SOUL SURMISE

CAMILLE O'SULLIVAN - CAMILLE SINGS CAVE LIVE

Irish singer, with a French mother, Camille O’Sullivan grabbed all of attention in a performance on Later… With Jools a few years ago. It wasn’t just me. The Telegraph chose her dramatic performance of Kirsty McColl’s In These Shoes as one of the best 25 Later… With Jules moments ever.

To be honest if O’ Sullivan had been only been about the theatre of In These Shoes she wouldn’t have gained traction. However, she was more than the bluster. Her albums Live@The Olympia and Changeling revealed a woman with the vocal abilities to cover a host of possibilities, Bowie, Radiohead, Tom Waits and even Snow Patrol. Cave was always heavy in the mix.

Camille brings all her drama to the piece. Her trademark raucousness to the sinister, Murder Ballad, Stagger Lee and brings it to a whisper in the haunting Skeleton Trees. 

Then there is the beauty of Into My Arms which comes across as that Van Morrison hybrid of romance with a Gospel tinge in the recognition of the divine. 

Ship Song and People Ain’t No Good begin with the barest layer of lush piano before gig off on one.

Don’t think for a moment that O’Sullivan is doing for cave what Jennifer Warnes did for Leonard Cohen with her Famous Blue raincoat album from 1987. Warnes gave Cohen a more accessible hue. Not so much with O’Sullivan. She is not bringing Nick Cave to a Mary Black audience!

Camille O’Sullivan takes on a ride and deep catalogue and bring her unique stamp on it (with her shoes!!!) without losing the reverence the original songs deserve. A more than worthwhile venture. I would love to have seen it live. 

COLDPLAY - EVERYDAY LIFE

Precariously traversing the contemporary crises across the world and bringing God and spirituality into the the mix. Welcome to my world…  and apparently the world of Coldplay too!

The fact that I have every Coldplay album ever released but have never reviewed any of them on Soul Surmise tells you that I like Coldplay but don’t love them! Well, that might be about to change! 

At midnight on Thursday I spend half an hour listening to snippets of the new album releases. Everyday Life sounded intriguing me but didn’t grab me immediately. My friend Chris Hunter texted Friday morning. He had played it through on his way to work and thought I’d need a listen too.

Thank you Chris. I did. He pointed me to BrokEn and When I Need a A Friend. Within minutes I had sent the former to Gary Burnett our Fitzroy blues guy and he had claimed it for the next time he is leading a Sunday service. We both thought When I Need a Friend was more for organ and Chris Blake!

That we had been thinking of Coldplay in worship liturgies suggests something different is happening on this record. It is.

Everyday Life is Coldplay’s White Album. No, not in most most amazing record ever made kind of comparison. Not even in its double album category. This album actually masquerades as a double record. It is all on one CD and is shorter than some previous Coldplay records. It is just that it is divided into Sunrise and Sunset as in all in the span of one day. Very Moody Blues!

No, Everyday Life is like the White Album in its lack of band cohesion and its scattering of genres all across it. Across these sixteen tracks (I am not even calling WOTW/POTP a song) we have gospel, blues, doo wop, brass, classical, folk and more spoken word than Revolution 9 ever dared get away with! There is some Coldplay in there too, Champion Of The World, their tribute to Frightened Rabbit’s late singer Scott Hutchinson, the one that will most easily fit the last live set list!

All of this makes for the most interesting Coldplay album, to my ears. There is tender piano and fragile guitar. There is Kemi Futi Afrobeat jazz and Gospel choirs. There are songs about racist violence, gun control or lack of it, Syrian refugees, parenting, of course love… and a whole lot of God.

Personally Orphans, Arabesque and Guns are the songs that deepen the Coldplay catalogue and grab my attention. However, Cry Cry Cry, Church, Daddy and Eko are equally interesting.

A few people have said to me, “I’ve been listening to the new Coldplay album and thinking that you must be all over that.” I hope that is a compliment to say that I quickly come to mind when music goes deeper but obviously with this one it is about the spiritual references.

