The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
The Lord is with you, Gideon
And even though you hide your heart
Like grain in the winepress
And even though you think yourself
The weakest and the smallest
The Lord is with you mighty warrior
The Lord is with you barren Hannah
The Lord is with you, empty one
And even though you whisper dreams
In the shadow of the altar
And even though you lift your prayer
Till your voice starts to falter
The Lord is with you barren Hannah
Because your weakness is his power
And your foolishness his grace
The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
Though you shrink from his embrace
And he will clothe you with his spirit
He will arm you with his love
The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
He will guard you from above
The Lord is with you restless Jacob
The Lord is with you, Isaac's son
And even though you wrestle with him
Striving till the daybreak
And in your brokenness you beg
A blessing for the heartache
The Lord is with you restless Jacob
Because your weakness is his power
And your foolishness his grace
The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
Though you shrink from his embrace
And he will clothe you with his spirit
He will arm you with his love
The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
He will guard you from above
Because your weakness is his power
And your foolishness his grace
The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
Though you shrink from his embrace
And he will clothe you with his spirit
He will arm you with his love
The Lord is with you, mighty warrior
He will guard you from above
(The Lord is with You) Mighty Warrior, a song
You were Talking About the End of the World: Christian Reflections on the Music of U2 (IX)
One of the distinctive qualities of the music of U2 is their characteristic use of unresolved suspended chords to create tension and atmosphere. In musical theory, a major chord is made up of the first, third and fifth notes in a major scale, played simultaneously and in various combinations. A C major chord, for instance, is formed (“spelled”) by the notes C, E, and G, with C being the first note in a C scale, E the third, and G the fifth.
A major chord becomes “suspended” when the third note is raised by a half-step, or lowered by a full step, so that it becomes either the fourth or the second note in the scale, instead of the third. In our previous example, if we move the E note up to an F (increasing it a half step), the chord becomes Csus4, spelled C, F, and G. Similarly, if we drop the E to D, the chord becomes Csus2, spelled C, D, and G.
Suspended chords have an airy, dissonant quality to them. In musical terms, they create musical tension, and need their related major chord for resolution. In other words, a Csus4 chord is kind of “waiting” for a C major chord to “finish it,” and without the C major chord, it feels “unresolved.”
I doubt U2 was the first band to ever use unresolved suspended chords in their music, but they are probably one of the first to make them part of their signature sound. Early on in their career, they became notorious for playing suspended second and suspended fourth chords without playing the related major chord to resolve it, allowing the tension of the suspended notes to create an ethereal, uncentred atmosphere in the music. This was helped along by the Edge’s use of elaborate guitar effects which allowed him to have unresolved second and fourth scale degrees echoing distantly and repeatedly over major chord structures. 1984’s “Bad” was probably their first global hit to make successful use of this compositional technique, but you can hear hints of it as far back as 1980s “I Will Follow.”
I don’t have hard evidence for this, but my hunch is that this is another musical innovation that the band lent to Contemporary Christian Music. At least, the use of unresolved suspended chords are ubiquitous in the genre. Some of this is simply a function of musical skill. Most CCM is played primarily on guitar, and in many musical keys (E, D, and G, especially) suspended chord voicings tend to be easier to play than their major counterparts. But even if the compositional technique was not borrowed directly from U2, the fact that modern ears so readily “accept” the sound of the unresolved suspended chord is probably owing to the fact that we’ve become familiar with it, through the music of contemporary rock bands like U2.
I find it interesting, on a theological level, that contemporary Christian music has a bit of a penchant for unresolved suspended chords, insofar as one of the musical effects of the suspended chord is to create a sense of anticipation. As I said earlier, a suspended fourth note musically “points” towards the major chord to resolve the tension (with a 3rd note in the triad instead of a 2nd or 4th). Until that chord is heard, the listener is left with a sense of something left unfinished, or something still to come. And this is fascinating to me only because the Christian message itself is one that points continually to something still to come.
“He will come again to judge the living and the dead,” is how we say it in the Apostle’s Creed. Because along with the proclamation that Christ came, and the announcement that Christ is come, the Christian Gospel has always included the hopeful expectation that Christ will come again.
In theological terms we call this “eschatology,” the Christian conviction that the final word has not yet been spoken, nor will it be until the Lord returns in glory and all things are set right. And in musical terms, we might say, unresolved suspended chords are wonderfully fitted for making music in response to a distinctly eschatological message.
Put more simply: the fact that unresolved chords create a sense of tension and anticipation make them well suited for singing about the Christian message, which is itself filled with the tension and the anticipation of the Second Coming.
This is not to say that there’s something innately “spiritual” about an unresolved major chord, or even preferable to other musical forms as a medium for Christian music. Every form of musical expression, I think, has qualities that reflect some aspect of the Christian message. This is why we are enjoined always to sing a “new song” to the Lord, and to make music “skillfully” in response to him.
There is something to be said, though, for music that leaves us unsatisfied, yearning, even, possibly, uncentred in our worship of the God who has assured us that all is not yet as it will be, and there is still more, unimaginably more, to come. In his book Theology, Music and Time, musician and theologian Jeremy Begbie discusses this in terms of “delayed gratification” in music—the way music, when it is intentionally crafted to do so, can leave the audience emotionally aching for more. He suggests, on the one hand, that more Christian music ought to explore ways of doing this, given the delayed gratification built into our eschatology, and he laments, on the other hand, that so much modern Christian music fails to make us wait for much of anything.
It is worth noting in passing that much of the music currently employed in Christian worship deploys remarkably little in the way of delayed gratification. Admittedly, a congregation must be able to grasp quickly new hymns and songs if music is to enable and release their worship, but . . . rather too often goals are reached directly and predictably with a minimum of the kind of delay of which we have been speaking. Could we be witnessing here a musical articulation of the tendency in some quarters of the Church to insist on immediate rewards and not to come to terms with (potentially positive) realities of frustration and disappointment?Begbie is writing about mainstream Christian hymnody there, I think, more than he is about Contemporary Christian Music, per se. What’s more, his words were penned back in 2000, a good two decades before the explosion the musical juggernaut that is today’s Contemporary Christian Music industry. Even so, I sometimes wonder if all the musical tension of all those unresolved suspended chords, chiming out in the anthems of todays most popular CCM hits, isn’t a reflection—if only a subconscious reflection—of the unresolved tension of our message itself: “Behold, he comes quickly, and his reward is with him.”
If there are any connections between all these dots—from the music of U2, to the songwriting of CCM, to the hope of Christian eschatology—it might be just one more way the band has helped the contemporary church find some new wineskins for its age old message message. And even if its only coincidence, I can't help but notice how apt it is to the message of the song, whenever I hear the unresolved tension of the Fsus2 in U2's “Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.” And in my more eschatological moments I can't help but think: “Nor will you, until He comes again.”
His Song a Weapon in the Hands of Love: Christian Reflections on the Music of U2 (VIII)
Eugene Peterson once pointed it out, that the first Christian ever to have been formally called a “theologian” was John of Patmos. It’s true: the Greek term they gave him was theologos—one who speaks “God-words.” And Peterson humbly points it out that, as a theologos, John’s great contribution to the life of the church was that fascinating piece of unparalleled, theological poetry, the Book of Revelation. And despite the centuries-old tendency to read the book of Revelation as though it were simply God’s survival manual for the apocalypse, at its heart it is exactly that: a poem. It’s a marvelously, majestically, mysteriously theological poem, to be sure, but still for all that, a poem.
