February 12, 2013

Isaac Wardell is the director of Bifrost Arts and the Director of Worship Arts at Trinity Charlottesville (PCA).  He’s been involved in church music and church plants in Georgia, Tennessee, and New York.  He studied at Covenant College.  While serving in New York City he played and performed with the Welcome Wagon, and has produced two Sacred Music anthologies with various musicians under the Bifrost Arts banner (Come O Spirit! & Salvation is Created), with a third due out in April.

I got the chance to chat with Isaac about hymnody, worship, the psalms, what it means to be a contemporary musician serving the church, and the relationship between worship and obedience.  Part One of the interview introduces the history of Bifrost Arts, hymnody and praise music.  Scroll to the bottom to stream an exclusive preview of “Psalm 46” from the upcoming album.  Part Two previews the April 22-24, 2013 conference taking place in Philadelphia titled “The Cry of the Poor.”  Scroll to the bottom to stream an exclusive preview of “By His Wounds” from the upcoming album.

—————————————————————————–

Hopeful Realism:  Tell us about the genesis of Bifrost Arts.

Isaac Wardell:  While I had been living up in Williamsburg (Brooklyn) [serving at Resurrection Presbyterian with Vito Aiuto], I had been quietly developing an ethos for approaching church music.  I had been studying music in college, studying hymnody, had a strong classical music background, and had been living in an urban, post-Christian community.  Incidentally, for about ten years, I had zero exposure to the “Christian culture industry.”  I was working in church plants which meant that I was deciding what we were listening to.  I wasn’t listening to Christian radio, but was going through hymnals and psalters finding ways for us to worship.  In the summer of 2007, we started doing a series of events we called “Sacred Music Festivals” where in small spaces we would  invite people to come and talk about sacred music and about this crazy novelty of people singing together- probably 75% Christians or religious people, but 25% or so just interested in esoteria.  Those events led to a partnership with Rev. Joseph Pensak, ministering locally to college students, as well as connections with other local churches and pastors who helped.

I was in my twenties at the time and probably felt a stronger burden about church music needing to be more excellent, more beautiful, more soulful…rather than reactive, creative.  That’s what I really excited about, especially because of my context.  I was working in a cultural context where those were the real values.  And much Christian music had such a reputation for being facsimile, consumer-driven and draconian.

HR:  Was there a major shift moving from Brooklyn to Charlottesville?

IW:  Bifrost has changed a lot.  As you said, now I work in Charlottesville, VA, essentially in a megachurch.  There are suburban evangelicals, brilliant minds like James Hunter and Nicholas Wolterstorff, college town culture and an evermore diversifying racial complexion.  When I think about how Bifrost can help the church, the idea of being aesthetically innovative and challenging the church to think about the arts in a much more deeply theological way is more of just one sliver of what we’re doing now.  We do much more education and thinking about how we can educate congregations, worship committees, and people involved in planning worship services to think about their way of approaching worship services.

While I’m really excited about releasing this record in the coming months, I’m actually starting to feel more and more that these church curricula that we’re putting out and these conferences and small events are the most helpful thing that we do.  It’s not so much just modeling this sort of ethos but really unwrapping it and showing some biblical concepts that you can bring into your congregation that can really give your congregation a new vocabulary for worship.

When I first came to Trinity it became obvious that our worship vocabulary was so impoverished.  People have “traditional-contemporary,” “high church-low church,” people talk about being relevant…all these things that are really not very descriptive about what the bible has to say about worship.

HR:  Tell me a little bit about a tension you might feel in your work between tradition and innovation.  Singing hymns in new contexts seems to have gained a lot of momentum and quite a following over the last decade or so.  I’ve noticed that the times when the Bifrost records do cover hymnody there isn’t an automatic impulse to necessarily “re-tune” the setting.

The hymn conversation is a fascinating one.  My personal thinking has evolved a lot in the last ten years.  The last thing I want to do is offend anybody, especially my friends who are involved in setting old hymns to new music.  A lot of people who grew up in evangelical churches didn’t grow up singing hymns.  I grew up singing popular Christian music.  When I got to college, I discovered hymns- the depth, beauty, poetry…all these things that were clearly missing from my previous worship experience.  A lot of people have that experience through RUF and others setting those hymns to new music.  That wasn’t exactly my experience because I went to school on a music scholarship, and was involved in a really traditional music program.  My discovery was in the classroom.  My falling in love with them wasn’t in a context of innovation, but rather just falling in love with them for what they were.  I have a more romantic relationship with the organ and the hymnal.  I don’t have a personal history of thinking of “old, dead hymns.”  When I first heard “Be Thou My Vision” it was a new beautiful, adult experience for me.

Part of what I did in my twenties when I was working at these church plants was just opening up the hymnal.  We didn’t have an organ.  It wasn’t some kind of evangelistic decision.  We were just trying to interpret these hymns in a faithful way.  If you listen to the Bifrost records, to a song like “Just A Closer Walk With Me” that’s just me playing the song.  There’s strings and a particular musical perspective that I’m bringing to it, but we certainly weren’t trying to turn anything upside down on its head and we weren’t trying to indict anything.

HR:  Inevitably every artist makes some sort of aesthetic decision.

IW:  Sure.  And I’ve spent the last four or five years digging even more deeply into the way I feel.  At this point I think I’ve come full-circle in thinking that the problem that hymns address is obvious.  Everyone can agree that in turning on [Christian] radio, the music doesn’t address real theological questions, all the facets of the human heart.  And you open up hymnals and they address that problem.  We can agree on that.  Beyond that, to say that hymns are the answer to all of our modern worship problems is problematic.  If you bring discernment and a historical ear to your hymnal you’re going to find some beautiful things in there, some things that were beautiful because of their context, and some things that are not beautiful because of the failures of their times.

Our children’s choir came in yesterday singing “Jesus Loves me This I Know.”  In this and a plethora of other hymns written between 1825 and 1925, that great 19^th century British period of hymnody, there are a lot of references to dying.   “And when you die Jesus will hold or cradle you.”  It’s alarmingly consistent.  “If I love him when I die/He will take me home on high.”  You look into it historically and you find that during that period of time in the Industrial Revolution is the highest rate of childhood and infant mortality in world history.  In all these Sunday School classes, you have these kids showing up to worship and having to deal with their peers dying.  So you have people in ministry answering those questions.  You can picture those conversations and their attempts at answers that make their way into their music.  Some of these answers seem odd or perhaps even questionable, but for the moment they were appropriate responses in their contexts.  Likewise, you open up the hymnal and you see people answering questions in hymns.  Addressing questions about war, inexplicable suffering and death, globalization and mission; in the best-case scenarios you see these hymns answering the real questions that people are wrestling with in their times.

I don’t think that hymns answer those questions for our time.  What we can learn is to be inspired by our hymnal to actually look at the questions people are asking in our times.  You read James Hunter’s book: central questions about identity, sexuality, what does it mean to be a person, how do we know that life has any value?  Questions about money, human relationships…these are the questions that are on the news every night.  I don’t know that I can turn on the radio and hear Christian music answering these questions.  But I also don’t necessarily know that you open your hymnal and find answers to these questions.

I’d like to issue a call to songwriters not to stop writing songs and just use your hymnal, but to write new things.  The new Bifrost record, and probably any subsequent records, will be all original hymns and worship songs.  It’s important for us to start modeling that.  In some way there’s something incredibly faithless about resigning yourself to saying that “they wrote all this great stuff back there and we’re not capable of writing stuff like that now.”  I’d like to suggest that the same Holy Spirit that inspired Isaac Watts is the Holy Spirit that can inspire us to write something as beautiful as “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross.”

