SOUL SURMISE

STREET LIGHTS - HOMEWARD BOUND

Bono and Gary Lightbody singing Paul Simon together. What a lovely thought. Well, you can download it now! 

U2 might be just finishing a long tour and Snow Patrol might just be about to arrive in Ireland on a similarly lengthy jaunt but both lead singers have had enough time to send in their vocal lines for a charity single. Now I’m a lover of the charity single, Band Aid, Sun City and Perfect Day particularly but this one might be as tasteful as any.

This is an Irish-centric song put together by Aoife Woodlock who produces the renowned RTE TV series Other Voices. As she tells it Lightbody was first to commit and with all these things when a major player like him says yes then others will join in the slipstream

Street Lights is a collaborative bundle of artists that again tells the world that when it comes to music Ireland fight way above our weight. -  Conor O’Brien of Villagers, David Geraghty of Bell X1, Colm Mac Con Iomaire as well as Cathy Davey and Saint Sister and more appear here. 

The High Hopes Choir are on it too. Which is appropriate as the choir was the brain child of world-renowned conductor  David Brophy as a vehicle to help homeless people change their lives. The single is in aid of homeless charities - Peter McVerry Trust, Simon Community Ireland and Focus Ireland.

It is some of the best of Irish singers doing what they do best, using their art in transformation. It might also be the very best charity single of its kind. Paul Simon’s Homeward Bound is a songwriting classic and the theme fits perfectly. The Street Lights version is beautifully orchestrated and arranged in a way that makes it yearning and hopeful all at once.

Buy it on iTunes now. A song that’s not just good but good for something. 

AMERICAN LANDFILL KINGS - TRUMP, SAM PHILLIPS & JESUS

 

On the day that the President is reported to be saying stupid things about Global warming I was immediately drawn back to this song from Sam Phillips wonderful new record World On Sticks.

American Landfill Kings couldn't be a better antidote to Trump's dangerous rhetoric. It not only keeps the warning in front of us all:

Where will we live?
When they've conquered the earth
And the wild dies
Where will we live?

Phillips goes further. She hits the apocalyptic nail right on its explosive head. 

How did we find ourselves
Living on top of the things
That we don't want any more

and

We die with a palace of junk
That can't find its rest in the ground

This whole scam is about wealth. It is all about the accumulation of money and stuff. We are possessed by our possessions. We worship at the altar of profit. The god of the age is money. It is the devil in respectable disguise. 

Of course Jesus was all over this lie that has cataclysmic consequences 2000 years ago. Some of the Bible is not only as up to date as it was when it was written. Some of it is more up to date now. Jesus' followers were not rich. Their temptation to worship such a good was limited. Living now, in America, in the richest generation in history and Jesus' words about money are sharper than any proverbial two edged sword. 

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money."

Trump is about money and wealth. He throws the accusation that those who believe in global warming are being political, as if he is not being political in his blind convenience. He is prepared to get America richer as he throws away the soul of America and leaves his children and their children with an environmental catastrophe to live through. It is about momentary me, me, me at the cost of the next generations and eternity. 

So, convenient blindness. Like the evangelicals throughout most of the twentieth century who dismissed Walter Rauschenbusch's social gospel because it was too cross carrying to listen to its Biblical prophetic rage. Or the conservative Protestants of Northern Ireland who dismiss "love your enemy" or "blessed by the peacemaker" because of it would to cross carrying to reconcile with their Catholic neighbour. Trump has blind convenience.

In Trump's blind convenience, America sbow to the god of money. America needs to dismiss global warming so as it can get out of any Environmental deals that would hold up rampant and unfettered capitalism. They can then up the profits, increase the wealth, live in more comfort. Like a snake in the grass they are deceived for what looks and tastes good and damned to their fate and by extension our fate too and the vulnerable poor across our world who will be first hit by the impact of climate change.

Amos warns the American Landfill Kings poetically and fearfully about what happens when they leave others vulnerable to acquire their own wealth:

"Therefore, though you have built stone mansions,
    you will not live in them;
though you have planted lush vineyards,
    you will not drink their wine.
¹² For I know how many are your offenses
    and how great your sins."