They are slightly more than references. Everyday Life’s first lyric is in a song called Church and though that could be described as a love song with an interesting title it is not long until we have pure Gospel Blues on BrokEn:

 

And I know (Ooh-ooh)

That in the darkness I'm alright (I'm alright)

See there's no sun rising (Ooh-ooh)

But inside I'm free (Ooh-ooh)

'Cause the Lord will shine a light for me 

 

…and then the Church-like When I Need A Friend:

 

Holy, Holy

Dark defend

Shield me, show me

When I need a friend

 

Slowly, slowly

Violence, end

Love reign o'er me

When I need a friend

 

The entire album plays out at the end of the title track:

 

At first light, throw my arms out, open wide

Hallelujah, hallelujah

 

This all points to a Fitzroy Gospel According To for sure but hold your evangelical horses though if you are itching to declare Chris Martin as you latest Christian superstar. Martin grew up in a Christian home and has constantly returned to that well for lyrical inspiration. He has distanced himself from that evangelical branch of Christianity and now calls himself an all-theist. 

That is more what might be happening here. There are spiritual quotes all over this record but none from Bible or Koran. The message of the piece is a simple answer to the final questions mused on that title track; questions I am asking in sermons every Sunday: 

 

What in the world are we going to do?

Look at what everybody's going through

What kind of world do you want it to be?

Am I the future or the history?

 

This Coldplay record is calling for am answer that sees humanity as one big family. Arabesque reminds us that we all have the same blood. A John and Alice Coltrane quotation “May there be peace and love and perfection throughout all creation, through God” on the song Children of Adam remind us we all have the same origins.

Many will see Everyday Life’s Gospel as simplistic and sentimental but the solution to all nations getting on is not rocket science. Perhaps in the positivity of solution Coldplay are ignoring the need to deal with the selfish problem at the core of our humanity and racism but an album like Everyday Life can only be a good message to reverberate around our polarised world just now. 

Here’s a wee tip. Go to Youtube and watch the launch of the album, performed in its entirety live from Jordan. It is quite the experience and has me declaring that Everyday Life is the most “I want to go back and hear that again” Coldplay album that this soul has yet heard!

JEREMY CASELLA - SPIRIT

On a recent trip to the United States those most famous two words from Psalm 46 raised their heads again and again - “Be Still”.

It began in Delaware of Ohio when my friends Julie Morgan, BJ Allmon and Phillip Fox sang The Head and The Heart song Let’s Be Still. God invites the Psalmist to “be still” when it feels like the earth is giving way and the mountains are falling into the heart of the sea.

That evening and later in Taylor University and at Calvin University (I preferred College) I spoke of the times we are living in and how the call to “be still” helps us stop to remember who God is and then, as we do that, who we are in the light of who God is. “Be still”, I began to think, are prophetic words for our very uncertain times. 

At Calvin I met Gracie. Her stepdad happened to be songwriter Jeremy Casella. Gracie mentioned that Jeremy had a new record about to land. I reached out to Jeremy and he sent me the album. 

My soul seemed to jump out of my body when a few seconds into the very first songs Jeremy sings, “Be still…” 

Indeed, if in your discipline of being still you tend to seek music to slow you down and resource your reflecting then this Jeremy Casella record is made for such spiritual practice.

Spirit is a pastoral record. These songs are honest and vulnerable. There is brokenness and pain. There is a yearning for belonging and postures of resilience and hope. There is also the tangible love of a soul mate as a conduit of the love of God.

A look at Casella’s credits on other artist’s work give a clue to the template here. His collaborations with Phil Keaggy and Andrew Peterson give an accurate clue to the authoritative beauty of his guitar playing (Keaggy) and the poetic nature of the spiritual lyrics (Peterson). If Rich Mullins had lived long enough to collaborate with Matthew Perryman Jones (what a thought!) they might have come up with something like this.