HR:  Beyond answering specific questions for a specific place and time, how do you see worship music working within a framework of a ‘theology of desire?’  Your last conference’s curriculum began to explore some of these themes, seeing a human person as primarily affective or liturgical, how do you design worship with music that takes that whole person seriously?  Hymns don’t let you necessarily range the whole spectrum of emotions in the way that perhaps even the most simple praise chorus, that you could pick on all day, may be able.

I’m assuming you’re probably familiar with Jamie Smith and Desiring the Kingdom?  I love Jamie and his writing and teaching, and his new book, Imagining the Kingdom is explicitly about applying that question in a worship context.

For my Presbyterian, Reformed context, one of the main areas of poverty in the PCA’s collective understanding about worship is this understanding of worship as being just a transmission of information.  Presbyterians get really excited about hymns being good theology set to music.  And there’s something to that.  But this fundamental understanding of worship being information and a system of understanding imparted to you so that music is just a vehicle- that’s a terribly small way of understanding what worship is.

In the Liturgy, Music, and Space (LMS) curriculum, we try to give the reader two handles.  On the one hand, worship has a formative aspect; worship forms us to think a certain way.  And worship has an expressive aspect; in worship our love for God is expressed.  Worship is the expression of a whole relationship with God and its also the formation of a whole relationship with God.

That’s what we’re trying to offer, not contemporary-traditional, not high-low, but formative-expressive as the most scriptural worship categorization.  These two qualities are manifest in scripture, from the Old Testament to the New Testament, that you see God telling the people, ‘when you worship I want you to do it in the very formative way.’  Even Deuteronomy, he says, ‘I want you to write these truths and hang them in front of your eyes on little leaflets and I want you to write it on your doorposts.’  And even when God is telling the Israelites how to celebrate Passover, he says ‘I want you to set your table, sit down, and you’ll say this prayer, and the oldest son is going to ask the dad this question and the dad will answer in this way…’  This is a very formative prescription for worship.

At the same time, you have all these instances in the scriptures, from the prophets right through the New Testament, where God tells his people, ‘I’m not interested in you just going through the motions of worship, not interested in your feasts and festivals, if your heart is not right and your not being obedient to my word.’  And that’s the expressive part.  There are times throughout the bible that you read of these exuberant expressions, things much more expressive than we’re comfortable with: banging cymbals, beating drums, David’s dancing in the street.  Even in the New Testament where in Peter’s worship services people are accused of being drunk.  There is a very descriptive element of expressive worship in the scriptures.

I don’t think that delineating between praise choruses and hymns is always necessarily helpful or accurate.  The category that we use around here is ‘scripture songs,’ a subcategory being ‘psalms.’  I think those are really important categories to have in this conversation, because the Psalms are a best-case scenario due to the fact that they are super-expressive.  They’re very raw.  They’re more expressive than any Chris Tomlin song.  The Psalms are the psalmists bringing all their whole hearts to God.  But the Psalms are also deeply formative.  The Psalms are really challenging.  They don’t just give you words for what you already feel.  They give you words to grow into.  I think the Psalms have to be our model…you see that from Jesus.  When he went to worship God, he learned how to worship using the Psalms, he sung the Psalms, and in his hour of need, Jesus quoted the Psalms.  When he’s hanging on the cross, he’s not extemporizing.  He’s not just expressing, but he quotes something he would have sung.  You see the Psalms even forming Jesus’s heart and giving him language for how to talk to God.

The Psalms are the starting place and then out of the Psalms you have a criterion from which you can judge how good a praise song is and how good a hymn is.  If you start to see a great disconnect between our hymnody and our psalter or praise chorus catalog and our psalter, it should be clear to us where the poverty is.

But that’s not the way we operate.  We’ve gotten so upside-down in our understanding.  You have both traditional people that would hate it if you brought the emotion of the Psalms into worship, and then there are those who are all about expression, who have made an idol out of emotive expression – so that when you try to make a case that the bible just doesn’t want us to express things we feel but to learn to express things that we ought to feel – they’d react really poorly as well.  I think the psalms are indicting on the state of our worship wars.  The one thing we can agree on is that nobody wants to worship that way.

HR:  I recently interviewed Sarah DeShields from Renovatus Church in Charlotte, NC.  They’re really trying to hold this in tension and use the handles “the liturgy and the shout” to speak of that dialectic of formation and expression.  Interestingly, they’ve wound up doing a few psalm-based texts to do this on a congregational level.

January 18, 2013

Sarah DeShields grew up in near Edinburgh, Scotland in a charismatic church, before studying percussion and moving to the states to serve as music director at Renovatus Church in Charlotte, NC.  I got a chance to talk with her in December about her creative process as a musician and some of her most recent projects.  She released a solo album, The Pilgrim Way in 2011 and an Advent EP, Baloo Lammy (November 12, 2012).  Most recently she put out  a congregational record of original and adapted worship music, The Liturgy & the Shout, from and for her local church.

Hopeful Realism: We’ll start by talking about your own album.  What would you count, on this first record, as your major influences?  What are the main ingredients that went into the making of this album?

Sarah DeShields: At the time when we were making the record, there were several influences.  One of the main ones was that I was listening to this one album literally everyday called Camino by a violinist named Oliver Schroer.  He recorded this album on El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage across Spain. He took equipment with him and recorded in churches or just their feet walking on paths, there are sounds of local people, there are sounds of cows with bells on their necks.  The pace of the whole album…in between, are these incredible, beautiful pieces of his own writing that I’ve never quite heard anything like.  It’s classical music, but it has this really intense spiritual element to it.  It was on everyday, every morning, it was part of my daily journey.  I also had been listening to the music of Hildegard von Bingen, who is a medieval writer and saint that wrote some incredible choral stuff that is calming to listen to…very monastic.  I had those two things rotating all year, so thematically, that’s where I was at and it became part of the album.  I wanted the album to have that feeling of pilgrimage,  contemplation, and meditation.

As far as other influences that came out, my background is in a lot of classical music and I went to school for percussion, so I played a lot of minimalist music.  When I met Jeremy [Rychard Snyder, the producer of the record], he brought a lot of his influences to the table that I loved and connected with.  He’s very influenced by a group called the Bedroom Community.  As a group, they’re very interesting to listen to, because they’re such a strange conglomerate of people and styles.  That electronic/classical/folk thing going on is what Jeremy and I are inspired by.

HR:  I’ve noticed in both your record and the worship album two major themes.  When I listened, I wrote down “space” and “place.”  Both albums, in different ways have a lot of room.  On your record, which you’ve identified as somewhat contemplative, this is not all that surprising, but for a worship record it struck me as unique to have that kind of room to breathe.

As far as place goes, there are some spoken portions to your album, and on the Renovatus record “Burning Coal” actually locates the listener specifically in North Carolina, also remarkable for a worship album.

SD:  I don’t know that we intentionally sought those things out.  It’s really just part of our process.  In the worship context, while we do all of those songs congregationally at our church, they don’t all necessarily sound that way on a Sunday morning.  The purpose of the album is not so that other worship teams can go and learn it and do it on a Sunday, it’s really for our people to experience the story of what those songs are about.

