...and back.

We've been back in the UK for a couple of months now, and in many ways it's like we've never been away.  You can catch up on our adventures here, and I'm gradually adding batches of my better photos here - more as and when I get round to it.

So, music.  I kept up a little bit of songwriting, though the majority of it exists in unassembled scribbled note form.  Interspersed with the joys of job-hunting, I'll be trying to squidge these together into something coherent.  Also, I brought back a new instrument, which will no doubt be incorporated somehow.

I'll also be trying to persuade myself back out into the open mic circuit sometime soon (I write this here in an attempt to make this actually happen...), and maybe even trying to get a bit more of a band together.  You have been warned.

J

Odd things we sing 5 - What the Lord Has Done In Me (Hosanna)

I thought there was something slightly odd about this one when we sung it a few weeks ago and, having sung it again last week, I think I’ve worked out what it is.

Let the weak say, "I am strong"
Let the poor say, "I am rich"
Let the blind say, "I can see"
It's what the Lord has done in me

Hosanna, hosanna
To the Lamb that was slain
Hosanna, hosanna
Jesus died and rose again

Yep, fine, brilliant. (“Hosanna” - a Hebrew expression meaning "Save!" which became an exclamation of praise back in ye olde bible times. The people shouted it as Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the donkey.)

Into the river I will wade
There my sins are washed away
From the heavens* mercy streams
Of the Saviour's love for me

After a little bit of searching through biblegateway, I’m guessing (feel free to enlighten me) that we’re talking about the River of Life mentioned in Rev 22, and/or the River from the Temple in Ezekiel 47, and/or the image of baptism. Again, no problem with that, as long as we all know what we’re talking about.

(*momentary side rant: please get your punctuation right! In this particular context neither heaven’s nor heavens’ makes any sense. Okay, I’m a pedant. Why do we tend to write song words with inadequate punctuation? It can make all the difference between perfect sense and abject confusion.)

I will rise from waters deep
Into the saving arms of God
I will sing salvation songs
Jesus Christ has set me free

Okay, fine with that image too (although, if we’re being pedantic, as is my wont, perhaps we might prefer an image involving God reaching down into said waters deep with his saving arms and lifting me out, rather than me somehow learning to levitate. I digress.) - at least in isolation.

I think what I’m getting at is the mixing of the water images:
v2: river of life - providing purity, life, health, etc - definitely a good thing.
v3: waters deep - symbolic of something negative/dangerous/threatening that we need saving from - or at least that’s how I read it - am I just reading it wrong?

Mixed metaphors can be confusing, but this one’s interesting because it’s almost the opposite problem: applying one metaphor (water) to two opposing concepts in one song.

All this really to highlight the following: songwriting technique is so important, and never more so than when songwriting for other people to sing in corporate worship. I think everyone needs to understand the words which are coming out of their mouth before they can truly use them to worship God. That means not just packing in all the Bible images you can because they sound good. It means not drowning people in archaic imagery and christianese. (We’re so used to singing about lambs and shepherds that we forget that the average punters (including ourselves) aren’t that au fait with ancient Hebrew shepherding practices. And don’t get me started on refining processes - is there some kind of underground smelting culture in our church which I’m unaware of?!**) It means using your creative talents to construct clear and helpful images which inspire awe of God in people and worship to him. It takes hard work and practice to craft a decent set of words (I know, and I’ve only ever written songs for one person (me) to sing, which is infinitely easier than writing for a bunch of people!).

I’m not writing this series just to bash songs I don’t like. In fact, I love a lot of these, and I‘ll say again that I have the greatest respect for those gifted songwriters who can produce the wonderful songs that we sing. But because songs and songwriting are things that I care about, I tend to get bugged by things which could be done better. Keep striving for excellence people, and don’t give up!

J

**Okay, I nicked this particular observation from Nick Page’s excellent “And Now Let's Move into a Time of Nonsense”.

Odd things we sing 4 - Amazing Grace (v6)

“The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine”

- one of the original verses of Newton’s great hymn - not one of the ‘traditional’ four that we normally sing, but resurrected for inclusion in the new Chris Tomlin version.

Anyone care to comment on exactly what this means, and where I might find it in my Bible? Alternatively, do you think it’s just a metaphor describing the most solid and stable things we know as tenuous and shaky compared to the constancy and steadfastness of God’s love for us?

I’ll gladly join in singing it again once I understand what it means. Till then, it makes me uncomfortable...

J

Odd things we sing 3 - From the Inside Out

I was reminded of this one when we sang it the other day. I really quite like this song. We very nearly picked it for our wedding service, but eventually decided against it. I think it might be something to do with these lyrics from the 2nd verse (full lyrics here):

Your will above all else
My purpose remains
The art of losing myself
In bringing You praise

Now, I’m pretty certain I know what they mean: it’s about humbling ourselves, putting God in first place ahead of ourselves, forgetting about our own wants for a while as we give God glory.