The way that Casella reflects on the outside world and them injects it into the soul is very Mullins. I could see Spirit appear on Mullins’s Winds Of Heaven, Stuff Of Earth, Autumn In Kingston Springs on A Liturgy, Legacy and A Ragamuffin Band and Last Chance/Psalm 88 is Casella’s Hard To Get.  

With a beautifully added string quartet the sparseness of Casella's production means more. It is lush minimalism and carries on top words of comfort and a musical sat nav for us lost pilgrims to find our way home. 

So glad I bumped into Gracie.

JOE HENRY - THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WATER

I have been listening to Joe Henry since the early 90s. T-Bone Burnett produced him and The Jayhawks were his band on occasion. Two good introductions. 1993’s Kindness Of The World was a particular favourite.

In more recent times I got as excited about records Joe Henry produced as the ones T-Bone Burnett did. When my very favourite band Over The Rhine came into his sphere of genius, I was stoked.  

When Over The Rhine were in Fitzroy a couple of years ago I got talking to Linford about Henry. Joe had been in Belfast in his joint venture with Billy Bragg around the same time.

In the conversation Linford shared how he thought that pretty much everything Joe Henry spoke was literature. He told me that Joe still uses pen and paper and stamp and envelope. He sends letters! He signs them all Love and Revelation, Joe. On their next record Over the Rhine had a song called Love and Revelation!

Which brings us to The Gospel According To Water. Wow. Here’s a dark horse sneaking up along the rails to get itself in the frame for Album of the Year. 

The aforementioned Burnett once shared the secret of the first Counting Crows record. He said that most bands arrive with a demo that needs made into a fully fledged record. With August and Everything After, he went on, I turned the record they brought me back into a demo. 

The Gospel According To Water has that demo sound. Hanging on a lone guttural guitar sound, for the most part, the playing is measured, intentional and beautiful in the raw state of it. 

Upon this, Henry throws that literature that Linford said of his conversation. These are poetic songs with enough words articulately rhymed and depth of meaning for us to swim in for years to come. 

They are tough songs, written in a spurt while Henry was living with stage 4 prostate cancer *. You can imagine that they are as raw in emotion as that guttural sound they move upon. Joe himself says of them:

“Though they have all grown out of darkness, I don’t believe any of these songs themselves to be “dark” in nature, nor about the circumstance that prompted their discovery. In them, I hear the re-accessing of my imagination and its greater invitation; hear deep gratitude, and a compassion toward self that I don’t always possess; an optimism I did not know I’d allowed to flourish.”

Linford did say “literature”.

So if you are up for some personal discovery, some re-accessing of your imagination, a listening for deep gratitude, a compassion towards your self and some optimism to flourish then look no further. This is honest. This is vulnerable. This is pastoral. This is Love and Revelation.

 

*Joe is in remission - prognosis is encouraging.

SNOW PATROL - REWORKED

Ah! Snow Patrol Reworked. I have dreamt of such a thing since they did a show in the Royal Albert Hall in 2011 that rearranged their hits. I love that kind of thing and as my mates Iain and Miriam were drawn into the band for that gig I was all over that creative venture.

For their 25th Anniversary Snow Patrol went back to that project. Any other band would have released an ordinary Greatest Hits with perhaps that Royal Albert Hall concert as extra CD (the DVD was an extra with the deluxe edition of Fallen Empires) but no; nothing as lazy for Snow Patrol.

Following 2018’s Wildness, perhaps their best record, Reworked reveals a band in a rich vein of creativity. It seems that after 7 years of inactivity they haven’t been able to stop, starting these recordings in hotel rooms as they toured Wildness.

The songs are so reworked and so carefully sequenced that it is hard to know whether to put it in the “new albums” or “reissues” magazine reviews sections or Best Of The Year Awards categories.

It is a quality record. It is as if they had stripped out the inside of a house and remodelled the interior with a different ambience.