For instance, “Psalm 51,” there is that whole intro…we started with just a Moog and some pedals and it was very eerie and strange and haunting.  For a while we were like, “we’re going to do some other stuff in there right?”  I was so worried about our congregation feeling uncomfortable to such a strong degree that they wouldn’t stick with the song.  The song came together, and that’s still in there.  Jeremy really fought for it.  The song is about brokenness, it is a hefty subject from a broken place and it is intense and it needs to feel intense.  We don’t allow ourselves in worship settings to really feel uncomfortable.  And sometimes that’s just sitting still for a while.  I think that it is easy when it’s something that you put in the background as soaking music, but if you have to engage it, I think it’s a discipline and a gift to have some music that asks to be engaged without having to turn it off.

The Gaelic stuff you hear on my album is my brother-in-law. He was raised on the Isle of Lewis and Gaelic is his first language. Sadly the language is dying out and they don’t teach it on the mainland so I never learned. The stuff you hear is the Apostle’s Creed and a hymn a local pastor wrote for the passing of his elder friends.

HR:  I’d be curious to hear about some of differences between the two versions of “Ye Nations.”

SD:  That’s one of the earliest ever songs for us.  “Psalm 51” was the first one we ever wrote for Renovatus.  “Ye Nations” was the second and it has been a staple for Renovatus since.  It is probably the most ingrained into our worship psyche.  Everyone knows it and I’m sure some people are sick of it by now.  When I did it for my own album, I wasn’t making it for the church per se.  In that way I didn’t feel like I had to care about what people thought of it or their expectations.  That sounds selfish, but it is also a very liberating thing.  It is incredibly important that artists have opportunities to make music despite whether or not it’s “sellable.”  I knew that version might be difficult for some of our people because they’ve heard a different sounding version for so long and didn’t have any other recording of it.  I heard from the grapevine that some folks felt like they were having a hard time accessing it.  And I’m totally fine with that.  When we came to make it for the Renovatus album, we wanted to keep it pretty simple, so I thought, ‘why don’t we just do marimba.’  It still has some of that minimalistic undergirding, but it is really more about the melody.  It just felt right, and I do feel like it was more accessible.  But what was funny on the release night, we tried to keep everything as close to the recording as possible, and everyone was completely engaged in it.  Maybe even more so than normal, because they could all hear themselves sing because there was only one instrument going on.

HR:  How much music on Sundays is original versus covers?  And how do you see this record interacting with the music people are listening to during the week, (contemporary Christian, retuned hymns, etc)?  Where do you guys fit in?

SD:  Usually on a Sunday at least one of our originals is thrown in.  But we do a lot of hymns.  We do a mixture of what’s out there and seems to be connecting with people spiritually, what’s pertinent to the sermon series…  We do some stuff from Bethel out in California.  We’ll do Chris Tomlin, Matt Redman, things that everyone knows and can connect with.  We have this part of our worship manifesto as a church that I think is very important is that ‘we will build altars for the people of God.’  We do this to mark what the Lord is doing, the power of testimony and the power of story.  “Psalm 51” came out of a season of brokenness.  There was some death and loss happening in the church and there was also a psalmic series that we were moving through, so it made sense to write something that embodied that.  So these are the altars that we have, and what we raise up, as songs are part of our storytelling- to the world but also to each other.  Altars are to remind each other of what the Lord has done, his faithfulness and his hand over you as a people.

That was our intent when making this album, not reaching a demographic or pushing to a certain market.  I don’t ever really see that happening with the sort of music we’re making, not because it is so unique or crazy.  There are churches doing stuff that is far more creative than what we are doing, but they are probably in obscurity because they don’t resonate with the masses.  I think we’re really okay with that and we’re used to that.  Another part of our church manifesto is that we’re a bunch of misfits.  That’s kind of where we lie.  This music is really for our people, these people.  Going forward that’s always where I want the focus to stay.  Whatever songs we continue to write, they’ll be out of our experience with one another as a community.

December 29, 2012

Over the past several years I’ve gotten in the December habit of compiling lists of my favorite music releases.  While I was in seminary taking preaching classes, I sought out an exercise that would help me enjoy, evaluate, and communicate texts in a creative way to an audience.  Since, at the time, all I was doing was reading and reading and writing and writing about biblical and theological content, I used music reviews as a way to hone my skills.  For about two years I wrote reviews for a small indie music blog out of Macon, GA called the Blue Indian (here is 2010 and 2011).  It was in this time that I realized if you could charitably and critically evaluate content that you sometimes did care deeply for, and some that you just didn’t “get,” and still make a compelling presentation to an audience, you had done most of the logistical tasks of preaching (which is what I wanted to work on).

So I present to you my list of twelve (a cheap way to continue to expand my list and delay decisiveness once more each year) favorite records that came out in 2012.  A brief disclaimer: these are my favorite records of this year, not necessarily the “best.”[1]  They might not be your favorites and for that I don’t apologize.  I may be skewed or inconsistent.  For instance, I’m well aware that half of these selections are from the South (including VA).  I’m also aware that I’m a sucker for M. Ward and the Avetts and unlike the Mumford boys (who came up big last year), they’re near locks on any favorite list I’ll likely write.  Again, I don’t apologize for this, everyone needs these kinds of go-tos.

I don’t have a fixed criteria for this evaluation.  Some of these albums and artists operate within a decisively Christian confession and view of the world, others quite the opposite, and many wrestle somewhere in the middle.  Some tilt towards the traditional, some towards the experimental, most hold both in some sort of tension.  Some are household names, while others share the fate of prophets in their respective hometowns.  I’ve included a Spotify playlist of this list in its entirety as well as a playlist featuring a single song from more than 40 (just wait until the year 2040!) notable releases.  I’d also love to hear, in the comments, some that I may have missed.  Cheers on a great year of music to have enjoyed and blessings on what I hope shapes up to be another.  -CEB

12: Mirage Rock (Columbia)

Band of Horses

These bearded bards have smoothed out some of their previous rolickers into a milder but really interesting album.  They’ve dusted off the legendary Glynn Johns (father of Ethan) for his first production gig in nearly three decades and it really pays off.  You can really hear the Carolina hills amidst the Wilsonian harmonies.

11: The Clearing (Dead Oceans)

Bowerbirds 

The earthy duo from Upper Air has expanded in number and so has their sound.  This record, grouped with the most recent offerings from Bon Iver, the Rosebuds, and Megafaun, would make for a really oddly cohesive April Base box set: ranging from ambitious and bombastic to charming and homespun.  Between the recurrent wildlife vagabonding and Phil Moore’s strangely entrancing songwriting meter, you are bound to get sucked in by the bare beauty and precious vulnerability of this music.

10: Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices (Asthmatic Kitty)

The Welcome Wagon

This time around Pastor Vito Aiuto and wife Monique cobble together a less-overtly Sufjan Stevens-infused collection of hymns and spiritual songs.  Again, the covers are outstanding, ranging from Crowder to the Cure.  The hymns are imaginative appropriations of some lesser-known texts, and Vito has continued to prove himself a worthy auteur and purveyor of surprisingly sacred music in the vein of a Brooklyn-hipster-Reverend Gary Davis.

