I’m “mail-ordered-ten-Christian-CDs-for-a-penny” years old. I thought Jars of Clay was the bomb but also, for a time, so were Stryper and DC Talk and Newsboys and Michael W Smith and Amy Grant.
I’m slightly embarrassed by this.
In church on Sunday mornings I sang from the Lutheran hymnal, and at camp I memorized dozens of church camp songs. But for some reason the ubiquity of Christian radio and the popularity of Christian bookstores had me convinced I needed, out of fidelity to my religious heritage, to also follow the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) charts.
I’ve always been enough of a completist that when, presented with the challenge to “know” a genre or artist, I lean in.
Along the way I remained fascinated with the few bands that somehow crossed over between “regular” music and “Christian” music. Somehow they were clearly and overtly Christian but didn’t sell under the moniker CCM.
My favorite was U2 but I also loved King’s X and Dolly Parton. Each is their own kind of Christian, all still perform today, all are as far as I know still Christian, but have never taken up the “Christian” label.
I think what broke me of the CCM habit was a MercyMe concert in Wisconsin in the Aughts: the singer said something along the lines of how the band that opened for them was “reaching the culture” for Jesus.
I don’t remember who opened for them. I do remember that line, and how much it chafed.
I started drifting toward bands that were weirdly Christian. I fell in love for a time with a lot of the bands recording with Asthmatic Kitty Records, bands like The Welcome Wagon and Half-Handed Cloud and most famous of all, Sufjan Stevens, who I will return to later.
Somewhere during that era I spent a bunch of time watching movies and videos made by the Danielson Familie band, which are just about as weird as anything the Oklahoma City natives The Flaming Lips put out, but cuter. I also listened to some of the indie (and admittedly niche) Lutheran musicians like Jonathan Rundman and Nate Houge and Rachel Kurtz and David Scherer.
I guess all of this was in that long late phase when people still bought CDs. But when Spotify emerged, slowly my passion for weird indie waned somewhat. I still love Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (which I believe epitomizes that era and genre of indie) but like Wilco I’ve retreated from the more “precious” aspects of that sound. Mileage may vary.
All of this leaves me wondering how we choose the music we choose and why. Clearly some of my listening habits have emerged based on a desire for identity markers at the intersection of indie and Christian.
But also more and more I just listen to music I like, by anyone and with a drastically ecumenical comportment toward faith(s), and I think that’s how the vast majority of listeners function.
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This whole reflection was spurred because a couple of weeks ago our children’s ministry leader sent me some recordings of Natalie Bergman. She wants to sing some of the songs with our children’s choir.
I did what I typically do with new musicians, I looked up and read her bio on Spotify. Turns out she was part of a duo, Wild Belle, that was indeed popular at the tail end of my indie phase.
I wanted to figure out where her Christian impulse came from. I’ll admit, I’ve got levels of suspicion I can’t shake, post-MercyMe concert. Was it strategic, “trying to reach the culture?” That’s a basic suspicion of much Christian music I still move around with.
But Bergman, like some other recent musicians (think M.I.A.) had a conversion experience that resulted in a musical reckoning. In this sense her move toward singing “Psalms” is careful.
In a recent interview with J.L. Sirisuk for example:
JLS: Why did you want to make this a gospel record – what’s your relationship with gospel music?
NB: Well, lets see. I don’t even know if it’s appropriate to call the music gospel because gospel traditionally comes from black churches, but I do think that it was inspired by traditional gospel music and also Christian music. I’m not that into Christian radio – some of the music is a little cheesy, but I just wanted to have my own interpretation of the gospels. I wasn’t afraid to sing about Jesus, but it is a hard time to be a Christian in America right now, or anywhere really because religion has such a bad name. Historically some people have done some horrible things in the name of God, and I don’t know where it went wrong but I would say I’m a Christian fighting the good fight and I want that to be the message. I want the message to be love and the goodness of the creator and why we were created. I think the message got a little bit skewed somewhere along the lines and people are just taking religion and corrupting it. I thought that singing gospel music was the appropriate thing to do.
This is evocative of a highly idiosyncratic album I’ve loved, Rickie Lee Jones the sermon on exposition boulevard, which is what I guess I’d call Christian adjacent.
That is to say, it’s Christian but with an authentic connection to the heart of that particular music, and faithful in the sense that it emerges not in order to accomplish something else (convert people) but simply to express that which the artist feels called to express (which can and often is about faith).
I love this kind of thing.
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I know, I’m probably supposed to like some of the older Christian music. You know the stuff written back when almost all music was religious music. And I’ve gone through phases when I enjoyed listening to Bach, or Gregorian chant, etc.
But again, I mostly listen to what I like, and what I like these days is seldom overtly Christian… except when it is.
I’m reminded of the phase I went through about a decade ago, when I was totally into Olivier Messiaen. He was a devout Christian and served at Église de la Sainte-Trinité, Paris, where he was titular organist for 61 years.
But he also famously composed much of his music as evocation of bird song. Somehow this makes sense to me, and I love the bird music even more than the organ music.
As a friend recently wrote, “Likewise the whole of Creation sings a harmonious song. Most people agree with this logic, but don’t notice on a typical day, except for a day like we experienced during the eclipse, when its absence was felt. Birdsong changed when darkness fell. When we learn to view all of Creation as the Church, then we will truly be United, One.”
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I promised I’d return to Sufjan Stevens. Even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve probably heard some of his Christmas songs during the holidays, as his Christmas albums are incredibly popular (and lovely). Sojourners recently published a piece about Stevens and his new album, Javelin.
The title is wonderful: The Queer Christian Yearning of Sufjan Stevens.
Even Stevens himself, with some of his recent albums, has wandered from the more precious indie rock of his earlier period and into the creation of ambient music (like Trent Reznor, but nicer).
I recommend you pause, read it, then go and listen to some of the musicians I’ve named or linked. Plus share with me your meanderings and trajectory relating music and faith. I’m truly curious if others have wandered around like I have.
I’m finding all this wandering has reverse engineered how I related to music in worship, which maybe needs to be a post of its own.
That was a really enjoyable post to read and the one you linked was lovely as well. I'll be honest that much of my musical taste over the years has been inspired by you and your recommendations, and I haven't spent much time considering the faithfulness of my music listening. I do know I don't like K-Love on the whole but there are some overtly Christian songs I have come to enjoy. I hope this will inspire me to think about that a bit more.
Uh…come sit by me and let’s talk about it. 😂 You might not want to because I have so many “weird Jesus records” and obnoxious CCM knowledge because I was indoctrinated for many years to believe that “secular” music was wrong, but SINCE we are on the subject…actually I can’t even begin to explain this here, but there’s a lot of good stuff that got stuck in the bubble of “Christian” music and Rich Mullins is probably first among them.
https://youtu.be/ijf-0euglz4?si=AQmCq4fgaQieJfBW