Reworked is gentler in spirit. You’re All I Have for is a fine example. Pumping out of the Eyes Open album as the lead off single in 2005 it is transformed in this incarnation to something so delicate.

Two things jump out from Reworked. 

Firstly, how good a songwriter that Gary Lightbody is. Take out the bluster and many a song can lose its soul or lack of it. These re-imagining reveal a robust core in their new tender skin. The lyrics are poetic. The melodies intoxicating and these haunting arrangements utterly beautiful.

Secondly, what a voice Gary Lightbody has; light and shade, gentle touch and earthy fulness. On the piano foundation of Take Back The City he is strong, rebuilding his wounded and wonderful home city. Then we have the falsetto of Empress and the fragility of Heal Me. 

Not that everything is easy with the gentleness. Run, with a distorted vocal treatment might be the most menacing moment. Who’d have thought! Yet, somehow Iain Archer doesn’t lose the anthemic chorus in the midst.

Everything sounds new but there are three actual new songs. I Think Of Home was originally part of a project that Lightbody did at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace. I have already described it as Lightbody’s In My Life. A celebration of his beloved Ireland - north, south, east and west!

Time Won’t Go Slowly, to the sound of a fairground carousel waltzer, ruminates on the relationship between love and time; a forty year old pondering mortality. It’s a suggestion that Lightbody’s best songwriting days are still to come.

Made Of Something Different Now is another such hint. Regretful heartache with the most hypnotic of melodies.

25 years in Snow Patrol are sounding like they are just hitting their stride. What they do in the first years of their next quarter century could be very creatively tasty indeed. Reworked is a band standing at the crossroads, looking back and forward, nowhere near the end of the road.

OVER THE RHINE - OHIO

Superlatives are left impotent as I attempt to describe Over the Rhine’s sixth album proper, tenth if we count various rare track compilations and a Christmas album. I found myself gasping throughout at the melodies, the poetry, the spiritual insight and the reflections and echoes of my inner most grappling with how God interacts with this beautiful yet fatally tainted human race and we with God. Then of course there is that voice. Karin Berquist has a voice that is seductive like no other, seducing your heart and your soul with a sound that is so otherworldly that you are not sure if your mortal ears can listen. Was it Julie Miller who stated that this was the voice that all of us would have in heaven; the women at least!

Musically this is as satisfied a sound as anything they have released before. Where the production on their first Back Porch release Films For Radio was chasing Dido and Sinead O’Connor into a little too modern pop this is ambient in the most gorgeously organic and acoustic of ways. Linford Detweiler who along with that angelic voice is the other half of Over The Rhine’s core has released two instrumental piano albums and here for maybe the first time the piano drives the entire thing way forward in the mix and navigated sweetly by a lot of pedal steel. That piano and that voice are a match made in heaven “a beautiful piece of heartache” as Latter Days on Good Dog Bad Dog suggests; a chemistry that explodes gently in aural ecstasy. As Over The Rhine should now be everything else serves the two main protagonists.

The songs? Well What I’ll Remember Most, Jesus In New Orleans, Lifelong Fling, Long Lost Brother and Remind Us are simply the best songs these guys have ever written. People will say that a double album is a little ambitious in the days when you can easily squeeze 75 minutes onto a single disc and though you could probably pick out the thirteen tracks that would have made the single record cut you would not have wanted to have missed the trippy How Long Have You Been Stoned, the Gram Parsons country rock of Show Me or the Gospel Choir of the hidden track Idea #21 for anything. In fact a triple CD would have been justified. Bring it on!

As writers Linford and Karin have never been so up front about their faith. Jesus In New Orleans probably typifies their approach. The last place that you expect to find Jesus is where he is and just maybe that is exactly where we should have been looking all along. There is drink and doubt and angels being wrestled and there is war and rumours of war and death; a whole lot of death. These guys were going through the pain of personal sorrow at the same time as America was in national mourning around September 2001. It seems that it has brought their writing face to face with mortality but also the life they have lived, are living and that in itself directs them to the destinations they need to set out for while they understand that eventually it will be home that they return to; in their case Ohio!