9: The Carpenter (Universal Republic)

Avett Brothers 

The Avetts were in a pickle on this one.  After working with Rick Rubin on I and Love and You and simultaneously getting flack from longtime fans longing for the mountain-punk of their beginnings and getting lauded by a much much larger audience, this album, their seventh full-length studio record (and 14^th total release!) bore many of the pressures of a sophomore album.  Somehow they managed to do it.  In the midst of immense scrutiny and personal and familial trial, they produced a record with genuine warmth of sound and lyrical depth.  In my mind, The Carpenter resists conflation with the Mumford phenomenon (though similarities abound and some might disagree), due in part to the band’s willingness to explore (and fall flat in some cases) while frequently tipping their caps to unabashed influences like Townes Van Zandt and Doc Watson.  These influences lie very near the surface but don’t seem as forced or forceful as the literary and biblical allusioneering of their comrades.

8: Life Is People (Dead Oceans)

Bill Fay

This record came out of nowhere for me.  I had heard both Jeff Tweedy (of Wilco) and Damien Jurado cover “Be Not So Fearful.”  But Bill Fay was as obscure to me as he actually is.  Tweedy, himself, makes an appearance on Fay’s first album of new material in 41 years. Fay returns the favor with a cover (almost in latter year Johnny Cash fashion) of Tweedy’s “Jesus, Etc” in one of the finer moments of the record.  “The Healing Day”  offers a cathartic, eschatological anthem for fans of Cash, Billy Prince Billy, Wilco, and Nick Cave.

7: A Wasteland Companion (Merge)

M. Ward

For being a spliced-together collection of songs from the road, Companion sure doesn’t sound like it.  While decidedly less lo-fi than his earlier records, and conspicuously featuring indie sweetheart, Zooey Deschanel (the “She” from his other notable project), “Clean Slate” and “Pure Joy” could fit in on an anthology of his best and most characteristic.

6: Voyageur (Zoe Records)

Kathleen Edwards

This past fall, I’ve countlessly heard, from both sides of the aisle, the bemoaned, “if so-and-so wins the election, I’m moving to Canada.”  Canadian Kathleen Edwards diffuses this by threatening the inverse on the lead track of Voyageur and then shows her hand on this “empty threat.”  Voyageur succeeds through heartbreaking lyrics and vocals, and daring and skilled arrangements.  Even in some of her less poignant moments, she manages to pull off sounding sincere singing about sidecars and pink champagne in a way rivals Kim Kierkergaardashian‘s ability to combine crass and contemplative.

5: Fear Fun (Sub Pop)

Father John Misty

Best described as a trip, Fear Fun, is part Josh Tillman travelogue and part apocalyptic fantasy.  Woven strands of reality and fiction are incarnated in hazy Laurel Canyon fare.  The result is remarkably more interesting than either the lush harmonies of Tillman’s former gig as drumming Fleet Fox or his intense but often monotonous singing-ax solo fare.  With the album, he chopped off his hair, and was seemingly and suddenly imbued with newfound frontman swagger.  I’ve wondered on more than one occasion if this could this be a neo-Robert Johnston scenario?  While confusing at times, hilarious at others, and shrouded in darkness even in its sunnier moments, FF has to be considered one of the oddest and most enjoyable albums of 2012.

4: Fake Blood  (Removador/Harvest)

Floating Action

Black Mountain experimenteur Seth Kauffman teamed with Jim James of My Morning Jacket and toned down some of the sitar from last year’s wonderful but difficult Desert Etiquette to arrive at his most complete work since his solo album Research.  This “conservatism” suits him well, as a little restraint helps the supreme nuance come out in fewer and less labored listens.  The title of the record stems from his observation and frustration at the pervasive ability of “fake blood” (art that doesn’t hurt to make, but safely appears so) to sell records and make fans.  This epitomizes Seth’s ability to surprisingly craft and juxtapose.  After all, when asked about surprising interests and influences, he once listed Saabs, Paula Abdul and Karl Barth in the same sentence.

3: Boys & Girls (ATO)

Alabama Shakes 

“I feel so homesick.  Where’s my home?  Where I belong or where I was born?” questions Brittany Howard on “Rise to the Sun.”  Her ability to repeatedly package such existential wonderings in, to borrow a buddy’s descriptor, such “gronky” (here think something akin to Led Zep, Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, Ike Turner… a funky sonic patina) containers shines.  Throughout this sparkling debut, the Shakes prove that while there is nothing new under the sun, its revolution around the earth and its faithful reemergence can endlessly illumine what we already know in surprising and quite enjoyable ways.

2: Big Inner   (Hometapes/Spacebomb)

Matthew E. White

Not since Illinois has it been so cool and engrossing to listen to an album that sounds, at times, like a glorified high school marching band jam session.  Like Sufjan’s masterpiece, Matthew E. White (who’s arranged for the Mountain Goats, the Sounds of the South tour and whose backing band has richly ornamented the huge sounding and hugely successful eponymous Bon Iver record) has proven that once you dive in you find the brass and fanfare is actually secondary.  Listen and you’ll be rewarded with a rich lyrical tapestry.  The sacred and the profane touch at times, their threads crawling over each other, combined though not indistinguishable.  At times you wonder if White is miming Randy Newman or Qoheleth as he muses about the sun’s hiding place on “Steady Pace.”  Or when he takes up the slave-song meme of crossing the “Brazos” and explodes into a more than 5 minute long, album-ending chorus of “Jesus Christ, he is our Lord!  Jesus Christ, he is your friend!”

1: Maraqopa (Secretly Canadian)

Damien Jurado 

After warming up with a handful of cover songs and Jurado’s previous release, Saint Bartlett, the Jurado/Richard Swift production tandem has hit full-stride with Maraqopa.  Sometimes enigmatic and others jangly and humorous, the amount of texture, attention, and the nuance kept me listening to this record throughout the whole year.  While his sound has evolved, his writing has remained constant.  He pens “I heard you call my name.  You were outside the door.  How did I not hear you before?” on “This Time Next Year” a parousia anthem whose opening doo-wop chimes are broken up by surf-guitar distortion.  Lines like these are sneaky.  In some ways they underwhelm, but Jurado has developed a penchant for writing such startlingly simple lyrics that lack any semblance dullness or pretension, but manage to strike the hearer as stark and unalloyed.

December 13, 2012

Inspired by my fellow contributors’ Advent posts, I’d love to share a few items from my community’s Advent observation.

1) Each of the last several years, I’ve had some part in writing and/or curating a church devotional.  Even though these reflections usually take place while there are still leaves on the trees and it’s not yet sweater weather, this rhythm of pre-Advent preparation has been a pastoral boon for me.  Unlike some things, even some sermons, I’ve found this exercise to be preparatory rather than exhausting.  By the time we’re lighting candles on Sunday morning (in an elementary school gym), I’m more prepared and excited rather than bored or tired.  Here is this year’s devotional (available for free download).  Clicking here will get you to some of the previous material, also freely given.

2) It has been really special as a pastor immersed in a community (both church and wider) chock-full of creative types to attempt to foster that creativity.  To pastor people who consider (and some who don’t) themselves artists has been one of the most joyful, challenging, and favorite parts of my duties and the Lord’s provision.  This season, I especially enjoyed the give-and-take that went along with commissioning this piece for our church’s Advent.  I got the opportunity to work conceptually with the artist, Nathan Hood, on a work that would adorn our bulletins and the advent devotional.

Here are some of Nate’s words on his process:

When putting things together for this Advent imagery there were a few themes in my mind upfront, including the power of God in the helplessness of a human baby and the mystery of God made known in Christ. Reflecting on it now, two things come to mind most readily.