I have always found it both sobering and inspiring to think that, whatever else he was, the first Christian theologian was a poet. Sobering, because so little of the work I do in the discharge of my daily duties as a pastor is actually poetic. There are plenty of God words to be spoken, of course, but most of them are of the practical or the pedantic kind. I preach; I propound; I pray. But very seldom does the moment seem to call for an unequivocal, unapologetic poem, per se.
This strikes me as especially curious, given the fact that such vast swaths of the Bible were written in verse. From the vivid praise of the Psalter to the visionary oracles of the prophets, from the dark debates in the Book of Jo to the sensual Song of Solomon, I mean, the authors of the Good Book seemed to think that good poetry played a central role in opening the heart to God, and in hearing from him in return. Even the Master himself, the Living Word who gave us the Beatitudes and inspired Mary’s Magnificat, seems to have been perfectly at ease among the arresting rhythms and piercing imagery of a well-turned line of poetry.
It’s not simply sobering, however, to realize how important a role good poetry played in the spiritual lives of those first Christians; it is also inspiring. Anyone who has agonized over the best way to say it precisely, what God was up to in a given moment of their lives—anyone who has stumbled unexpectedly across a metaphor so perfect it untangled a knot in their hearts they didn’t even know was there until it had opened—anyone who has had a line of verse flare suddenly in their spirits and so illuminate an otherwise impenetrably dark night of the soul—anyone, that is, who has ever had just the right words at just the right moment coalesce beautifully with something God was intimately doing in their lives, will be encouraged to know that the Christian faith has always made ample room for good poetry in its vision of the spiritual life.
Which is perhaps one of the reasons the music of U2 still holds a special place in my heart, some 40 years after first hearing them play. Despite the cliches that dog the band—their pompous self-righteousness, their predictability, their over-dependence on slick production at the expense of musicality—and to whatever degree these critiques are valid, still their music contains some of the most evocative poetry I’ve ever encountered in a rock-music context. In some ways, Bono was to the 80s and 90s what Bob Dylan was to the 60s and 70s, but the comparison falls short. I’ve always heard, in Bono’s lyrics, something both more spare and more expansive than anything I’ve encountered in a Dylan tune.
A few samples from the repository of U2 lyrics that echo regularly in my heart might prove the point:
We turn away to face the cold enduring chill
As day begs the night for mercy, love
A sun so bright it leaves no shadows
Only scars carved into stone on the face of the earth(One Tree Hill, The Joshua Tree)
I remember, when we could sleep on stones
Now we lie together in whispers and moans
When I was all messed up and I heard opera in my head
Your love was a light bulb hanging over my bed(Ultraviolet Baby, Achtung Baby)
And I have no compass
And I have no map
And I have no reasons
No reasons to get back(Zooropa, Zooropa)
You gotta cry without weepingI realize there’s a high degree of subjectivity when it comes to things like song lyrics. What speaks to one heart is not necessarily guaranteed to speak to another. Even so, the poignancy and pathos of lines like these, I hope, need little pointing out. I can still recall hearing some of these words being sung for the first time; the sound was like that of the click of a key in a lock, opening a door into a space in my heart I had always sensed was there but didn’t know the way to. Even today, the opening line of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” or the outro of “The Fly,” and many parts of many other U2 songs still have that effect.
Talk without speaking
Scream without raising your voice
You know I took the poison from the poison stream
Then I floated out of here(Running to a Standstill, The Joshua Tree)
One of the running themes in this series on the music of U2 has been the question of the band’s faith and/or spirituality: is U2 a Christian band? I’ve explored that from a variety of angles, suggesting that, though they have always held themselves aloof to the label, in some ways they are more “Christian” than many of their explicitly, evangelically “Christian” counterparts. I won’t rehash all those arguments, but I will suggest here, that perhaps this is most evident in the poetry—the deep yearning and profound imagery—of their lyrics. There are wonderfully poetic Christian songwriters, too, to be sure. Michael Card and John Mark McMillan are Christian lyricists I think of who stand on a similar level as Bono when it comes to using words, by turns, as gemstones and slingstones both. But in my experience, artists like these are the exception, not the rule.
Perhaps, though, if we took a cue from Bono, and rediscovered or reclaimed the power of well-chosen words to minister to the heart and glorify the Creator who made it, we may be pressing into one of the most Christian endeavors of all. After all, not for nothing did the Psalmist declare: “My heart is stirred by a noble theme, as I compose my verses for the king.”
We're One But We're Not the Same: Christian Reflections on the Music of U2 (VII)
Although they had been around since the release of Boy back in 1980, U2 didn’t start to earn the massive global recognition it enjoys today until the mid 80s. Most rock historians agree that the moment which effectively introduced them to the world was their 20-minute-long performance as part of the storied musical event known as Live Aid, 1985. This 16-hour concert featured over 70 acts performing in two different cities and was staged as a fundraiser for famine relief in Africa. U2 was the 15th act to perform on the Wembley Stadium stage, singing two tunes: “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” and “Bad.”
It was their earnest and impassioned performance of “Bad” that is especially remembered today. Part way through the song, Bono began beckoning to a young woman in the crowd, gesturing for her to be brough up on stage; when this failed, he unexpectedly jumped down into the crowd and found his way to the woman in question. Then, while she kept her face buried against his chest, he slow-danced with her for 30 seconds or more, before returning her to the crowd with a kiss and climbing back onto the stage to finish the song.
It is one of the most iconic and quintessential scenes from the annals of U2 lore. Bono, the guileless and passionate frontman, throwing convention to the wind to connect with his audience, while The Edge keeps the chiming notes of his echoing guitar sounding out over the crowd. It would later be revealed that the woman in question was being crushed by the crowds pushing forwards, and Bono had jumped down to help her.
As Wikipedia puts it, though, “The [performance] turned out to be a breakthrough moment for the band, showing a television audience of millions the personal connection Bono could make with audiences.”
This desire to connect with the people they are performing for has always been a part of U2’s ethos, and, arguably, their appeal to their fans. In his biography of the band, Unforgettable Fire, Eamon Dumphy talks about this aspect of their live shows in the earliest iterations of the band. Even as a teen, Bono was a highly sensitive soul, and tended to launch into rambling monologues during performances, intent on connecting, not just musically, but emotionally with his audience.
A yearning for connection shows up in their songwriting as well, with lyrics that explore both the emotional landscapes of the human heart and the political landscapes of the modern world, trying sincerely to map each onto the other. "Bullet the Blue Sky"—a song ostensibly about America, but also about the thumbprint the idea of America has left on the human heart—or "Zooropa"—a song about the political upheaval of 1990s Europe, but also about the mark that upheaval has left on the modern soul—are both great examples of this (as are: "Mothers of the Disappeared," "Silver and Gold," "Pride (In the Name of Love)," and "New Years Day").
Of course, U2 is hardly the first band ever to believe that their music could do more than simply entertain or excite, that it could also, in fact, illuminate and unite. But they are probably one of the biggest bands ever to have emphasized this aspect of their art. And they got as big as they are, arguably, because of their conviction that music could connect human hearts in this way, that a song was more than just a song, it was an emotional bond between performer and audience.
Their music, and the storied career they have enjoyed performing it, is a testimony, I think, to this particular power that music possesses, and as a Christian pastor, it makes me wonder if it’s why, even though the group has been so ambivalent about their faith, still their music feels so Christian, even when they’re ”only” singing about streets with no name or Billie Holiday, the Angel of Harlem.
