. That’s OK with me.

So my time of country listening might be diminishing as I get back to the stuff I listen to most of the time (I still listen to the Beatles and U2 a lot) but I’m a lot more open minded now and I’ve enjoyed listening to this stuff a lot more than I expected.

Favorite albums of the year

2010-12-19T21:47:00.003-05:00

I’ve not updated this blog very much this year – my job has kept me especially busy lately. But I have been listening to a lot of music (I still have my 45 min commute) and, as I have done for the past few years, I have compiled a list of my favorite music for the year. So here they are, in no particular order - the albums that especially got me excited this year.

Robert Plant / Band of Joy – This album surprised me. I listened to Raising Sand, Plant’s duet album with Allison Krauss and, while I liked it, I didn’t spend much time with it. Band of Joy, though, is a bit moodier and the production is airy and interesting. Plant’s singing is, of course, great. I was a fan of Led Zeppelin in the 70s but haven’t listened to much of his solo work. Plus it is fun to hear Plant singing in his lower register.

Elvis Costello / National Ransom – Momofuku, Costello’s album two albums ago was great. I thought it was up there with his very best. But I was disappointed with the follow-up, Secret, Profane and Sugarcane. I found the melodies on SP&S to be not as intriguing and the sound of the album didn’t move me. National Ransom is like an extension of Secret except Costello branched out a lot more in style so, where SP&S was somewhat one style throughout, Ransom is quite varied. Every once in a while, when I’m listening to Costello, I realize what an amazing writer he is – his songs have interesting chord progressions and his melodies, which are catchy, are not obvious. I’ve noticed that on many of the songs on National Ransom. It ranks up there among my favorite Costello albums.

Sufan Stevens / All Delighted People / The Age of Adz – This year, Sufjan Stevens put out both and EP and a full album, although the EP was nearly an hour long so calling it an EP was a bit strange. Both of them are among my favorite albums of the year. All Delighted People features a lot of what we’ve come to expect from recent Sufjan albums, twittering flutes, interesting arrangements and heartfelt (if not a bit obscure) lyrics. It is great. Some of the eight tracks are long but the arrangements are complex enough to hold my attention throughout. This album (OK, he calls it an EP so that we realized it wasn’t meant to be his BIG STATEMENT) is great - maybe the lowered expectations helped me see as just a nice collection of songs. Then a few months later he delivered The Age of Adz, a big electronic serious album about schizophrenia and identity. When I heard it I realized that, indeed, All Delighted People was just the warm up. The album is complex and fascinating in it’s combination of quirky Sufjan flutes and other wind instruments mixed with the beeps and blurps of electronica.

Fistful of Mercy / As I Call You Down – Fistful of Mercy is Dhani Harrison, Beh Harpur and Joseph Arthur, all three interesting indie artists who have their own projects. I became aware of them because of Dhani Harrison, George’s son, and because I liked his album of last year with his band thenewno2. In fact, I named their album one of my favorites of the year. Their new project, Fistful of Mercy, is quite different – part Crosby Stills and Nash, part Traveling Wilburys. Not the most elegant or serious album in my collection but it features fine (although a little quirky) three part harmonies most of the time and a nice acoustic vibe throughout.

Eric Clapton / Clapton – Releasing a self-titled album more than 45 years into your career says something. In this case it says that this is a very personal album. While not as emotionally raw as Pilgrim, as radio-friendly as Slowhand, or as guitar heavy as Journeyman, Clapton is a warm relaxed tour through much of the music that Eric Clapton has found himself drawn to over the last few years. There are few songs with drums playing flat-out, for example. Most of them feature brushes or at least drums that are gently played or pushed to the background. But this isn’t an earthy acoustic album – this is a jazzy album that is a combination of blues and standards featuring Clapton the singer as much as Clapton the player. Some of the songs would be at home on an album from the 1940s while others would sit nicely on Clapton’s duet album with J J Cale and still others would be on a slightly softer version of one of Clapton’s blues albums like From the Cradle or Me and Mr Johnson. Don’t come to this album expecting to have your socks rocked off. Clapton apparently isn’t interested in that right now. But for a mature album by a veteran musician, this one is great.

Peter Gabriel / Scratch My Back – The reviews of this album are all over the map from “best ever” to “what was he thinking?” so I hesitated before getting it but when I did I quickly joined the “best ever” camp. Gabriel, who famously instituted a “no cymbals” rule for one of his early solo albums put in a “no guitars or drums” rule on this album and gave us a lushly orchestrated album of cover versions of songs by other artists. The arrangements are hauntingly beautiful and a few of the songs are slowed down to the point where you hear them in a whole new way. His cover of Arcade Fire's "My Body is a Cage" is gripping and Lou Reed's "The Power of the Heart" is just beautiful.

Phil Keaggy and Jeff Johnson / Frio Suite – Phil Keaggy has released a number of albums over the years but lately he’s been doing some interesting work with other artists. He’s released albums with Randy Stonehill, with Jack Giering and John Sferra and soon he’ll be releasing an album with percussionist Kyle Jones. (He gave me a copy of that album, called Numen, which may well end up on my next year’s list – it doesn’t seem fair to put an album on here that isn’t out yet so I'll wait on that one.) Frio Suite, with keyboardist Jeff Johnson is a beautiful, new-age-type album that is subtle and moving. The two of them recorded this at a distance, each adding their own parts in their own studio, but you'd never know it by listening. It sounds like a wonderful journey down a metaphorical river.

Finally, two albums that I really haven’t taken the time to dig into yet but I want to add to this list because I think they belong here:

Arcade Fire / The Suburbs – Another great Arcade Fire album – they’re three for three now. I like how they manage to tackle big issues while at the same time being not uber-artsy and inaccessible. I find their music often takes me a while to really understand and this one is no exception.

The Rescues / Let Loose the Horses – The Rescues was my big discovery last year and Let Loose the Horses is their first major label release. I don’t like it quite as well as their earlier stuff – yet, at least – but I’m a fan of their harmonies and their sound. Also of note, their cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” (unfortunately, not on this album – but available as a single on iTunes) is awesome.

Buy Bethany's Book

2010-07-23T16:02:00.003-04:00

You should all buy The Book of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. It is based on her popular blog and is now available though amazon and other fine booksellers.

Worship Songs

2010-06-11T09:42:00.002-04:00

Recently on a friend’s facebook wall I engaged in a discussion about the lyrics to a song for worship. I argued that we need to choose songs well – that with the thousands of worship songs available we can only use a few and it is good for us to choose ones that work well and avoid the ones with questionable lyrics.

With that in mind when a song from Michael W. Smith’s recent worship album, A New Hallelujah, came on my iPod I started this discussion in my head all over again. The song is “When I Think of You” and I love to sing along with it. It has a great beat, the arrangement is very cool (it is sung with an African Children’s Chorus) and it’s really catchy. The problem is that I’m not really sure what it means. Here are the lyrics:

When I think of you, I see you dancing, You’re dancing.
When I think of you, I hear you singing to me
When I think of you, I see You praying
You’re Praying
When I think of you, I hear you calling for me
Yahweh, there is no one like You, Lord
Yahweh, Hallelujah, we sing
Yahweh, there is no one like You, Lord
Yahweh, Your banner for me
Your banner for me is Love

There is no one like,
There is no one like my Yahweh, my Yahweh

This all gets repeated multiple times. As I said, it’s real catchy and by the second time through I’m usually singing along. Here’s my question, though: what is it about? Who is “you” in this song? Who is thinking about whom? In the chorus, "you" is clearly the Lord - but what about in the verses? After thinking about it for a bit I’m beginning to think that this is just another example of a worship song in which the composer strings together a bunch of nice sounding spiritual words, which really don’t go anywhere. This was reinforced when, before the next song MWS sings “faith is rising tonight” a couple of times – I’m not sure what that means either. Now I like Smith a lot – I have almost all of his albums over all these many years and when he records a worship song it often becomes the definitive version. So, tell me what you think about this one.

Glass Harp’s best album

2010-05-23T12:09:00.001-04:00

Recently Glass Harp released a 2008 concert CD that, initially I was less than excited about. That was before I heard it. You see, I figured I’d heard all these songs before. I have the original three albums. I have Hourglass, their reunion CD. I have the Carnegie Hall Live CD, the With Strings Attached set and also the massive Stark Raving Jams and they’re OK. But none of them (with the possible exception of Carnegie Hall, recorded in the early 70s) really caught the excitement and the improvisational power of these three guys. I finally got to see them about five or 6 years ago and I was thrilled – they rarely tour together anymore. But Strings Attached was just too calm and too scripted. Stark Raving Jams was too unfocussed and the recording quality wasn’t great.

So when I saw that Live at the Beachland Ballroom was being released I thought that this was just another live Glass Harp album with the same songs (they mostly still play the stuff from their three original studio albums) and that it was totally redundant. I was wrong.

Live at the Beachland Ballroom is the one Glass Harp CD that you need to have. I haven’t heard Phil Keaggy playing with this sort of abandon and fire on a recording in years. And Glass Harp is not just Phil and a rhythm section – Dan Peccio and John Sferra are totally on target here too and the connection between these guys while they play is amazing. They’re totally in sync and the band turns on a dime. This is clear in a number of places on the album but no more so than in the nearly 16-minute “Beachland Jam.” The band jumps in and out of multiple jams, mostly started by Phil on guitar but within seconds Dan and John jump in and join him. Vocally, they’ve never been better and instrumentally they’re at the top of their game. This is probably the best Glass Harp album yet. Buy it here.

Thinking about U2’s Zooropa – exile and restoration

2010-05-07T19:14:00.003-04:00

I found myself awake a lot last night so I popped in my earbuds, hit play on my iPod and listened to Zooropa, perhaps the U2 album I have had the least affinity to. That may have changed after my careful listen last night.

I realized that you can view this album as being two halves – the first half about the shallowness of the world and the second half about restoration, a theme that shows up in scripture as exile and restoration in the overarching story of Israel and in smaller stories like the Prodigal Son.

Let's take a quick walk through the album and see what's there. (You can find all the lyrics here.) In “Zooropa” we hear “And I have no compass and I have no map / And I have no reasons, no reasons to get back / And I have no religion and I don't know what's what / And I don't know the limit, the limit of what we got” which indicate that the singer has no direction.

“Babyface” reduces the woman that Bono sings about to little more than tinfoil and lace. Perhaps the most obvious example is “Numb” with its litany of excesses in the current age. “Lemon” is a reflection on how the image is preferable to the actual person. Building the car itself becomes the destination – we’re really going nowhere. “Stay” tells the story of yet another aimless person: “Red light, grey morning / You stumble out of a hole in the ground / A vampire or a victim / It depends on who's around.”

This brings us through the first half of the album – a half that’s frankly, pretty depressing. It is an unflinching look at a world that has little going for it except an onslaught of excess.

In the second half things start to look up. We begin, surprisingly enough, with a song about a crashed car. Who “Daddy” is is never explicit but it must be a song about grace. We crash the car and God pays for it. When I first heard “some days are better than others” I thought about the bad days that are referred to. Now I think that it’s a song about the good ones. “Some days you hear a voice taking you to another place / Some days are better than others.”

“The First Time” is a song with the Trinity built into it, the Holy Spirit in verse one, the Son in the second verse and then the Father in the third. I was puzzled by the throwing away of the keys in the third verse for a while, thinking that Bono was talking about leaving the church. Now I don’t think that’s the case. The key in question is not the key to church – in all three verses we see that God has reached out and the singer has not been able to fully grasp what’s being offered – in the third verse it’s the keys to the coming kingdom but the singer is too caught up in the stuff from the first half of the album to accept them. But he still recognizes that he feels loved.

I wonder if the voice of “Dirty Day” is the voice of Jesus. Here’s why: the father to son talk, the talk about “kissin’ time” and this verse: "Get it right / There's no blood thicker than ink / Hear what I say / Nothing's a simple as you think / Wake up / Somethings you can't get around / I'm in you  / More so when they put me in the ground."

If, in “Dirty Day,” redemption is made explicit, then it’s made personal in the “The Wanderer.” This album is a journey – a journey from the crassness and excesses of society to the redemption offered by Christ and accepted by flawed people. It’s a story of grace. I like this album a lot better now!

Peter Gabriel's Scratch My Back

2010-03-27T11:08:00.003-04:00

Music is pretty important to me. I have it on most of the time and I listen pretty intently quite often. Every once in a while an album comes along that just stops me in my tracks. The latest one to do that – and the first one in a while – is Peter Gabriel’s gorgeous Scratch My Back. Scratch My Back is a covers album but it is unlike any other covers album I’ve ever come across. Gabriel likes to make rules for an album – the rule for his third solo album (Melt) was “no cymbals.” OK – that sounds weird but what happened was the drummers and producers came up with the gated drum sound that went on to define Phil Collins’ drum sound on his first few solo albums. The rule for Scratch My Back was “no guitars and no drums.”

The result, and apparently Gabriel did not necessarily start out looking at it this way, is an album of voice, piano and orchestra. These are not flimsy pop orchestrations. These are some of the most robust and exciting string arrangements I’ve heard lately. Of all the songs that Gabriel covers there are only a few that I was familiar with before the album. The album starts out with David Bowie’s “Heroes” and right off the bat you hear the strings announce that this is an album that you don’t want to listen to in a hurry. Not every song sends chills up my spine but an awful lot of them do. Elbow’s “Mirrorball” is amazingly haunting and Lou Reed’s “The Power of the Heart” is breathtaking. Gabriel’s slow take on Paul Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” allows us to hear the lyrics in a new light – “the way the camera follows us in slo-mo” indeed. Neil Young’s “Philadelphia” is actually not much of a departure from the original but Gabriel’s voice gives it a different feel and gives it a new interpretation.

I looked at the reviews on Amazon and I find that people either love this album, giving it 4 or 5 stars or hate it, giving it 1 or 2. I totally get that – this album is going to either make you think Gabriel is a genius or it will bore you. I am firmly in the first category.

Fun with Garageband

2010-02-10T20:20:00.004-05:00

I've been having fun with Garageband lately - here is my latest recording, a cover of Phil Keaggy's "Days Like You." If you download it (it is an itunes file) and listen to it let me know how much you like it. If you don't just pretend you didn't hear it. :-)

Paul McCartney: Good Evening New York City

2010-01-03T09:16:00.005-05:00

When I heard that McCartney was releasing a CD/DVD of his NYC run of shows last summer I thought that this was probably one too many live releases. After all, Paul’s pattern lately has been tour after releasing a studio album (or, as he’s started doing lately, do a mini-tour) and then release a DVD of the show. He has been using the same band since the 2001 tour to support Driving Rain, his first album after his wife Linda passed away and he’s released four DVDs with this band (not even counting the shorter things like the Memory Almost Full Deluxe Edition or the third disc of the McCartney Years.) So I did not rush right out to buy this one. However, a friend told me that Meijer had Good Evening New York City for $10.99 – that’s for 2 CDs and a DVD – and I couldn’t resist it so I asked Laura to get it for me for Christmas and that’s what happened – it sat waiting for me for as a present along with other DVDs this Christmas.

So I’ve been watching it over the past few days about a half hour at a time and I’ve come to believe that this is perhaps the best live McCartney DVD yet. Here are my reasons:

Paul’s in great form – he and the band are playing and singing great. (There has been some Internet complaining about his use of auto-tune but, frankly, I don’t hear it.) They’ve been playing together for nearly a decade and it shows. They’re tight and playful in their playing. I’ve never noticed that Brian Ray is a fine bassist before – a nice bonus for when Paul plays guitar or piano.
He does excellent versions of songs he’s done before with some nice twists like jams at the end of “I’ve Got a Feeling” and in the middle of “Paperback Writer.” The version of “Something” is like the one on the Concert for George, where Paul starts with the ukulele but then the band comes in part way through – very nicely done.
The set list is very good. Lot so Beatles, of course – nearly the entire second half of the concert is Beatles – but also a very nice selection of solo stuff taken from a large number of his albums. Band on the Run is, of course, well represented with four selections but one of those is the seldom-played “Mrs Vanderbilt.” There are also a few songs from McCartney’s recent Fireman album Electric Arguments as well as Memory Almost Full. Even the Beatles songs have some surprises like “I’m Down” and “A Day in the Life” ended with Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” (Credited just to Lennon, by the way, even though the original was officially listed as a Lennon/McCartney song.)
This is one of the first DVDs of Paul’s shows that actually just shows the concert rather than having lots of intercut interviews, etc. And this time the focus is on the band rather than showing how much the fans are loving it, unlike some of his other videos. Another annoyance in some of the early videos is the frenetic editing – you never get more than a few seconds on any one band member. This time the pace is about right.

In nearly every way this video is superior to others that he has released lately. Even if, like me, you have many of his videos in your collection, this one is worth getting and if you don’t have any then this is the one you should consider getting, especially considering the price.

2009 - albums of the year.