First is the awesomeness, the wonder, the amazing happening of the Uncreated becoming a created being, becoming human. The question always arising from that thought for me is, “If God himself were to walk among us, what would God do, what would God be like if we could see, touch, hear, taste, and smell him?”  ”What would he be up to?”

Secondly, comes the thought that Christ is at once God and man, our King and our Servant, the Lion and the Lamb. There are many realities alive in Him at the same moment. There are many alive in us, and so many if we have received the love and the sonship he holds out to us.

What do you see? What are your thoughts during this time?

Ultimately in our expression of these truths words fail us, as does imagery. Forgive me for attempting both, and thank you for letting me be a part of this. May our capacity to receive the love of our Father grow, increase, abound. Peace to you church.

3) Finally, our music ministry at church decided to give some of our Advent music away.  In 2010, this short record came together as a companion to our Advent devotion.  At the time, we were (and still are) trying to figure out what it means to observe this season of waiting and how Advent tempers our unabated early embrace of Christmas (or at least the sentimental christmas-iness around us).  The result is a “night-themed” collection of alternately chilly and warm devotionally-sprung, but missionally-minded tunes.

I’d love to invite you to take advantage of this here:

Hope, peace, joy, and love during this season.  May God enable you through his Spirit to be an attentive and expectant wait-er.  May we anticipate our Lord’s second coming with the “thrill of hope” that we experience and celebrate his first.

-Chris Breslin

November 21, 2012

[drawing above: From the Dragon's Hoard by Shaylynn Rackers]

 

It was story-time.

My wife and oldest daughter were away for gymnastics practice, and I had just tucked my smallest daughter in her bed. The house was oddly quiet for a home with two strapping little boys at-large.  I found them both on the sofa, each of the them reading a book (the 7-yr old was reading; the 4-yr old was staring down at an open text…  he sure looked the part).

I wanted to tell them a Bible story, but we suddenly got into a conversation involving squires, knights and dragons.  Toy swords (which are always near at hand in our home) were grasped and the 4-yr old narrated a tale about a dragon’s cave with huge bats and a brave squire. When it was my turn for story-time, I held them both in my arms and recounted a tale pieced together from majestic lore of old….

There was once a great King.  The greatest of all kings ever to have reigned in those lands.  He fought with the courage of a wild beast, looking his enemies in the eyes and never wavering.  He was blessed and special, unlike any other ruler.  A vow was made that the throne would ever go to one of his sons or grandsons down through the long ages.

—”What was his name?! What was his name?!” asked the 7-yr old, eyes wide open

“Shhh.  Just wait…”.  I resumed—

Then the people of this kingdom forgot who they were.  The great line of kings forgot their ancient father, the fierce and good King of old.

—”Was it Arthur?  It was King Arthur wasn’t it?!”

“Shhh.  Just wait…”

The people and the kings began to fade away.  Other kings, stronger and braver, fought against the people.  Captured them.  The years passed.  The family of the kings all but disappeared.  The people lacked hope.

But then—in the Shadows… in the Dark… in the Night—a baby boy came.  He was from the family of the great King.  But this baby would be the King of all.  And one day he would grasp a sword sharper than any other, a sword stronger than any other, and all evil would fly away from his face.  And one day he will fight every last dragon, and take their ruler, the great Dragon-Beast, the strongest monster of all, and throw him into the Lake of Fire forever and ever.

—”With all the bad guys?” (my 4-yr old is ever concerned about the “bad guys” getting their due).

“If the bad guys do not serve the the great King but follow the Dragon, then I am afraid they will be in trouble, too.”

Then I asked, “Do you want to know the name of this Greatest King?

Nods.

“Jesus. And the first king was David.”

Ahhhh, of course! flashed through the still widened eyes of the 7-yr old.  “But Dad, there are no dragons in the real world.”

“Are you sure?” (I had been reading an essay by J.R.R. Tolkien earlier in the day).

He was thinking. Wondering. And I explained to him that there be dragons, indeed.  But also mighty forces of light and beauty.  And we want to serve those good forces, fighting not with fists or swords but with truth and kindness.

The 4-yr old: “I like it when bad guys cry.” He was still delighting in the just end of badness.

“But sometimes,” I offered,” maybe we are the bad guys and don’t know it.”  The lines can get blurry at times, can’t they?

And on that note: “Bedtime, guys.”

October 12, 2012

When I took a preaching class in seminary, I never expected it to be such a creative launching pad for me.  We listened and watched all kinds of preaching and preachers and focused on different, and sometimes novel, ways of communicating both clearly and compellingly.  I went on to take another course, with professor Chuck Campbell, on Preaching, the Powers, and Principalities.  It was here that my imagination was further sparked to see and speak to the captivities and spiritual powers at play in our daily lives and in our congregations.  One thing I particularly enjoyed was Chuck’s playfulness; in the midst of incredibly serious material he never seemed to take himself too seriously. 

When Baylor University Press sent me a copy of Chuck’s (along with co-author Johan Cilliers) newest preaching book, Preaching Fools: The Gospel as a Rhetoric of Folly, I took the opportunity to sit down with him to discuss. Throughout the book there is a notable chorus, “The gospel is foolishness.  Preaching is folly.  Preachers are fools.”  This is a fairly unusual, possibly threatening, but certainly scriptural, statement for the average pastor.  An odd line in our job descriptions.  The book certainly struck a chord in regards to preparing and delivering sermons, but also, because of its surprisingly multimedia nature, it struck a chord in regards to the arts and their ability to embody and communicate this “gospel foolishness.”

In today’s post, Chuck speaks about preaching’s ability to unsettle us, put us in a middle ground, and change our perception.  At one point he mentioned the book’s very title changing before his eyes: from a noun to a verb, being the fool to being fooled.

The second post explores some of the similarities and engagements the book has with the arts.  We wind up talking about everything from the music of Derek Webb to Stephen Colbert to the upcoming American presidential election.

Hopeful Realism: Some of your interest and expertise lies in what Scripture calls the “principalities and powers.”  How have those interests developed in your work over the years?

Chuck Campbell:  The work with the powers began when I was doing a lot of ministry with homeless people in Atlanta.  I heard them use this language.  I was, a full day to a day-and-a-half, overnight sometimes, on the streets with homeless people.  I got to know some of the people and they would use this language.  This material began to make sense of what I was seeing…nobody wants there to be homelessness, but it just kept getting worse.

Secondly, it started making sense “of me,” in addition to “to me.”  It helped me understand my own sinfulness in a different way, in a kind of complicity and captivity rather than just getting up in the morning and saying, “I’m gonna go do something evil.”  People in our churches don’t say that.  They never leave and say, “Thanks for the sermon, now I’m gonna go do something evil.”

So it pushed me to explore that material as a way of thinking both theologically and ethically about my own understanding of sin, what I was seeing in my work with homeless people, and to a little lesser extent in ministry on Death Row.  It was never theoretical to start with.  As I kept reading and working it really became a focus in my preaching work.  The new book is still dealing with it, but in some different ways.

HR: Where did this new angle, foolishness and folly, come from?

CC:  Even in the Word Before the Powers there is a section on lampooning.  Someone mentioned that I should look at jesters because that’s really what I was talking about in many ways.  Then three things happened.  I had a sabbatical and I read Dostoyevsky, who does a whole lot with “holy fools” in his novels.  I started reading material on the history of jesters, tricksters, and holy fools.  And I came across some material on the famous First Corinthians text on the foolishness of preaching [1 Corinthians 1:18-31].  These things started to come together.  So this really did grow out of the powers material, one way of dealing with the powers being a sort of jester-like, lampooning fashion.  And also there was a sense that potentially that was what Paul was doing when he was interrupting the work of the powers in First Corinthians.