Yet for me it still has something about it that makes me stop before singing this verse. Maybe it’s only me who sees it this way, but the first time I sang this song, I took these lines as implying that we should be aiming to lose ourselves in some kind of zen-like trance while worshipping God. Which doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

People experience meeting with God in all kinds of different ways, but I believe we are to do so fully engaging our minds just as much as we might engage our senses. God made us intelligent thinking beings, and cutting that part out of our worship experience just seems wrong to me. True worship comes as a response to understanding what God has done for us, and that involves using our brains.

So there you go, a serious point out of a misunderstanding of some slightly ambiguous lyrics :o)

Odd things we sing 2 - Days of Elijah

Right, well, the purpose of this series is not just to slag off other people’s songs, but to try and explain (or guess) what the writer might have been getting at, and if I’m going to criticise, to do so in some semblance of a constructive manner.

Post no.2 is Days of Elijah by Robin Mark. This is one that went through a phase of being sung all the time, then through an equally protracted phase of being rejected and denounced by everyone (wrongly, in my opinion). Here’s the words:

These are the days of Elijah,
Declaring the word of the Lord.
And these are the days of Your servant Moses,

Righteousness being restored.

And though these are days of great trial,
Of famine and darkness and sword,

Still, we are the voice in the desert crying
'Prepare ye the way of the Lord!'



Behold He comes riding on the clouds,
Shining like the sun at the trumpet call;

Lift your voice, it's the year of jubilee,

And out of Zion's hill salvation comes.



These are the days of Ezekiel,

The dry bones becoming as flesh;
And these are the days of Your servant David,

Rebuilding a temple of praise.

These are the days of the harvest,
The fields are as white in Your world,

And we are the labourers in Your vineyard,
Declaring the word of the Lord!

There's no God like Jehovah.
There's no God like Jehovah!

In Nick Page’s wonderful book “And Now Let's Move into a Time of Nonsense” (you should all read it, especially if you’re at all involved in worship leading or songwriting - humorous, relevant and useful), he talks a bit about being careful of putting too many obscure biblical references into a song - and this song is the worst offender - The Source music book has something like 17 different scripture references at the top of Days of Elijah’s page.

And I quite agree - songwriters should be making sure that our songs are readily accessible and understandable by the majority of those who might sing it, and worship leaders need to be choosing songs in the same way (as well as being true, relevant, edifying, etc).

But this is one song that, I think, has been unnecessarily vilified, because the theme of the song is actually dead simple. Here it is:

In the past (“those days”), God did lots of amazing things (through unextraordinary people like you and me).
Now (“these days”), God is still doing lots of amazing things (through unextraordinary people like you and me).
“Those days” are “these days” - there is no discontinuity in the work God is doing.

Or, even more simply: God worked. God is still working. He used ordinary people like Elijah, Moses, Ezekiel, David then. He uses us now.

So worship leaders, use discernment when picking your songs, absolutely. But if you’re quibbling over a song like this because you think people might not understand, then take the time to learn what the writer meant, and take 20 seconds before you sing it to explain what it’s about. Everyone wins.

AHMTS Song by Song 13/14 - You Come Running/Good Night

listen here and here

You Come Running is basically a reprise of The Turning Song - the few times Tim and I played it live it was performed as one 8-minute piece (old live version here), and was in fact recorded as one long song. This arrangement of Amazing Grace is what Tim soloed around after Farther Up and Farther In on Puzzle. I love weird chords. You should have worked that out by now. Thanks to Lorna for singing this one so beautifully (I was getting tired of my own voice!), and to Peter Moles for lending Tim his soprano sax for the recording.

Good Night is a little piece I’ve had lying around for a while now, but never knew what to do with. It seems a nice fit here for a gentle close-out to the album.

AHMTS Song by Song 12 - Lilies & Sparrows

listen here

Putting your trust in something or someone is often easier said than done, especially when the person in question is somewhat intangible. This song comes from a beautiful section of something Jesus said to the crowds of people following him, recorded in Matthew 6:25-34. (Part of a larger block of things he said, widely referred to as the Sermon on the Mount - see Matthew 5-7).

 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
 "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

I think one of the hardest aspects of our human condition is the surrendering of our own plans - after all, who doesn't like to be in control?!

Fiona plays some beautiful saxophone in the background of this one - I love those bends in the last chorus!