Maybe Sam Phillips gives us a way out. It is a good paraphrase of Jesus words about seeking God's kingdom before the stuff and actually about giving up the stuff if we want to inherit the kingdom of God.

 

Giving, letting go
Unpossessing to unbind us

Open hands, open hearts
Every moment to remind us

Let it be!

PAUL MCCARTNEY - A STOCKI PLAYLIST, OF HIS EXTRA TRACKS

I love those extra tracks that my favourite artist releases and spent my youth making cassette tapes of these extra tracks. In the past few weeks I started collecting Paul McCartney's extra tracks. I finally put them together in this playlist that fits a CDR. I love it, the songs and the flow of them. If you fancy it...

1. It’s So Easy - from Rave On Buddy Holly

2. I Want To Walk You Home (featuring Allen Toussaint) - from Goin’ Home: A Tribute To Fats Domino

3. A Love For You - from Ram (Disc 2)

4. Vanilla Sky - from Vanilla Sky Soundtrack

5. In The Blink Of An Eye - from Ethel and Ernest Soundtrack 

6. Lady Madonna -  from BBC Radio 2: Piano Room

7. That’s All Right - from Good Rockin’ Tonight: The Legacy of Sun records

8. Cut Me Some Slack (featuring David Grohl, Krist Novoselic & Pat Smear - from Sound City: Real To Reel

9. Strawberry Fields Forever/Help/Give Peace A Chance - from All My Trials CD single

10. All Things Must Pass - from Concert For George

11. All My Trials - from Tripping The Live Fantastic: Highlights

12. Hope For The Future - Hope For The Future EP

13. Maybe Baby - Maybe Baby Soundtrack

14. I’m Partial To Your Abracababra - Brand New Boots and Panties: A Tribute To Ian Dury

15. A  Room With A View - Twentieth Century Blues: The Songs Of Noel Coward

16. Don’t Let The Sun Catch You Crying - Inspired By Genius: Music Of Ray Charles

17. It’s Now Or Never - The Last Temptation of Elvis: An All Star Tribute

18. My Soul (with Nitin Sawhney) - single

19. Heal The Pain (with George Michael) - Twenty Five

20. I’m In Love Again (with Klaus Voorman) - A Sideman’s Journey

21. The Very Thought Of You (with Tony Bennett) - Duets: An American Classic

22. Love Song On The Earth - single

SNOW PATROL'S SOON - EMPATHY FOR VISITING DAD WITH DEMENTIA

It was only in a recent interview with Gary Lightbody that I discovered that it was a phrase of Lightbody’s father that gave Snow Patrol their biggest hit, Chasing Cars. Apparently Mr Lightbody senior believed that infatuated romance was just like dogs chasing cars. A lovely insight.

Gary Lightbody loves his dad. I have heard him send out his love to his folks from the stage. On his solo EP of songs, recorded live at Bangor Abbey and inspired by Seamus Heaney, we are driving around Ireland with his dad. On the song Lifening off Fallen Empires he sings:

 

To share what I've been given, some kids eventually

And be for them what I've had, a father like my dad

 

As with many of us, Gary is currently watching his ageing father heading into dementia. On the new Snow Patrol album Wildness he gives us a raw, emotional picture of such an ordeal. I am probably swaying towards favouring the alternative version on the deluxe edition of the record. I think the piano gives a little more melancholy and the brass adds poignancy. 

Soon takes us to the end of the cul-de-sac where there is no turning circle. The loss of memory… the looking back in a son’s head when a father cannot… and a realisation as he looked forward that we are next. His dad, in his every day the same as the last or the next, has less to fear than the son. 

The son’s memories though re-imagine his dad as he was:

 

We are standing on the home shores now

My whole hand hanging onto your thumb

There's a place in the palace of you

We can always be standing like that

We could hide in there, just as we were then

Just my father and I am just your son.

  

By the end the word son drifts further and further out in the mix, like the memory fading. Utterly sad. Totally brilliant. Beautiful heartache. Thank you Gary Lightbody for the empathy and catharsis.

I play Soon often on the melancholy journey to visit my father. I think about the song while I sit with him. On the way home I ponder the awakening reality that indeed I am next. 