HR: I was surprised how multimedia and especially how visual this book felt considering it is a preaching book.  Right out of the gates, the beautiful cover, Picasso’s Crucifixion featuring Don Quixote, seems to set a sort of vision for the book.  Then we’re introduced to a phrase like “bifocal vision.”

CC:  I need to give credit to my co-author Johan, who is responsible for much of the visual arts in the book.  He is an extraordinary artist himself.  He always writes with some sort of visual art.  I contributed some of the political cartoons.  I’m excited it turned out this way.  We wanted it to be a very interdisciplinary book with visual art, literature, cartoons and everything else in it, because that’s what preaching is.  That’s what we have to do.  We are always drawing on all these different pieces, even when we’re not Shakespeare scholars or experts.

The “bifocal vision” is a term from New Testament scholar J. Louis Martyn.  It’s been a very helpful term for me and as you see in the book, it begins to shape the way that we look at the rhetoric of preaching as a kind of “bivocal” rhetoric that is trying to do orally what this bifocal vision does visually.  Martyn uses it as an apocalyptic understanding of the gospel, especially in Paul, where the New Age breaks in, interrupts, invades, the old age.  And yet of course the Old Age has not died and the New Age has not yet fully come.  So the challenge is to be able to see both things at once.

Sometimes people might use the bifocal vision to be like glasses where you see close up and then you look with a longer vision for the fulfillment.  As you may or may not have noticed in the book, we don’t take that route.  We’re looking at both at once, here and now.  In my mind, this is a more apocalyptic way, where the New Creation is already here; you can’t always see it but you can’t ignore it in the Old Age when you are seeing the pieces of it already here.

It is certainly a growing edge in the book: the rhetoric of preaching being “bivocal.”  Having to say two things at once, both the Old Age and the New, without letting go of either one in a real sense.  As I’ve thought about the sorts of stories and example that have been most powerful to me, they tend to be those kind.  Another aspect of the bivocal rhetoric is simply to keep things from being settled.  Where things are clear, rigid, and tied down.  Some of the forms like metaphor keep things open, which is characteristic of this life between the Ages.  This space between the Ages.

HR: Space seems to be another major motif of the book; this middle ground of “liminality.”

I underlined while reading, “there is no separating the folly from the wisdom or the scandal from the gospel.  Jesus too keeps us unsettled; he invites us on the Way, he calls us to discipleship at the threshold between the ages and bids us to follow -and preach – one whom we can never master or control, but who ever remains elusive and disruptive.”[1]

CC: This is a huge growing edge for me.  And I’m still trying to live into it and figure out what it means for preaching.  I preached on Tuesday in chapel and these sermons are still sweating blood trying to figure out how to do it.  One of the things that has happened as a result of this book and might be an important word for a lot of us in the church today, is beginning to think of the gospel not as something that gives us a solid security or clarity or ties things down, but really as the gospel itself keeping us unsettled and “on the way.”

We live in a culture and a time where things are quite unsettled.  So many cultures, and the church itself, is going through a kind of liminal phase.  We’re not sure where things are headed.  The danger there is to really want to assert and reassert a kind of reactionary clarity that grows out of fear.  So I think one of the subtexts that surfaces is that Christians don’t have to be afraid of these times.  We can live into them.  It’s really our space, this sort of unsettled space.  And we’re following the One who we can trust and we can see even in this tumult, the New Age breaking in.

This may not be new to anyone else.  It strikes me that it’s often assumed that Christianity provides the security, clarity, finality, solidity…but I’m beginning to think it may be something different.  Which might be some of the best, good news to free us from our fears that we can have as a Church.

HR: Along these lines, fragmentation is another dominant theme in the book.  There’s a sense that our view of fragmentation should not just lie in something being broken, but as some sort of artifact of the future.  That “faith means not to be in tact.”[2]  This is really challenging to me, but also sort of threatening.

CC:  It’s unsettling.  Another facet to fragmentation is being part of the Church where we’re not ever whole apart from these other fragments.  That’s where some of my colleague’s writing in the book on ubuntu keeps that kind of dynamic between the individual and community going in some interesting ways.

August 5, 2012

To just say Jonathan Green plays hymns is a bit deceptive.  Posted up in Edinburgh, Scotland, this native Bostonian, weaves the stories of the past with the realities of the present, glancing towards the future.  His “hymns” blend the ethereal thump and fuzz of his electronic equipment with the warm strums of obviously human instrumentation.  He lives with one foot in a local congregation (Free Church of Scotland) that until recently hasn’t used instruments in its Psalm-heavy worship.  And one firmly planted in the realm of indie-rock experimentation.  JG Hymns’s newest release, Lots, delves deeply both into the stories of Scripture, plumbing some of the nuance and texture of familiar stories that even a good reader glosses over or dismisses due to familiarity, and then launches from these stories, trampolining these ancient (and less than ancient) encounters with God into relevant parables and challenges for here and now.

I sat down to chat with Jonathan about Lots, congregational music, hope, grief, and experimentation,

Hopeful Realism: Tell me about your newest work, Lots.  You’ve described it has the telling of nine different ways in which people from past and present times have responded to significant events in their lives.  You’ve appropriated scripture stories (Deborah, Leah, Samuel) but also H.G. Spafford (writer of It is Well With My Soul).  What was it about these people, these stories, that particularly piqued your imagination?

Jonathan Green: There’s a couple of ways that works.  One is from hearing sermons.  When I first heard Tim Keller preach from Old Testament stories, I feel like I was hearing them for the first time, in the ways that he moved Old Testament stories from a moral lesson into a shadow of the story of Jesus.  I found that incredibly profound.  Part of me was just responding to this new way of looking at those old stories.  So on Hymns Vol. III there’s this story of Joseph, that is basically a Keller sermon in three minutes.  Part of it is me interacting with Old Testament characters afresh.  Taking potentially flat characters and bringing them to life.  It’s kind of like the HBO series about John Adams.  Before I saw that, early American history was just weird guys with wigs in a history book.  There’s no connection whatsoever, they were just a funny painting.  And after I saw the series, they’re flesh and blood.  And the situations which they find themselves in come to life.  So I started looking at Old Testament characters as real people, in real situations and had newfound sensitivity towards them.

I think also my wife [who’s a native Palestinian] being from where the bible happens, and now spending some time over there, I look at these stories in a new way.  Connecting with Near Eastern culture, I look at these situations differently.  So a story like Leah’s connected with some of the things I was thinking about for this record.  Namely that there is this woman who tries so hard to get the attention of a man.  In the first part of the story, she has several children, and after each one she thinks, with this child, my husband’s going to love me.  And it just doesn’t happen.  And then finally, there is this moment where she recognizes that her relationship with God is paramount and when she gets that settled her identity is no longer in the man that she’s trying to win but is fulfilled.

And it’s this nice story, but the whole cycle happens again and it seems like there’s no resolve to this desire that the two women have, both Leah and Rachel.  I feel like, with Lots, and thinking about stories in the bible, I don’t know that there’s always necessarily a resolution to the story that we want to put on it.  It’s more often open-ended, almost like a question asking the reader, what they want to do about it.  Like the way Mark ends.  Like the way Jonah ends.  It really asks the listener to be drawn in.  Sometimes as a songwriter you provide the beginning, middle, and ending for the people.  And they end up having that movie theatre experience, where it is all provided for you.  You go and you are passive, rather than engaging with the situation and the person. 

