12. The Great American Novel: Larry Norman
Are Christians supposed to be disillusioned? Should they be agents of political change? Does being a ‘light’ in the darkness mean speaking up for the oppressed and railing against injustice?
Larry Norman asked all these questions of me when I was still young and just coming to terms with my faith. Unafraid. Defiant. He scared both establishments…secular and spiritual…and it’s why he’s still one of my favorite artists.
11. The River: Rich Mullins
Rich Mullins disperses with anthem-y hymns and rousing worship choruses and strips it all down in an honest autobiographical tune about the fragility of romantic relationships. As the music lithely floats like water across smooth stones…Mullin’s prays that God will help him keep the girl that he loves…as he daydreams about motorcycle rides, and disparages his own songwriting ability, his own memory torturing his soul…I realized, even the most ‘worshipful’ of Christian artists should sometimes stand naked and honest with their shortcomings and secret hopes and loves. Groundbreaking stuff.
10. I could laugh: The 77’s
As someone who has struggled with depression you can imagine my relief when I heard this tune crawling through my headphones one night as a 15 year old.
“mama don’t understand,
she wants to hold my hand
night and day, and she don’t like my clothes and…
their wearing thin…on her nerves
and she don’t like my hair and…
my glorious crown brings her down
and she won’t take me serious
think I’ll join the circus be a clown
they’ll all laugh, they’ll all laugh, I could laugh
but it’s not funny…no…
teenage angst? In my Christian music? Glorious. Absolutely Glorious. I could see King Solomon, the Prophet Jeremiah and St. Paul morosely humming along…as Mike Roe channeled Lou Reed and gave me reason to hope…I wasn’t alone. I loved God, but I sometimes felt like crap…and here was another voice, from some other place, maybe some other time…who felt just like me.
9. Shine On You Crazy Diamond: Pink Floyd
I was in a band with some friends when I was about 16. That summer we made our first road trip from San Antonio to Abilene, Texas. It was a church and they put us up in a hotel and everything. Triumphant from playing, what we thought, was a great show we drove back through the lonely Texas night. Yes, the stars were, indeed, big and bright in a never ending black expanse. And then this song whispered it’s way onto the radio. (Kudos to the DJ who probably needed a bathroom break and played this 17 minute opus)
We pulled over. We opened the doors, crawled on the roof of the van. Looked up at the stars…and we let this song wash over us…in all of it’s melancholic beauty. A lamenting tribute to Pink Floyd’s former band member, Syd Barrett…it brought tears to my eyes and it was then that I knew that the show we played earlier was a joke…and I’ve been chasing this moment ever since
8. Billie Jean: Michael Jackson:
I was in elementary school. Fifth Grade. It was the school talent show. A young black classmate of mine got up on the stage, lip-synced and danced to this song that I’d never heard before. (Christian Radio being all I was allowed to listen to at this point) Then he did something insane…he moon-walked.
Girls went crazy– screaming. Female Teachers went crazy too…fanning themselves. Time seemed to stop. I’d heard dance music before…but this was something else. This was having some kind of effect on the entire school. It was electric. It was primal. It was an inferno. It had swept across the nation. I wasn’t around for Beatlemania…but I was around for this…and whatever we think of Michael Jackson…we’re still feeling the aftershocks of this song and that white glove and that dance today.
7. Precious Angel: Bob Dylan:
The bible has it’s prophets, it’s teachers, it’s evangelists and kings…and then there’s ‘Song of Solomon’. Romantic. Mysterious. Erotic. This song is all of those earlier things that I mentioned, prophetic, evangelical, but it’s done in the context of this love affair. He’s talking about the kingdom of God…but he was singing it to this girl.
Not only that, he’s singing about a black girl. He even mentions the racial tension in the line ‘both our forefathers were slaves’ in case the listener isn’t quite getting it.
He calls her ‘the queen of my flesh…the lamp of my soul.’
Just as exotic as the lines from the the great biblical love poem.
For a young kid still learning the lines to ‘at the cross’ and ‘amazing grace’ in an ultra-conservative Spanish speaking Pentecostal Church…it was REVOLUTIONARY.
And the music was amazing.
When I later heard Mark Knopfler’s guitar heroics on ‘Sultans of Swing’ and ‘Money for Nothing’…I was like, ‘hey! That’s the guy playing on “precious angel”.
Now, there exists this built-in bias critics and fans have against Zimmerman’s ‘born-again’ period…but all agree…this is one of his finest moments, Ever.
6. Hell Hound On My Trail: Robert Johnson
I treat the blues the way some mystics treat sacred sites and texts…with much reverence and wonder. In 1990 and 1991…when the rest of my friends were getting into NWA and Nirvana…I was scanning NPR and vintage record stores…I had heard “hell hound on my trail” and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Robert Johnson was like a ghostly spirit, his voice coming out from the netherworld to warn me of evil spirits, wicked women, and the terror and ecstasy of the blues. The mythology surrounding his selling his soul to the devil at the crossroads only intensified the feeling I got as a young man, as I listened to this sorry soul sing of woe and regret.
5. Airbag: Radiohead
In 2000, I was on the road in L.A.. Still a part of Youth With A Mission, my fellow missionaries and I were staying at a Bible College…sleeping in dorm rooms. Again, late at night, I put OK Computer into my Sony Discman on the recommendation of a friend…and had a moment like the Pink Floyd one I described earlier.