REFLECTING ON STEVE BIKO & A SONG THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

Today is the anniversary of the brutal death while in police custody of Steve Biko in South Africa. He was only 30. Biko was an anti-apartheid activist and leader in the Black Consciousness Movement. After his death he became an icon for the movement, perhaps made most famous in the movie Cry Freedom and Peter Gabriel’s song about him, Biko. I did not realise it at the time, and I am more an admirer of Gabriel’s work than a fan, that this song might have impacted my life more than any other.

In July 2002, in a Church on the Guguletu township on the Cape Flats of Western Cape, I was asked without warning to explain to the congregation why I had brought 25 white Irish students to worship. In the few seconds that I had to make my way to the pulpit I had to think very quickly what had brought not only me to South Africa but a gang of young people along with me. 

The answer opened up a profound truth to me. I wasn’t there because I had heard about the injustice of apartheid from the pulpits of my Presbyterian Churches. I told the congregation that I was there because rock musicians like Peter Gabriel had sparked a Biblical passion for justice in general and their people in particular and that these rock prophets had profoundly changed my life. I went on to tell them that though many of the musicians were not Christians they forced me back to the Old Testament prophets and I was there with my students because we wanted to bring God’s Kingdom to Cape Town as it was in heaven.

The Biko song changed my life in that it fuelled me, with many other God induced serendipities, to become involved in the transformation of South Africa. I became part of Habitat For Humanity’s house building programme in the Western Cape which has been one of the most privileged and moving episodes of my life. Along with my students we raised funds and physically helped to build 40 houses for former shack dwellers. 

When you hand people the key to their first brick house it is an amazing feeling. As well as Habitat For Humanity my student teams got to engage in Peace projects, AIDS visitation, school projects and a Fair Trade initiative. It did not change the entire world in an instant but it did change the world a little, bit at a time.

As well as all of that, my students came home transformed and many changed their vocations or became campaigners, changed the way they looked at the world and led other such teams themselves. I can think of a number who have spent time in Africa as part of their work. Mark Drennan works in Sierra Leone with Children of the Nations. Justin Zoradi set up an NGO These Numbers Have Faces that has helped countless young Africans to get to college and just published his book Made For These Times.

Soul Surmise readers will be aware of continued love for Africa that now focuses more in Uganda than South Africa. Without question my first interest in what was happening anywhere in Africa was Peter Gabriel’s Biko. 

Today I listened to my favourite version of Biko, a cover by Paul Simon. It’s more acoustic, more melancholic, more my style. Later this evening I will listen to my favourite version by Gabriel, when he plays the song at the 46664 Concerts in Cape Town in 2003. By then South Africa was a very different place than when he wrote the song.

As I listen, I will remember Steve Biko and some of his writings that have inspired me. I will remember driving down Steve Biko Road into Khayelitsha back in the early Noughties. I will remember a man who gave his life for a fairer world and who touched mine through all kinds of circumstances, one of them very tragic.

During these reflections today I was drawn to a few lines from one of my favourite bands Over The Rhine. In maybe my favourite song of theirs, Jesus In New Orleans they sing:

 

“Oh, ain't it crazy

What's revealed when you're not looking all that close?

Oh, ain't it crazy

How we put to death the one's we need the most?”

 

The song is very much about Jesus and we did indeed put him to death. Often though I wonder did they also mean Dr Martin Luther King and since the first listen I have thought how much South Africa could do with a Steve Biko type leader today.

MAGDALENE LAUNDRIES - JONI MITCHELL'S TAKE

As those impacted by the Irish Magdalene Laundries received an apology from President Michael D Higgins I blog a section from a chapter in my book The Rock Cries Out which gives Joni Mitchell's take on the Laundries...

It seems that one morning in the late 90s, with a cheerier tune at her disposal, Joni Mitchell picked up the Toronto Star at the grocery store. In it, she read about an Irish scandal of how the selling of a property of the Sisters Of Charity in north Dublin unearthed 133 bodies of the “fallen women” who were sent to Convent Laundries for sexual misdemeanours. Mitchell wrote Magdelene Laundries and, to give the song an Irish context, she first recorded it with the Irish traditional band The Chieftains on their 1999 release Tears Of Stone. 