2009-12-19T17:49:00.007-05:00

This has been a strange year of listening for me – not many new albums have really grabbed my attention. Plus, for a couple of reasons, I spent time rediscovering old albums. The Beatles remasters of course were released in September and, while I’m getting the stereo remasters for Christmas, the mono remasters have been in my rotation for a couple of months and they’re spectacular. I can’t wait for the stereo ones. U2 came out with a remastered Unforgettable Fire which was a great thing to listen to. Between old U2 and the Beatles there isn't a whole lot of room for new music to creep in.

On top of that I spent part of the summer deliberately going back and listening to old classic albums that I had somehow missed the first time around, albums like Blue by Joni Mitchell and Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix. They are clearly on my best listening of the year list. I also continue to enjoy Electric Arguments by the Fireman (Paul McCartney) which was on my list last year.

But none of those are new albums – there actually are only a handful of new ones that got me excited, two of the are live albums of bands playing old stuff. One that surprised me is Over the Rhine’s Live from Nowhere, Vol. 4. I had low expectations for this album since it was all songs from my least favorite OtR period, their earliest days. But the playing and singing on LfN4 is just wonderful – it’s a reunion concert of the early band and Ric Hordinski’s playing is great. Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood (who made up half of Blind Faith in the 60's) released Live from Madison Square Garden which is a very good live album with both Clapton and Winwood at the top of their game. I got to see their tour last summer and Clapton was clearly playing very very well. I never dreamed that I'd actually ever see the two of them playing Blind Faith songs together live. It was great (although they were playing even better when I saw them than they did on the album!)

Three new bands caught my ear this year. Owl City’s album Ocean Eyes is a lot of fun. The song “Fireflies” grabbed me right away and the rest of the album followed suit. It might sound too much alike over all but I'm not sick of it yet. I discovered another new band, the Rescues – I think they’re great and their album Crazy Ever After got a lot of play last summer too. The Rescues is a collection of four solo artists who together have catchy tunes, lush harmonies and interesting arrangements. Dhani Harrison’s band thenewno2 (the new number 2) released You Are Here, an album that has glimpses of his father George’s melodic style but cast in a fresh way. This is not just a son cashing in on his father’s name – I think Dhani might have a real future ahead of him. Even though I got it early in the year I keep going back to it.

Finally, my number one album of the year has to be U2’s No Line on the Horizon. This album is adventurous and risky but there are moments of sheer brilliance like “Magnificent” and “White as Snow.” I even like the lead single “Get on Your Boots.” Whenever I don’t hear the album for a few weeks and listen again I get excited because it’s just so good. I remember when I first got it I listened with my ipod in a hotel in Troy, MI and was just blown away. That was when I realized what a very special record this was. I got to see U2 in Chicago this fall and I will again in East Lansing next summer. The clear high point to my musical year!

Thoughts on "River" and Christmas

2009-12-14T20:17:00.003-05:00

I haven't blogged for a very long time and it seems trivial to make this my first post in a while but I've been listening to a fair amount of Christmas music lately - no big surprise, seeing it's December 14 - but I've noticed more and more artists including Joni Mitchell's beautiful song "River."

Here's the thing - what does that song have to do with Christmas? The first couplet references Christmas:

It's coming on Christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace.

That's it - it's a song about a broken relationship that happens to reference the idea that it's getting close to Christmas when Mitchell is writing the song. It's not a Christmas song! Just because a song has the word Christmas in it doesn't mean it should be included on ALL new Christmas CDs. OK, that's an overstatement but it's being treated like a Christmas standard and it should not be - it's not even a Holiday song (like "White Christmas") or a seasonal song (like "Winter Wonderland.")

It's a beautiful song - I like it a lot and enjoy it when it pops up in my playlist. But there is no reason why it should be on Christmas CDs but it appears on recent Christmas CDs by Rosie Thomas, Sarah McLachlan, Sixpence None the Richer and James Taylor. Enough is enough.

The Great Albums Project

2009-08-28T21:43:00.002-04:00

This whole thing started with Eric Clapton. I was looking on Wikipedia for information about Jimi Hendrix’s album Electric Ladyland. I had never really listened to Hendrix before and since Clapton and Steve Winwood played a killer version of Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” on their live album and tour when I saw them in Chicago this summer I thought it wise to check out the album that it came from. So I went to the library and I had Electric Ladyland reserved for me – actually they shipped it from another local library. While I was looking they had Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love actually in the rack so I took that home first. I listened to it and I liked it. While I was doing some reading about the album’s background I stumbled across the Rolling Stone list of greatest 500 albums, which had Electric Ladyland listed at #54. Hey, I thought, this is a cool list. Any list that has three Beatles albums in the top 5 has to be good. Then I noticed that while I had a fair number of these albums or at least I was pretty familiar with some there were others that I frankly hadn’t ever listened to. So I decided to spend part of the summer using the library to get and listen to some of these albums so I could see what I was missing.

Here is a preliminary report.
4. Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan – the jury is still out on this one. I already knew most of the songs so it wasn’t like I was completely unfamiliar with it. It’s classic Dylan and you either love it or you don’t – I am a moderate Dylan fan so I get why it’s cool I just don’t know how often I’d want to listen to it.

6. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye – this is one of the first albums I tried that I did not already know and love. I really like the title track and though I’d like the whole album a lot more but I found that it all sounded too much the same for me. I, frankly, don’t see how it got so high on the list.

7. Exile on Main Street, The Rolling Stones – I’ve heard about this album for years, of course but I have never been as much a fan of the stones as I think I ought to be. While I like listening to them on occasion I usually don’t last for a whole album.

11. The Sun Sessions, Elvis Presley – this one struck me as being only of historical interest. I frankly didn’t even get all the way through it.

15. Are You Experienced?, The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Great stuff. Although I think I like Electric Ladyland better.

19. Astral Weeks, Van Morrison – very nice – I’ve only listened once so far but I’m looking forward to exploring this a bit more.

30. Blue, Joni Mitchell – another nice album that I’ve only heard once – but I like it a lot – this and the Van Morrison feel similar to me. Both delicate, recorded with limited instruments and very personal. I’m going to enjoy hearing this a few more times.

So that’s it so far – what a great summer of exploring old music!

New Book

2009-07-30T19:41:00.005-04:00

The new book, which I wrote with Laura, Celebrating the Milestones of Faith: A Guide for Churches, arrived at our house today - here is a picture of it.

You can get it from Faith Alive Resources

Sustainable Youth Ministry

2009-07-27T10:49:00.006-04:00

I’m just finishing Mark DeVries’ book Sustainable Youth Ministry and I like it a lot. I’ve not written as much about books here lately but I’ve been reading lots of books about faith formation in preparation for the book I’m editing this summer and fall on the topic. I hope to write a little about some of the other books I’ve read but I’m writing this today because I’m so enthusiastic about Mark’s book.

This book is an incredibly valuable resource for Youth Leaders but also for churches. It should be read by church staffs and volunteer church leaders too – anyone who connects with a church youth program would benefit from this book because Mark has seen what works and he’s seen what doesn’t work and he lays then out nicely in this book. It is written in his whimsical style (which is even better in person – he’s a great speaker) and there is a lot of practical wisdom in here that I really appreciated.

I hope to read this book with our church ministry staff and discuss it soon. I highly recommend it.

Eric Clapton - better than ever

2009-07-24T08:58:00.003-04:00

I’ve watched Eric Clapton in three different videos so far this summer and seen him live once (with Steve Winwood – an absolutely amazing show) and I am convinced that he is playing and singing as well as he ever has. What’s more, his personal life seems to be in such good shape that he has been able to sustain this level of playing now for quite some time. In his recent Live DVD with Steve Winwood, Steve talks about how Eric is now a really fine singer and band leader – two things he did not want to do in Blind Faith. That’s been true now for about 20 years – since he got sober and straight.

It is interesting to watch the arc of Eric’s career before that point. He was always a great player but he seemed to have lots of near misses. For every album like Slowhand there was the lesser No Reason to Cry. His fans, me among them, were waiting for that killer album that would blow us all away like Layla did. We had a long time to wait because, even though Layla was recorded under “enhanced” conditions, the drugs soon took their toll on Clapton and for a while he did absolutely nothing. Then came the string of albums in the late 70’s and 80’s, which were quite uneven. He seemed to not want to do what we really wanted him to – play the guitar in a way that made us realize what all the fuss was about.

I find the live album Just One Night to be a good example of where he was during that period. There are great moments on that album but much of the album is spent playing the songs that were OK but not the ones we really really wanted to hear. He’s got some great solos but the whole album just often leaves me cold. For one thing, he seemed intent on using a really thin sound on his guitar, one that didn’t let him take control of the band the way he did back in the 60’s and early 70’s.

Then, in 1989, I remember getting his Journeyman album – the one that, for me shows him getting back to who he really is – and realizing that this was the Clapton that I had been missing all along. The live album that followed that, 24 Nights, was, according to his autobiography, almost a throw-away because of his grief over the loss of his young son. But you can hear that he’s playing better than he has for quite a while and his song choice harks back to songs from Cream and Derek and the Dominoes as well as the great new songs on Journeyman. And to show that it wasn’t a fluke, his Unplugged album, which was released right after 24 Nights, showed him to be a fine acoustic player and highlighted his singing voice. It also featured the song “Tears in Heaven,” which won him the first of his THREE Grammy Awards for pop VOCAL.

Since then he’s released a number of really fine albums including the amazingly personal Pilgrim and what I think is his definitive live album, One More Car, One More Rider. His latest studio solo album was, frankly, the weakest one he’s released in a while, but even that one has great playing on it. I was also really impressed, both times that I’ve seen him this decade, with his professionalism and his fine playing. He’s come through the rock and roll excesses and emerged a winner. If you get the chance to see him now you’ll be seeing one of rock’s premier players and singers at the top of his game.

The Concert for George

2009-07-23T10:13:00.004-04:00

I watched some of The Concert for George this morning again, the George Harrison tribute concert. Especially with the recent Michael Jackson tributes I was struck with how the tone of this is just about exactly right. First of all it was a year to the day after his death. His friends, primarily Eric Clapton, not just entertainment industry folks who wanted to show that they knew George, put it together. The people who appear in the concert represent many parts of George’s musical life – Paul and Ringo, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty (from the Traveling Wilburys,) Billy Preston, Gary Booker, Ravi Shankar, Joe Brown (for whom the Beatles opened in the early 60’s) and even Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

The night did not feature any over-the-top tribute speeches proclaiming him the greatest entertainer who ever lived – OK, the Monty Python bit featured one that was SO over the top that it was hilarious but it soon morphed into “The Lumberjack Song.” It was a bunch of musical friends playing George’s music or music that George loved. Even the video was done well featuring two discs, one with the feature film “The Concert for George” with performances from the concert and the rehearsal as well as interview footage from the participants. The other disc has the entire concert.

The bottom line, though, is that the music is great. George was a good composer who was often great and this concert features the best of his work performed by Clapton’s crack band and some of his very talented friends. Highlights for me include the McCartney/Clapton version of “Something” which starts out with Paul’s ukulele version and shifts to be a full band version with Eric singing and playing – just beautiful. The version of “I Want to Tell You” is really cool. The Ravi Shankar composed “Arpan” suite performed by his daughter and an orchestra of Indian instruments is also wonderful – I listened to this a bit three years ago on my trip to India. Overall the DVD is well worth it – I truly enjoy watching it and listening to the CD.

summer report #1

2009-06-10T09:49:00.004-04:00

I've been lax about posting here because I was asked to post over at ThinkChristian and I figured that many of the things that I had to write about I could put over there. But then I haven't put anything there for quite a while and stopped writing here too - too busy with work I guess.

But I have been doing a lot of listening and watching of DVDs as well as doing some reading and thinking and I have reported on none of it. I've been rewatching some old shows and enjoying them. I've been trying not to ram through a series - one season after another. I've taken a break between seasons. That means I'm simultaneously in the middle of many many things. So right now I'm rewatching

The West Wing, Season 1,
The Simpsons, Season 3,
Alias, Season 1, (NOW I remember why I got so hooked on this show!)
Everybody Loves Raymond Season 3

and I'm watching Burn Notice, Season 1 and Boston Legal Season 2 for the first time. Excellent. Clearly, it will take me a while to get through all of these. I don't get through them very quickly.

I'm also listening to thenewnotwo (Dhani Harrison's band), the new Elvis Costello, U2's Medium, Rare and Remastered (the CD you get if you join U2.com) and many other things. I've gone back and gotten out my old King Crimson and Rick Wakeman albums. That has been fun too.

I'm reading Book, Bath Table and Time by Fred Edie and The First Year Out by Tim Clydesdale and enjoying both of them.

I've also started working on a new book - I'm editing an as-yet-untitled book about Faith Formation. The book that Laura and I wrote on Faith Milestones should be out in about a month. Here is the page from the catalog.

So it's been a busy summer so far!

New post over at Think Christian

2009-03-31T10:33:00.001-04:00

I've been invited to do some of my posting over at ThinkChristian.ne t and my first one was put up there today. It's about American Idol. Please go read it and comment!

More thoughts on No LIne on the Horizon - Get on Your Beautiful Feet

2009-03-06T07:25:00.003-05:00

I woke up at 5:00 AM this morning, 50 minutes before my alarm and 30 minutes before I allow myself to get up so I reached for my ipod (which I keep by my bed for such a time as this) and figured i would listen for half an hour. I put it on random album knowing that I have a lot of single songs on the ipod right now from Paste samplers and free itunes downloads. I thought about listening to U2 but figured I would experience a little variety - after all I had been listening to the new album a lot lately. After one song (by Tina Dico) No Line on the Horizon started (it's only a 1 GB ipod so it's not THAT unreasonable that it would pop up.) Even though I'd listened to it a LOT lately as it started it sounded good to me and I haven't listened with earbuds in a while so I let it run and enjoyed it a lot - again. I heard lots of sounds I had not heard before - the time spent on making this album really shows when you listen intently.

I got to the halfway point - almost time to get up - and "Get On Your Boots" came on. Now I've been listening to this song for a month now but in the context of the album it seems to play differently. Bono got to the "You don't know how beautiful you are" part and I suddenly had a realization. I thought of Isaiah 52:7,

How beautiful on the mountains
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace,
who bring good tidings,
who proclaim salvation,
who say to Zion,
"Your God reigns!"

As soon as I thought of it I knew that I was on to something. Bono is a scripture nut - he knows it and he quotes it a lot. It oozes out of him. He's singing a song about feet and then riffs on "how beautiful." There has to be a connection.

Incomplete thoughts regarding No Line on the Horizon

2009-03-05T08:26:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I learned that the forthcoming companion album to U2's No Line on the Horizon will be called Songs of Ascent, a reference, no doubt to the set of Psalms (120-134) that the people of Israel sang as they made their way to Jerusalem to celebrate the passover.

With that thought in the back of my mind I finally this morning read the lyrics to "I'll Go Crazy if I Don't Go Crazy Tonight." The chorus (which I have a hard time understanding without the lyric sheet) begins "It’s not a hill, it’s a mountain / As you start out the climb." Now I'm not sure if there is a connection between this mountain and the hills that the people of Israel climbed on their way to the passover but I'm going to keep my ears open to see if there is.

More on U2's No Line on the Horizon - reflecting on "Unknown Caller"

2009-03-03T20:24:00.003-05:00

I’ve been listening to the new U2 album by trying to think about what each song might be about in the overall context that I pointed to in my previous post. Today I thought a bit about the song “Unknown Caller.”

In “Until the End of the World” Bono takes the point of view of Judas. In “Unknown Caller” I think he may be taking on the point of view of Jesus – just after the resurrection on Easter Sunday. Here are the lyrics.

Here’s why I think this interpretation could work. When Bono sings “Sunshine, sunshine” I can imagine Jesus stepping out of the tomb on that Sunday morning.

The first verse puts Jesus before the resurrection:

I was lost between the midnight and the dawning
In a place of no consequence or company
3:33 when the numbers fell off the clock face
Speed-dialing with no signal at all

Lost between midnight and dawning could refer to being in the garden or to his time between being on the cross and Sunday morning. 3:33 might well refer to Jeremiah 33:3, which Bono hid on the cover of All That You Can’t Leave Behind and calls God’s phone number. Here is what it says: “Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know.”

When Jesus calls on God he says "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me." This is the speed dialing with no signal. (As a note, I think that Jesus' words are a clear reference to Psalm 22 in which the Psalmist starts out saying that God has forsaken him and realizes that God has not. I think this is the point Jesus is making by quoting the Psalm and it seems that Bono might have taken this at face value instead - thinking that God the Father had indeed forsaken Jesus on the cross. So I think Bono is referring to this word from the cross but I think he interpreted it incorrectly.)

The song continues

Go, shout it out, rise up
Oh, oh
Escape yourself and gravity
Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak
Shush now

This sounds to me like Jesus telling us to celebrate his resurrection. Especially later when he sings

Restart and re-boot yourself
You’re free to go
Oh, oh
Shout for joy if you get the chance

I could go on for the rest of the song like this but I'll let you do a little digging for yourself. It all seems to fit the overall idea. I'm amazed at the number of songs on this album that have a pretty distinct Christian theme. There are others on the net who are saying similar things about the album (much of what I like) but sometime I think they're stretching a bit to make every song fit a larger theological theme. I've tried really hard not to do that here. I really think this is what Bono had in mind. There is a lot of cool stuff on this album and I don't intend (at least not at this point) to go through it song by song but I'm listening to this album a lot and the more I hear it the more I like it.