I say this because music-making has always been a central aspect of Christian community, one of the ways the community forms itself and expresses its collective life before God. From the New Testament witness, it seems that this goes back to the earliest days of the church. In 1 Corinthians 14:26, Paul talks about believers coming to the community’s meeting with a song to share; and from the sounds of Ephesians 5:19, the earliest believers used songs, hymns and spiritual songs as a way of communicating to one another about their love of and devotion to the Lord.
A good deal of contemporary Christian worship music places the emphasis almost entirely on the individual, with the focus almost exclusively on the way music helps the singer connect with God; but a deep dive into the Psalms will show that the Scripture is fully aware of music’s ability to connect us one to another as well. This goes beyond the framework of the traditional rock concert, of course: part of the community-forming power of music comes, not from it being performed and consumed, but from what happens when we make it together. Even so, if we wanted something to inspire us to reclaim the connection-forming power of music, and maybe imagine ways it could happen, we could do worse than to look at how the best of U2’s music forms deep bonds of connection between the band and their audience.
She Moves in Mysterious Ways: Christian Reflections on the Music of U2 (VI)
One of the unsolved mysteries that occasionally got debated in my youth group as a kid was whether or not U2 was a “Christian Band.” I’ve already alluded to this question in a couple of posts in this series on the music of U2, but I thought it might be worth a deep dive of its own.
On the one hand, there are enough tracks in the U2 catalogue that explicitly refer to God, Christ, the Church, or passages of Scripture, that you could easily make the case that Bono and the Lads are about as Christian as you could expect a chart-topping supergroup to be. In “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” Bono declares it boldly that he “believes in Kingdom Come,” and (presumably) that Jesus “carried the cross of all [his] shame.” Similarly, in “When Love Comes to Town,” he confesses that “[he] was there when they crucified my Lord.” In “Until the End of the World,” he imagines the Last Supper through the eyes of Judas, and in “Sunday Bloody Sunday” he sings about "[claiming] the victory Jesus won.” And the list goes on: he asks God to take his soul and make it sing, in “Yahweh”; he extols grace as a “thought that changed the world” in “Grace.”
On the other hand, however, the band has always been somewhat aloof about their faith, and many of their songs reveal a deep ambivalence towards matters religious. In “Peace on Earth,” Bono asks ironically if Jesus can’t take the time to throw a drowning man a line. In “For the First Time,” he talks about leaving “his Father’s mansion, where there are many rooms to see,” sneaking out the back door and throwing away the key. In Pop’s “Wake Up Dead Man,” he sings about being alone and helpless in God’s abandoned world, and in “If God Will Send His Angels” he wonders out loud if God’s got his phone of the hook, and if he’d even pick up if he could.
So there are two definite sides to the coin that is “U2’s Christianity.” They’re the type of band that can put Psalm 40 to music so evocatively (in their 1981 masterpiece, “40”), so evocatively, indeed, that Contemporary Christian artists wouldn't hesitate to include it in a worship set (as Michael W. Smith did in 2002); yet they’re also the kind of band that can put out a song imagining the world through the eyes of a psychotic killer (their 1987 “Exit”), and sing about going out “to taste and to touch, and to feel as much as a man can before he repents” (as they did in 1993’s “The Wanderer”).
In the tight-laced youth group that I spiritually came of age in, back in the 80s and 90s, this ambivalence made U2 suspect. They were safe listening, compared to Motley Crue or Ozzy Osbourne, but they were still somewhat dubious, as far as “Christian rock” went. Their music was a bit too secular to be sacred.
Youth group leaders have a lot of stake-holders to keep in mind when they make musical recommendations to their charges, so perhaps the very tentative endorsements my leaders gave U2 back then were justified. I don’t know. From a theological perspective, though, there is something deeply and profoundly Christian, I think, in the ease with which U2 seems to belong in both worlds, the sacred and the secular.
In his masterful treatise on Christian Ethics, Deitrich Bonhoeffer writes about the implications of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, when it comes to the human tendency to divide the world into sacred and secular spheres. If it is true, Bonhoeffer suggests, that in Christ God really has brought together His divine life with our human life, then there can no longer be any real division between the sacred and the secular. Because of the person and work of Christ, he says, it is no longer possible to think "in terms of two spheres,” the divine and the worldly, the holy and the profane, the Christian and the un-Christian; for the believer, now, there is only the single reality of the world reconciled to God in Christ.
“Whoever professes to believe in the reality of Jesus Christ, as the revelation of God,” he writes, “must in the same breath profess his faith in both the reality of God and the reality of the world; for in Christ he finds God and the world reconciled” (Ethics, p. 198). In another place, he makes these two realities inseparable, claiming that:
In Christ we are offered the possibility of partaking in the reality of God and in the reality of the world, but not in the one without the other. The reality of God discloses itself only by setting me entirely in the reality of the world, and when I encounter the reality of the world it is always already sustained, accepted and reconciled in the reality of God. (Ethics, p. 193).This is a truth, I think, that contemporary Christians, especially evangelicals, often fail to grasp. Despite the claims of the Gospel, still, we tend to think in terms of “two realities”—the one, claimed and explicitly devoted to Christ, the other opposed or turned away from him. If Bonhoeffer is on to anything, however, the “reality” that seems, ostensibly, opposed to God, is still, in Christ, claimed by him and destined for redemption. Christians cannot abandon it as irredeemably secular, and, indeed, by manifesting the presence of Christ in that sphere which is, to all appearances, god-forsaken, we evidence the fullest truths of the Gospel: that Jesus is the true Lord of the whole world, sacred and secular alike.
This is easier said than done, though. I don’t personally think that “manifesting the presence of Christ in the secular sphere” means simply plastering John 3:16 bumper stickers on your car and wearing your Jesus Saves T-Shirt everywhere you go. I think, rather, it means embracing the world with all its foibles, failures and fractures as precious to God, viewing it empathetically with the eyes of Christ, and responding to it compassionately as a “reality” that Christ came to love and died to redeem to himself.
What this looks like in practical terms is hard to describe, because it depends entirely on each believer’s individual context. If you wanted to image what it sounds like, though, to reunite the sacred and the secular in Christ, you could take a listen to any number of U2 songs that attempt to do just that, from the one about the girl with crimson nails swinging Jesus round her neck, to the one about an invisible ultraviolet light that illuminates the world, whose love is “like a secret that’s been passed around.”
Maybe learning to see the world the way the best of U2's lyrics describe it, could be a first step towards experiencing the fullest meaning of the Gospel: that God was in Christ reconciling the World to Himself.
What More in the Name of Love?: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (V)
I am ordained as a Free Methodist minister, and have served in this denomination for the whole of my pastoral ministry. Historically, the Free Methodist Church has always placed a strong emphasis on ministry to the poor, the disenfranchised, the down-and-out. The denomination emerged in the 1860s in America, being birthed out of anti-slavery protests and calls for religious reform in the Methodist denomination of the time. B. T. Roberts, one of the founding leaders of the Free Methodist Church, was famously expelled from the Methodist Church for his work advocating—or agitating, as his detractors had it—to bring slavery to an end, and for calling out the Methodists for its complicity with the practice.
I did not grow up Free Methodist, finding my way to the FM when I was looking for my first ministry appointment after graduating with my Masters of Divinity, back in 2008. The tradition I grew up in was much more focused on the “spiritual” dimensions of the Gospel—the justification by faith and the salvation by grace that the scriptures promise all who confess with their mouths that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts God raised him from the dead. It actually had little time for “the Social Gospel,” and more than a little suspicion of it. Wasn’t “social justice” what the mainline denominations worried about, at the expense of evangelism, and because they’d lost their biblical moorings? Wasn’t it dangerously close to a “works-based-righteousness” that flatly contradicted the glorious truth that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, and explicitly not by works? And if that were true—that good works are unnecessary to salvation—well, to put it bluntly: why bother?