The song points out the same fundamental flaw as another Joni Mitchell song Tax Free did for the Televangelists. It is the seeming hypocrisy – “Why do they call this heartless place/Our Lady of Charity” she sings before a painful shrugged chortle proceeds a repeat of the ironic “charity”. That Mitchell is not dismissing Jesus with the abhorrence carried out in his name is heard later when she goes on, “These bloodless brides of Jesus/If they had just once glimpsed their groom/Then they’d know, and they’d drop the stones/concealed behind their rosaries.”

Years later a movie about the Laundries, Magdalene Sisters, would be released. In an interview with director Peter Mullan for BBC Northern Ireland Ralph McLean asked Mullan how such things could have happened. Mullan had asked a nun involved in the Laundries the very same question and she answered “an absence of doubt.” 

For many believers doubt is treated with suspicion but the Sister had put her finger on a great truth. When humans take the strength of their belief and ease it across the thin line to absolute knowledge then arrogance can lead to all kinds of things being done in the name of God. Mystery is what saves us from such abuses as Mitchell is highlighting. As the apostle Paul reminds us in a chapter that Mitchell had used in her song Love “we see but through a glass darkly.” 

The mistake of believing that we can see any clearer can have repugnant results. Nations can invade nations, Churches can exclude those who do not think like them, individuals can treat their neighbours in the most dismissive, judgemental and damaging ways. A look back at Slouching Towards Bethlehem finds Mitchell summing it up thus; “The best lack conviction/Given some time to think/And the worst are full of passion/Without mercy.”

Joni Mitchell’s repugnance with things carried out by the orthodox Churches, masquerading as in the name of God, never completely unravelled a conversion experience that she talked about three decades before she wrote Magdalene Laundries? In a Mojo interview with Barney Hoskins in 1994 she talks about the difficult life she has had. It is easy to overlook a life that was struck down early by polio, had to give up a daughter for adoption, experienced a miscarriage as well as the usual romantic heartache. She is not looking for special attention. She says, “I have had a difficult life as most people have…a life of very good luck and very bad luck…but I don’t think I’ve ever become faithless; I’ve never been an atheist, although I can’t say what orthodoxy I belong to.”

The visions and dreams of her early song Woodstock are far from lost in Mitchell’s later work. Passion Play from the same album, Night Ride Home, is a song of gospel story and gospel truth. Mary Magdalene is “trembling and gleaming,” getting better press than she would an album later in Magdalene Laundries and Zaccheus is “a sinner of some position.” To those in need comes redemption and a heart healer. 

The Messiah arrives into a world that is “divinely barren and wickedly wise” and from the context it can only be Jesus Christ, “Enter the multitudes/The walking wounded/They come to this diver/Of the heart/Of the multitudes/They kingdom come/Thy will be done.” In looking hard for the kingdom, Mitchell is taking another look back to the garden and the chorus is “who’re you gonna get to do your dirty work/When all the slaves are free?” The Kingdom that Jesus came to bring is a future day but it will take us back to our original intentions in that garden where we were stardust and golden.

REMEMBERING JUNE 4 1989 on TIANANMEN SQUARE with BRUCE COCKBURN IN MY EAR

(Every June 4th I remember the students of Tiananmen Square. On June 4th 1989, during a peaceful protest for democratic reform, hundreds of students were shot in a bloody military clampdown. A year later I was on that square…)

 

There are moments when you make good choices over the song to play. Way back in August 1990 I pressed the play button on the old walkman (remember them) and Bruce Cockburn’s Waiting For A Miracle started throwing images around my head that mingled perfectly and disturbingly with the bombardment of see and unseen stimuli around me.

 

Like the ones who've cried

Like the ones who've died

Trying to set the angel in us free

While they're waiting for a miracle.

 

With my ears and my eyes in harmony to the disharmony, my soul attempted to make sense of my context. I was on Tiananmen Square. It was 16 months since June 4 1989 and the place was haunted by what happened there on that day. I wrote in my journal: -

 

“Tiananmen Square? All my thoughts on China, before and after I came here, ricocheted around the vast emptiness of this square. I will never forget this hour of my life and I’ll never be able to write down all that I thought in that too short a time.

