One of my buddies and fellow music aficionados sent me a CD and notes. Love this so much.
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Dear Joseph,
Ever since you sent me a mix CD of Saturday Morning Spirituals (is that what it was called?), I’ve meant to put together a mix of songs that in some way have spiritual significance to me. That’s what this is, for the most part, but I’ve also thrown a few other things on that I’ve come across that seem to fit with the Saturday morning theme. I call it Songs To Dress For Church To, vol. 1. What follows is a new form of correspondence I’ve been practicing recently that I call the annotated playlist as letter. Feel free to read or ignore. The songs will be just as good, maybe better, if you don’t read my comments and ramblings. I hope all is well with you and Becca and Magdelana.
God Yu Tekkem Laef Blong Mi—The Choir of All Saints, Honiara
This and two other songs like it on this list are from the soundtrack to The Thin Red Line, that beautifully quiet war movie. I need to see it again because it’s been awhile, but I remember it being almost boring because of its slowness and length but also riveting. By the time it reached the end, after its recording of slow, quiet life punctuated by bursts of war violence, it had earned the right to muse the way it did on the meaning of life, death, and war. These songs are a beautiful counterpoint to the violence and death of a war movie, and they also are meaningful to me because they take me back to island singing and island life.
Given To Fly—Pearl Jam
This song came along right at the time in college that I was noticing and looking for correspondences between religions and evidence of the spirit in the world outside of church and religion. Somehow this song and other songs on the same album filled that seeking in a satisfying way. I played it for a friend once who asked me if I thought the song was talking about Jesus. There are definitely similarities in the stories (although I doubt Jesus would smoke, even though he wasn’t an Adventist), but I don’t like to think about it that way. The song and the unnamed character are mythological and archetypal and the story is moving because it speaks the truth, whether it’s factual or not, whether it tells about a “real” person or not.
Don’t Panic—Coldplay
The first time I heard this song was on a quiet Friday night at River Stones. You know from experience such a night is rare, a gratefully welcomed anomaly. The boys were mellow, polite, helpful, in a good mood. And I was able to listen to this song and others on the album uninterrupted as I prepared dinner for them. From the moment I heard it down to this day I’ve thought it a perfect song and it helped me that night to see the sacredness in the work I was doing at an often thankless, stressful, and downright difficult job.
Instant Karma!—John Lennon
The voice, the echo, the melody, the urgency. I just realized I have a strong visual association with this song, though I can’t necessarily describe the visual with any clarity or vividness. I see black and white swirling images that are both moving sketches of people and our earth and at the same time the unimaginably huge and beautiful universe we call the sky. Either the song taps into some subconscious existential knowledge and sense of awe and urgency within me OR I am recalling the visuals from some cheap commercial that used the song as its soundtrack. I can’t say which. (Damn you advertisers for colonizing my brain.) In any case, the song is great. I prefer to believe it is the first-mentioned phenomenon that is going on as I listen to it.
Have You Ever?—Brandi Carlile
I saw Brandi Carlile at The Ark in Ann Arbor last spring. Great performer. And The Ark is a tremendous venue to see anyone in. So small. It was a great show. This song reminds me of a Robert Frost poem. Not that the lyrics are as great as Frost’s, but it has that Frostian feel of woods and winter and wandering lonely and satisfied with the self in an incomprehensible but somehow right world.
Ezekiel Saw The Wheel—Woody Guthrie
This takes me back to Adventist youth group and camp meeting singing. Same song but it sounds a lot different here. Guthrie’s mostly monotone melody line becomes hypnotic. Just now listening to it I’m remembering what I visualized when I read Emerson’s essay The Circles which is an interesting abstract essays on the circles of existence, something he never really defines but just talks about wheeling and gyre-ing through the world in a very Transcendental way.
Box Of Rain—The Grateful Dead
I recently read or heard that whichever member of the band wrote this wrote it for his father when his father was lying in a hospital bed dying. He was able to sing it to him before he died. As if this song needed anything to make it better, but I like the level that this personal story of the song’s beginning brings to it.
Go Tell The Congregation—The Black Crowes
This’ll get you up and going! Go tell ‘em! Preach it! Confess! Get up on the stage of your local Adventist church and wail raw-ly your joy, like Chris Robinson slithering barefoot across a carpeted stage. Harness that energy but leave the weed and pills out of it.
Do You Realize?—The Flaming Lips
Okay, it’s getting a bit exhausting trying to come up with new ways to sing the praises of great songs. This one just sounds so good. Its simple lyrics leave me with the feeling I have after a funeral of someone who has died too young. Sadness, of course, but also gratitude and urgency toward life. That seems to me to be a pretty powerful effect for a song to have.
Exiles Among You—The Weakerthans
This is a song I picked up in Yosemite. It reminds me of foster kids lost in the world, of the brilliant and wonderful kids hiding out from life in Yosemite (and other places), and, in the last quiet verse, of the interesting paralysis within that comes from knowing exactly what it is you’re supposed to do but being unwilling to do it.
Do You Feel Loved—U2
“Take this tangle of a conversation and turn it into your own prayer.” I think that’s the line that most gets me in this song, though there are many good lines. This album has some of the most complex and intricate poetry I’ve heard in popular music in the way that it weaves together different strands to speak at multiple levels with the same words. I think a lot of lesser lyricists think they’re doing that, but this album actually does take the tangle of influences in the world and turn them into meditative poems and prayers.
God Loves His Children—Flatt & Scruggs
This song is just goofy with that high-voiced break “God will protect you…” I think that’s the reason I put this song on. The delivery of that one line always cracks me up.
Ready To Go Home—Hank Williams
From the goofy to the raw and sublime. Hank Williams mesmerizes me.
Always Love—Nada Surf
So many have sung about love that it’s almost become trite to say things like “All you need is love” or “God is love.” But the most fundamental, deepest truths often sound trite to say out loud. This is one of those. In my struggle and difficulty to believe in God, I have come to the place currently where I believe that God is not a being who is perfectly suffused with love, not a being at all, but actually, literally is love, is the way that we treat each other. God exists in that. Other things as well but largely in that.
Until The End Of The World—U2
I once played this song in a Bible class with Ernie Bursey at Walla Walla College in which he asked everyone to bring in a piece of music that had spiritual significance to them. I admit I was partly trying to be a little iconoclastic, but at the same time this song really did have spiritual significance to me. I love that it tells the story of Judas through Judas’s voice, but like Given To Fly, it masks the story, making it more universal and archetypal. What I did not realize until Bursey asked me to read the lyrics and I was reading them out loud to the class was that the song contains some pretty overtly sexual language, going beyond a simple kiss on the cheek. Well, I wanted to be an iconoclast.
Pray For Us—The Melanesian Brotherhood, Tabalia
Another of the Thin Red Line island songs. I love the birds singing in the eaves and corners of the thatched huts of these songs.
People Get Ready—Aretha Franklin
A wonderfully slow-moving and robust train of a song.
When The Saints Go Marching In—The Kingston Trio
Another throwback to youth group singing and guitar playing. My youth pastor was down with the old loud rollicking blues and folk inspired praise songs. There’s not much that’s more fun than really going off on a song like this with a bunch of musicians and a room full of singers. It’s the kind of experience that makes me say that no matter what my theological beliefs (or lack thereof) may be, I believe in the songs.
Jesus, You Are Here—The Choir of All Saints, Honiara