I should add that for a space of time in my young adult years, I participated in a Christian Youth Ministry that was heavily focused on social justice and social transformation—the so-called “Social Gospel.” They were so focused on it, in fact, that the hand-wringing over neglecting evangelism and/or watering down the Gospel that the Christians in the churches of my childhood might have done, would have been lost on them. Worse than lost on them: it would have been distasteful. For many of the friends I made in this Youth Ministry, the Gospel was social justice, worship was social action, and anything that took things like sin, sanctification, the atonement, or the Holy Spirit too seriously risked losing sight of the real work of the believer: to be about the work of the Kingdom: giving water to the thirsty, food to the hungry, and solace to the harried.
I’ve lived in both religious extremes, is my point: the liberal Social Gospel extreme, and the conservative sola fide extreme. Which is why, when I first became a Free Methodist minister, I found this denominations “both/and” when it came to social justice and personal devotion so refreshing. In Free Methodism, both works of mercy (social action for the sake of Jesus) and works of piety (personal devotion guided by the Holy Spirit) are both means of grace, and equally important.
This may be why I’ve always appreciated the emphasis the band U2 has always placed, through their music, on making a real difference in the world: their recognition that their massive platform has given them a massive voice to speak up on social issues, and their willingness to use that platform to promote a worthy cause.
In saying this, I acknowledge that this is also a feature of U2’s music that has turned off many a would-be fan. The band—and especially their lead singer, Bono—is just too damned preachy. Their penchant for supporting the “flavor of the month” when it comes to social issues was hilariously parodied when they appeared, as themselves, on The Simpsons. When Homer interrupts their concert to discuss waste management, as part of his bid to become Springfield’s next Sanitation Commissioner. The audience boos uproariously, Bono gives him the stage, because, in his words, “waste management affects the whole damn planet!”
On a serious note, however, there’s this poignant and earnest denunciation of the 1987 Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen, Ireland.
Musically, I was raised on the Beatles and the Beach Boys, as a child, and came of age as a teen listening to acts like White Snake and Van Halen. When I first encountered U2 in the late 80s, I was listening almost predominantly to glam metal, with all its hedonistic anthems to debauchery echoing in my head. In those days, encountering a band like U2, that took its vocation as a rock band so seriously, was world transforming for me. Here was a band that believed, actually, that songs should be about something, striving towards something, calling for action to something, and that that something ought to be something important.
As my musical education grew, I would learn that this impulse towards using music, and rock music, especially, to channel the rebellious spirit of youth towards social justice traced back much further than U2, to the protest songs of Bob Dylan, Elvis’s determination to cross racial barriers, or the folk tunes of Woody Guthrie.
What U2 did, however, that none of those who went before them did—or at least, they did it more explicitly and more successfully—was to marry their passion for social change with a spirituality that was always latently Christian, and at times explicitly so. As much as it is possible to do so in a genre as full of contradictions as rock music, U2 brought together a cry for social justice and a yearning for spiritual transcendence in the same place.
A song like “Pride (In the Name of Love),” or “Sunday Bloody Sunday” are great early examples of this; songs like “Where the Streets Have No Names” are more classic examples; songs like “Crumbs from Your Table,” “Walk On,” and “Yahweh” are instances from much later in the U2 catalogue.
In a previous post, I discussed Contemporary Christian Music’s musical debt to U2. What CCM never borrowed, however, is U2’s conviction that music should not only reach up, towards the divine; it should also reach out, to the oppressed, the down-trodden, the exploited. In my opinion, the worship music of the modern evangelical church is the poorer because of this. Almost all modern worship songs adopt a “just-me-and-Jesus” posture, telling Jesus how much we love him and how much he has done for us. I can’t remember ever hearing a song telling Jesus that we were going to give a cup of cold water to a parched child, or clothing to the naked stranger, because we knew that in doing so we’d be expressing out love for him.
Maybe that’s too much to ask for, in a corporate worship setting, but if the contemporary evangelical church was going to borrow more from U2 than simply some haunting chord progression and the creative use of guitar effects pedals, it could do worse than to borrow their belief that works of mercy and acts of piety are not at odds. They are, in fact, two beautiful sides of the very same worshipful coin.
I Believe in Kingdom Come: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (III)
One of Stryper’s greatest hits was a tune called “To Hell With the Devil,” a song it sang with as much unironically literalism as you can achieve, belting out the phrase against crunching guitars, wearing skin-tight spandex and teased out hair. (I remember my father finding my To Hell With the Devil album in my cassette collection and preparing to give me a good talking-to about it, until he realized that they meant the song sincerely, and, after all (he said) there’s probably no better place for the Devil than that.)
So I was reliving the oldies with my Gen-Z friend, like I say, and a half hour later we’d covered any number of Stryper tunes. It was a bit embarrassing for me, to realize how bad my musical taste was at sixteen, though in those days I thought Stryper were virtuosos at their craft (and, to their credit, if you can see past all the corny costumes and glammy make-up, they were actually pretty talented musicians as far as the hair-metal genre goes).
But what stood out to me on this 40th-year reunion with the music of Stryper was how theologically clunky their songwriting was. It never occurred to me, at sixteen, that a line like “Speak of the Devil, he’s no friend of mine / to turn from him is what we’ve got in mind” was not exactly elegant poetry.
Here’s the opening verse of another Stryper classic, “Soldiers Under Command.”
We are the soldiers under God's commandIt’s not exactly subtle. But neither was the theological impulse of a band like Stryper. Essentially, the group—and the Christian metal genre more generally—was attempting a kind of Christian coup of utterly secular cultural expressions, baptizing all the hedonism and pseudo-occultism of the heavy metal genre with a veneer of religion, so that Christian metal fans could eat their cake and have it to.
We hold His two-edged sword within our hands
We're not ashamed to stand up for what's right
We win without sin, it's not by our might
And we're fighting all the sin
And the good book -- it says we'll win
I say this with a good deal of fondness for Stryper. As a yearning sixteen-year-old raised in a devoutly Christian home and trying to find his way in a decidedly un-Christian world, music that had all the energy and urgency of the stuff my friends were listening to, without any of the guilt I got when I listened to Iron Maiden, was, quite literally, a God-send.
But I also say it by way of contrast to the music of U2, the band that this series is actually about. One of the huge questions swirling around U2 when I was a teen, and this was especially asked by the same youth group leaders that recommended the music of Stryper to me—the most important thing to know about the band—was: Is U2 a Christian band?
The jury never returned a verdict on that one. Certainly, much of their music, especially the earliest outings, were replete with spiritual references, Christian allusions, and religious subtexts. And even without these more direct nods to the stuff of faith, their music never offered any pagan peons to Satan, or celebrated debauchery and dissipation the way so many of their contemporaries did. If they weren’t overtly Christian, then at least they were “Christian friendly.”
That said, they were also very evasive about their religious convictions. They never openly declared allegiance to any church or creed, never explicitly stated their faith, never tossed Bibles into the crowds at their concerts (a staple at Stryper concerts). Yes, Bono sang passionately in his belief in “Kingdom Come, when all the colors bleed into one,” but that’s a far cry from announcing that he was going to “fight all the sin,” because the “good book says we’ll win.”
As one music critic put it, U2 is “the greatest Christian band that never was.”
When held up against a band that is so brashly “Christian” as Stryper, U2’s ambiguity about their Faith raises some profound questions about the role of Christian artists, the relationship between faith and culture, and, especially, what makes Christian art “Christian” anyway.