HR: You talk about this idea of the listener participating with the story, narrative, and music.  It’s interesting though; the first and last tracks are hymns, usually understood as highly participatory, congregational music.  But in some ways you’ve completely “de-congregationalized” these hymns.  They’re no longer sing-able.  And that’s okay.  What I find interesting is that they do beckon the listener to participate, but in a much different way.  It seems that approaching hymns in this way is closer to the kind of apparently passive participation that happens while contemplating art at a gallery, rather than the effusive participation that happens via traditional congregational singing and interaction.  If you “get it,” you are engrossed in perhaps a more complete way than unison singing can even afford.

JG: I feel like the world doesn’t need many more congregational songs.  There are so many people, past and present, with this new hymns movement, how have a great vision, there are plenty of people “on the job.”  Writing local songs, for local congregations is great, but I feel like there is a lack of music that isn’t just stuck in the pews and can work in other crevices of life.  Music that you can have a personal, private relationship to, a different one than just on Sunday.  I’m really wrestling with the extent to which Christian music can go on a Sunday.  Can it really work in a rock club, both textually and texturally?

HR: Some of the focus of this site is the dialectic of hopeful realism.  That our Christian faith has something integral to say to “the way things are” in its imperfect beauty and brokenness but also witnessing to the fact that because of Christ we live in an overlap with our hopeful future, anticipating and being pulled into that reality.  Tell me about how that sort of Christian eschatology might play in the aesthetic of your recording projects.

JG: It’s always a constant fight to be super concerned with both the present and the future.  And it is always a fight.  You can fall in love with what you’re making and forget about the future.  You can think about the future and forget your community and the needs of people around you.  And for an artist, some of those needs are aesthetic needs.  Handing people arena rock again and again and again is kind of like pulling the wool over people’s eyes.  When you look at the bible, it is the most incredibly diverse book.  The stories and styles, even the responses it warrants: confusion, frustration, incredible excitement, it changes your life, embarrassment.  It is an amazing range and yet for some reason it is not always fully represented in Christian art.  So when I feel like I’m most human and most spiritual, when those two really fuse together, I have to explore places I don’t really want to go or have been before, because I know they’re good for me.  And I know that I’m going to have the same dumb tendency to find a hit song and repeat it twenty times.  The people I most look up to, both on a human and spiritual level, are the ones where those two facets are tied together.  Where they have an authentic response to the situations of life, like Jesus did.  Where they don’t recycle things, live through the quotes of other people, the anecdotes of other things, they can be fully engaged in the present while fully confident and aware of what Christ has done.

HR: Tell me in particular about Funeral Song.  Though nearly wordless, this song struck me as able to carry this weight, to epitomize this kind of bifocal vision.  The title already betrays a grim reality at hand.  Then there are nearly five minutes of instrumental before haunting and hopeful chorus.  What did you experience that went into the making of this song?

JG: We had a crazy couple of years.  There was a couple in our church who’s sister had a child born with cancer who lived for a couple of months and died on Christmas day.  What are you going to say to that?  About a year later, another couple in our church she had a miracle baby, born three and a half months early.  He could fit in your hand and had like a ten percent chance of survival and is now a laughing, crawling, walking toddler.  But got pregnant again and went into labor early again had twins, and they lived for twenty minutes.  What are you going to say to that?

Meanwhile, my grandmother passed away this last year.  She lived to be 101 and was set to turn 102 in a couple of weeks.  So you have the most extreme lengths of life imaginable.  And I found myself thinking about the way God sustains and takes people.  Sometimes it is absolutely inexplicable.  So the natural Reformed response is to read books on it and come up with a really smart answer and feel good about yourself because you did your homework.  But I’m not sure that that’s always the best way to go about things.  So this song was my attempt to be still and trust in the truths of Lord.  And that’s where I think that music can step in, where words and books can’t.

I tried to tie it with the track before it, the Horatio Spafford track.  Here’s a guy who wrote a hymn after his four kids drowned on a boat, the least likely response you’d imagine.  I quoted his hymn in Funeral Song, but I didn’t want to do a big treaty on life and death, I just wanted to give an offering for people that would hopefully encourage them.

HR: You alluded to the things that music can do that text and typical ways in which we process cannot.  When I listened to Funeral Song, I was reminded of something Bonhoeffer notes in his Letters and Papers from Prison.  The repetition, but also the horn flourishes off of the baseline and standard movement, feels like how Bonhoeffer talks about Christ as the cantus firmus [1], which we hold to and, by the Holy Spirit, improvise off of.  He offers that this baseline holds together the polyphony of life, the fragmentation on the verge of disorder that we experience around us.  This song seems to make sense of the wordlessness we may feel at those times.

JG: I suppose you can get that in the Taize tradition, where you repeat a chorus.  When you’re not used to it, you feel like you’re going nowhere.  I had a funny experience visiting a local Greek Orthodox Church.  We went to a day service, the guy leading the prayers repeated the “Christ have mercy on us sinners” portion a hundred times in a row.  It was like a road trip: exciting, miserable, exciting…  Musically, aesthetically, there is a time and place to repeat and just sit in it.  And it’s not a stagnant thing, there are subtle changes.  There is movement within the meditation.  It is definitely something that was important to that track.  But I thought a hundred times might have been too much.

HR: This record seems to have much more electronically manipulated vocals and instrumentation than your previous works.  It’s interesting considering the content of the record, the ways you’ve taken “synthetic” music and managed to communicate the earthiness of these stories.  Listening to some of the recent music that does this, Bon Iver, James Blake, or Animal Collective, they use manipulated sounds to communicate disintegration, confusion, alienation.  It makes sense though; it’s rooted and earthy.  In some sense, those songs and sounds can only happen now, describing the way things are.  Right now most of us live virtually and realistically.  So it would make total sense that real voices are run through Autotune over a real piano.  We have a hard time discerning between “manual” and “automatic”, but at the same time emotion that results seems no less organic or real even though the ingredients have been manipulated and are obviously not completely “real.”

JG:  People might not know the technical details of why that’s successful.  But I do think they come into play.  If you have a drum machine and you hit the play button and let it loop, there’s no fluctuation in what’s happening.  There’s just a drone.  But when you take that same loop and cut it up and manually paste it in, so that it’s slightly off.  It immediately becomes that much more human.  The way those guys produce their music, they treat the electronic elements in a way that a violinist approaches her instrument, so that it still breathes.

June 12, 2012

[A new dimension for HR's new site is a focus on Art, Theology and Culture.  Chris Breslin will be leading our forays into the world of music searching for lyrics and tunes that wrestle with the raw realities of life and faith, and sitting down with artists and practitioners who are doing some of the wrestling...]

Vito Aiuto is one half (along with his wife Monique) of the band The Welcome Wagon, and also the pastor of Resurrection Presbyterian Church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY.  The Welcome Wagon releases their sophomore LP, Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices, today via Asthmatic Kitty Records.

Hopeful Realism: In terms of being a recording artist and a pastor, what amount of attention are you able to give to your music?

