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Re: here's a question- (otr content!)

Melanie, et al.,


I think it's different for different artists, and I don't know how L & K 
work, w/r/t organizing an album, concept-wise. But I think that there is 
a definite shifting of gears, and not just lyrically, when the "Little 
Blue River" starts. The first songs on the album have a similar sound to 
them, call it the Backyard Bus sound. But when Little Blue River comes 
in, it hearkens back to an "earlier" OtR-- the song has a GDBD-ish feel.
Plus, a lot of the songs on the second half of the record are older- 
"Goodbye," "Whatever You Say," "Moth" are all circa 1998.
Whether they planned it or not, it's there.
I think it partly happens because when you think about it, the same 
artists are making all the songs. Linford once commented that "Happy To 
Be So" was like his addition to the Pslams. I think OtR songs are very 
much like the Psalms, at least literarily. The Pslams are a diverse, 
hetergenous collection of the cries of human beings to their God, or to 
each other, re: their God, or re: life. OtR songs tend to have that 
quality about them-- even the love songs sound like Pslams, and often 
the two styles blend to a dgree that language about the Divine and 
langauge about the human become intertwined (think "Ubiquitous Hands" or 
"Whatever You Say." In both these songs, either the relationship to the 
Divine is figured as a romance, or the romance with a human has taken on 
qualities of the Divine, or both simultaneously. I vote for option 3). 
My point being that the Pslams are not a sequence-- they were composed 
over the course of hundreds of years by several people. yet they have 
aunified feeling to them. Part of it comes from similarity of subject 
matter.
But the Psalms are strangely irreverent and worshipful; they're angry 
and joyous, frustrated and hopeful. They're very human, and I find that 
Otr's music has much of this about it as well (though I can't say i've 
ever heard an *angry* OtR song-- no, wait, "Happy With Myself" is angry.)
Anyway, if you're writing honestly about the kind of stuff OtR chooses 
as subject matter, over time, a body of your work tends ot feel like a 
spectrum. Different peices resonate with each other, or speak to each 
other, or change each other.

There's been a lot discussion about 'worship' music on the board lately 
and frankly, given that the names of artists passed around seem to just 
be Contemporary Christian pop musicians, I'm not sure I know what that 
genre is supposed to be exactly... I would kind of expect a worship song 
to facilitate my conection to the Divine, and to carry with it some 
numinous, transcendent quality, but Jars of Clay and Sixpence None the 
Richer? Is DC Talk worship music?
  I think that I prefer OtR's "pslams" to that sort "worship" music, 
precisely because of Melanie's reaction to Little Blue River. I wrote 
earlier that I find OtR's music to be healing music, and I think that 
the same spirit each song many gifts, according to its calling.
For me, even song like "Happy With Myself," a song with its lip stuck 
out defiantly against whatever hegemonic group is trying to dictate the 
character's behavior, even song like that is still a healing, worshipful 
song. I happened to hear that song right at the beginning of my 
disenchantment with evangelical Christianity, and the lyrics seem to 
have been written for me and my situation? I was tired of  people 
telling me I couldn't accept my gay friends as they were, tired of being 
told I couldn't listen to OtR b/c they weren't "Chirstian" enough, etc. 
The line "I don't have what it takes to please you" became a sort of 
spiritual lifeline. I *didn't* have what it took to please all those 
people who were so keenly interested that I believe the same as them. 
And so but anyway the point being that the song helped me.

Okay. I've babbled enough for one topic, I think.

-John

np- Bruce Cockburn "Humans"




-- 
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"The Law goes silent in times of war."
                         -Cicero
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http://www.johnpauldavis.org

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