In his book, Christ and Culture the renowned Christian theologian Richard Niebuhr offered a succinct framework for understanding the different postures different Christians take when it comes to the relationship between faith and culture. He described 5 distinct positions: 1. Christ against Culture (standing opposed to culture as irredeemably secular), 2. Christ of Culture (uncritically embracing developments in culture as being of Christ), 3. Christ above Culture (seeing your Christian faith as something separate from culture, with no conflict and very little contact between them), 4. Christ and Culture in paradox (seeing culture and faith as irreconcilably in tension with one another, but participating faithfully in both without resolving the difference), and 5. Christ as the Transformer of Culture (believing that culture is redeemable, and working faithfully to transform it in a way that brings glory to God).
Using Neibuhr’s framework, I would argue that, although a band like Stryper was attempting to adopt the fifth posture—Christ as the Transformer of Culture—what actually happened when it tried to Christianize the tropes of Heavy Metal was closer to the first posture: Christ against Culture. I say this because of the view implied by a song like “Soldiers Under Command,” that the only thing that can make a musical genre like heavy metal acceptable is if it is “co-opted” for the purposes of the Gospel. This explains the blunt-force with which the message is delivered in Stryper’s music. The whole approach suggests that the only acceptable musical expressions are those that are explicitly, unambiguously, even aggressively clear about the faith that has motivated it.
By contrast, U2 tends to adopt Posture Four in their music: holding Christ and Culture in tension, somewhat reveling in the paradox, and refusing to resolve the ambiguity. Christ is certainly present in their art, but not in its entirety, nor are they willing to pull back the veil and show where he is or is not standing. The deep irony—and it’s an irony we will explore more in coming posts—is that while adopting a “Christ and Culture in Paradox” posture, U2 has had a far more profound and far-reaching impact on culture than Stryper ever did. In adopting Posture Four, that is to say, they found themselves standing in Posture Five.
In her beautiful book, Walking on Water, Madeline L’Engle shares thoughts on being a Christian and an artist, arguing that we do a disservice to faith and art both when we assume that the thing that makes Christian art “Christian” is the number of times it refers to Jesus, and/or the clarity with which it makes those references. When we do this, she says, we end up both exploiting Jesus and corrupting art. What makes Christian art truly Christian, she argues, is the faithful lens through which the artists views the world, the mercy and love with which they engage what they see, and the freedom and the honesty with which they attempt to convey that in their art.
Whatever else the music of U2 offers us, it is an intriguing object lesson in L’Engle’s claims on this point. Consider, for instance, a song that attempts compassionately and mercifully to step into the agony of a heroin addict—like their poignant “Running to a Standstill”—or a tune urging us to acknowledge the difference that divides us and carry each other all the same—like their achingly beautiful “One”—or a lyric playfully celebrating the mystery of grace—like their tongue-in-cheek “Daddy’s gonna pay for your crashed car.” Perhaps tunes like these bring far more glory to God, despite the fact they never mention the name of Jesus, than four spandex-clad metalheads ever could, belting out at the top of their lungs that “In God we trust, in him we must believe, In God we trust, His Son we must receive.”
Three Chords and the Truth: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (II)
I used to know this guy who was an accomplished bass guitarist, and occasionally he would quip that Adam Clayton is the luckiest bass player in the world.
For him, the joke was that Adam Clayton is one of the most successful and wealthy bassists on the planet, despite his relatively rudimentary skills on the bass.
You could say similar things about the other members of U2. The rock-and-roll legend about lead singer Paul Hewson—aka Bono—is that his nickname came from an Italian phrase, "bono vox," which means “beautiful voice.” He earned this mysterious sobriquet as a kind of ironic nod to the fact that he is not an especially great singer. Passionate, yes. Distinctive, of course. Endowed with a compelling urgency, sure. But his voice is not considered by most—even among ardent fans—to be particularly “beautiful.”
Nor is the Edge exactly a guitar virtuoso. In saying that, I don't mean any disrespect to his music, because more than half of everything I know about guitar I probably learned playing U2 songs. And I don’t mean to imply that he lacks talent, either. When it comes to creating atmospheric soundscapes, the Edge is, in my opinion, a genius at his craft. When it comes to riffs, scales, licks and phrases, however, he does not have an especially diverse vocabulary. If you’ve learned three or four different U2 chord progressions, you’ve pretty much learned them all. There is a telling scene in the movie Rattle and Hum, where U2 is rehearsing the song Love Came to Town, with blues guitar legend B. B. King. As they’re preparing the arrangement, King says something about how he doesn’t usually play chords, to which Bono replies: “Don’t worry, Edge can do that—there’s not much chords in this song; I think there’s only two.”
For all their fame and admiration—a renown that is, in my opinion, well earned—still, none of the members of U2 are truly virtuosos of their respective instruments. When you strip away the layered studio production and surreal sound effects that makes their music so distinctive, few of their songs rate much higher than campfire choruses, when it comes to musical complexity.
Which I don’t bring up in this series on U2 as a criticism. It’s only to illustrate something profound about their music that makes the band so fascinating to me: the fact that U2 is one of the more compelling instances of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
In sociology, we use the word “emergence” to describe this phenomenon. According to sociologist Christian Smith, emergence refers to the process of “constituting a new entity with its own particular characteristics through the interactive combination of other, different entities that are necessary to create the new entity but … do not contain the characteristics present in the new entity” (Smith, p. 26). Emergence occurs when two or more entities at a ‘lower level’ interact, serving in this way as the basis for a new, ‘higher level’ entity with characteristics that cannot be reduced to those of the lower entities.”
To consider how emergence works, we might examine one of U2’s most popular songs, ranked 93rd in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time: “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” According to Wikipedia, many critics consider it to be one of the greatest rock songs of all time—U2’s “Let it Be,” as it were. It has certainly always held a special place in my heart as one of the quintessential songs of my growing up years.
Musically, however, the song is relatively simple, and easily dissected: a modest 3-chord progression and a straight-forward melody, with a couple of chiming guitar parts composed of some basic arpeggios on some suspended major chords, played with a delay over a four-note bass line . It’s true that the drum groove is unique, and helps to make the song so memorable, but even so, it is not an especially complex composition.
When all these rudimentary parts come together, however, something profound emerges that cannot be reduced to this mere list of its basic components. I have always felt that “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” opens a window onto something almost archetypal, something not present in any of its individual parts, or even in the arranging and recording of the tune, but is only audible when it's all heard together and taken as a whole.
One might argue that this is true of music generally, and in some ways, it is. One of the reasons music is such an evocative medium, I think, is its ability to bring into existence polyphonically something that somehow cannot exist when individual sounds are simply made on their own.
There is something especially “emergent” about the music of U2, however. As basic as so much of their music is, what emerges when the four of them make it together is irreducible. It probably has something to do with the earnestness with which they tackle their art, the genuine desire to connect with their audience, the sincere love they seem to have for each other, as much as it has to do with the musicality of their playing, but whatever it is, there is an “emergent mystery” to the music of U2 that I’ve always admired.
It might be pushing it to draw this connection, but I like to think about the church in a similar way: the community that emerges when followers of Jesus bring their simple, rudimentary gifts together, I mean, allowing the Holy Spirit to bind them together for the glory of God, is also impossible to reduce to a simple sum of its constituent parts. In the case of the church, of course, it is the presence of Christ himself that causes the “transcendent something” to emerge, whereas U2 has been notoriously ambivalent about their Christian convictions. Even so, the way the church becomes something far greater than just a collective of individuals, an emergent body of believers loving the world with a love not present, or even possible, in any one individual’s passion or care, is perhaps symbolized beautifully by the way four mediocre musicians from Ireland took 4 basic chords and a whole lot of heart, and turned them into something that could touch lives and change the world.