No Line on the Horizon – U2’s new album

2009-02-27T23:05:00.005-05:00

I am a huge U2 fan. I already knew I would like their new album, No Line on the Horizon, before I heard it. Why? Because 12 albums into a career there is not a single U2 album that has not paid off for me on repeated listens. These guys are thoughtful, creative and better at doing what they do than anyone else. I'm a fan and I'll admit it. So if you expect me to be lukewarm on this album you'll have to go someplace else.

Five years ago U2’s How to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb grabbed me on the first listen. The songs on the album were spectacular and accessible – I understood them early on and continued to find new things to like in them as I played (and replayed and replayed) the album. That album stayed in my player for a very long time. I saw the tour and what little remained of my U2 skepticism went right out the window.

So, now that my confession is out of the way and I’ve given up any pretense of impartiality I can address their new album, No Line on the Horizon. My first taste of it was the single “Get on Your Boots” which, sure, is a little dopey in spots but, frankly, I played the single a lot. iTunes keeps track of the number of plays and I was well over a dozen by the end of day two. I thought it was creative and fun and had a killer riff. But when I finally got the chance to hear the whole album I realized that there was really nothing else quite like that on the whole album. In fact my initial response was that the album was quite subdued overall. This will take repeated listening to really get, I thought. And I was right. After a number of plays I have come to see this as a wonderful U2 album, and sounds to me very much like the natural successor to either Zooropa or The Unforgettable Fire.

Steve Harmon, in his review of the album suggests that this is the horizon line referred to in the song and tha albm title is the line separating heaven and earth and that Bono is looking at the horizon for a day when earth will be more like heaven. I am still hard pressed to get that out of just looking at the lyrics to the song but his argument makes a lot of sense to me. But that’s the thing about U2’s writing – the theological stuff is sometimes only there for those who have ears to hear. And in this case the whole album seems to be about trying to find what Bono had been looking for since the Joshua Tree. Even without the context for of the whole album I thought that “Get On Your Boots” was a call to arms – a call to the church to get out of it’s too complacent ways and do some work – these are work boots Bono is calling sexy. In context, it makes even more sense. This is how we can usher in the world where justice reigns – the world in the future (which needs “a big kiss” according to Bono.) This interpretation works for me.

There are times in this album where the point is pretty clear, as in the amazing “Magnificent.” Those of us who look for Christian subtext in U2’s music found it immediately in “Magnificent” – a song with a stirring sound and soaring melody. I can’t wait to hear how this one goes over live. But in this one Bono sings about how he was “born to sing for you.” The occasional reviewer missed the point here but Bono is pretty clearly talking about God – especially when he says that his first cry was a joyful noise. Bono also calls on some pretty familiar Christian imagery in “White as Snow.” You can't ignore this stuff and you can't just assume that Bono is playing with words - he is clearly evoking something in using these scriptural references. It all seems to point to an how Bono is still looking for peace and justice and love - and, in some cases, listing how we've all fallen short. This may be one of their more coherant album-long statements yet.

Musically I find this album has lots of things to enjoy. Eno and Lanois’ influence in pretty clear and this album really doesn’t sound like any other U2 album – but it still sounds like U2. It may not be as packed with hits as Atomic Bomb was but No Line on the Horizon is every bit as good. Bono still hasn't found what he's looking for but it's good to know that he and the rest of the band haven't stopped looking.

Ouch

2009-02-17T09:28:00.002-05:00

Earlier this year (early January, in fact) I had dug up some old CCM albums and was listening to them again for the first time in a few years. Among other things, I wrote this:

Considering Lily, the band, is one of my guilty pleasures from the 90s and also one of my great disappointments. This pair of sisters made a folky album as Serene and Pearl and, when that didn’t work out commercially for them, they rocked it up a bit and formed the band Considering Lily. Their self-titled album is dorky and obvious with mundane images and lightweight tunes. But I liked it and there was something about its quirkiness that caught me back then. The reason that this band was such a disappointment for me is that, for their second album, one of the sisters quit and the newly reformed Considering Lily released an album that was not really at all like their first one. They got more normal and lost their charm. After that they never released another album. While this first one was a lot of fun my patience for the pedestrian writing and playing on this album isn't what it used to be. After two listens it ended up getting deleted from my itunes.

Over this past weekend I received this comment on that post: “Ouch. Serves me right for "Google"ing Considering Lily trying to find some audio clips of "The Pieces Fit" to link in an email.”

The comment came from Jeanette. Clicking on her blogger profile revealed nothing. But I seemed to remember that the woman who was added to the new Considering Lily was named Jeanette. I did some quick googling and I was right – Jeanette Herdman.

I have to admit that my heart fell when I read her note. It was not my intention to hurt her or anyone with my musings about those albums and I felt bad that she had read it and had been hurt by it – even if only a little. I went back and reread what I had written to make sure I hadn’t been especially mean – and I don’t think I was. But it reminded me that music that I review doesn’t just happen – it’s made by people.

I have read some reviews and critiques of my recent book (Helping Our Children Grow in Faith – quick, go order it and read it and then say nice things about it) and, while they’ve been mostly positive there have been a couple of comments that were lukewarm or critical. As I read them I know that it goes with the territory - something that I'm sure Jeanette knows too. In fact – I was quite nervous about that before the book came out. Once you put a book out there you are opening yourself up to people reading it and saying “this guy’s crazy and what’s more he can’t write.” I’m also a musician and I know that reviews can be rough. And, truth be told, when I occasionally write in a particularly snarky manner with humor I get good comments from people who think I’m really smart and witty and clever in the way I put down whatever it was that I was reviewing. That positive reinforcement encourages people to be mean in reviews.

But I also know that I enjoy writing and reading reviews of music and other things and that I will read, watch and listen to things that I just don’t like. Should I not write about them?

I think I will continue to write about them BUT Jeanette’s note reminded me to do it with a spirit of humility and to speak the truth (or at least my opinions) in love. And, Jeanette, thanks for your note and for reminding me of the faces behind the art. I’ll go back and listen to The Pieces Fit again – who knows maybe I’ll now hear things that I didn’t hear all those years ago.

more u2 on the way?

2009-02-17T09:00:00.002-05:00

A recent interview with U2 revealed this:

The future is another question for another interview. How long can U2 stay meaningful? Where will rock's greatest adventure end? For now, there is enough material left over from the sessions for an album that, Bono says, will be released before the end of the year. It will be "a more meditative album on the theme of pilgrimage".

Wow.

A very nice Keith Getty quote

2009-02-10T08:28:00.000-05:00

"If I've got non-Christian friends coming to church, I'd far rather give them four verses of comparatively heavy theology with some theological words which explains the gospel, than give them twenty repeated words that could be said about your pet horse or your girlfriend."

Read the rest of the interview here.

Gearing up for Sympo 09

2009-01-27T15:08:00.001-05:00

Thursday begins the three-day marathon that is Calvin Symposium on Worship and I’m quite busy this year. On Thursday I will welcome about 150 high school students, teachers and principals from all over North America to spend much of the day talking about Christian High School chapel – a topic that is not often given this sort of intense attention. I’m pretty excited about it and, fortunately, I have my friends and colleagues helping me out. Ron Rienstra will talk about Worship Basics, Sharon Veltema and Jack Postma from Unity Christian High School in Hudsonville, MI, will talk about their program. Cindy DeJong and Paul Ryan from the Calvin Chapel program will talk about what they’ve learned leading chapel with college students, the Calvin Worship Apprentices (including my daughter Meredith) will lead the high school kids in workshops around some of the nuts and bolts of leading worship – using the arts, music and speaking. Finally, I’ll talk about Faith Nurture and how chapel relates to that and we’ll have some time to hear from some of the other participants.

Before the workshop begins I’ll play guitar for worship in a band lead by Greg Scheer. Then on Friday and Saturday I’ll lead a seminar on why and how we can use Psalms with kids. Whew. But even with all this I hope to attend a bunch of seminars by other folks and I always leave excited to have been present and to have been able to participate.

Album of the moment

2009-01-17T20:24:00.005-05:00

Usually there is one album that speaks to me in a special way - this will last for a week or even longer. I am thinking about tracking this album here on this blog for a while just to see what it's like. I don't expect to write long reviews of them (although I might) but rather I'll just mention them and encourage my regular reader(s) to post their own AoM and to refresh them whenever the album changes. Right now there are two Albums of the Moment:

1) Under the Waterfall by Cindy Morgan - this CCM album from the early 90's is just delightful. Yes, there are a few moments when I'm not exactly enamored of what's going on but overall songs like "Stand" and "I Know You" almost always lift my spirit and make me sing along.

2)This album is possibly being replaced by Apple Tree by Katie Herzig. Herzig's album is a wonderful mix of delicate vocals matched with creative and tuneful songwriting. I like the way she writes and I like the way she sings. I also like the way the image of the Apple Tree pops up in, I think, three of the songs. I find Apple Tree practically irresistible right now.

Who is the best Beatle?

2009-01-16T09:56:00.002-05:00

As part of a facebook wall exchange on the best bands in the world Andy Boyer asked me “who was the best Beatle?” This came after I pointed out to him the ridiculous notion of his that placed Nirvana in the top three bands of all time and missed the Beatles completely. [EDIT: Andy reminds me that he did mention the Beatles in his "bands I also like" section so saying that he missed them completely is unfair. I agree.]

His question, though, needs a response that is longer than a facebook wall can easily contain so I thought I’d respond here.

First of all, this is the sort of question that you shouldn’t have to answer. One is capable of enjoying the Beatles music without picking favorites or trying to sort out who brought what to the band. Not only that but there was something special in the collaboration of the four people involved. I know from playing with a variety of people that, if you let it, changing even one player in a band will change everyone. I play differently with a different piano player or drummer. When I played with the Lazy Blue Tunas I was able to play a lot differently because there were two other guitars occupying the same aural space and I needed to back off on some things and I was able to add other things. So, it’s hard to sort out what was going on with the Beatles as well.

All four Beatles brought something special to the band and that changed over the ten years or so that they were together. Paul’s bass playing, for example, is one of the high points of the best Beatles music. Have you listened to the bass on Sgt Pepper or in George’s beautiful song “Something?” Paul doesn’t get enough credit for that. John’s playing, while not virtuosic like Paul and George’s still carried the day on more than one occasion – his piano in “Ob La Di Ob La Da,” for example is what made the track work (even though it’s not one of Paul’s best songs.) George’s guitar is often just the thing that made a track work. His 12-string playing on A Hard Days Night made the album. Ringo’s drums were always on target – listen to the drums on “Come Together” – they’re brilliant. You can’t pull the pieces of the Beatles apart easily.

So let’s take a look at their post-Beatles work. This is also tough because John’s was so much shorter than the others and, for about half the time John was alive after the Beatles he wasn’t actively recording. George, too, took a lot of time off. Ringo had an on-again off-again recording career, even at times losing his recording contract. Paul, on the other hand, kept working. So how do you compare them? John’s songwriting has been recently highlighted on the wonderful “Instant Karma” collection where other artists covered his music and that reinforced the notion that he had a lot of good songs on his own. But, frankly, how many of John’s solo songs can people list? Even Imagine, his most popular album has only one song that people know - the title track. He also had minor hits with “Instant Karma” and “Give Peace a Chance.” In the same period McCartney had a large number of hits – “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “Another Day,” “Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey,” “My Love,” “Band on the Run,” “Jet,” “Listen to the What the Man Said,” “Silly Love Songs,” “Let ‘Em In,” and“With A Little Luck” (to name the ones that I can off the top of my head.) And that’s just in his first decade after the Beatles. There have been nearly three more decades since then. In that same first decade George had “My Sweet Lord” and “Give Me Love.” So Paul is the clear winner in this category.

But it’s not just about hits. What about quality? Paul made a couple of lousy albums along the way. Wild Life has long been seen as one of his weaker albums and, indeed, it is not very good. And Paul has been tagged with writing a bunch of silly love songs – a charge that sticks to a certain extent. John’s work though is at least as uneven. Some Time in New York City was pretty poor. Side two of Live Peace in Toronto is unlistenable. Even his brilliant work on Double Fantasy really only amounts to half an album with Yoko’s music making up the other half – I’m quite content having on the John songs from that album and it’s posthumous follow up, Milk and Honey. George also had his stinkers – Extra Texture and Dark Horse haven’t even been released on CD yet. Ringo had one great album, Ringo. He did have a number of cool songs but, frankly, if you buy his Photograph anthology you’ve got just about all the Ringo you really need on one CD. So how do you compare Paul’s massive output with the relatively meager output from the others? It’s tough but on balance I think Paul had at least as high a batting average as the others and he came to the plate much more often. This, I think, gives him the edge.

So, Andy, with no disrespect to the other three, I think my answer is Paul McCartney.

How does iTunes Genius work?

2009-01-15T10:57:00.003-05:00

I've been using iTunes Genius lately to make playlists and I've been really happy with the results but this morning something amazing happened - I chose a Postal Service song to start the playlist and iTunes picked the only two covers of Postal Service songs I have on my computer to put in the playlist - "Such Great Heights" by Iron and Wine and "We Will Become Sillouettes" by the Shins.

So, how did it know to pick those? This isn't just genre matching - there is more going on that that. When I start with a solo Beatle it gives me other solo Beatles. When I give it Stevie Wonder it gives me other artists that match quite well. I'd love to know the algorithm it uses to come up with the lists.

Any ideas?

Revisiting old CCM albums

2009-01-05T08:43:00.005-05:00

Almost every year we go on a bit of a cleaning binge involving our basement. As we need more room to put new stuff and, as kids come home for Christmas break we need more space. We also realize that we accumulate a lot and a good purge is helpful. This leads to deciding what stuff we can toss and what stuff we need to find a better way to store. This year as I was realigning my CD collection and as I was going through some of my old stuff I came across a number of old CCM albums which I’m not ready to get rid of yet and I grabbed five of them because I remember them as being among my favorites and I thought it would be good to hear them again. They are:

PFR – Great Lengths (1995)
Considering Lily (1996)
Cindy Morgan – Listen (1996) and Under the Waterfall (1995)
Margaret Becker – Falling Forward (1998)

I loaded them in my itunes, put them on my ipod and they (along with some recently rediscovered Stevie Wonder) have been popping up every so often in my listening over the last week or so and it’s been great to revisit these. So, after listening again after a number of years, how are they?

PFR’s album, Great Lengths is full of Beatlesque tunes with solid arrangements, playing and singing. The two lead voices blend nicely and the power trio’s sound is nicely augmented with other instruments. A few of the songs reek of mid-nineties CCM sensibilities – like they were counting the number of Jesus references to make sure they were ok to play on the radio – but enough of them avoid this that the album still holds up well. This one will likely stay in my itunes.

Considering Lily, the band, is one of my guilty pleasures from the 90s and also one of my great disappointments. This pair of sisters made a folky album as Serene and Pearl and, when that didn’t work out commercially for them, they rocked it up a bit and formed the band Considering Lily. Their self-titled album is dorky and obvious with mundane images and lightweight tunes. But I liked it and there was something about its quirkiness that caught me back then. The reason that this band was such a disappointment for me is that, for their second album, one of the sisters quit and the newly reformed Considering Lily released an album that was not really at all like their first one. They got more normal and lost their charm. After that they never released another album.While this first one was a lot of fun my patience for the pedestrian writing and playing on this album isn't what it used to be. After two listens it ended up getting deleted from my itunes.

Cindy Morgan started out doing what was then called “urban” music and I wasn’t such a big fan. But then at the time of her third album she changed her style a bit and released a fine album called Under the Waterfall which, to my ears at least, almost sounds at home sitting next to today’s pop albums by American Idol alum. It’s a good album with some nice grooves on it and a killer track, “Stand,” which is just wonderful. She followed that up with an even better album, Listen, which spent a lot of time in our players back 12 years ago and still sounds good to me today – these two albums are the ones that I’ve played most since digging them up last week.

Finally, I also dug up what I consider to be Margaret Becker’s best album, Falling Forward. This album really shows her acoustic side but yet it has cool Falling Forward wasn’t nearly as good either. This one I haven’t heard too much yet since the great rescue from the basement but what I’ve heard I’ve liked a lot – so this one will also stay in my itunes for a while at least.

Overall, this experiment has worked out well. When push comes to shove I tend to revert back to certain bands – the Beatles, U2, Grateful Dead, Phil Keaggy, Elvis Costello – and it’s good for me to branch out. I’ve tried to do that with contemporary bands like Death Cab for Cutie and Ingrid Michaelson and I’ve enjoyed a lot of recent music but many of them don’t hold much interest for me in the long run. It was good to see that some of these old albums from artists not in my top tier still work for me.

Top albums of the year

2008-12-14T09:42:00.005-05:00

Best of lists are inherently idiosyncratic and mine are especially so. These albums are not the best of the year because I have only listened to a small percentage of the albums that have come out this year. This list represents the albums that stayed in my player the longest over the course of the year - the ones that I like a lot and that kept getting played. So here they are, in no particular order, my top 8 of 2008.