In the earth of their native state Over The Rhine have made their ordinary every day world extraordinary. They have found a severe mercy in the midst of their personal as well as humanity’s deepest darkness. They have delved deep to find hope in the tragedies our darkness create. They have found a place of joy in the midst of the certain-to-come-our-way tears. They have used all their wrestling to weave poetry and music into a tapestry of utterly astonishing beauty. Ohio, be proud.

Superlatives are left impotent as I attempt to describe Over the Rhine’s sixth album proper, tenth if we count various rare track compilations and a Christmas album. I found myself gasping throughout at the melodies, the poetry, the spiritual insight and the reflections and echoes of my inner most grappling with how God interacts with this beautiful yet fatally tainted human race and we with God. Then of course there is that voice. Karin Berquist has a voice that is seductive like no other, seducing your heart and your soul with a sound that is so otherworldly that you are not sure if your mortal ears can listen. Was it Julie Miller who stated that this was the voice that all of us would have in heaven; the women at least!

Musically this is as satisfied a sound as anything they have released before. Where the production on their first Back Porch release Films For Radio was chasing Dido and Sinead O’Connor into a little too modern pop this is ambient in the most gorgeously organic and acoustic of ways. Linford Detweiler who along with that angelic voice is the other half of Over The Rhine’s core has released two instrumental piano albums and here for maybe the first time the piano drives the entire thing way forward in the mix and navigated sweetly by a lot of pedal steel. That piano and that voice are a match made in heaven “a beautiful piece of heartache” as Latter Days on Good Dog Bad Dog suggests; a chemistry that explodes gently in aural ecstasy. As Over The Rhine should now be everything else serves the two main protagonists.

The songs? Well What I’ll Remember Most, Jesus In New Orleans, Lifelong Fling, Long Lost Brother and Remind Us are simply the best songs these guys have ever written. People will say that a double album is a little ambitious in the days when you can easily squeeze 75 minutes onto a single disc and though you could probably pick out the thirteen tracks that would have made the single record cut you would not have wanted to have missed the trippy How Long Have You Been Stoned, the Gram Parsons country rock of Show Me or the Gospel Choir of the hidden track Idea #21 for anything. In fact a triple CD would have been justified. Bring it on!

As writers Linford and Karin have never been so up front about their faith. Jesus In New Orleans probably typifies their approach. The last place that you expect to find Jesus is where he is and just maybe that is exactly where we should have been looking all along. There is drink and doubt and angels being wrestled and there is war and rumours of war and death; a whole lot of death. These guys were going through the pain of personal sorrow at the same time as America was in national mourning around September 2001. It seems that it has brought their writing face to face with mortality but also the life they have lived, are living and that in itself directs them to the destinations they need to set out for while they understand that eventually it will be home that they return to; in their case Ohio!

In the earth of their native state Over The Rhine have made their ordinary every day world extraordinary. They have found a severe mercy in the midst of their personal as well as humanity’s deepest darkness. They have delved deep to find hope in the tragedies our darkness create. They have found a place of joy in the midst of the certain-to-come-our-way tears. They have used all their wrestling to weave poetry and music into a tapestry of utterly astonishing beauty. Ohio, be proud.

PAUL NELSON - OVER UNDER THROUGH

My mate Gary Burnett is in a rich vein of album recommendations just now. As if his Marc Cohn and Blind Boys Of Alabama’s tip off wasn’t enough he pushed this CD across the table in a cafe recently.

Paul Nelson came to making records late in relative terms. Perhaps it is why this sounds such a mature album. For a few listens I thought that it was built around Nelson’s guitar playing but the tender blues guitar that layers this record is executed by Kevin Barry (not the Irish novelist - I presume!). It is the sweetest sound; like Eric Clapton in his mid seventies Slowhand phase. 