It seemed so calm, so still, so peaceful and yet I am asking what happened here and what are the few people scattered around me thinking. I can see all these signs of history, the Monument to the People’s Heroes and Mao Mausoleum among them. But what about signs for the future? I watched people sitting, almost reverentially where the students sat the previous year and wondered what they were thinking. Did a loved one come here with a vision of a future and die for that future? The Chinese can so easily in their friendly and gentle disposition hide from us the truth of their hopes and fears.”

 

I have said it before and will say it again that Cockburn’s travelogue songs are so full of his lyrical genius that you just wish he was with you everywhere you go. Add places of political injustice and even more so. Waiting For A Miracle was written about Nicaragua but it fitted here. Never have I had such a detailed soundtrack to what I was seeing around me. Cockburn’s words could have been written as I attempted to write down my own thoughts: -

 

“Somewhere out there is a place that's cool

Where peace and balance are the rule

Working toward a future like some kind of mystic jewel

And waiting for a miracle.”

 

“Peace and balance” is a very Chinese concept. Working for a future and as the next verse suggests, “How come history takes such a long, long time/When you're waiting for a miracle.” A miracle? As I sat on my own, wondering and pondering and writing, Cockburn’s song was as Tolstoy suggested art should be, “Intercourse between human and human.” 

Cockburn and I were in conversation but more it became a resource for me to be in spiritual intercourse with God also. And my prayer was that these people, particularly the children who all smiled for a photograph and then moved their heads right on my click, that an interruption of God’s grace would bring a peaceful and balanced future and see the speed of history quicken. Almost thirty year on... and I remember that hour as vividly as when I was there and Cockburn still converses with me. Still I pray!

HOLY AND PEOPLE FULL OF HOLES - SURMISING THE TRAGIC DEATH OF FRIGHTENED RABBIT'S SCOTT HUTCHINSON

The music world was devastated by the discovery of the body of Scott Hutchinson in the Firth of Forth last week. The main man from Scottish band Frightened Rabbit had left Twitter messages: "Be so good to everyone you love. It's not a given. I'm so annoyed that it's not. I didn't live by that standard and it kills me. Please, hug your loved ones.” Shortly afterwards, he added: "I'm away now. Thanks.” Oh how these messages break the heart.

Anyone who knows the work of Frightened Rabbit will know that there were many clues in Scott Hutchinson’s songs about his depression long before those final Tweets. At the weekend, the songwriter Karine Polwart wrote a beautifully poignant reflection on Scott’s sad passing, based around his song Swim Until You Can’t See Land:

 

“Dip a toe in the ocean, 

oh how it hardens and it numbs

The rest of me is a version of man 

built to collapse in crumbs

And if I hadn’t come now 

to the coast to disappear

I may have died in a landslide 

of rocks and hopes and fears”

 

Oh my goodness!

I was drawn to his song Holy. Again, the video seems sadly prophetic, ending with a woman walking into the sea. It is obvious as a Church pastor that I would be drawn to a song of that title. Yet, as a Church pastor it comes with a biting sting. As I reflect on the life of someone so depressed that they had to end their life, I am asking what could those who believe Jesus, who comes with a power for healing of heart, soul and mind, have done to help.

Scott is not complimentary in his description of us:

 

“While you read to me from the right, act way on high, high

Clutching a crisp New Testament, breathing fire, fire

Will you save me the fake benevolence, 

I don't have time, I know I'm full of holes, full of holes.”

 

The juxtaposition of holy and holes hits hard:

 

“You're acting all holy, 

Me, I'm just full of holes, full of holes”

 

The tragedy of how religious people define holy and the acting out of it as a self righteous arrogance has not only not helped the world but damaged many a vulnerable soul. One of the key traits of the holiness of God, God’s separateness, God’s otherness, is God’s compassion and unconditional love for human beings, no matter how full of holes they might be.

As another songwriter, my good friend Martyn Joseph, put it in a song about Christ’s cross:

 

“Strange dissident of meekness

And nurse of tangled souls

And so unlike the holy

To end up full of holes”

 

A very different juxtaposition; the grace of God’s redeeming act on Good Friday.