1. The Fireman - Electric Arguments
I am a big fan of Paul McCartney, as even a cursory glance of this blog will show, and it’s nice when he makes a good album. I am of the opinion that he’s done that a lot lately and Electric Arguments is another fine example. It is creative, melodic and interesting. I wrote more in my recent blog post here.

2. In the Name of Love - Africa Celebrates U2
I found out about this album by reading a review in Paste Magazine so I got it and I love it. I can be a sucker for African music and mixing that sound with the music of one of my favorite bands, U2, is a no-brainer for me. This album is by a variety of artists, none of whom I had ever heard of before. Some tracks, of course, are stronger than others but even the tracks I thought were not great at first have grown on me. This is a fun album that shows that U2’s music translates into other genres very well. (This is far superior to the similarly titled album that CCM artists did a few years ago.)

3. The Allens
This album is probably my favorite Noisetrade find of the year (along with Katie Herzig’s album which almost made the list - get that one here.) This husband-wife duo from Texas sings and plays in a way that speaks to me. I like their sound and I like their songs. And the album is free. Go get it.

4. Elvis Costello – Momofuku
I’ve been an Elvis fan for quite a while and he released a good one this year just before I saw him in concert for the first time. The songs are well written and the album was banged out in a hurry so it sounds fresh and exciting. That's why it is named after the inventor of instant noodles. Here is my review.

5. Big Blue Ball
Peter Gabriel assembled a group of people from all over the world to record in his studio over a period of something like 15 years. The tracks cover a wide range of styles and Gabriel himself only appears occasionally but the album is varied and interesting and has some really cool tracks.

6. Ingrid Michaelson - Girls and Boys
This album is actually a 2007 album but I didn’t even know who Ingrid was until this past summer so I'm cheating and putting her on this year's list because her CD spent a lot of time in my player this year. Her songs are wonderful in their simplicity and her guitar and piano compliment her fragile voice perfectly. Her recent album, Be OK, is more of a collection of b-sides and live tracks than a real album and Girls and Boys is superior.

7. Jon Foreman – Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer
Jon Foreman, the driving force behind Switchfoot, shows that there is a lot more to him than just a rock guy with this set of 4 EPs that deliver acoustic settings of songs that don’t fit the Switchfoot mode. Foreman continues to write about his faith in a way that doesn’t settle for easy answers or trite sloganeering. For acoustic albums there is great variety in both the songwriting and the arrangements with Foreman bringing in brass, strings and even his sister-in-law Sarah Masen on vocals on one song. The compilation, Limbs and Branches, gives 10 of the songs from the 24 song, 4 EP collection and adds two new songs to it as well. An earlier review that I wrote is here.

8. Phil Keaggy – Phantasmagorical
This past year Keaggy toured to support the 30th Anniversary of his landmark album the Master and the Musician. He recorded Phantasmagorical with some of those songs ringing in his ears and continues his string of strong albums. The playing is, of course, fabulous but the writing continues to be very good and Phil’s talent as an arranger continues to grow. This album stands up to some of his best. See my earlier review here.

25 days of free Christmas songs

2008-12-06T10:08:00.001-05:00

Amazon is giving a song away for free every day in December - click here.

Electric Arguments – Paul McCartney as the Fireman

2008-12-02T17:51:00.003-05:00

Electric Arguments is the new album by the Fireman - Paul McCartney and Youth (the bassist for Killing Joke – whoever that is.) I did not buy the first two Fireman albums. They were strange ambient music – at least the part I can hear on samples from itunes – and, while I can appreciate ambient music I’m not sure I want to invest in it. But this new one is different. This has Paul singing. He and Youth went into the studio with no song in mind and no plan and, by the end of the day had a recording. He did this 13 times over the year. The result is an album that is part McCartney being his tuneful self, part McCartney being his experimental self and part Youth being his, well, youthful self.

So, what do I think? Well, on the one hand, I’m not sure yet. It is a bit of a strange album. On the other hand in the week since I’ve picked it up I find myself playing it over and over again. I haven't done this with any other album since Memory Almost Full, McCartney’s last album. I find myself entranced by the moodiness of the songs, by the interesting arrangements and by the sheer variety. There are also some really cool moments on the album.

Many reviewers are saying that this is the best McCartney album in decades – some say since Ram. Now I don’t remember people going all crazy over Ram or saying that that was one of McCartney’s best albums but, OK, Ram was a cool album and I can see why they say that Electric Arguments reminds them of it. But it also sometimes reminds me of Magical Mystery Tour and of McCartney II and also of Press to Play – did anyone else buy that one??? But to say that it’s McCartney’s best in decades is to minimize the cool stuff that McCartney has done lately. He’s done a lot of really outstanding albums lately – Flaming Pie, Chaos and Creation and Memory Almost Full have all gotten strong reviews and they’ve all been called the best in years from McCartney. (Reviewers seem to have short memories.) But because Electric Arguments is a collaboration with a producer it has a different flavor than his other albums, much like Chaos and Creation did.

So Electric Arguments is not “McCartney’s best”, nor is it a “return to form” or any of those things that some reviewers are saying. But it is a very good experimental album from an artist who, to a greater or lesser extent, does this a lot more often than he gets credit for. And I just can't seem to take it out of my CD player.

Joel Osteen on the economy

2008-11-29T16:00:00.004-05:00

"If we can stay positive and hopeful, God will bring us through to a better day."

This quote, from the latest issue of Christianity Today, shows that Joel Osteen flunked Grace 101.

He also apparently blames the great depression on people who were, well, depressed. While I do think that a fair amount of the economy is a head game and that if we keep in mind that the economy is fundamentally sound (where have I heard that before?) things will go better for us, I also think that if God was giving us what we deserved then I wouldn't have a computer at all - I certainly wouldn't have a mac. :) This isn't about what we deserve. God has a plan for us - just as he had a plan for Joseph - and I hope that it doesn't involve me sleeping in a homeless shelter but, even if it does, God will still be with me.

So, Rev Osteen, I disagree with your assessment. I think that God has already seen us through to a better day - it's called Easter. The rest is just gravy.

40 Years Ago - the Beatles' White Album

2008-11-21T07:58:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow, Nov 22, marks the 40th Anniversary of the release of the White Album. I reserved a copy of that album at my local record store in Ridgewood NJ before it came out and when I went to get it the proprietor reached under the counter and pulled it out and gave it to me. It was white. It had the words "The Bealtes" embossed on the cover along with a number stamped on the front - I forget what the number was but it wasn't a particularly low one - I think somewhere in the 100,000 range.

I took it home and put in on the stereo in my bedroom. I was 14 years old and this was one of the first album releases I had ever looked forward to. Wow - what a mix of sounds and songs - what a LOT of songs! This album was in marked contrast to the Sgt Pepper / Magical Mystery Beatles that I had been listening to - especially after coming fairly quickly on the heals of the Yellow Submarine Soundtrack which just reinforced the psychedelic image of the Beatles. It struck me asa wonderful collection of songs. I remember one reviewer saying that this album made it clear that Lennon and McCartney were the best songwriters since Shubert. Yeah - it's that good.

I must admit that I had more patience for "Revolution 9" back then than I do now but I have more patience for "Good Night" now than I did then so I guess it all evens out. But any album that has "Back in the USSR," "Dear Prudence," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "I Will," "Revolution 1," and "Martha My Dear" is clearly a classic. And my list of songs here just scratches the surface. This is an amazing album.

I've written about this album before here, here and here.

This is very cool - you should watch it

2008-11-12T14:19:00.003-05:00

Beth over at U2 Sermons pointed me to this outtake from the Rattle and Hum film by U2. It is the performance of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm looking For" with the New Voices of Freedom. Much fun to watch.

Not misused quotes but still pretty funny

2008-11-04T07:47:00.002-05:00

This picture is from the BBC website today of a sign posted in Wales - wonderful. In case you can't read it the caption says "The English is clear enough to lorry drivers - but the Welsh reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

Top 10 Spiritual Songs by U2

2008-10-30T07:25:00.002-04:00

This article from the @U2 website is an interesting look at the spiritual nature of U2's music and lyrics. A few of my top choices are left off ("Where the Streets Have No Name," "All Because of You," "Until the End of the World") but it is an interesting list with some nice commentary. I have to find a copy of the song "Mercy" somewhere - anyone have it that they can send me?

What if the Beatles were Irish?

2008-10-26T13:14:00.001-04:00

The singer here is satirist Roy Zimmerman. Thanks to Abbey Road for the link.

From the Department of Redundancy Department

2008-10-25T17:30:00.004-04:00

This was the headline in the on-line version of my local paper this afternoon. It was on the first page 1.

Red Alert!

2008-10-15T21:40:00.004-04:00

I'm trying to be calm about this but ....

Pictures from the new Star Trek movie are posted here!!!

More cool free music

2008-10-12T21:16:00.000-04:00

This offer expires on Nov 15 so don't miss your chance.

More on U2 remasters

2008-09-28T18:11:00.003-04:00

I have had a chance to spend more time with all four of the U2 remasters that have come out in the past year (and I’m anxiously waiting for the fifth to arrive this week) and I realize that these are pretty much everything I’d like to have in a remaster series. Here is why.

Don’t mess with the album. Good albums have a flow to them that, while it could theoretically be improved on, generally I get used to the album the way it is and I want to experience the original. By all means, improve the sound, but don’t add tracks. That just messes up the end.
Add tracks to a second CD. What I really want is a second CD full of cool stuff like EVERY non-album single and b-side that connects to the album and unreleased live tracks from the era. I am a completist and I expect a good remaster to help me complete. I’m not looking for demos (although they can be fun,) I’m looking for something that I actually will want to listen to, not just have for historical purposes.
Make the art count. I want to have the original album art but also let me see the covers of all the singles and what else was on them. Basically I want the complete story of this album and this era in the band’s life.
Add cool liner notes. Include a critical essay, complete credits and a description, preferably by a key member of the band, of the b-sides. Lyrics are a nice touch too.

The U2 remasters delivers on all counts. And here’s what else they did to make it cool. The Joshua Tree has an extra deluxe edition that includes a video of a concert from that era. Since Under a Blood Red Sky is already a live album – and a really really good one – more live tracks aren’t really called for so they leave the album just as it is but added tracks to the live concert video, which has never been released on DVD. Yeah, U2 got it right with The Joshua Tree, Boy, October, War and Under A Blood Red Sky.

Jill Phillips - Nobody's Got It All Together

2008-09-27T21:59:00.002-04:00

I have mentioned NoiseTrade.com before but I recently listened again to one of the first albums I downloaded there, Jill Phillips' Nobody's Got It All Together. It's a really fine album and well worth the FREE download.

U2 and word play

2008-09-16T20:12:00.003-04:00

This morning I was listening to the Joshua Tree by U2 in the car on the drive in to work and looked out at the eastern sky as the sun was starting to make it purple and orange. I could see the horizon which, as a any good former math teacher knows, is the root of the word "horizontal."

That lead me to put the word "horizon" together with U2 and think about the rumored title of their forthcoming album "No Line On the Horizon." I thought more about the relationship between the words "horizontal" and "horizon" and wondered if there was a word which relates to "vertical" the same way.

Then the U2 connection came full circle and I realized the word I was looking for was "Vertigo."

Hello, Hello, I thought - I wonder if they were thinking of Vertigo and vertical when they decided to write a song about horizontal. hmmmm.

the ipod album shuffle

2008-09-11T21:41:00.003-04:00

When I got my new mac computer it once again reset all of the playcounts on my itunes back to zero making all of the carefully planned playlists that I used obsolete. This was the second time in a month so I was a little disconcerted.

So, on a whim, I changed my way of listening to music on itunes and my ipod. (This actually first occurred to me on an airplane during 3 and a half hours on the tarmac at Newark Airport.) I switched from song shuffle to album shuffle. Now when I listen to either my ipod or itunes it starts at the first song on a random album that I had not heard in x days (right now x is set to 150 but once I get through everything I'll reset it to a number that works better.) If I stop before the album is finished it picks it up at some other time.

This way I'm hearing albums the way that the artists intended but I'm also having the fun of randomly hearing things. This morning, for example, I turned on my computer at work and started playing Led Zeppelin II - not exactly morning music but it got me going! I would not have picked it but by the time I was up to the third song I was into it.

I have a lot of random songs that have been downloaded over time so I get individual songs interspersed with albums so I never really know what I'm going to get when I listen. I also mix newly acquired albums in more frequently.

I have completely embraced my inner geek - just in case you haven't figured that out.

Phil Keaggy – Phantasmagorical

2008-08-31T17:30:00.006-04:00

Phil Keaggy has had a wide variety of releases in his long career. Some instrumental, some vocal. Some electric, some acoustic. And, of course, some that are really good and some that are not as good. In almost any artist’s career there are high points and low points and there are also albums that really stand out. Phil Keaggy has had a couple that have really stood out over the years. One of those was The Master and the Musician, his first instrumental album. Phil recently toured to support the 30th Anniversary of that album so as he prepared his latest album he had M&M on his mind and in saw some similarities between Master and Musician and his latest album, Phantasmagorical. He mentioned those similarities when talking about the album before it’s release creating some buzz among his fans. In fact, it even has, as it’s subtitle, Master and Musician 2.

It has finally arrived (you can order it on his website) and I've now had a couple of weeks to digest it. While it is clearly not the sequel to M&M (and I don't know if Phil ever really intended it to be - decisions about titles like this are sometimes driven more by management than by the artist) it is also a very good album. As I mentioned in a recent review of The Song Within, Phil seems to be in a great creative space right now and has released a couple of very strong albums in a row. One of the things that strikes me about Phantasmagorical is how often a song will begin and I’ll find myself wondering who it is – not realizing it is Phil because he is experimenting with some new sounds – slide guitar, for example in the first track, “Like Snow Before the Sun” or the horns at the beginning of "Cascading." There is a lot of variety in this album and, of course, stellar playing throughout. But one of Phil's strengths is as a composer and arranger and he does that well on Phantasmagorical. Yes, there are times when it sounds like parts of it could have been on M&M but there are also parts that sound more like the sequel to Beyond Nature, (perhaps my favorite of Phil's instrumental albums) and there are parts that I'm hard-pressed to say if they'd fit on any of his previous albums.

Perhaps the best track on the album is the one that Phil previewed for us on the M&M tour, “Forever to Joy,” one of the songs that actually most sounds like the Master and Musician album with its strong melody and the delicate use of flute. It’s a great end to a great album. Phantasmagorical is one of the better PK albums of the last decade and it ranks nicely up there with his best ever.

George Harrison playlist

2008-08-20T21:08:00.005-04:00

Here is another of my playlists. This one features the solo music of George Harrison. Once again, my rules are that it had to fit on a CD and that I wanted it to give both a good general intro to George's music and also include some of my own quirky choices.

Name / Artist / Album
01 My Sweet Lord / George Harrison / All Things Must Pass
02 Don't Let Me Wait Too Long / George Harrison / Living In The Material World
03 What Is Life / George Harrison / All Things Must Pass
04 Give Me Love (Give Me Peace On Earth) / George Harrison / Living In The Material World
05 Crackerbox Palace / George Harrison / Thirty Three & 1/3
06 Love Comes To Everyone / George Harrison / George Harrison
07 Wake Up My Love / George Harrison / Gone Troppo
08 Got My Mind Set on You / George Harrison / Cloud 9
09 Cheer Down / George Harrison / Best Of Dark Horse 1976-1989
10 Any Road / George Harrison / Brainwashed
11 Horse To The Water (with George Harrison) / Jools Holland and His Rhythm and Blues Orchestra / Small World Big Band, Vol. 1
12 When We Was Fab / George Harrison / Cloud 9
13 All Those Years Ago / George Harrison / Somewhere In England
14 Blow Away / George Harrison / George Harrison
15 This Song / George Harrison / Thirty Three & 1/3
16 Baby Don't Run Away / George Harrison / Gone Troppo
17 Never Get Over You / George Harrison / Brainwashed
18 Living In The Material World / George Harrison / Living In The Material World
19 All Things Must Pass / George Harrison / All Things Must Pass

Notice that I included the Jools Holland cut which is basically a George cut - it was released only a few months before his death and was, apparently, the last thing he recorded. (By the way, feel free to let me know if you like this format for showing the playlist more or less than the tables I had before. I have a new computer and it isn't as easy to do the tables.)

Why I like my new mac

2008-08-16T11:18:00.004-04:00

I recently wrote about my new apple macbook and I really don’t want to be that guy who jabbers on about how cool his mac is and how relatively uncool PCs are but, basically – it's true. Now, granted, there are a few things that that mac doesn’t do as well – for example, the MS Word version for mac doesn’t post directly to my blog like the windows version does. It also won’t do mail merge to email (which I actually used occasionally.) It doesn’t sync my palm to my groupwise and groupwise isn’t as nice on a mac as it is on a PC.

BUT I’m really glad I switched. Here is a short list why.