Nelson who himself plays mostly acoustic guitar and Fender Rhodes writes a great song. He has a poetic bent that he uses deftly on songs of introspection (Secrets and Ghost In The Basement), social change (Silent Minority) and particularly the spiritual (Go Down Ezekiel and There Is Weeping). Over Under Through caught my attention most of all. It is like a Psalm or a message of hope from the prophets to a people in exile. Hold on whatever the circumstances blowing a gale around you.

As I have already stated, this is a mature record. It is soaked in realism but finds faith in lament. Indeed Colour of Blue gets closest to his raison d’être. This is a record where the guitar gently weeps and pours out resilience in the sound of gentle blues. 

 

Read more about Paul Nelson's album on Gary Burnett's website, At The Crossroads - https://downatthecrossroads.wordpress.com/paul-nelson-over-under-through/

VAN MORRISON - THREE CHORDS AND THE TRUTH

I am convinced that Van Morrison is as happy about his vocation as he has been since he was playing The Maritime Bar in Belfast in the early 60s. 

My thoughts on Van Morrison’s complicated relationship with the public in general and the press in particular is that a young Morrison simply wanted to play his music. Most unfortunately for Van his musical vocation coincided with an explosion of pop music and his particular vocational genius got caught up in an industry that was not at all in keeping with his shy personality. 

To be as deeply introverted, as Van Morrison seems to be, and then get caught up in the pop circus is not a match made in heaven. Rather than take swipes at Van Morrison’s contrariness we should be grateful that he didn’t just give it all up and walk away as he threatened to after Veedon Fleece in 1974. 

Forty five year after that little flirt with retirement, in the mid 70s, Morrison is now in his mid 70s and everything about his relationship with pop music is very different indeed. No longer does he have to fear his photograph on the front cover of music magazines or the pressure of hit singles. Yes, the odd journalist still tries to shoehorn inside his introverted mystery but even they are now few and far between.

As a result, Morrison is having the musical time of his life. He now plays smaller intimate venues like those he imagined he would be playing when he started out. As far as albums are concerned he can do what he wants, creating as much or as little as his own soul directs.

Hence, Three Chords and The Truth is his sixth record in four years. The last four records have seen Morrison liberally mixing jazz and blues covers, along with his own originals or re-workings of his classics. It all seemed free and easy, enjoyable for him and his fans. I wouldn’t say I loved every song but I am glad of them.

Three Chords and The Truth is not part of that outpouring. It is almost a bookend, the other being the first of the recent six records, Keep Me Singing.

Like Keep Me Singing most of these songs are original Morrison songs but more than that there is a different intention to the collection. This is very much a Van Morrison record in the vein of his very best. Indeed, you can hear echoes of most every era of Morrison’s eclectic career.

There is the wonder on the Don Black co-write If We Wait For Mountains. The opening song March Winds In February reminds me of Hard Nose The Highway. Dark Night Of The Soul could be a title from anything between Beautiful Vision and The Healing Game. I can hear Them play Early Days. Fame Will Eat The Soul is that recurring them on his albums since the late 80s. Days Gone By is a wonderful closer, as he re-writes Auld Lang Syne and infuses it with Van transcendence.

There are a plethora of different shades of the Van Morrison muse are stretched right across this tracklist. The return of Jay Berliner to the session players adds sublime guitar playing throughout. 

Nobody In Charge is not my favourite song on the record but it is the most politically intriguing. Is this as political as Van has ever been:

 

Politicians that waffle endlessly

People just don’t want to see

Getting’ paid too much for screwin’ up

don’t you think everyone’s had enough?

 

There’s nobody in charge

At that we know, that we know about

There’s nobody in charge

Nobody seems to have any clout

 

And speculation across the nation

Media implantation rules the day

Brainwash is easy, if everybody’s lazy

Everything always looks so grey 

 

This could be about the fact Northern Ireland’s Local Assembly has not met at Stormont in almost three years. It could also be about the daily newscasts from outside a Brexit divided Westminster. Some of my American friends would say that it has wider connotations! Surely, that Morrison feels at liberty to surmise on such issues is a sign of his new sense of freedom.