AHMTS Song by Song 11 - Starmaker

listen here (and download for free)

The most recently written piece. All the other songs were in place in some form at least, but the album still felt incomplete. It wanted two more things: 1. a title, and 2. a song - for which I already had a semi-formed concept:

I’m quite happy to discuss all sorts of things about God: complicated doctrine and theology and where dinosaurs might fit into the picture and something of what he’s like in a theoretical kind of way, but often pull up short of describing what he actually means to me at a more personal level (even now, I think only one of my songs mentions Jesus by name in the lyrics). So perhaps this one goes a little way towards remedying that.

Then the other week Karl pointed out a little throwaway sentence in Genesis (v1:16b), which says simply “He also made the stars.” Incidentally. By the way. A little side-project because it amused him. Title and punchline wrapped up right there.

From a musical point of view, this one was quite a challenge. The melody, chords and timing worked fine in the verses, but trying to work out just where to put the notes in the mid section and guitar solo was a total git. Now of course, I can’t see what the problem was, but at the time it was just brain-meltingly confusing trying to remember when to start the next phrase. Fun though! - I like 7/8. It was also nice to work on something a little different in sound - it puts me slightly in mind of 90s pop band Dubstar - anyone remember them?

AHMTS Song by Song 9/10 - Hide & Seek/Found You

listen here and here

I think perhaps everyone feels like this sometimes - that lonely feeling of ‘What’s going on? And why have I been left to deal with it on my own?”. It was written more about my relationship with God than anything else, but I think the addition of Lorna’s harmony vocals accentuates the human relationships aspect too.

(For any MBCers: cue hand movements. “...these-way relationships and that-way relationships and the-other-way relationships...” :o) )

I like the feeling of unresolvedness that's left at the end - these things don't always tie up as neatly as it might look like they're going to, or we might like them to.

AHMTS Song by Song 8 - The Turning Song

listen here

This is one of the very first songs Tim and I ever wrote, not long after we started jamming together in 2005. This one of course features Mr Buick’s mighty saxophony.

The title came before we had written any of the lyrics: when we were working out the interlocking sax and guitar riffs at the beginning, we just couldn’t keep track of how many times we had played the phrase, and thus how to move to the next section together. Tim hit on the method of turning through 90 degrees each time through the riff, so when he was facing the right direction again we knew we’d done four, hence The Turning Song. Genius! Fortunately, we got a bit better at it than that before we ever played in front of any microphones...

The lyrics sort of fell into place after that - something roughly along the lines of the parable of the lost son. As my old pastor Matthew said (I’m quoting roughly from memory, and he may well have been quoting from someone else): “There’s no good thing I can do to make him love me any more than he does already, and there’s no wrong I can do that will make him love me any less. He loves me because he loves me because he loves me.”

AHMTS Song by Song 7 - Left to My Own Devices

listen here

Nope, not a cover of that Pet Shop Boys one! Though I do have something of an unexplained soft spot for some of their stuff...

I don’t really know what to write for this one...

I guess it’s a reflection of the fact that whilst I find believing the basics of my faith relatively easy, carrying out the implications of that can be much harder. There’s often that sense of ‘I could/should be doing this better’ or ‘there must be more to it than this’.

Then again, we've got to start somewhere, and to want to want to do something could be the first step towards actually wanting to. Which in turn is a step towards actually doing it. Whatever 'it' is.

As you’ll have gathered, I like complicated or layered parts, so for the drum parts I had to hold myself back from doing anything that didn’t fit the monotonous feel of the song.

AHMTS Song by Song 6 - Icarus

listen here

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, sometimes I read a phrase somewhere or hear a line in a song which makes me think ‘nice idea, but they could have developed that so much further... wait, why don’t I do it?’. In this case it was a line from Phish song, The Squirming Coil. I think it’s fair to say that in many of their songs the lyrical content is very much secondary in importance to the intricacies and ebb and flow of the music, and on the whole this one is no exception. However, the lines

“...like Icarus, who had to pay
With melting wax and feathers brown
He tasted it on his way down”

seemed to be crying out for stretching into something more expansive. My favourite songwriting experiences are when the words and music develop simultaneously, and kind of meld together of their own accord. This was one of them. The descending chord sequences in the ‘spiralling down’ and guitar solo sections are a couple I’m particularly fond of.

I’ve been playing Icarus live for a few years now, but I only got round to recording it properly more recently. The outro jam pretty much wrote itself in the studio. Using the loop pedal is a good crowd-pleaser for live performances, but it’s great to be able to multi-track stuff properly on the computer and edit it afterwards. I just think about what each band-member in my imaginary multi-Jo supergroup would be doing in the jam, and do my best to emulate it.

AHMTS Song by Song 5 - Missing

listen here

Written as I was first getting to know my wife, this is about as close as I’m likely to get to a love song.

