f l o o d

From the Ears to the Heart

i was gonna talk about this at the end of my next ranting post (which i haven't written out yet, but it's all in my head), but i figure that no one would actually read my rants all the way to the end, so i'll make a separate post.

i got three new cd's in the mail these last couple of days (hooray for christianbook.com and half.com): porch and alter by charlie hall, the beautiful letdown by switchfoot, and illuminate by david crowder band. here are my impressions:

not much to say about the switchfoot cd. everyone's heard the singles off the album by now. theyre consistently pretty darn awesome.

charlie hall has moved right up to the top of my list as one of the best modern worship leaders of today. right up there with the matt redmans and delirious's out there. the amazing depth and passion of his lyrics coupled with the musical ability and innovation of his band are a wonderful combination. as some of you may know, i haven't been so well off spiritually recently. i feel as though there is a wall in my heart and mind blocking me off from being able to really experience God. my experiences in worship and at church lately have been kinda...dulled, i guess is the only way to explain it. like a muted facsimile of the glory i had experienced in the past. it's not that the church has dulled, but my heart has. anyways, i got this cd because we've been doing "holy visitation" and "once for all" in our (jeb fisher band) practices, and theyre great songs. so i was driving to class this morning, listening to this album, and "god of hope" starts playing. i nearly started bawling right there in my car. it seems God can still reach me sometimes when i let my guard down.

though You slay me i will hope
hope inspires my endurance
Your hope is my anchor
God of Hope fill me

illuminate is sick. just plain siiiick. musically, david crowder band blows away just about any other worship band out there. theyre willing to experiment and take risks in ways that no one else even comes close to. and they do it without compromising the spiritual grace of their lyrics. they even do revamped version of some older songs, like st. francis of assisi's hymn "all creatures of our God and King," (which they did a version of on their first album as well). these guys are so frickin' awesome. you may have noticed that i have a link to dcb's website in my links section. i didn't put that link their just because i like the band. it's actually a hilarious site. the guy's are really odd and interesting. they do regular humurous news posts and have very fun bios. they also have lyrics and chords for all of their songs on the site, which is much appreciated by musicians like yours truly. anyways, i wanted to share with you something from the website that i came across today and found particularly side-splitting. mike hogan, the violinist/dj for the band uses his bio space to answer fan questions. here is an excerpt from a recent question:

who would you rather go on a date with and why... britney spears,
christina aguilara, avril lavigne, pink, or mandy moore?

Amazing question! Lets do this! First and foremost, lets get a couple of things straight. I am engaged, so I will now and forever prefer to go on a date with my future wife. So, now that that is out in the open, lets discuss the pop stars, shall we? Pink is out from the start because she scares me. Avril also has to go because I’m way too old. Now, if I were about 7 years younger, who knows? It would be tempting to go out with Britney, but she seems to be having something of an identity crises these days. Is she a good girl, or a bad girl? Is she a girl at all, or she a woman? Does she party a lot, or is still a squeaky clean mouseketeer? I don’t know, and don’t really care. She’s off the list. Which leaves us with Christina and Mandy. I like the fact that Christina is staying true to what she says is herself, and has attempted to make grown up, personal music to match. And lets face it, she can actually sing. Good for her, but I got to kick her off the list for the simple fact that she is Christina Aguilara, and I don’t think my mom would approve. So Mandy Moore is the big winner. I really don’t know a thing about her, but she seems like a nice person. There you have it.

bwahahaha! "pink is out from the start because she scares me." ohh...too funny.

and i found that i broke my riaa boycott to buy these cd's. from what i had seen before, i thought that these bands were all on independent christian labels (all three are with sparrow records), but i saw on the cd cases that switchfoot is distributed by columbia, and david crowder band by emi. ah well. they're worth abandoning my moral outrage for. even though the artists themselves are only getting pennies per cd and the record companies are getting rich off of them. but that's for another rant. speaking of which, the long awaited (yeah, right) "merchants of cool" anti-corporate rant is coming soon. stay tuned. same bat time, same bat channel.

Posted by bwu at November 4, 2003 08:17 PM