Size and weight – I like the size of the macbook and also how light it is. It is really a much more portable computer than either the IBM or the Dell that I had – certainly a lot more portable than the recent Dell I got from work.
Style – let’s face it, these folks at apple know how to design stuff. They just look so cool!
Ports and connections – all the ports are on the side so when I tip it back I don’t bend the power cord connection. Speaking of which, it’s magnetic so it just comes off without breaking (not that I ever had any problem with my old one, but this design just makes it less of a possibility.)
Speed – there are two ways the mac is faster. It starts up and shuts down faster. A lot faster. But it also opens up programs faster. Not that I’m impatient or anything but, well, let’s move on.
Searching for things – finding files is a lot easier and faster – you type into the little search window in the finder and you get results instantly instead of the five minute wait for windows search to do it’s thing. I used windows search only when I had to because it was such a pain – I search for things on the mac all the time.
Preview – thanks for Bryan for pointing this one out to me. If you think you have the right file but you’re not sure you highlight the file and click the spacebar – it shows you the file instantly so you can see if it’s the one you want. It also works as a great way to view photos.
Video chatting – with the camera above the screen I can chat with people and see them. I don’t use it much but I get to chat with Bethany face to face occasionallyy in Georgia and I finally got to see Father Ron Hatton, an internet friend who’d voice I had heard and who’s pictures I had seen. I feel like we’ve actually met now. Yeah, I know you can buy a camera for a PC and do the same thing – this is built in, easy and seamless. Oh, and the camera let me quickly take this picture showing my new t-shirt.

So, there it is. Why I like my Mac. I’m that guy now. And I’m OK with that.

New music from NoiseTrade by the Allens

2008-08-14T10:38:00.003-04:00

I downloaded this album this morning and I've listened twice already - I like it a lot. Go get it for free.

A Beatles sampler

2008-08-03T11:52:00.000-04:00

In another posting I posted a McCartney playlist. Here is my shot at distilling an intro to the Beatles for those who need an introduction. Again, it had to fit on one 80 min CD. I used the versions from 1 and Yellow Submarine when possible because they sound better. I also tried to make it flow well so that it was a good listening experience.

	Name	Album
1	I Should Have Known Better	A Hard Day's Night
2	Back In The U.S.S.R.	The Beatles [White Album]
3	Dear Prudence	The Beatles [White Album]
4	And Your Bird Can Sing	Revolver
5	Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band	Yellow Submarine
6	With A Little Help From My Friends	Yellow Submarine
7	Things We Said Today	A Hard Day's Night
8	Come Together	1
9	Let It Be	1
10	Can't Buy Me Love	1
11	I Feel Fine	1
12	Birthday	The Beatles [White Album]
13	Lady Madonna	1
14	All My Loving	With The Beatles
15	Penny Lane	1
16	Strawberry Fields Forever	Magical Mystery Tour
17	It Won't Be Long	With The Beatles
18	Paperback Writer	1
19	We Can Work It Out	1
20	The Inner Light	Past Masters, Vol. 2
21	Eight Days A Week	1
22	Something	1
23	Yesterday	1
24	All You Need Is Love	1
25	Hey Jude	1
26	I Want To Hold Your Hand	1
27	Across The Universe	Let It Be... Naked

Switching to Mac

2008-08-02T15:57:00.003-04:00

Over the past few months I’ve been more and more intrigued with macs. I think it started just about two years ago when I got my first iPod. I realized that the design was SO elegant that it was really really well made. I still think that the iPod is an incredibly well designed music listening device – just think about the controls on it – very simple but yet it does everything you want it to. And the learning curve is not steep at all. It just makes sense and it works well.
My son, Bryan, told me that this is true of the mac computers too and so I started paying attention more. Now about ten years ago when I started teaching at Calvin they had just stopped requiring PCs for everyone because macs are particularly good for certain things and they were allowing them again but I wanted nothing to do with them. The classroom in which I taught, though, had a mac so I learned quickly that the windows interface and the mac OS were really quite close. I made the transition with little problem. My anti-mac bias started to crack.

My kids’ school, Holland Christian, is now part of a program in which every student, grades 6-12, has their own laptop computer – a mac. I went to visit the school to specifically look at this project with an IT friend from Calvin and we were very impressed. Also, this sumer, when Bethany came home for vacation for a week and a half she had her new mac and I was quite impressed with the way she could just lug it around and how quickly it would start up and work. It was very very cool. That made me think that I should try a mac but one thing was stopping me – I use GroupWise for my email, calendar and to-do list all the time and I couldn’t live with just the web interface.
Lo and behold, last week I discovered that I didn’t have to – I found out that there is a GroupWise client for mac that Calvin uses. I borrowed a mac from Calvin’s A/V and tried it out. I loved it.
So, Monday I get my own mac. I’m already starting to feel a little bit like “that guy” who is always talking about how cool macs are – I’ll try to resist but they are pretty cool.

A McCartney playlist

2008-08-01T11:38:00.002-04:00

I recently found a Beatles blog which had a George Harrison playlist by someone who used the same rules that I recently used to make a couple of setlists so I thought I'd post mine and see what people think.

So here is my Post-Beatles McCartney setlist. There aren't many rules – it just needs to be able to fit onto one CD. That's the tricky part because that forces you to trim it down quite a bit. I also wanted this to be a good introduction to McCartney's music for someone who wasn't familiar with it and I wanted it to be a good listening experience so the order took some thought. Here's what I came up with.

	Name	Album
1	The Lovely Linda	Wingspan: Hits and History
2	Big Barn Bed	Red Rose Speedway
3	Jet	Wingspan: Hits and History
4	English Tea	Chaos and Creation in the Backyard
5	Pipes Of Peace	Wingspan: Hits and History
6	Live And Let Die	Wingspan: Hits and History
7	Motor Of Love	Flowers in the Dirt
8	Band On The Run	Wingspan: Hits and History
9	Ever Present Past	Memory Almost Full
10	Another Day	Wingspan: Hits and History
11	Mull Of Kintyre	Wingspan: Hits and History
12	Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey	Wingspan: Hits and History
13	Only Mama Knows	Memory Almost Full
14	Beautiful Night	Flaming Pie
15	Venus And Mars / Rockshow (Single Edit)	Wingspan: Hits and History
16	Dance Tonight	Memory Almost Full
17	Maybe I'm Amazed	Wingspan: Hits and History
18	Every Night	Wingspan: Hits and History
19	Tug Of War	Wingspan: Hits and History
20	My Brave Face	Flowers in the Dirt
21	Your Loving Flame	Driving Rain

There are three big ballads on here – McCartney often ends his album with one of these – and I like them a lot but I needed to somehow put them on here in a way that made sense. So I split the 21 songs into three parts and ended each part with one of the ballads – that helped me give the list some flow. My daughter Bethany questioned the inclusion of "English Tea." Feel free to suggest other options.

A Great Headline

2008-08-01T07:01:00.004-04:00

Every day I check my local paper on line to see what the local news is. Today's headline really impressed me as hard-hitting journalism.

Now, in fairness, there was concern that another city's water treatment plant had been the major contributor so it really is a worthwhile story but the headline made me wonder,

This Means War

2008-07-27T15:58:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, U2 is going to be getting a few more of my bucks over the next couple of months and it started last week when I picked up the deluxe remastered edition of their third album, War. I am getting all three but I had to order the other two because they weren't in – which actually might be a good thing – it will spread them out for me.

First of all, the packaging is very nice. I liked the big box deluxe version of Joshua Tree very much and this, while it is a smaller (and cheaper) version it complements that one well – there is a booklet inside a slipcase which holds the two CDs as well as a number of pages of pictures, essays and information. Edge has notes on many of the tracks from the bonus CD and there are lyrics along with any notes about single releases. The sound on the remastered version of the original is fine – although there was nothing revelatory.

The bonus CD, though, is much better that I anticipated. Of the three bonus CDs this is the one I was least excited about because a look at the setlist indicates that four versions of "New Year's Day" and three of "Two Hearts Beat As One." I wasn't real excited about that. But it turns out that I really like them – the dance mixes are actually quite different and have a cool vibe to them. The other tracks are OK. One was already on the b-sides from 1980-1990 and the others are interesting but far from essential.

But the real find is the two live tracks that close out the CD, "I Threw A Brick Through a Window/A Day Without Me" and "Fire." These show a youthful U2 in full force back when they opened shows for others and had to proves themselves to the crowd in 30 minutes – and they do a fabulous job.

If you're a U2 fan then this is a must – a great version of a great album. I'm looking forward to the other two CDs more than ever now – I hope they arrive soon!

A great time for U2 fans

2008-07-24T09:28:00.002-04:00

As I write this on my new Palm Centro as I'm sitting in an airplane somewhere between Michigan and New Jersey on a quick trip to visit my mom. Ever since I got an iPod and noise-cancelling headphones I've enjoyed listening in planes and in airports. I don't read well in moving vehicles so listening is just right.

It also gives me a bit of time to reflect on some of the listening I've been doing lately. It's been a while since we've had new U2 to listen to but that will soon change. This is going to be an exciting fall for U2 fans. This week the band released remasters of their first three albums each with a bonus disc of extras (which I won't be able to get until I return home.). But those of us who check iTunes on Tuesday mornings were surprised to find the audio from the Joshua Tree Bonus DVD now available as an album on iTunes called Live From Paris. Many of those on the internet who follow the band suggest that this is what they should have released instead of Rattle and Hum. They may be right. I listened on this flight and it's great.

All this should be enough to keep us happy until September when the long awaited DVD and CD remaster release of Under a Blood Red Sky happens.

Then, in November the NEW album hits - their first since How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in 2004! The has been little news about it except for a few hints here and there but I've enjoyed every one of their albums before so I'm really looking forward to it.

More free music

2008-07-19T13:51:00.003-04:00

If you like free music - and who doesn't? - then you need to go check out Derek Webb's Noisetrade.com website. Derek discovered that giving music away in exchange for email addressed increased attendence at his shows, merchandise sales and even sales of the albums he is giving away.

So he created NoiseTrade to showcase lesser-known artists - in the past two weeks they've gone from just over 20 albums to over 40, including ones by Derek, Sandra McCracken and Sixpence None the Richer.

New Music from Sixpence None the Richer

2008-07-11T07:29:00.001-04:00

Go to NoiseTrade to find the new EP from Sixpence None the Richer and other music - pay what you like or tell three friends!

Ringo's birthday

2008-07-07T11:59:00.001-04:00

Today is Ringo Starr's birthday - although I suppose using his last name was utterly unnecessary. He turns 68 today and he had an interesting wish - he asked if everyone would flash a peace sign and say (shout, whisper, think ... whatever) "peace and love" at 12 noon wherever they happened to be.

This happened quite off the cuff when some TV program asked him what he wanted for his birthday and his answer just "just more peace and love." He then went on from there to say something like "why don't we all just..." and there you have it.

Ringo's old band certainly did a lot to promote peace and love in the 60's and I was one of those people who grew up thinking that peace and love are a pretty good idea, overall. So, Ringo, thanks for the music. Just in case I forget I've timed this so that it pops up right at noon.

Peace and Love.

Still watching Father's Day videos

2008-07-06T15:57:00.003-04:00

I got some DVDs for Father's Day and I'm still working my way through them but here is a quick update:

Serenity - it is not often that TV shows that didn't even get a complete first season turn out to be major motion pictures but this is a case where it happened. The show was Firefly, which I got for Christmas from Bethany and Meredith. They only made 14 episodes of Firefly, a space western which was pretty cool. In fact, they only aired 11 of the 14 episodes - but, as is the case with some TV shows, this one found it's footing after a few episodes and then got better as the season went on. By the time I got to the end of the season I was looking forward to seeing the movie, named after the spaceship they flew on.
The movie did what many movies do compared to TV shows - the budget is bigger, the effects are better and the plot is also bigger. But Joss Whedon did this one up well, making it bigger than a regular episode but yet not so big that it felt unnatural in comparison to what went before. I really enjoyed it and I recommend both the series and the movie.
Spiderman 3 - I reviewed this film when I saw it in the theater and , while it may be my least favorite of all three Spiderman films it is still enough fun that when it went cheap enough I knew I would enjoy it - I did.
The Indiana Jones Trilogy - one more film to watch yet (although I saw them all a number of years ago) - I'm also looking forward to the disc of extras and the making-of documentary.

All in all, an excellent Father's Day once again!

Tim Russert

2008-06-13T18:05:00.002-04:00

NBC News political analyst Tim Russert died suddenly today at age 58. He was probably my favorite political analyst. He had a relaxed style which I really liked and when he said something I just figured it was true - and it usually was. I well remember during the 2000 election when he got out his white board and started adding up electoral votes pointing out that it was still up in the air and showing how either Bush or Gore could win. That board became his partner for the rest of the evening. Just at the time that snazzy graphics were showing up on the screen, Russert showed that clear explainations were more important than flash. I'll miss his contribution to the news.

What's the trouble with Moralism?

2008-06-06T10:33:00.002-04:00

My book is quoted in this article from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship website. It's a good article with many other good links on the topic of faith formation.

Momofuku – Elvis Costello

2008-06-05T16:12:00.001-04:00

A few months ago I saw that the Police were going to be playing the Arena in Grand Rapids and I thought "that's cool." But when I saw that Elvis Costello was the opening act I jumped at the chance and decided that it was worth the money. That prompted me to rediscover and discover (thanks to Bethany) much of Costello's extensive catalog. To put the icing on the cake, he had a new album, Momofuku, coming out on CD five days before the show I had tickets for. Perfect.

So I spent a lot of time with some of Elvis' albums reminding myself that I really liked My Aim is True, Mighty Like a Rose and his collaboration with Anne-Sofie Von Otter, For the Stars. I learned to love North and All This Useless Beauty and I once again was astonished at how Costello jumps from genre to genre all the while keeping his sense of melody and interesting chord structures. I will admit that his classical piece, Il Sogno, didn't do much for me, sounding somewhat like a soundtrack to nothing. But overall I was really really impressed. So when I read that Momofuku was Elvis with the Imposters, the same band that had done When I Was Cruel and the Delivery Man I wasn't real excited (because those aren't among my favorite EC records) but figured I'd pay 10 bucks so that I'd know the new music for the show.

I'm really glad I did because Momofuku sounds fresh, energetic and engaging in a way that many of Elvis' other recent albums don't. I like almost all of the songs and the performances are not over-thought. The album came about very quickly – hence the name, a reference to the inventor of instant noodles. Costello had no intention of making a record but when his band fell into place at a session for the next Jenny Lewis record he couldn't resist. This format suits Costello well and the album has an urgency that is infectious. From the open track, "No Hiding Place" to the finale "Go Away" Costello's legendary lyrical directness is in full force. And while it didn't jump out at me at first, hearing him perform "Flutter and Wow" in concert has made that song one of my all time favorites. Momofuku is an album that is best enjoyed if you're in the mood to listen closely but not too closely, to think about what you're hearing but not too much and to enjoy a great record rather than listen to the NEXT BIG ARTISTIC STATEMENT. But that is the main strength of this record - because Costello seemed to not try so hard to make that big statement he succeeded in make a great little pop record that's worth repeated listenings.

Ready to rock the RCA

2008-06-04T18:09:00.003-04:00

This weekend the Reformed Church of America is having their General Synod in Holland, MI. Ordinarily that would get only a moderate notice from me since I belong to their sister church, the Christian Refomed Church, and RCA synodical decisions have only a minimal effect on me. But this year I have been asked to play guitar for worship for this group every day (except Sunday) for the next 5 days or so. I practiced once with the brass and string group for the opening and closing worship and tomorrow I practice with just a keyboard player for the morning prayer sessions. I'm looking forward to this for a couple of reasons: 1) worship services planned by my friends Ron Rienstra and Greg Scheer are usually awesome so these should be too 2) it is fun to play guitar 3) it is fun to lead worship on the guitar 4) it is fun to play with good players - and I will be.

So, watch out RCA - I'm ready to rock.

Preaching podcast

2008-05-20T06:46:00.002-04:00

Preaching Magazine's Michael Duduit interviewed me about my book, Helping Our Children Grow in Faith, and now the podcast has been posted. You can listen to it here.

Old guys still rock – Phoenix by Asia

2008-05-04T16:28:00.002-04:00

I was pretty excited for the first Asia album when it was released back in 1982 (a long time ago.) The band was a super group made up of four top-flight members of some of the best progressive rock bands in the world – or at least in England. Steve Howe, the guitar hero from Yes was at the top of my list because his playing always made me sit up and take notice. Geoff Downes, who had recently joined Yes after making his mark with the Buggles' hit "Video Killed the Radio Star," was going to be playing keyboards and, while Downes was no Rick Wakeman, the fact that he had done a stint in Yes put him near the top of my list of cool keyboard players. Carl Palmer from Emerson, Lake and Palmer would be on drums and I thought Palmer was a fabulous drummer so I was stoked for that. In fact, the person who I knew least well was John Wetton, bassist and vocalist for UK and, before that, for King Crimson, a band that I had always held in high regard but one I didn't know too well (yet – I would later listen to them quite a bit.)