From another perspective: after coming back from studying up in Aberdeen, there was a lengthy-ish period when I very much missed it - having my bunch of friends around me, sharing Flat 3 with the guys, my church there, and to a lesser extent the place itself. Then one day I realised that I was no longer missing them, despite still loving them very much. There was as much sadness in that realisation as there was in missing those things in the first place.

AHMTS Song by Song 4 - Romans 7

listen here

This is one of the ‘oldies’ (being all of a venerable 3 years old!). Chapter 7 of the book of Romans contains this passage which is one of the most aggravatingly tortuous pieces of discussion I’ve ever come across - and yet it remains one of the few bits of Paul’s writings that I find I can readily identify with, wrestling with the mismatch between our good intentions and our less good inclinations.

After being played live for a while as an acoustic guitar tune for a long time, it was great to be able to give this one the ‘full band’ treatment. Despite not being a drummer myself, I quite enjoy programming the beats and fills. For the drum fills I transcribe an imaginary Carter Beauford doing something improbable.

AHMTS Song by Song 3 - Economology

listen here

The other day, a friend of mine shared a thought along these lines: Your train is just about to pull out of the station, and you are running along the platform trying to catch it before it goes. In your haste, you barge straight into a guy going the other way. He is in your way. Now there’s an arrogant thought: He is in my way! What makes my way any more important than his?

Don Miller puts it eloquently in his book Blue Like Jazz, where he describes coming to the sudden earth-shattering realisation that “everybody is I”. It’s also nicely put in downhere’s excellent song The Problem:

“Everybody's wondering how the world could get this way
If God is good, and how it could be filled with so much pain
It's not the age-old mystery we made it out to be
Yeah, there's a problem with the world
And the problem with the world is me”

My friend went on to ask what it would look like if we went around with the attitude that everyone else’s way was more important than our own - maybe we wouldn’t get where we were going very fast!

I wonder if climate-change-denial will ever be put on the same level as holocaust-denial? Surely it’s an equally bad level of humanity-caused destruction? - just more insidious and with many more to blame. Including me.

AHMTS Song by Song 2 - Since 3 Days Ago

listen here

For this one I had the chord sequence and structure for one verse worked out, and more unusually, a melody... which then sat around for a few weeks doing nothing.

But it seemed too good to waste, so eventually I thought to myself: just pick a good story, put it into your own words and try and fit it into the melody. I’m quite pleased with the result. The bridge was great fun to write and play, and gives the Rick Wakeman influence a suitable outlet! The backing vocals were entertaining too.

And it is a great story. Some of us are weird enough to believe it’s the centrepiece of history.

Also, He Made the Stars... OUT TODAY!

Buy CD here


Listen/Download: DLDown Download Store / iTunes music store / Amazon mp3


Also, He Made the Stars...

...is a collection of revisited old favourites and brand new material. Some of the songs were written before we recorded Puzzle, but had to wait until now to find a place where they fit. Some of them were written specially for this album, and re-wrote themselves even as I was recording them.

This has been my full-time employment over the last few months, so I very much hope you enjoy it. Please let me know your feedback on it - any reviews welcomed!

Over the next few posts, I’ll be telling you a little bit more about each song: sometimes notes on music, recording or songwriting; sometimes an insight into what I was thinking about when I wrote the song. So without further ado...

1. Planetarium

listen here

A little overture. The bass solo reflects the bass lines of a couple of the other songs (I’ll leave you to work out which ones). I like harmonics.

Hear here

Are you still alive?!

Well, you may be wondering what's been going on with DLDown in the last wee while... well, here's some idea of what I've been up to anyway...

• A spot of recording! - studio versions of Romans 7, Icarus and Missing are all at various stages near completion, so look out for one or two of those on myspace soon.

• A wee bit o' songwriting. I'm sure everyone has different ways of going about this. My method (for want of a better, less precise word) usually involves lots of scribbled ideas on lots of random bits of paper lying around in my room.

Sometimes, the whole song grows and expands out of a sentence or phrase that I've heard in another song, or have subconsciously picked up somewhere else, the obvious examples being Farther Up and Farther In (from a line in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle) and Icarus (which began as an extrapolation of a line I heard in a Phish song, The Squirming Coil). Others are an attempt at a different angle on a Bible story or passage, and still others are more closely related to emotions or circumstances I'm going through at the time.

Occasionally, some of these make it to the consolidation-into-something-coherent-and-singable stage, from which point the best ones pretty much write themselves, usually in the middle of the night when I really ought to be sleeping. Lilies & Sparrows is coming along nicely, and I'm hopeful that a couple more will be on their way shortly!

• Looking forward to tonight's gig - the first in a wee while. Should be grand!
J