Trying to Throw Your Arms Around the World: Christian Thoughts on the Music of U2 (I)
I share this as both an explanation and an apology for the series I’m starting today, a theological analysis of the music of U2. By way of explanation, it’s simply to point out that a Christian examination of a popular rock band like U2 does fall in line with the general theme and purpose of my blog. By way of apology, though, it’s to acknowledge that in some ways, the music of U2 is far too easy a target for a blog that is ostensibly intent on finding theological meaning in unexpected places. When I was exploring the theological meaning of the popular Disney show, Gravity Falls, all sorts of surprising theological gems kept bobbing unexpectedly to the surface; it’s less likely that a similar exploration of U2’s music is going to yield near as many surprises.
They are, after all, one of the most Christian “secular” bands on the planet. Their song lyrics are replete with overt Christian imagery, and their approach to the rock-star lifestyle never really shocked the world with its hedonism, making them one of the safest choices for a Christian kid who didn’t really want to listen to Christian music. They were one of the only non-Christian bands my youth group leader endorsed in the semi-fundamentalist church of my teen years. Even today, their lead singer Bono is regularly quoted for his opinions on the deity of Jesus, the resurrection, or God’s preferential option for the poor. So they’re maybe not the best candidates for an unlikely source of theological reflection.
That said, I still think there may be some unexpected glimmers of theological gold to be found, if we take some time to pan in the musical river that is their 47-year-long career. For starters, we might note the uneasy relationship they have with the evangelical sub-culture, or the unique way they bridged the sacred and the secular in their song-writing, or their social-justice advocacy work, which so often rang with echoes of the Old Testament prophets.
We will get to each of these in turn, and more, as we survey the breadth of their musical output (which, at 15 plus studio albums is impressive by any count). I grew up listening to U2, and though they’ve never really been my favorite band, they’ve always been an ubiquitous presence in my musical trajectory. I am sure I listened to my cassette version of Joshua Tree until it wouldn’t play clearly any more. To this day I can still remember listening to Zooropa for the first time, and feeling like I was stepping into a musical world I never could have imagined existing, but was still strangely, intimately familiar to me.
I sort of lost track of the band after No Line of the Horizon, listening to Songs of Innocence only a handful of times then moving on, and somehow missing Songs of Experience and Songs of Surrender altogether (to this day I still have to give those outings a listen). Nevertheless, there have been long stretches of my life where U2 was almost the only band I listened to, and when I was starting out as a guitarist, a good 75% of my repertoire consisted of U2 songs. Suffice it to say, then, that I will be speaking from a place of warm familiarity and tempered appreciation. After all, it was U2, I think, who challenged me to think through how the thing that makes Christian music truly Christian might not have anything to do with amount of Christian jargon it has in the lyrics, and how truly caring about the world—loving it well in the midst of all its political messiness and social injustices—is a vital Christian activity.
I hope to say much more on those themes in the weeks to come. In the meantime, and perhaps to establish some credibility as a fan, let me offer the list of my top ten favorite U2 albums, here in closing.
1. Achtung Baby
2. The Joshua Tree
3. Zooropa
4. All That You Can’t Leave Behind
5. Rattle and Hum
6. The Unforgettable Fire
7. Pop
8. How to Dismantle and Atomic Bomb
9. No Line on the Horizon
10. Songs of Innocence
Charmed, I'm Sure, a song
And I didn’t have a clue
The day this heart met yours
What was falling from the blue
Or how high we would soar
Cause angels, elves and seraphim
Were knocking on my door
An enchanted rendezvous
And I didn’t notice
I was charmed, I’m sure
The day I met you I was charmed, I’m sure
I didn’t know what was in store
But even if I could’ve, well I would’ve
Been charmed I’m sure
There was something in the air
A fire in the sky
It was shining everywhere
Bedazzling my eyes
Cause angels, elves and seraphim
We helping me to fly
With a song and on a prayer
And I didn’t notice
I was charmed, I’m sure
The day I met you I was charmed, I’m sure
I didn’t know what was in store
But even if I could’ve, well I would’ve
Been charmed I’m sure
Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy, a book review
Listening to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 certainly has that effect on me, and, mysteriously enough, it continues to have that effect, no matter how often I hear it.
Jourdain argues that music "works" on us by triggering deep physiological responses in our neurological structures that are evolutionarily “trained” to perceive subtle layers in sonic relations—the inner relationships, that is, between different sounds as they occur in an organized sequence. He suggests that this ability is the result of eons of evolution that refined our sensitivity to sonic relations, as a way of heightening our chances of survival. As a result, our brains are structurally attuned to the subtle (and often not-so subtle) relationships between sounds that well-crafted music presents us with. As a result, music has a unique ability to engage both the right and left hemispheres of our brains at once, stimulating pleasure both through its orderly structure, and through its close association with memories, emotion, and sensory arousal.
This physiological response, he goes on to suggest, interacts on a deep subconscious level with our specific cultural conditioning, which we use to make meaning out of the organized sounds of a musical performance. Our culture trains us to expect certain things of the music we hear, prompting reactions of delight (or disgust) as those expectations are met and/or subverted. At the same time, our bodies resonate physically with the rhythmic patterns of music, responding kinesthetically to the elegant structure it imposes on time. All of these responses—the neurological, psychological, kinesthetic, and cultural—he argues, were inadvertently wired into the human animal, as evolutionary processes naturally selected certain traits that better-fitted us for survival, helping us to avoid being eaten by the proverbial lion on the primordial savannah, and predisposing us to a kind of social interaction that would better ensure the propagation of our species.
I’m not sure how directly he argues that last point, but it is certainly one of the corollaries of his study. The seemingly-spiritual response music produces in us is really little more than a pleasurable biproduct of evolutionary forces that were themselves the result of decidedly unmusical events: those of our ancient ancestors who were less adept at interpreting the meaning implicit in that subtle rustling in the grass on the savannah died in the springing lion’s paws; those who were better at it survived, and passed on to subsequent generations a deep sensitivity to the meaning of sound. Those of our primaeval parents who responded well to the socially organizing effect of cooperative sound-making stayed together and were more likely to survive and pass on that predilection to their progeny. Those who didn’t simply died, and passed on nothing.
While Jourdain’s exploration of the phenomenology of music was profoundly fascinating, I have to be honest that, as a Christian reader, I felt it proved far more than it meant to. The word “ecstasy” literally means “standing outside one’s self" (or something along those lines). But if Jourdain’s fundamental assumptions are true, and meaning is only to be found in the random forces of a faceless evolution, then there is, actually, nowhere outside ourselves to stand. Throughout the book, he continually refers to things like the “elegant structures” of music, making value judgements regarding how “beautiful” some forms of music are and how crude others. Yet throughout my reading, I kept wondering: on what basis—if his basic argument was true—could we safely speak of music in terms of its "beauty" or "elegance"? Probably the most we could say is that certain types of organized sound are more effective at achieving its evolutionary effect, and others less so, but this is a far cry from describing something as intrinsically beautiful.
For all his talk about ecstasy, Jourdain has very little to say concretely about how and why music transports us the way it does, and where, in particular, it is transporting us to. As a Christian reader, in fact, the overall effect of Music, The Brain, And Ecstasy on me was not to cause me to stand in awe at the mysterious results of eons of blind evolutionary processes. Rather, it led me continually back to my deepest faith commitments: if the effect of music on the human psyche really is as complex and mysterious as Jourdain continually insists it is, where could so complex and mysterious a phenomenon have come from?