In my imagination, the first album from this new supergroup would feature long – very long – songs with multiple sections, long instrumental passages and pompous but often incomprehensible lyrics. There would be a theme – something really huge like "our future as a human race" – that would weave throughout all the songs. And it would have creative artwork which had an other-worldly quality, preferably by Roger Dean who had done most of the coolest Yes album covers. Before I ever heard a single note I had all this figured out. After all, what else could these guys possibly deliver than something that would completely blow my mind?

When I eagerly snatched up their self-titled debut (on vinyl – this was 1982 after all) I was disappointed. I wanted the sequel to Close to the Edge, perhaps Yes' finest moment, or maybe the follow up to ELP's Brain Salad Surgery, both of which had 18-30 minute suites which defined the high point of progressive rock in the 70's. What I got was something quite different. The band decided that they would not go after overly complex heady progressive rock but, rather, they would shoot for short, radio-friendly songs which would actually get played on the radio (or the newly minted MTV) and might even be a hit. They produced songs which showed their love for melody and their instrumental chops without making an album that you needed a long attention span to digest. What I got was the pop sounds of "Heat of the Moment." It wasn't bad. In fact, it was quite catchy. And the synth horns that opened the track were pretty cool. Howe's guitar work was vintage Howe. It was simple but it was still complex in a cool progressive-rock kind of way. It wasn't what I expected but once I accepted it for what it was I liked it. The first album took off big time and was a massive hit. They were everywhere on the radio and on MTV. This was the biggest hit any of these guys had ever had. The four members of Asia had gone from the relative obscurity of the progressive rock confines to being a big arena-rock band. And when I listened with headphones the album had a lot of cool stuff going on. Steve Howe had overdubbed lots of interesting guitar parts and had used a whole arsenal of different instruments to make his patented Steve Howe sound part of the aural landscape. It was a great album. I was excited about the prospect of where they'd be going next.

Unfortunately it didn't last. When their second album, Alpha, was released it sounded like a Wetton/Downes album with Steve Howe relegated to putting a few guitar touches on as an afterthought and Howe left the band soon thereafter. The band tried to continue with other guitar players but they never caught the fire of that first album again. There has been a band called Asia around almost continuously since then but it was mostly Geoff Downes and whoever else he wanted to play with. For most of us Asia was the four guys who started it and the bands that followed may have done some interesting music but it wasn't the same – not even close.

Whatever personal stuff had kept the guys apart for all these years got sorted out and the band got back together a year or so ago and did an oldies tour. That went so well that they recorded an album of new material called Phoenix. I'm glad to say that the classic Asia sound is back. Phoenix sounds like the legitimate follow up to 1982's self-titled debut and, while Howe isn't quite as present as he was on their first album, he's definitely part of the mix. The players have aged, of course, but they still play and sing well. The lyrics still sound a bit pompous but it could be more a function of Wetton's rich baritone voice and of the backing track making almost anything sound that way than any issues with the actual lyrics. Wetton's recent health scares have caused him to reflect on the meaning of life and this comes out in at least a couple of tracks giving the requisite progressive-rock gravitas to some of the songs.

Musically, this album is one of the most melodic progressive rock albums in memory. It could almost be subtitled "the return of the power ballads" as they roll out one after another heartfelt, catchy melodies with powerful hooks and instrumental motifs that get stuck in your head pretty quickly. There are still things I wish for – Palmer's drumming in mostly unremarkable, although there isn't much opportunity for him to show the kind of chops he did on ELP's Tarkus, for example. Wetton's thunderous bass propelled many of the early King Crimson albums (especially Lark's Tongues in Aspic, Red and some of their live material from that era) but his playing on Phoenix is somewhat reserved. And I wish Steve Howe had been part of the basic track on more of the songs instead of being used primarily for instrumental flourishes. But it is the playing and songs of Geoff Downes along with the voice of John Wetton that defines Asia's sound and those pieces are intact. This is a fine album – one that I have found myself listening to a lot more than I expected. While it is quite different than most of the music that is being produced these days, fans of Asia's best work from the 80's will find much to like here and younger listeners might just find something new and interesting to try out.

John Legend covers "Pride"

2008-04-25T07:42:00.000-04:00

Worth watching

Most helpful map EVER

2008-04-24T20:00:00.006-04:00

Lynnae has to play violin in the school orchestra at Oakland Christian Reformed Church on Sunday night and she asked me where it was. I said it was out in the country. (Actually, I think I said "boonies.") She wanted to know where it was more specifically.

So, being an internet kind of guy I found their address on line and plugged it into google expecting a map. Here is the map that showed up. VERY HELPFUL! (click to enlarge)

Can’t Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould

2008-04-11T19:44:00.002-04:00

I finally finished Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould. It took me a long time because a) it is a long book and b) I've been quite busy lately. In the prologue, Gould writes that this book is unique in that it combines "three main perspectives – the biographical, the musical and the historical – in an effort to convey the full import of the Beatles' lives art and times." (p. 12) Gould is looking to do all these things in one book, something he claims no other book on the Beatles does. He succeeds on nearly all counts.

As for the biographical, Gould's book is not quite the definitive biography that Bob Spitz' recent book is – and it couldn't be, especially since this book is not as long and covers things that Spitz never intended to. That said, I wonder if a novice could read this book and get a sense for the whole story. I'm not sure. It struck me, at times, that one had to know the story of the Beatles to really understand what was happening in the book. For me, that was a good thing – I don't need five pages explaining things at a level that someone who is culturally illiterate would need. I just found myself wondering if this book was written primarily for people like me who has seen, heard and read it all as far as the Beatles is concerned.

The historical part I found especially enlightening and learned things about the band and the things that were influencing them that I had not learned. The part of the book that is WAY over the top for novices are track by track discussions of nearly each and every song in the Beatles catalog. While the discussions are enlightening and interesting, the level of detail sometimes goes beyond being a fan to being something else entirely. On the other hand, I really dug thinking about the songs that way, and thought that the critique was especially interesting on the Beatles' top albums, Revolver, Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road.

So if you've read at least one other Beatles book I highly recommend this one. It's very very good.

Switchfoot at Calvin College 4-5-08

2008-04-06T20:27:00.005-04:00

I was pretty ready to see Switchfoot at Calvin College on Saturday night by the time they came out for their show. I have been playing Jon Foreman's EPs, Fall and Winter, a lot the past month, I had put their last two albums, Oh! Gravity and Nothing is Sound, on rotation in my ipod and I had them in the car. I went to the conversation with Jon Foreman in the afternoon and it was really excellent to hear him talk about his new EPs and his songwriting. We had a fairly quick dinner and then back to campus to wait in line for quite a while. While in the car I played "Stars" for Lynnae and said how it was my favorite song on the album. I sure hoped they'd play it. We got in about 45 minutes before the show was scheduled to start and then had to wait until TWO opening acts did their sets. Emory and Athlete both had 45 minute sets which were, for me, about 45 minutes too long each. To make things a bit worse Emory were really really really loud. To the point where I went to get earplugs. So, after all of that it was almost 10:00 by the time Switchfoot hit the stage. I was already tired and I hoped it was worth it.

Then the lights went down and the band took the stage with Jon Foreman going over to the piano where he sang the chorus from "The Shadow Proves the Sunshine" and when he got to the end of the chorus the band came in with a wash of sound which morphed into the amazing opening riff of "Stars." It was clear almost immediately that this band was not going to be content with merely playing album versions of their songs – they were rethinking and reworking them. I was immediately hooked. They went right from "Stars" in to "Oh! Gravity." The sound was great and the band was on target. By the fourth song Jon Foreman announced that this was the best audience of the tour and it felt like it. The crowd was very much into the band and the band responded with a high energy performance that left nothing in the dressing room.

Foreman is a really good front-man, reminding me of Bono in spots, the way he speaks between and during songs, the way his music deals with larger themes and how he seems to want to raise the level of conversation but also encourage all his listeners to be better people. Jon went out into the crowd at one point standing on the armrests of the seats just behind me. (The picture is my daughter Meredith with Jon Foreman right behind her.) It was clear that the band was watching him for cues on when to change the music around and that Foreman was free to improvise over the band because they knew what they were doing and they were following him well. I saw them a number of years ago outdoors and they've improved greatly since then. The addition of the two newer band members has allowed Foreman to have much more latitude in concert – he doesn't have to worry about playing guitar so much – he has other people to do that.

The concert ended with their hit "Meant to Live" after which Jon came out to do a solo song from his newest EP, Spring. Then he started a solo version of "Dare to Move" which was great but before he was finished with the first chorus the rest of the band joined him and rocked the song out to close out the show. I have liked their music on CD but I really didn't expect them to be that good in concert. I am now a big fan.

a blog milestone

2008-04-03T21:27:00.004-04:00

I've mentioned before that my daughter Bethany is a bit of an internet celebrity. Her "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks has been written up by the Associated Press, the Chicago Tribune and even the Holland Sentinel!!!!

Today, her blog reached a milestone - she has had over one million page views. That is astonishing. Way to go, Bethany!

Reading / Listening / Watching – March 2008

2008-03-30T16:27:00.005-04:00

It has been a while since I've posted so I thought I'd do an update of what I've been up to.

Reading

I'm a little past halfway through the brilliant new Beatles book Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould. I wrote about it before I started reading it and it is every bit as good as many of the reviews say it is. It does a great job of not only talking about the lives of the Beatles but it also puts that and their music in the context of the times and the political social and artistic changes that were happening in the world. On top of that there is a song by song discussion of each of their recordings. It really is special and, while it is a bit too in-depth to be anyone's first book about the Beatles, for someone like me who has read lots of books on the Beatles, I'm enjoying it immensely.

I have, for the past couple of years, participated in the Calvin Theological Seminary book of the quarter reading group and this quarter we're reading Elizabeth Strout's Abide With Me, a fascinating look at the life of a small town preacher who's wife's death has brought him, his young daughter and their community personal turmoil. It is only through allowing his church to see him broken and in need of help that he can once again effectively lead them. We'll get together three times to discuss the book, once with the author who is visiting Calvin for the Festival of Faith and Writing! It's a good book and I enjoyed it a lot.

Listening

Because I have tickets to the Switchfoot and the Police/Elvis Costello concerts coming up soon I've gotten back into their music lately and, while I've already expressed my love for Jon Foreman's EPs I have mostly lately listened to a lot of Elvis Costello and, I must say, that his gift for melody and for inventive song and chordal structure is really extraordinary. I have long thought "Couldn't Call it Unexpected" from Mighty Like a Rose was a prime example of this but I just lately came to love the album All This Useless Beauty. It is just packed with beautiful songs. And if you haven't heard For the Stars, his duet album with opera singer Anne-Sophie Von Otter, you're missing something truly special.

I have also enjoyed Bethany Dillon and Matt Hammitt's worship album In Christ Alone. Meant to be more a modern hymns album than a praise and worship album it takes a number of songs by Keith Getty and others and puts them in a more modern setting and does a credible job with them. Some of the tracks come across as sub-standard versions of very popular songs (the title cut, or "How Deep the Father's Love" for example) but others, most notably Getty's "Jesus is Lord" which is transformed to a hip, new uptempo version, work really well and gives me a new appreciation for the song.

Finally, in the flurry of new and old music that I've been enjoying, I'm ashamed to say that it took me a couple of years to finally pick up the amazing Before the Daylight's Shot by Ashley Cleveland. I should have known better since her previous album, the live You Are There, is one of my all-time favorites. It's just that she doesn't release albums' very often and so I forget just how good she (and her guitarist/husband Kenny Greenberg) is. Amazing stuff. Meant to be played loud.

Watching

I continue to work through DVDs and I'm getting near the end of both Season 6 of 24 (which is much better than I was lead to believe based on the "24 is losing it" buzz that I heard last season) and Season One of Veronica Mars which also I'm enjoying quite a bit. I must also admit to watching American Idol and I have to say that, while David Archuletta got off to a strong start, David Cook is really bringing it lately … dawg.

I also watched the film Enchanted last weekend and it was wonderful. It dragged only the slightest bit near the end but, as a send up of Disney animated classics it is really great. The songs are catchy and the effects are quite impressive. And Amy Adams is just too likeable as the soon-to-be princess. Even if there are no kids in your house, this one is too much fun to miss.

Together We Worship - again

2008-03-18T12:10:00.003-04:00

A few days ago I wrote about The curriculum about worship that Laura and I wrote and recently published. Today it got mentioned in Dan Beerens' Nurturing Faith blog.

Thanks for writing about it, Dan!

Jon Foreman – Fall and Winter

2008-03-16T18:26:00.003-04:00

Switchfoot has been an interesting band to follow over the years. They got their start in San Diego and were signed by Charlie Peacock to his fledgling Re:think label around ten years ago. Charlie told me over dinner one night (yeah, I had to work that in) that he didn't produce their album because he didn't want to screw it up. He thought they were pretty cool and I did too. Then they hit the big time by placing songs from their album in at least one high profile movie and they've expanded their band from three to five full time members. They've solidified their sound and they've recently left their label to go indie. I wrote nice things about their latest album, Oh Gravity, in this blog before.

I've been impressed with the way Jon Foreman, lead singer and principal song writer, doesn't go for any obvious CCM-type images even though that would have been a safe way to go early on. Their music is fun, challenging and interesting. I was excited to see that they're coming to Calvin College for a concert next month. I've already got my ticket.

What I found most interesting lately, though, is that Foreman has begun releasing the first two of four EPs named after the seasons. Initially released as online downloads, the first two were gathered together in a 2-CD set and released to stores a little while ago. I got the Fall and Winter set last week and I'm quite impressed. These are songs that clearly wouln't work well in a full band setting. Most of these songs are Foreman's acoustic guitar, his voice, and limited other instruments like a cello, a small brass group or a bass clarinet, of all things. The focus in front and center on the vocals and the songs and they're really fine. Foreman's voice isn't the kind of voice that gets me excited – he hits all the notes but there is an untrained quality to it that, while it oozes authenticity, isn't all that great when stripped of the trappings of the band. But in this case it works and it works well. A hat tip to Foreman and executive producer and guest keyboard player Charlie Peacock – he said yes this time – for giving us an album that sounds both well produced and yet makes us feel like we're eavesdropping on the way Foreman sounds when he's alone in his home.

With an album like this the sound of it could easily run together and sound the same after a while but I listened to both of these in succession this morning with my ipod and I found that the arrangements are different enough (and the albums are short enough) that I didn't have a problem with that at all. I found myself enthralled by these EPs and I can't wait for Spring to show up.

There is a Light that Shines in Darkness

2008-03-11T07:51:00.002-04:00

Over the last few years I have often found myself awake at night (or at least very early in the morning) and I am thankful for my ipod. I pop in my earbuds and listen to music for a while. Sometimes I fall back asleep but other times, like this morning, I just lie there and listen for a while. I put the ipod on shuffle and enjoy the random set of music, all of which I like.

This morning one of the songs that popped up was Phil Keaggy's "All There is to Know" from his album Crimson and Blue. The emotional and lyrical centerpoint of that song for me is the line "There is a light that shines in darkness." Reflecting on that line this morning made me think about the book of Judges and how that book shows how the people of Israel drifted away from God. In that book we have a series of events all of which start with Israel forgetting about God and ending with a deliverer, a "judge," rescuing them from their bondage only to find themselves drifting away again. And things get worse and worse – by the end of the book we have two stories that show that even the Levites, the priestly tribe, had forgotten the way that God wanted them to live.

As that book ends things are in pretty bad shape. But then we read the little book called Ruth, a book in which we see that there is a light that shines in darkness and that light shines from Bethlehem. There is still at least one person, Boaz, who is honorable and who will redeem Ruth, not because of anything that she has done, but because of who she is. I like that book. I like thinking about what it might have been like between Ruth and Boaz. I find myself wondering what there was about Ruth that made Boaz notice her. I find myself wondering why God chose to bring in an outsider, Ruth from Moab, to continue the line of Judah which would become the line of Christ. The book of Ruth reminds me that even if things look grim God will not forsake us – not because of what we have done but because we are His people. These are the thoughts I had because I used my iPod this morning.

A Worship Curriculum for 4th – 6th Grade

2008-03-10T09:42:00.002-04:00

About three years ago the director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship suggested that Laura and I might consider writing a curriculum that Christian elementary schools could use to teach worship. We took up that challenge and, over the course of that summer and the following school year, created the curriculum, Together We Worship. This week, we got our copies of the final product, now published by Christian Schools International.

I have fond memories of writing this curriculum. That summer Laura and I discovered the joys of walking out to the pier on the south side of the Holland channel, near the lighthouse. It was on those walks that we hammered out the ideas behind this curriculum. One of the great challenges was that we could assume very little with respect to what the children had experienced about worship. Worship services around North America can be quite different and we didn't know if these children were in churches that practiced a very traditional type of worship, a very contemporary form of worship or something in between. In addition, we didn't know what kind of training the teachers would have in thinking about worship so our notes had to be fairly extensive on the content of the lesson. On the other hand, because this was to be used by professional educators we could assume more teaching skills than we can when we write for Sunday School teachers. Another complication is that for other curricula we had written we had been given a format to follow – we had no such format for this unit because it would be a stand-alone curriculum and we really were starting with a blank slate. Those discussions happened often along the Holland channel and on the shores of Lake Michigan. We could jump in the car and get there in about 7 minutes from our house and that was a great opportunity to explore a part of Holland that we really hadn't explored before.