The bottom line is a line I have been using for some time. May we not see holiness as something that feeds our own self righteousness but as something that feeds the world’s deepest needs with love and grace and compassion. 

That is holy. Divinely designed for those full of holes. As my heart breaks over the death of Scott Hutchinson there is an extra jagged edge for a song that suggests that what he knew of God was not helpful in his life full of holes. May we be forgiven.

STOCKI'S ST. PATRICK'S DAY PLAYLIST 2018

This is a playlist I have made for St. Patrick's Day. It is made up of songs that I have heard since last year's St. Patrick's Day. For the nerd, Beki Hemingway is indeed American but currently lives in Gorey and there is an Irishness creeping into her work!

The playlist is done with a similar thought process to flow and themes that I would have used in my radio show Rhythm and Soul, way back int he day... Celebrate Ireland's wonderful song craft! Blessed St. Patrick's Day! Enjoy!

 

GLEN HANSARD - Roll On Slow

VAN MORRISON - How Far From God

IMELDA MAY - When It’s My Time

BEKI HEMINGWAY - Two Hills To Climb

JOBY FOX - Belfast

ULIAD & DUKE SPECIAL - Shipyards Of Belfast

DUKE SPECIAL - The Ice-cream Man

URSULA BURNS - Heartbreak Was Heartbreak

BURNING CODES - Belfast (Place Of My Soul)

KAZ HAWKINS - Belfast Town

SON VOLT - Ballymena

RORY NELLIS - Born For Rainy Weather

JOSHUA BURNSIDE - Blood Drive

CIARAN LAVERY - To Chicago

CHRISTY MOORE - City Of Chicago

U2 - 13 (There Is A Light)

PAUL BRADY - Something To Change

LUKA BLOOM - I Am Not At War With Anyone

ANTHONY TONER - The Night Prayer Of Saint Augustine

NA LEANAI - Find The Light

MALOJIAN -  Let Your Weirdness Carry You Home

ASKING GOD FOR SIGNS - A Song, A Scripture and a Soul Surmise

A Song, A Scripture and a Soul Surmise is a new series of blogs that I hope might be a resource for quiet reflection. The idea is that in a Scripture reading, a song to listen to and a short reflection/poem/prayer of mine we can listen for the Spirit to whisper some truth through the white noise of so many voices around us... For most impact, line the song up first...

 

SCRIPTURE: MARK 8: 11-13

11 The Pharisees came and began to question Jesus. To test him, they asked him for a sign from heaven. 12 He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? Truly I tell you, no sign will be given to it.” 13 Then he left them, got back into the boat and crossed to the other side.

 

SURMISE

Lord, how many times have we asked for signs

Shouted at the night, “Are you there?”

Whispered in the shadows, “Where are you?”

Prayed in our confusion, “What should I do?”

Lord how many times have we asked for signs...

 

Asked you to write some message in the stars

As if the stars themselves were not enough.

 

Lord, how many times have we asked for signs

Screamed into the darkness, “God, shine a light”

Muttered in the discomfort, “Have you forsaken me?”

Wrestled in our lack of courage, “Give me some guidance”

Lord how many times have we asked for signs...

 

Asked you to write some message in the stars

As if the stars themselves were not enough.

 

Lord, how many times have we asked for signs

Shaken our fists at the silence, “What are you doing?”

Grumbled in some wilderness, “Why have you brought me here?”

Wondered in our lack of seeing, “Do you really love me”

Lord how many times have we asked for signs...

 

Asked you to write some message in the stars

As if the stars themselves were not enough.

 

SONG:

THERE YOU ARE - CAROLYN ARENDS (from Seize The Day & Other Stories)

 

I was hoping you would write to me a message in the stars

As if the stars themselves were not enough

And I awaited your arrival here from some place very far

As if I couldn't feel your constant touch

Why did I think that you'd send thunder

To wake me from my slumber

When anytime I open up my eyes

 

 

There you are - loving me like crazy

There you are - though I am unaware

There you are - when my heart is doubting

Even there you are...