Where that moment was dreamlike…this was a lightning bolt.
I realized that I was not making the music of the possible…I was settling. Radiohead was not settling. Borrowing from the past and yet pioneering the future…they were displaying genius…and like cold water on a sleeping man…I was waking up all over again. Where was I? What was I doing? “You can and should do better than this, mate…” Thom Yorke seemed to be saying…
Then I went back and listened to it again…and shook my head in disbelief and delight.
4. 40: U2
In high school. I struggled with how to act. My dad was a pastor. And I wanted, no, I needed to be ‘cool’. To ‘fit in’. In order to do that, I tended to overdo it with obscenity, with crazy antics, vandalizing school property, alternating between freak and wallflower… I wanted the girls to like me. But I wasn’t allowed to go to parties or dances. Add to that, my family was barely scraping by financially. I was a mess. I’d go to church and feel guilty as sin for my over the top ‘bad-boy’ behavior…then go to school and try to outdo myself from the previous week’s paganism.
A friend from class, a non-believer, gave me ‘Under A Blood Red Sky’. Vinyl. This guy was cool. He’d be a hipster now, but then he’d be considered punk. He’d give me cool music to listen to. Violent femmes. Red Hot Chili Peppers. The Smiths. Jane’s Addiction.
He really valued this copy of U2’s live at red rocks concert. He told me I’d love it.
I heard ‘40’…and was floored. Here was a band, from Ireland, sort of punk, sort of new wave, un-abashedly singing ‘I waited patiently for the Lord, He inclined and heard my cry.’ And they were doing it un-ironically.
I never really got my act together in high school. But I think from that moment on, I relaxed a bit about my faith in God…and though I wrestled with how to express that faith to others…Bono and Company showed me it could be done.
Much later, in an earnest and zealous phase in my life, I spurned this band publicly in an attempt to become a more ‘sanctified’ version of myself…while they continued to make great music and publicly wrestled with and wrote about their faith in such a way that has challenged how many think about the confluence of art and Christianity.
That’s a great band for you.
3. Hey Jude: The Beatles
I’ll never forget where I was when I first heard this song. I was probably 11 or 12. I was with some older guys from the church youth group. We were riding in a black Pontiac trans-am. They were cruising some street, windows down, radio cranked. They were laughing, whistling at girls, and spinning tires… …I can’t remember why my parents let me hang out with these guys so late…but there I was… enthralled with this sudden taste of freedom.
Then Paul McCartney’s voice and piano came on…the oldest and coolest guy of the group told everyone in the car to shut up. Up to that point, we were listening to whatever was popular at the time…probably Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, or ‘Motley Crue’…but this was different. I’d never heard this before. And a sudden reverence was brought on by that famous, four minute coda at the end…like waves of melody, pain, pleasure, and some sort of generational defining experience from another age…it was like a part of the time space continuum was being ripped open in that black trans am, and I was allowed, as it were, a glimpse into the best part of the 60’s.
This was real music. Everything else was immediately shown to be either, pure crap or a a sorry derivative of what we were now listening to. I was enraptured; I didn’t want it to end.
The older guy, who told us all to be quiet, declared, “the beatles are the best group of all time…period.”
I still believe he’s right.
2. Circle Slide: The Choir
Ok. So this is a no-brainer, eh? I’ve talked about this ad nauseam in other places and interviews…so suffice it to say, that I heard this song at one of those headphone kiosks in a Christian bookstore at the mall. I was already a fan of ‘the choir’…but this album had the following effect on me. I listened to it, over and over again. Have you ever seen a sign at one of those things…you know, the hand written kind by management…asking you to limit your time with the headphones to some reasonable amount like ‘15 minutes’ or so? I’m pretty sure you have me to thank for that.
I am not exaggerating when I say I listened to that album at least 3 to 4 hours. I think I took a bathroom break and came back to listen again.
I was broke. I might have asked the clerk if I could put the tape on layaway or something. I remember having to save money in order to come back and buy it.
I remember this thing played on those momentous self discovery road trips of my youth.
I remember that I defined my friendships by whether or not a person liked this album or not.
I remember the opening snare drum…the dream scape that ensued…
I remember falling in and out of love to this music…
I remember it all…every time I hear it.
1. Love Broke Through: Keith Green
I grew up listening to Keith Green. Keith’s songs have been the sound track to many of my most intimate and defining encounters with God. I grieved as a young boy, when his plane went down. When I hear his voice…it’s the voice of an old dear friend. His piano is as familiar as the street that I grew up on. I still get a thrill when I hear him pounding away at it with joy and reckless abandon.
And though some of his songs had more prophetic fire in them, like ‘asleep in the light’ or ‘to obey is better than sacrifice’…I was more influenced by the songs where he’d let down his guard and let his absolute, unabashed love for Jesus shine through…as is the case with this song. When you’re on the journey that is the Christian life…it’s sometimes imperative to be reminded why you started this journey in the first place. This song accomplishes that, like no other. The fact that it just happens to describe the story of my life no matter where my life might be in any particular moment…is what makes this song number one.
above the stratosphere: the circleslide blog 