After our initial work was done the Institute invited 15 Christian schools from around North America to participate in a day-long workshop around our work. That consultation day happened almost exactly two years ago. Here is what I wrote at the time. We asked each school to send two teachers (often one classroom teacher and a music teacher) to spend the day with us and then to use the curriculum in their school and to send us feedback on what worked and what didn't. That day was great. Many of the teachers sent us good feedback and we revised the curriculum and then waited to see if we could get it published. Thanks to the work of a number of people the curriculum is now available in print and on CD. Special thanks to John Witvliet, the staff at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and the teachers who helped us revise this work. It is great to finally see it in print!

Watching and Listening winter update

2008-03-01T10:10:00.003-05:00

Between commutes that, because of the weather, are often twice as long as they typically are (which means that most days I've been on the road for at least two hours) and some sort of cold/flu/virus that I'm fighting I've been listening to a lot of new music lately. I've also caught up on some DVD watching since Christmas. I tend to have a couple of series going at the same time. I almost never watch more than one episode of a show in one sitting so it takes me months to get through a series and usually days to get through a film. While that can blunt the impact of the film I typically don't have a couple of hours to give to one film at a time so I do what I can. I'm still in the process of getting to know most of these albums on this list so I haven't formed final opinions on but I'm working on it.

Indelible Grace V: Wake Thy Slumbering Children (CD) – Kevin Twit has once again assembled a wonderful batch of artists (like Derek Webb, Sandra McCracken, Jeremy Casella, Andrew Osenga and others) who have rewritten old hymns to give us the fifth in his Indelible Grace series. This set is perhaps a little less up-tempo than previous editions but on my second listening I realized how many beautiful melodies there are on this album and it has grown on me ever since.

Joni Mitchell: Shine (CD) – I'm still trying to figure this album out. Mitchell makes an, at times too strident, album about the environment which has only a little lyrical subtlety but her jazz/folk sensibilities and her amazing voice still come through. It is the opening instrumental, "One Week Last Sumer" though that really grabbed my attention.

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova: The Swell Season (CD) – I have heard from more than a few people that I need to see the film Once. The song "Falling Slowly" won an academy award for best song and Bethany got me to listen to the song and the album. This album has really caught my attention. It is full of emotion and careful, delicate instrumentation which set off the sometimes fragile voices in a way that really heightens the drama of these songs. I have played it multiple times a day for the past week and I just can't get enough if it.

Derek Webb & Sandra McCracken: Ampersand (CD) – They've appeared on each other's albums for years but this is the first time husband and wife Derek and Sandra have actually made an album (or in this case and EP) together. Technically it isn't released for two months but with a pre-order you get an immediate download and it has been a lot of fun to listen to. My immediate favorite track was a cover of Dylan's "If Not For You" with more than a little George Harrison influence.

Tift Merritt: Another Country (CD) – I had never heard of Merritt until her song "Broken" showed up on a Paste Sampler. I was so impressed that on the day the album was released I downloaded it from iTunes. While "Broken" still remains a favorite I am impressed with the rest of the album as well and I'm looking forward to hearing it more so that I get to know the other songs too.

Heroes: Season One (DVD) – I finished the first season of Heroes and enjoyed it more as the season came to a close. This is a smart, quirky show. I understand that the strike-shortened second season didn't quite deliver like the first one did but I'm willing to hang in there with them for a while because I really enjoyed the first season.

Firefly: The Compete Series (DVD) – I had not heard of Firefly until my daughters gave the DVD to me for Christmas. This series only lasted for a short season (11 eposodes plus three that never aired) but, just as it was being canceled it really got going well and the last three unaired episodes are among my favorite. The plot was continued in the feature film Serenity which I now have to see.

Across the Universe (DVD) – This Julie Taymor directed film based on the Beatles song catalog was an ambitious idea – how do you make a coherent plot out of a series of songs that were composed without any such plot in mind? The result is mixed. There are times in the film that work really well, like the prom dancing to "Hold Me Tight" or Uncle Sam pointing and saying "I Want You." There are also many things that seem to be there simply because there was a song that might work. After watching it and all the DVD extras I'm about ready to watch it again. My son tells me that he thinks it gets better on repeated viewings. I think that the plot will become clearer and I'll probably catch a lot more so I'm looking forward to seeing it again. The soundtrack, which I've had for a while, makes a lot more sense in the context of the film. They did a nice job of reimagining the music in the context of the film.

Bones: Season One (DVD) – It has taken Laura and me over two months but we're nearly done with the first season of the detective series Bones and we're really enjoying it. The characters are becoming more developed and the cases are varied enough to keep it interesting. I'm occasionally annoyed that Temperance Brennen, the lead character, can tell amazing amounts of things about someone from simply looking at a bone fragment but I guess if I'm willing to let characters fly around in a spaceship in Firefly I can live with a little suspension of disbelief in Bones. I like the interplay between the characters and mystery aspect of the show keeps me guessing.

Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport – Richard Mouw

2008-02-23T14:44:00.005-05:00

A week and a half ago I was about to take a trip to San Diego for a conference and knew I was going to carry my computer in it's backpack on the plane. I very much wanted to begin reading Can't Buy Me Love, the new book about the Beatles, which had arrived a few weeks ago but which I have not been able to start. That book, however, is rather thick and, as my computer is quite heavy already, I didn't relish carrying that book on my back through airports. I put that one in my suitcase (which I checked) and I looked for something thinner to take along on the plane with me. I went to the (rather large) pile of books that Laura and I have yet to read and selected Richard Mouw's Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport because it was quite thin and it had the word "airport" in the title so that seemed like an obvious choice. Much to my surprise, I enjoyed it so much that I never took my Beatles book out of my suitcase.

Mouw's title refers to a scene in the Paul Schrader movie Hardcore in which a Dutch-American Reformed man from Grand Rapids is asked by a young woman what he believes. His response is that he believes in "tulips," referring to the acronym that has helped many of us remember and organize some of the doctrines that define Calvinist thought. Even though the movie character might have his theological head on straight he doesn't do a very good job of presenting his faith to this young woman. Mouw, however, does a splendid job of presenting the TULIP doctrine and of laying out the five points in a way that helped me think of them anew. While I have known this stuff for a long time Mouw's description is fresh and he brings great insights into how this doctrine fits into today's world.

Where Mouw really shines, though, is in the way he presents Calvinist beliefs as not a closed theology, designed to keep people out but rather as a particular view of scripture which, in his case, has been adjusted and affected by his experiences and by the writings of others. As I got to the end of the book I was reminded of Brian McLaren's Generous Orthodoxy. What I liked most about McLarens's book is that he seemed open to learning things about his faith from others – both Christian and non-Christian. Some probably think he goes a little too far in being open to other beliefs. While there were indeed parts of his book that caused me some consternation, I appreciated the spirit in which he wrote, a view that says that he has his beliefs but that he is willing to listen and learn. I believe that what Mouw lays out in his book is a "Generous Calvinism." Mouw isn't ready to compromise his beliefs but he is happy to listen and learn from others. He talks about his "hunches" and what things make him uneasy but does so with a clear love for the Canons of Dordt (a very old document laying out some of the basic tenets of Christian belief from a Calvinist perspective) but also a clear love for his brothers and sisters who don't share his theological perspective. It is this delightful tone which Mouw sets in this book that makes it so enjoyable and helpful. I highly recommend Calvinism in the Las Vegas Airport both for Reformed folks who could use a refresher course but also for people who just don't get what Calvinists are really about or who think of Calvinism as a dreadful set of doctrines. Mouw's book is a great place to start a dialogue.

A Hard Winter?

2008-02-19T19:36:00.007-05:00

Think we're having a tough winter in West Michigan? Here is some data from Weather Underground

Statement as of 6:56 PM EST on February 19, 2008

... Record winter time snowfall set at Grand Rapids...

A record winter (dec through feb) snowfall of 87.6 inches has been
set at Grand Rapids as of 7 PM this evening. The previous record was
85.1 inches set during the winter of 1951-1952.

The record snowfall for February is 35.5 inches set in 1900.
Currently the total snowfall for February in Grand Rapids through 7
PM this evening is 34.3 inches. That puts February 2008 in second
place for the snowiest February on record. Since it is still snowing
at Grand Rapids it is more than possible that by midnight Grand
Rapids will also set the all time record for snowiest February on
record. February 2007 is now in third place with 33.6 inches of
snow.

This means that we've had the two worst Februarys in the last 100 years this year and last year. And note that this is only February 19 - we still have a long ways to go before winter is done. Maybe living in Holland and driving to Grand Rapids isn't such a great idea...

[EDIT] As of 7 AM on Feb 20 we broke the record:

... Record February snowfall set at Grand Rapids...

The record snowfall as of yesterday for the month of February is
35.5 inches which was set in 1900. The total snowfall for today is
0.3 inches since midnight.

Grand Rapids has now set the all time record for snowiest February
with 35.6 inches as of 7 am today.

Phil Keaggy – the Master and the Musician Tour at Calvin College – Feb 9, 2008

2008-02-16T16:29:00.003-05:00

I'm stuck in the airport in Denver on my way home from the APCE (Association of Presbyterian Church Educators) conference in San Diego so, as long as I'm here for a while (like six hours) I thought I'd write a bit about last weekend – the Phil Keaggy Master and Musician Tour that I attended at Calvin College in Grand Rapids Michigan – where I'm trying to get back to before the day is over.

It was the second night of the tour and it is a remarkable show. Thirty years ago Phil released his landmark instrumental album The Master and the Musician, an album that has been a favorite of mine since I bought it back in the 70's. To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary he assembled a wonderful set of musicians to recreate the entire album on stage. Ric Hordinski was brought in to play guitar and lead the band, Tom Shiness played guitar and other things, John Sferra was on drums and there was also a flautist, keyboard player and a bass player.

The concert opened with Phil introducing the show by saying that the flute and keyboard player, a married couple, would open with an instrumental piece – an airy moody non-melodic piece to set the tone. Next Tom Shinness played a piece on his harp guitar and then the band came out and began the album. The album is about 50-some minutes long but playing it on stage took longer because there is some chatting between the pieces and some, like "The Agora," "Follow Me Up," and "Mouthpiece" were extended. Almost all the songs were done note-perfect which, frankly, was a little strange. I'm not used to rock musicians trying so hard to perfectly match what is on the recording and it felt a little restricted. That, however, does not mean that I didn't love it. I've been a fan of Phil's for years and his playing was, of course, mind-boggling. The whole band did a great job but I was once again impressed with Ric Hordinski's playing – he drew the short straw on recreating some of the more difficult passages from the album and he did them really well. It was really cool to hear the whole album done this way. Ric said that he cut his teeth on this album as a young player so it was a special treat to have a hand in doing it on stage with Phil. You could tell that the music was challenging but that the band had a great time pulling it off. I got the impression that it went better in Grand Rapids than it did the night before in Cincinnati.

The second set, though, was at least as good and I loved it even more. Phil played some of his classic songs from the 30-year ago era, songs that those of us who have been his fans for decades have loved but haven't heard him play with a band in a VERY long time. He played "Love Broke Thru," "Let Everything Else Go," and "Noah's Song" as well as a couple of more recent songs. He came back for an encore with "Time" and "What A Day." These are the songs that I learned to play on guitar many years ago and still play and sing quite often. I attended the show with my three youngest children, who are 21 and 16 years old, and Meredith, the twenty one year old said "this was like the soundtrack to my childhood." The set was short but it was truly wonderful and that set is among my all time favorite Phil Keaggy experiences. I've heard Phil in concert a lot over the years – something like 20 times – but I've never heard his band sound as good on these songs. Back in the old days when he did these he didn't have a band that nuanced the music like this one did. It really was spectacular.

I had a chance to hear some of the soundcheck and to connect with Phil and Ric a bit and that was a real treat. I've met Ric a couple of times before and it was really great to touch base with him. I've heard him in concert by himself twice now (or maybe three times) and he's worth hearing if you get the chance. Check out his latest recording, The Silence of Everything Yearned For. Wonderful stuff.

So, if the M&M tour is coming to your town make a point of hearing it – it was a great evening.

Another Beatles book?

2008-02-04T18:27:00.000-05:00

Another Beatles book? Yes, maybe the best ever. | csmonitor.com

This is the second review that I read that said Can't Buy Me Love by Jonathan Gould is perhaps the best Beatles book out there. I recently got it and I'll be reading it soon. It will have to be very very good to beat Bob Spitz' biography of the Beatles (which I write about here among other places.) But, let's face it - the world is big enough for more than one great book about the Beatles so it doesn't have to be a contest. I'm looking forward to reading it.

EDIT: Ron asked for a link to the Amazon site for the book - here it is.

Catching up

2008-02-03T16:30:00.001-05:00

I have been doing a lot of listening to music and watching DVDs lately and I haven't commented here about many of them so here is a quick summary of what's been going on.

Beatles – I'm near the end of the standard part of one of my trip-through-the-albums-in-order journeys. I just heard Abbey Road and Let It Be for the second time in my car which means that I will next turn to the two Past Masters CDs and then on to all the special ones like the Yellow Submarine Songtrack, Live at the BBC, the Anthologies, etc. so I still have a lot of listening to do. This trip has reminded me of how much I enjoy this music and of how much I'm ready for remasters – could they be announced today at the superbowl???

The Reminder by Feist – This CD appeared on many end of year best-of lists so I took a chance and ordered it and I'm really enjoying it. The combination of authentic, roots sounding songs and instrumentation with sometimes highly polished production gives the album a vibe that is different from what I'm used to. The best comparison I can make is Norah Jones' second album but that's not really fair to either of them. Leslie Feist's songwriting is unique and her vocals and very nice. Mostly though this is an album that feels authentic in a way that I really like.

A Place to Land by Little Big Town – I'm just getting into this CD but it is high on my playlist right now. Imagine the Eagles of their first four albums with a slightly more 21^st century vibe and you get the sound of this band comprised of two men and two women all of whom sing. Sample the album opener "Fine Line" to see what I mean.

Classic Artists: Yes – This three hour documentary (four by the time you're done with the additional interview footage) on DVD is great for fans of the 70's supergroup that keeps coming back for the faithful to see again every once in a while. It follows the twists and turns of the personnel changes with interviews from the vast majority of key players while keeping it lively and interesting. Not much performance footage but I have concerts on DVD of theirs so I really wanted the overview and interviews. It's a fine addition to any Yes fan's collection.

Lost – I watched the season 3 DVD to get myself geared up for season four and it's great, of course. This is one of my all-time favorite shows. I hope the writers strike doesn't screw it up too badly. The first episode of the new season rocked.

Heroes – I'm still watching the first season on DVD. I like it a lot so far.

Upcoming Phil Keaggy concert – Phil's Master and Musician tour is coming to Calvin College next weekend. A friend from PA was trying to fly out to see it but he was unable to make it so I'll go with my kids. I'm pretty pumped about this concert, perhaps the first time Phil has toured with a band other than Glass Harp in over 15 years.

I've also been reading, mostly professional stuff, but I am partway into the Golden Compass and just can't get into it. Maybe I'll give it another shot before I give up completely.

Symposium thoughts

2008-01-27T16:14:00.001-05:00

After three long days of Worship Symposium I'm back home and ready to dive into the new semester. But first things first – for the next month you can hear Debbie Chavez interview me on KMGI radio from Bellingham, Washington. If you go here and scroll down to January 23 you can hear me in segments 2-5.

That was Wednesday night, the night before Symposium, so it was great for me to be able to do that (it was actually still afternoon on the west coast) and then move on to thinking more about symposium. I presented my session twice to a nice sized group (about 150-170 total over the two days I think) and also go to play bass with the Alternative Worship group as they lead a group in worship on Friday evening. It was a good experience for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that my daughter Bethany and my good friend Ron were both leaders for this service and so I got to see a bit more of the behind the scenes stuff that went on. I also got to know Doug Gay, from Scotland, a bit and hung out with Luke Hyder from Milwaukee and local musician/friend Greg Scheer . We lead with three of Doug's songs written specifically for this occasion. It was cool.

The worship services were stellar, as usual, with the service lead by Calvin's LoFT team perhaps being my favorite. Trig Johnson preached and did a wonderful job and my daughter Meredith played viola along with the team (which she does often) but also got to accompany Michael Card. She got to know Card and Calvin Seerveld a bit by assisting them in their workshop on lament. It was really good.

I also got to hear Scott Hozee, Jane Vann, Dallas Willard and Richard Ostling (who was interviewed very nicely by my friend Nathan Bierma.) Where else can one have breakfast with Calvin Seerveld, lunch with hymn writers Rae Whitney and Ed Doemland, and share a walk with Lester Ruth? Or run into Jorge Lockward and Jimmie Abbington and have a brief chat on your way to get coffee.

They also handed out my new books (see them here and here) to the people who came. You can see the picture of the books all stacked up and ready to be handed out. One exciting moment came as Laura and I sat down to lunch with three delightful people who we had not met before. I looked over to see a woman sitting alone at a table reading my book. Pretty cool.