Vito Aiuto: That’s been changing over the years. The first record that we did was completely apart from my job. I would take vacation or I would do it in my own time. So at that point in time we didn’t ever really think of it as anything that we would give a lot of energy to, besides just enjoying it ourselves. The more that we did it and then when we put the record out and it was received pretty well, we just fell in love with playing together and playing with other people. Now the elders of the church and our leadership have decided to have me set aside a little time each year to pursue stuff with music. A couple weeks out of the year, I’ll spend recording or writing or putting on a concert, and we’ll probably tour a little bit if we can find a time. But we’re still figuring out what role it plays in my life and the life of my church, and I want to try to have that balance as well as I can.

HR: It seems like your church is really receptive and discerning on this part of your ministry. I think I read on one of your bios that you’ve said the new record has kind of a liturgical structure to it. And I know that you’ve contributed to some projects like Bifrost Arts’ album and Cardiphonia’s Songs for the Supper project, so how much of your music is or isn’t used in your local church?

VA: Almost none at all. That’s something that may be changing as we continue on. It’s not used at all for a couple of reasons. One is, from the beginning we’ve always had a good music director and we’ve always loved what he’s done. And in an effort not to make it be about us or have a show about us, I’ve wanted to keep a distance. So that’s one reason we haven’t used much of our music. Another is, I think that writing congregational songs is a particular kind of art and I never aspired to it, maybe until recently. It’s not something I ever thought of, like what Bruce Benedict does or what Isaac Wardell does with Bifrost Arts, or what Kevin Twit or Christopher Miner has done with RUF, and there are lots of other people, especially at the beginning. Then I found out that some congregations I knew were starting to sing them.

There are a couple of songs, like the one I wrote that was on one of the Cardiphonia things for the Lord’s Supper, which is called “Draw Nigh and Take the Body of the Lord,” I did try and sort of write that as a congregational song and I know some people have used it. But on the other hand, it’s in two different meters. And I didn’t really mean to do that. I didn’t realize till I heard people sing it. I sing it at home, and Monique and I are used to it, but it sometimes lurches from 5/4 into 6/8 in the middle of every verse. I just kind of idiosyncratically write songs and I think you have to be really mindful of how that’s going to sound and how that’s going to play out.

HR: In terms of the album’s shape or aesthetic, it shares a title with a book written by Thomas Brooks. How much did that play into how you conceived this or was it happy coincidence with the “Remedy” cover track?

VA: It’s not directly related to Thomas Brooks. I like that book and I’ve enjoyed reading it over the years. They don’t bear a direct relationship to each other, but one way they are together is that I liked the idea of “spiritual sickness” and “spiritual medicine.” Trying to be healed by something. And he offers a bunch of remedies in there against Satan’s attacks or against spiritual malady, and so our hope really is that our music will be used by God to heal people and I think it has been used to heal us to a certain extent. This is going to sound crazy, but I didn’t really make the connection with the title of the record to the David Crowder cover until it was already all put together. I know it sounds absurd, but it was totally lost on me.

David Crowder invited us down to Waco to do this worship music conference and he was so gracious. I had a couple really great, long conversations with him on the phone and long emails where we would just discuss music and stuff and I got it in my head that when I went down there I wanted to find one of his songs and kind of do with it what I had done with other songs from Isaac Watts like 200 years ago. So I just went online and looked at a bunch of his lyrics without listening to the music. I think I listened to about half of “Remedy,” once, before I wrote a remake of it. I sort of flipped it right off, because I didn’t want to hear at all what he had done with it. We didn’t get it done in time for the performance in Waco. But I sent him a demo and asked if we could use it and he said, “Yes.” He’s one of the most gracious people that I’ve ever met. He was so gracious to us in a number of ways.

HR: Talk to me a little bit about the nostalgia or irony that shows up in your art. I’m also thinking particularly of the packaging of the debut: incredibly ironic, but somehow endearing, still having a kind of honesty to it. How do you approach that?

VA: There’s an essay by David Foster Wallace called Television and U.S. Fiction. It’s about how he thinks that irony is destroying fiction and has almost destroyed art in the West. It’s decimating it and has made a wreckage of our ability to interact with art. And at the end, he basically says, ‘Well, I think the next thing is going to have to be sincerity.’ And he says that it’s basically going to have to be a sincerity that goes through irony. Because you just can’t do sincerity anymore because it’s already kind of been ruined. So you have to pick the flower up off the floor and do something with it even though it’s been stepped on. You can’t find something that hasn’t been sullied by irony.

So it’s not lost on us that the packaging of the first record is kind of kitschy. But at the same time, for the first record, every single last piece of art on that record actually came from Monique’s grandmother’s house. She was raised in that, and everything on the record, we believe. It’s not like there is anything on that record that I would disown, or even the packaging. Some of it is overtly earnest and even kitschy, but I am pretty much ready to stand by that stuff. I think this is true of a lot of people; I’m really tired of irony. I’m tired of sarcasm. I’m tired of interacting with my friends, where we make fun of each other to show each other that we love each other. I’m totally scarred by that. I’m tired of it and I don’t want to do it. I really just want to make music that’s really honest and is almost embarrassingly sincere.

HR: I see a lot of parallels with songwriting and preparing as a preacher. In some way you have to crawl inside of the idiom that your congregation will understand and incarnate it in a new way so that that word is effective for them. Have you found that your life as a songwriter and a preacher intersect?

VA: I think I’ve grown as a preacher the more I actually talk to people that I know in my congregation. The more you interact with and talk with and weep with the people in your congregation, the more you’re going to know them and what they need to hear. It takes a long time, because sometimes you know what they need to hear, but you just can’t say it. Or you’re not going to be able to articulate it in a way they can hear it. I think if you ask God, he’ll help you and the longer you’re at it, he just matures you and you can get at it a little bit better.

As a songwriter, it is a little bit different. For me, most of songs I have written have started with music. They all start with chords or a melody line, or it starts to serve something that I’ll just emote or I’ll speak words that don’t mean anything. So I’m kind of starting with more raw feeling than I am with ‘I think my congregation needs to hear this.’ I think there are a lot of parallels there, but I have an easier time talking about it when it comes to preaching because I’ve been doing it longer. Music’s just a little more mysterious. I think preaching is really mysterious too, but there’s something about music that touches people in a way that’s hard to describe. With preaching there’s a heart-to-heart kind of element where you’re just looking people in the eyes and telling them Good News. I want to do that with music, but there’s something mysterious about a pedal steel guitar or one chord sliding into another that says something that’s hard to put a finger on.

HR: Describe some of the relationships you get to grow and experience as a result of your music.

VA: I think one of the things that I’ve fallen in love with in regards to music is that it’s a really communal thing. When you get even two people in a room, let alone, we just played a record release show and there were fourteen people in our band…so everybody has to find there place in that, everyone has to work together, and you’re all gathered around and in this thing. I really love that. It’s a really powerful thing to participate with someone else in.

Getting to do it with Monique is a great blessing. It’s also really hard, because we’re both really pig-headed and prideful, so when we write a song, play or rehearse together it’s an arena in which we’re being tested by the devil and by one another to see, are we going to be generous to each other? Are we going to forgive one another? Are we going to believe all things and hope all things? If she makes a funny face when I present a new song to her or if I snap at her are we going to forgive each other? So music is an arena in which all that happens. For us it’s like a small business and a really awesome hobby and an outworking of our marriage all melded into one. When I was in college I was writing more. I was writing poetry. As a pastor I write a lot; I write sermons. One of the great things about music is that you’re making it with other people and that you have to depend on other people and they have to depend on you. With writing, you can kind of just be an egomaniac; you can just do the whole thing yourself.