More to the point: what is really happening in us, when carefully structured and aesthetically pleasing sounds strike our bodies and elicit a response that can only be described, for lack of a better word, as spiritual? The evolutionary answers to those questions—like the ones Jourdain proposes—leave me personally feeling empty and cold. In the words of Puddleglum to the godless Green Witch: “Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one, and the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. That’s why I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can, even if there isn’t Narnia.”
If you’re not a fan of Narnia, perhaps a more concrete quote would help. In his book The Devil’s Delusion, philosopher David Belinski surveys the many confident claims of the evolutionary atheist—and he’s writing as an atheist himself, mind you—but he looks at the wild claims evolutionary atheism makes, of having made the “God Illusion” unnecessary. At the end of his survey he offers this humble acknowledgement: “We live by love and longing, death, and the devastation that time imposes. How did [these things] enter the world? And why? The world of the physical sciences is not our world, and if our world has things in it that cannot be explained in their terms, then we must search elsewhere for their explanation.”
The best of music, I think, puts us in poignant remembrance of the love and longing, the death and devastation that indeed marks our existence, assuring us that there are things in this world that cannot be explained purely in terms of the physical sciences; and whatever else is happening when a rapturous—or stirring, or alarming, or exciting—piece of music washes over us, and we feel it, and respond, we are being pointed out of our world to another. Not that the music itself can bring us there, but it reminds us that such a place exists, a place where the most satisfying answers of all are offered us. To quote C. S. Lewis in quite a different vein: "If I find in myself desires that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probably explanation is that I was made for another world." It is our longing for that other world, I think, that the aesthetic effect of music stirs up in us.
It's not for nothing that even in the earliest biblical witness, people responded to their experience of God in song, and in the fullest glimpse of his throne room that we're offered, we're told it's pulsing with the indescribable music of heaven.
Second Wind, an album
Each year I try to release a new recording project of original songs. Not that I have delusions of rock and roll grandeur or anything; I do it mostly as an outlet for my creativity, as a way to grow as a musician, hone my skills as a writer, and learn a bit each day about music production. In the nearly two decades since I released my very first album—recorded in a day with some muscians from my old church in Two Hills, for a total budget of $1000.00—I would say the discipline of writing and recording an album each year has checked all those boxes, making me a better muscian, writer, and producer, all while giving me the great joy that comes from doing things creative.
This year's effort harkens back to those early days, in that a handful of the songs on the album are new recordings of some of the old tunes that appeared on that very first album (it was called Sunlight and Water, and I still have a few copies of it sitting in a box at the back of my closet, if anyone still listens to CDs anymore, and wants a copy). The rest of the songs are tunes I hammered out between the cracks of a momentous year of change last year. Between going into transition as a pastor, becoming an empty nester as a parent, starting a new degree to become a counselor, and starting a new ministry in a new church, I found a bit of time, here and there, to scratch out a few new songs.
This project is called Second Wind, a title which alludes to the fact that some of the songs on the album are getting a "second wind" by being re-recorded and re-released from the old days. The title also gestures to the fact that I'm at a stage of my life where I feel like I'm getting my second wind, as a father, a pastor, and a follower of Jesus. As as a final layer to the title, there's a bit of play on the wind/breath/spirit word group in the Scriptures (see John 3:1-16 for more....). The songs on this album all deal with different aspects of discipleship, and as such they are about renewing ourselves spiritually—getting a "second wind"—in our life with God.
Like I say, I'm not holding my breath for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to call any time soon, but if one or two songs on this endeavor spoke to a heart or two out there, I'd feel it was worth the effort. Over the next month or two, I plan to post each song individually, and tell some of the stories that inspired them. For today, however, if you're curious, here's the whole thing, posted for your listening enjoyment.
Phantosmia (A Scent of Smoke), a song
About three years ago I started having this strange experience where I would randomly begin to smell smoke, when there was no real smoke to be smelled. The first time it happened it was so strong that I figured something in my office building must actually be burning, so I started wandering the halls trying to pin-point where it was coming from, sniffing the air so deeply that I almost hyperventilated. Three years, multiple doctors appointments, two specialist referrals, one EEG and one MRI test later, I was told that this was a common phenomenon, a condition related to migraine auras, and completely harmless. Apparently there's even a name for it: it's called phantosmia.
I've actually come to welcome my phantosmia episodes when they happen (usually one will come along every couple of months or so). The smoke scent itself is not unpleasant, something like a campfire smell, and they often trigger vague feelings of nostalgia. Early on in my journey with phantosmia, though, I was thinking about the ways in which this experience of looking intently for a smell that isn't there could be a metaphor for life. A few songwriting sessions later and I'd come up with this.
I’m being haunted
By a scent of smoke
I’m just being taunted
Cause when I look around
Nothing’s burning
Oh, how I hunted
For a scent of smoke
I had what I wanted
But when I woke I found
Empty yearning
Like a bird in a fist
That flutters away
Before it can be glimpsed
Like a dream that escaped
Before the dreamer awoke
My heart has been shaped
By a scent of smoke
Still I’m undaunted
I can take a joke
And yet I’m haunted
Cause when I look around
Nothing’s burning
Like a bird in a fist
That flutters away
Before it can be glimpsed
Like a dream that escaped
Before the dreamer awoke
My heart has been shaped
By a scent of smoke
The Years the Locusts Have Stolen, a song
One of my favorite bands of all time, actually, was a somewhat obscure metal band called White Lion. You may know them from one or the other of their two big radio hits, "Wait," and/or "When the Children Cry," but they have a whole treasure trove of musical gems in the vault, just waiting to be discovered. This is owing, primarily, to the fret-board wizardry of their lead guitarist, Vitto Bratta. Bratta was probably the best guitarist to come out of the glam metal era, and had White Lion's star burned a bit brighter for a bit longer, he may have earned a spot in that league of guitar legends that includes the likes of Hendrix, Clapton and Van Halen. As it was, I always felt that he was both more melodically tasteful and more technically accomplished than Eddie Van Halen, the guitarist who was, undoubtedly, his biggest inspiration.
Anyways, I'll never forget the day I first heard the opening riff of the opening song of Pride, their break-through second album. I am a bit of a synesthete, so all I can say is that before the song was done, I was awash in rich waves of majestic purple, darker than the sea is deep, and spangled with bright bursts of Roman candle silver. After that came "Don't Give Up," "Lady of the Valley," "Wait," and each song was like nothing I'd ever heard before but had been listening for all my life. Bear in mind, I was only a 14-year-old boy.
All this is by way of introduction to this week's cut from my "Three Hands Clapping" album. The day I started writing it, I'd recently listened to White Lion's Pride for old time's sake, and had it in mind that I wanted to write a song in homage to this band that had played such a prominent part in my musical formation. I'd also had it in mind for a while that I wanted to write a song based on Joel 2:25, but I didn't know where to begin. I did my best to put these two ideas together, and this is what came out. I ain't no Vitta Bratta, of course (not by a long shot), but the opening riff and the solo is the nearest I can come to approximating his awesomeness.
I hope you enjoy!