I'm already excited about next year.

Getting Ready for Worship Symposium 2008

2008-01-20T19:31:00.000-05:00

This week is the 2008 Calvin Symposium on Worship. I've attended a number of these symposia, something like 10 of them, and I look forward to it every year. Some of the most well respected people in the field of worship leadership from a broad range of denominations and from around the world will be at Calvin College this weekend.

I'll be presenting twice about "Creating a Child Friendly Culture in your Church" and my daughter Bethany will also be presenting about emergent worship or something like that. It will be good to see her again - she's flying in from Georgia to speak. Laura and my daughter Meredith will also be there - Meredith will be playing in the worship band twice and helping Calvin Seerveld and Michael Card out by singing in their session. So it looks like my family will be well represented there as will two new books with my stuff in it: my new book, Helping Our Children Grow in Faith as well as Howard VanderWell's The Church of All Ages, in which I have a chapter on "Intergenerational Faith Development" and Laura and I have an additional chapter on "Intergenerational Connectors in Worship." Bethany has a short piece in it too!

Since Laura and I have attended so many of these we will see people we know and get a chance to visit with old friends. We're really looking forward to it. Then, almost immediately after that, the new semester starts! The night before symposium begins (Jan 23) I'll be interviewed on KGMI radio in Bellingham, Washington at 3:15 PST. Those of you in the pacific northwest (like Kent!) might want to listen in. it will be my first radio interview about my book but probably not the last, I'm already trying to find a date that works with a station in Philadelphia.

Amazing! Calvin prof Gary Schmidt wins 2nd Newbery Honor

2008-01-14T18:10:00.000-05:00

Winning the Newbery Award is an amazing honor for anyone - my colleague Gary Schmidt has now doen it TWICE!

Calvin author wins 2nd Newbery Honor - Michigan News, Updates, Photos & Video | Detroit, Lansing - MLive.com

Radiohead: In Rainbows

2008-01-09T18:25:00.000-05:00

I've gotten a bunch of new music over Christmas break - most of it from groups I had not heard much of before like The Spoons, Feist, Sara Bareilles, The National and Radiohead. I had not spent much time with Radiohead although I had listened to OK Computer a few times and enjoyed it when I was in the right mood. Their new album, In Rainbows, jumped to have a firm place in both my car and my iPod. I was thinking about what I liked about it and found this review, Radiohead: In Rainbows - PopMatters Music Review, that did a great job of summarizing much of what I like about the album so, instead of me writing this one, daunting since I'm not a huge Radiohead fan and many are calling this one of the top albums of the year, I'd just send you over to the review. I would especially like to point out this paragraph that nicely sums up what first grabbed me about the album:

Radiohead themselves seem to be ready to move on during opener “15 Step”. The song starts in well-traveled Radiohead territory—a heavy drum loop bumps and chugs along while Yorke’s trademark whine waxes paranoid, singing “First you reel me out and then you cut the string”. Jonny Greenwood layers some surges of static over all of that and the formula is set. That is, until a surprisingly docile, sliding guitar riff comes in, setting a contrast that carries through the entire album, where everything calm turns out to be decidedly not, and everything anarchic is more childlike and giddy than sinister. As the song pushes on, a battle arises as drummer Phil Selway takes on the drum loops, playing fast and precise as ever, and eventually he wins out. He finishes the song, and the rest of the record rests on his sturdy shoulders.

Ronnie by Ron Wood

2007-12-31T09:13:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading Ronnie by Ron Wood, guitarist for the Rolling Stones and I enjoyed the book quite a bit. The book can be a little frustrating in times because at first Wood doesn't deal with things in a strictly chronological way which can be a bit confusing. And his discussion of his time in the Faces is pretty brief and mostly about destroying hotels. I would love to have heard a bit about the Rod Stewart solo album thing that Wood was involved in. Wood's book also seems to be mostly a series of anecdotes rather than a more organized look at his life, understandable since he spent most of it drunk or stoned. It appears that Wood is sober now although he still seems to have a rather casual attitude about drugs and booze. This is in sharp contrast to Clapton's autobiography which is really the story of his recovery. Wood's is a trip through his life of debauchery and, while he expresses regret at a few of the things that he did that were not very smart, most of the time he just laughs his way through them.

But, those issues aside, this is an engaging book and the writing is easy-going and fun. Wood's personality really comes through. It was my intention, since I'm not much of a Rolling Stones fan, to just dip into the book here and there. But the first chapter grabbed me so quickly that I soon found myself reading it all. Many of the characters in this book show up in the recent books by Eric Clapton and Patti Boyd (see my reviews here and here) so it is interesting to see yet another perspective on this. Ronnie is hardly the definitive biography of Ron Wood – it's not nearly comprehensive enough for that and there are too many anecdotes and not a complete look at his life. But it is an engaging look at someone who has lived the rock and roll lifestyle to the hilt and has lived to tell about it.

Apple Stores

2007-12-29T15:12:00.001-05:00

Grand Rapids has an Apple Store and my son, an Apple fan, often gets me to go in there with him. It's not a hardship for me because the store is a great place and they have cool stuff. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that way. Here is a New York Times article that says the same thing.

My book arrives!

2007-12-20T12:18:00.000-05:00

My book arrived! You can get your own copy here.

Phil Keaggy – The Master and Musician 30th Anniversary Edition

2007-12-19T09:11:00.001-05:00

A little over thirty years ago, when I was a student at Calvin College, a band of Christian musicians came to campus to give a concert. The band was called Wing and a Prayer and it was many of the players from the influential band Love Song, which had recently disbanded. I got to hang out with them for the day as they set up and prepared to give the concert and their bass player Jay Truax asked me if I had ever heard of Phil Keaggy. I had not. He told me that I absolutely had to get a hold of his album, Love Broke Thru. I did and that was how I started listening to Keaggy's music. I have been doing it pretty consistently ever since. One of the first albums of Phil's that I bought as soon as It came out was The Master and the Musician, an instrumental album that was a real eye opener. Keaggy combined influences from rock, folk and jazz along with delicate arrangements to make a wonderful album that still remains one of his finest.

In celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Master and Musician, Keaggy has released a new edition, remastered and sounding wonderful, along with a bonus CD of out-takes, interviews and commentary. The sound on the remastered M&M is simply wonderful. The guitar sounds are clear and distinct and I am hearing things that I have never heard before. This has made a great album even better. The bonus CD is interesting but I don't think it is going to get lots and lots of play – it's the sort of thing you listen to while you're studying the album but not just for casual listening. The commentaries, interviews and alternate partial mixes are fascinating, though and will help me understand the album better as I listen to it anew.

This is a wonderful reissue of a landmark album. You can pick it up from Phil's website. (As you can see, I got a signed copy.)

The internet allows us to see the ghosts of Christmas Past

2007-12-18T09:19:00.001-05:00

This is, apparently, from the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special. This scene marks the "Life Day Ceremony." Any additional comment would be superfluous.

My Musical Year - 2007

2007-12-15T13:53:00.001-05:00

Throughout the year I have written about a number of the CDs that I spent time listening to. I was glancing at a couple of online top-ten lists and realized that I have listened to very few of the albums in these lists. This may be a factor of my advanced age but I really do try to stay up on things. I bought, for example, new albums by Rilo Kiley, A Fine Frenzy, Mae, Norah Jones, and Arcade Fire but I still feel like I've been out of touch with cutting edge music. I try to stay caught up by downloading the songs of the week from iTunes and by reading Paste magazine and listening to the sampler CD but, frankly, I end up deleting most of the stuff I get because I'm not wild about it. And even though I listen to songs by Brenda Carlisle and Amy Winehouse I just don't like it well enough to want to listen to a while lot more. I guess I'm just old.

So, with that disclaimer, here is my list of albums that really grabbed me this year. As in years past, this is not the best of the year, per se, it's the stuff that I spent the most time actually listening to. So this is the stuff that I clearly liked the most.

Memory Almost Full – Paul McCartney
The single most listened to album of the year for me, hands down, is Paul McCartney's latest. It seems almost cliché that I would pick a Beatles album but, the fact is, I listened to this album a LOT this year. I just really liked it. See my review here.
The Circling Hour – Iona
I spent a lot of time listening to Iona this year and The Circling Hour just might be one of their best ever albums. Outstanding music with great lyrics. My review is here.
Instant Karma – various artists
The John Lennon songbook as interpreted by artists as diverse as U2, Green Day and REM. This one spent a lot of time on my iPod and also in my car. Great songs. My review is here.
The Song Within – Phil Keaggy
I have loved Phil's playing for years and it is a real treat to have him hit one out of the park this year. This instrumental album is one of my all time favorite Keaggy albums. My review is here.
Neon Bible – Arcade Fire
Bethany recently wrote about this on her blog and I waited for a long time to write about it because I felt like I didn't understand it very well. Musically it is quite dense and lyrically it confuses me but I really do like it – I'm just not sure why. Here is what Bethany had to say about it, though.

There were, of course, other albums that I enjoyed: Tell Me What You Know by Sara Groves, The Silence of Everything Yearned For by Ric Hordinski, both The Trumpet Child and Live from Nowhere, Vol 2 by Over the Rhine, Singularity by Mae, Overdressed by Caedmon's Call (my review is here) and Letters to the Editor, Vol 1 by Andrew Osenga (download it for FREE here) are all honorable mention albums but they just didn't have the staying power in my iPod and player that these other albums did.

So there is my list. I also rediscovered a lot of of music this year like the Andrew Osenga catalog and Iona's music and that was a lot of fun.

Paul McCartney - The McCartney Years - Another Review

2007-12-14T11:22:00.000-05:00

Here is a review of The McCartney Years written by someone who was predisposed to dislike it. I found his take interesting.

In case you missed it, here is my review.

Pattie Boyd – Perhaps Not So Wonderful

2007-12-08T18:21:00.001-05:00

As a fan of both the Beatles and of Eric Clapton, I found the idea of an auto- biography of Pattie Boyd, the woman who had married both Eric and George Harrison, to be one that I couldn't miss. She had a front row seat to the all of the post Hard Day's Night Beatles and to Clapton's years with Derek and the Dominoes and his early solo Career. Boyd is Layla! So I was anxious to read Pattie's story called Wonderful Tonight. I thought this would be interesting not only as a person who has read a lot of Beatles books but I had recently read Clapton's autobiography. The difference between them is striking. I thought that Eric's book is, curiously, the better written of the two. I say that this is curious because Boyd's is basically written by her collaborator, Penny Junor, while Clapton rewrote his ghost-written book himself. More striking, though, is that Eric rewrote his book because he said it was too easy to blame other people in the ghost-written version. Blaming themselves is something that recovering addicts seem to do well. They know that the things that they do when they're drunk are not someone else's fault. In contrast, Boyd is eager to lay her problems at the feet of lots of other people; her parents, Harrison, Clapton, etc. I'm sure that living with these people was no picnic but Boyd seems to take little responsibility for her seemingly constant drinking. (She was bad enough that Clapton wrote the song "Shape You're In" about and to her.) Near the end of the book she simultaneously writes about being short on money but yet traveling to exotic places, something those of us who are not high rollers have a hard time understanding.

To make matters worse there are a couple of errors that, while they're not a big deal, are irritating. Boyd talks about the wonderful Harrison song, "Something," that he wrote for her. Unfortunately, she says that it's on the White Album instead of on Abbey Road, where it really is. Then, near the end of the book she said that she had to sell a rare guitar because she needed the money – she sold a "1960 Les Paul Stratocaster." As any guitar player knows there are Gibson Les Pauls and there are Fender Stratocasters. What she wrote is the equivalent of saying that she has a Cadillac Mustang. She clearly doesn't really know what we had.

But quibbles aside Wonderful Tonight is just not a great book. Her story, especially as it gets near the end, just isn't interesting enough, which seems hard to believe. Beatles fans who have read other books about them will learn nothing new here. Clapton fans might find this new perspective interesting but, frankly, she doesn't add much to that story either. So, if you want to read it, do what I did – check it out of the library. I'm unlikely to ever want to refer back to it.

Lennon, 27 years later

2007-12-08T09:27:00.001-05:00

On this 27^th anniversary of John Lennon's death it's hard to believe that I continue to discover new things in his music but 2007 was a year of rediscovery for me with respect to Lennon's solo music. This was due mostly to the Instant Karma collection which helped me to realize that the songs themselves, not just the performances, were powerful. After hearing those I went back and listened to many of his original recordings to find that, even after all these years, they still sound great. I've written before about Lennon and his influence on my music. As a member of the Beatles he was a driving force behind their work and his writing and singing in that band set the standard for pop music for the next four decades. It certainly would have been interesting to see what would have happened had be not been killed so early – would he, like Paul, have continued to make music consistently throughout his life, expanding into classical music perhaps? I think that's unlikely. I think it is more likely that he would have, like George, led a mostly private life emerging occasionally with new music when it suited him and I think that, while that music would have continued to show remarkable growth, that he would continue being primarily influenced by the most basic of rock influences. John was a rocker and, when push came to shove, old rock and roll was not just one of his primary influences (as it was with Paul,) it was THE influence. I don't think he would have strayed far from that.

Revolver – the best Beatles album?

2007-12-04T08:37:00.001-05:00

I am once again going through all the Beatles albums in order on my commute. As I have mentioned before, I have a six-CD changer in my car and two of those slots have Beatles in them. I've allowed each Beatles album to stay in the rotation for two plays and then I switch it out for the next one. Today I heard what I have long considered the best Beatles album, Revolver, and I was reminded why I like it so much. It's almost all there – all the things that are great about the Beatles are present on Revolver. George Harrison has a rocker ("Taxman,") a song with Indian influence ("Love You To,") and a mid tempo song ("I Want to Tell You,") all of which are among his best Beatles era compositions. John Lennon is cryptic ("She Said She Said,") experimental ("Tomorrow Never Knows,") and produces a couple of great standard mid-era Beatles songs ("Doctor Robert," "And Your Bird Can Sing.") Paul McCartney is clearly starting to work outside the bounds of two-guitars-bass-drums with some of his songs adding strings ("Eleanor Rigby,") brass ("Got to Get You Into My Life,") and French Horn ("For No One,") while writing some of the most memorable melodies of his career ("Here, There and Everywhere.") Even Ringo's throwaway novelty tune is the iconic "Yellow Submarine." The performances are top-notch and we see that the band is starting to develop distinct individual personalities while still operating as a unit.

Revolver is sometimes overshadowed by it's successor, Sgt Pepper because it had such a huge influence on the culture when it was released. And, frankly, at the time, Revolver was "just another Beatles album." George has even said that he sees Revolver and Rubber Soul as basically parts one and two of the same album but I think he undersells this album. This is ironic, really, because this album has more of his compositions than any album before and it shows him stepping up as a composer. It also shows some of John and Paul's strongest work. This isn't to say that the albums made before and after this one were weak. It's hard to think of Rubber Soul and Sgt Pepper as anything other than unqualified successes. But time has shown that Revolver found the Beatles at the top of their game.

Rediscovering Iona’s Back Catalog – The Book of Kells

2007-12-01T14:54:00.001-05:00

I've written recently about the latest album by Iona and how much I have been enjoying it. In addition to still listening to The Circling Hour, I have been also working my way, slowly, backward in their catalog and enjoying their older albums. I must say, this is a wealth of excellent music. I have worked my way back to their second album, Book of Kells from 1992, which I remember reading a long time ago was considered the best of their first four albums. I've had it for a very long time and I remember it being a sometimes tough album to "get." Reading reviews on Amazon and on iTunes, some of the people there clearly didn't think it was their best, in fact, the reviews were often lukewarm. This puzzled me so when it came time to start listening to Book of Kells I was anxious to hear it with new ears. Having listened to it a number of times over the past week or so I am more convinced than ever that this album is a highlight of their early years.

The Book of Kells is an illuminated copy of the gospels which was made in about 800 AD and is now housed at Trinity College in Dublin. On my trip to Ireland three years ago I actually stopped at Trinity College and was in the same building as this book. I nearly stopped in to see it but time was short. The Book of Kells is the inspiration for this album which is a reflection on the gospels as well as on this particular artisitic rendition of the gospels. The lyrics reflect the ancient character of the book itself and displays a reverence for God's word and for the saints who went before us. The music is ethereal and powerful. The band plays with both force and finesse. Joanne Hogg's voice is spectacular, of course. This album has some compelling melodies although a lot of the music is evocative more than it is melodic so a cursory trip though this album will not reveals all it's treasures. My suspicion is that the people who gave it a lukewarm review did not give it sufficient time to sink in. I think it is a wonderful artistic statement and a great album.

George Harrison - six years ago

2007-11-30T21:23:00.000-05:00

A year ago, on the fifth anniversary of his death, I wrote this about George Harrison. I still mean it.

I have continued to listen to George's music over the past year, including and especially his work with the Traveling Wilburys (who's album re-release I reviewed here.) I have been working my way through the Beatles releases (in order, of course) in my car and I'm up to Help! and Rubber Soul. I have had these albums for over 40 years and they still sound great to me. Remarkable.