Hear a rattle of wings
Like a whisper of death
In a wilderness bleached by the sun
And the stubble is dry
And there’s nothing else left
When the black cloud is lifted and gone
When the bones are picked clean
And the heart has been turned into dust
You can’t unsee what you’ve seen
And there’s nobody left you can trust
I’ll pay you back for the years the locusts have stolen
I’ll pay you back for the tears that fell in the dark
When the sun has turned black
And the stars from the sky are fallen
I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back
And you’re not who you were
And you’re not who you are
And you’re not who you’re gonna be
And you can’t get it back
And you can’t let it go
And you can’t find a way to get free
Like a stone in your heart
It’ll weigh you down, regret
And it’ll tear you apart
All the things you can’t forget
I’ll pay you back for the years the locusts have stolen
I’ll pay you back for the tears that fell in the dark
When the sun has turned black
And the stars from the sky are fallen
I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back
Diamond in the Rough (a song)
I didn’t know that the day that I sat down beside you
I was sitting down next to my destiny
And I didn’t know that the day you smiled at me the first time
I was meeting a long lost piece of me
And I’m so glad you didn’t let the disguise fool you
I’m so glad you didn’t fall for my bluff
Cause if you had we might have never learned the truth about us (that)
Whatever else we had together
Together we had a diamond in the rough
I didn’t know the first time I felt your breath upon me
How much grace was breathing over me
I didn’t know the first time I held you in my arms
How strong a heart was beating next to me
And I’m so glad all my mistakes never deterred you
I’m so glad that we held on when the going got tough
Cause if we never had we might have never learned the truth about us (that)
Whatever else we had together,
Together we had a diamond in the rough
So place me as a seal upon the hinges of your heart
Like a lover’s seal engraved upon your arm
Cause love is strong as death, more jealous than the grave
And its flame burns with the fire of the Lord
I do not know all the ups and downs that lie before us
And where we’ll be when its all said and done
And I do not know what we’ll see there in the rear-view mirror
When we look back after its all said and done
But I hope it’s true we’ll say we savored every moment
I hope it’s true they’ll say we left a trail of love
Cause if we do that’s how we’ll finally know the truth about us (that)
Whatever else we had together,
Together we had a diamond in the rough
A Thousand Words, a Song
They say the Inuit up north
Have got a thousand words for snow
And well, honey, I just don’t know if that’s true
But if you need a thousand words
For the stuff of life you need the most
Then I guess I ought to have a thousand words for you
They say that Earnest Hemmingway
Could write a thousand words a day
Well he must have had a most prolific muse
But if you give a thousand words
To the thing that most inspires you
Then I guess I ought to have a thousand words for you
And I remember how they say
That a picture’s worth a thousand words
Well honey, give or take a word or two
But a thousand pictures won’t suffice
To tell you just a single thing
Out of the thousand words I want to say to you
A thousand words could never contain
The one thing I most want you to know
A thousand words could never describe the beat of my heart
I know its not much, I know it’s absurd
And I’ll never say something you haven’t heard
I know it falls short, but it’s all I’ve got
A thousand words, a thousand words
It’s better to be thought a fool
They say than open up your mouth
And prove to the whole world that its true
And if brevity’s the soul of wit
Then maybe all I have to do
Is just hold my tongue and let the silence speak to you
Your Faded Blue Jeans, a song
Every eye in the place
Is fixed on you
You can feel their gaze
Following you
And they’re sizing you up
And they’re weighing your soul
And you can’t get away
No matter where you go
Everybody’s watching you
As you’re walking down the street
(you can feel it)
Shining like the sun in your faded blue jeans
With your hair done up and your defenses down
And the world at your feet (and you know)
You’re the most magnetic thing they’ve ever seen
You in your faded blue jeans
You were breaking their hearts
But they just didn’t know
While you’re playing your part
We can’t stop the show
And you’re turning their heads
We can’t look away
And you’re knocking them dead
To live another day
Everybody’s watching you
As you’re walking down the street
(you can feel it)
Shining like the sun in your faded blue jeans
With your hair done up and your defenses down
And the world at your feet (and you know)
You’re the most magnetic thing they’ve ever seen
You in your faded blue jeans
You’re more beautiful than you could ever know.
You’re more beautiful than you could ever know, you never know, you never know
Everybody’s watching you
As you’re walking down the street
(you can feel it)
Shining like the sun in your faded blue jeans
With your hair done up and your defenses down
And the world at your feet (and you know)
You’re the most magnetic thing they’ve ever seen
You in your faded blue jeans
Purple City, a song
Diana, do you wanna come on out and play?
I’ll show ya a little bit of homemade ecstasy
I know ya, that you’re bored and you got nowhere to be
We’ll go there together
Diana, do you wanna come along for a ride?
I’ll take ya to a place where you’ve never felt more alive
It’ll wake ya to all the emptiness inside
We can chase it forever
Purple City, just keep staring into the lights
Looking for Purple City, trying not to lose your sight
Cause the night is young
And the truth still hasn’t hit me
That we’ll lose it when we find it, Purple City
And Tommy, do you wanna head out for a run
On a highway that takes us past the setting sun?
The lights are sparkling on the horizon
We’ll go there together
And Tommy, I think I’m ready to take the leap
Cause falling is better than dying in your sleep
They’re calling, all the things we know we just can’t keep
We’ll lose them together in …
Purple City, just keep staring into the lights
Looking for Purple City, trying not to lose your sight
Cause the night is young
And the truth still hasn’t hit me
That we’ll lose it when we find it, Purple City
Diana, I guess it’s time we headed home
The sunrise is gonna find us both alone
But your heartbeat is still aching in my bones
I’ll always remember ….
Purple City, just keep staring into the lights
Looking for Purple City, trying not to lose your sight
Cause the night is young
And the truth still hasn’t hit me
That we’ll lose it when we find it, Purple City
This Town, a song
I grew up in the small town of Gibbons, Alberta. Set on the prairies with a population of 5000 and open farmland in every direction, it was not an especially cosmopolitan community to grow up in. It never felt small to me, though, or especially provincial.
I had the good fortune to go home a couple of summers ago and spend a full day wandering my hometown, some 35 years after the fact, reminiscing and reuniting and rediscovering how truly remarkable this small town was. I had no clue, for instance, that the freedom to explore the Sturgeon River valley unsupervised for hours on end was a great gift to a growing child's psyche, or that living a stones-throw from every good friend you had gave you a profound feeling of connectedness and belonging. Growing up in little old Gibbons, I realized, was a beautiful gift from God.
A year or so later, I wrote this song as a tribute to the Town of Gibbons, and a word of thanks to God for having given it to me, and me to it. I hope you enjoy, and I hope it inspires you to reflect on your own childhood, and all the things you never knew at the time were shaping you into the grown-up you've become.
We were chasing dragons
With our homemade wooden swords
There in your river valley
At the edges of our world
We were making legends
Out of never ending days
On your forbidden rooftops
In your back alleys
You don’t always know how who you were
Is who you are today
Or how the man that you’ve become was born
In child’s play (oh)
This town was big enough
For the three of us to run around in
Till we were tall enough to ride
With fireworks on the summer nights
While lightning played across the sky
It wasn’t much but it’ll last me till I die
We were chasing lovers
When all the dragons had been tamed
The mystery discovered
And all the heroes had been named
We were forging friendships
Under never-ending skies
Out on your open highways
Under your watchful eyes
You can never say how wounds
Will grow up into dreams
Or how the ground beneath your feet
Is firmer than it seems (cause)
This town was big enough
For the three of us to run around in
Till we were tall enough to ride
With fireworks on the summer nights
While lightning played across the sky
It wasn’t much but it’ll last me till I die
If nature’s brightest gold is our first green
This town will always hold a special place
In the treasury, of my memory (oh)
This town was big enough
For the three of us to run around in
Till we were tall enough to ride
With fireworks on the summer nights
While lightning played across the sky
It wasn’t much but it’ll last me till I die