Don’t miss Van’s humour either.. When he sings “Free State” in You Don’t Understand it has local connotations in his Northern Irish homeland. The Free State is what my Granny and Van’s parent’s generation called the Republic Of Ireland. 

He articulates it here with the wry Van humour that he used at Self Aid in Dublin in 1986 when he introduced new songs from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher by saying that it would be out “on the Twelfth of July!” Or in that little snippet of The Sash on I’ll Tell Me Ma on his collaborative album with The Chieftains, Irish Heartbeat. 

Three Chords and The Truth is not the most iconic album of Van Morrison’s career or the one with the most hit singles. To compare it in such ways is to miss not only what Van Morrison is now doing and also what he always wished he had been doing. It is another wonderful record of inspirational music by a genius of the genre. It is a most satisfying listen. 

CAROLYN ARENDS REFLECTS ON KANYE WEST'S JESUS IS KING - a guest blog

This appeared on, Canadian singer songwriter, Carolyn Arends' Facebook page. I found it beautifully written, sensitively expressed and very insightful, not only about Kanye's new record but about arts and Christianity in general. I am honoured that Carolyn allowed me to post it on Soul Surmise as a guest blog.

 

No one, I'm sure, is curious what a middle-aged folk-singing woman thinks of the new Kanye album. But my son, Ben Arends, asked me to listen to it, so I did.

And here's the thing. I love it.

I think that good songwriting is NOT propaganda but it IS witness, in the sense that the songwriter bears witness to what he or she sees or experiences - whether that's romantic love, or grief, or quest, or malaise, or injustice, or delight or, most ultimately (in my admittedly biased view), encounter with God. In great songwriting, the songwriter has a particular genius for bearing witness in fresh, visceral, paradigm-shifting ways, for making us instinctually respond with “Yes! Life IS like that!”

I believe that Kanye is bearing witness to something real on his new album. And I am gobsmacked by the creativity and craft with which he does it.

Do I think he gets everything theologically correct? Oh, heck, no. (I don't think any of us do, but Kanye's theology seems particularly in-process to me). Do I think he can be relied upon, going forward, for steady and uncomplicated growth in godliness, free of setbacks? Probably not. (I'm not sure any of us can, but how much harder must it be for a man as gifted and fragile and amplified as Kanye?)

But has Kanye made a good record? Oh yes, I think so. And good not only in the “you can dance to it” sense but also in the Good and True and Beautiful sense.

To my fellow Christians I want to say, let art do what art can do – let it bear witness to Encounter without having to become propaganda or an iron-clad contract. Part of the shadow-side of Kanye’s gifting, it seems to me, is a tendency towards a Messiah complex, and his greatest temptation now is probably to become a Messiah for the Messiah. Let’s not inadvertently feed that temptation by either extolling him as a Great Hope or excoriating him as a Great Risk. He’s a great songwriter, with an uncanny knack for influencing pop culture, and he is currently heartsick for God. (As far as I can tell, God has been haunting Kanye’s life and work for a long time, it’s just reaching a particular apex at the moment). Will it last? I sure pray so, much more for his sake than for ours, although, selfishly, I would so enjoy seeing where his faith takes his art. (It is songs like “Follow God” – where Kanye seems to resonate with the Apostle Paul that sometimes we do not do what we want to do and sometimes we spaz when we don’t want to spaz - that actually connect the most powerfully for me. They make me say, “Yes, the life of faith is like that!”)

Disciple to disciple, I’d say to Kanye, “Keep seeking God, and, more importantly, know that He is seeking you.” At the same time, Middle-Aged Folk Singer to Pop Culture Icon, I’d say to Kanye, “Dang man. That’s a good record!”

 

Carolyn Arends has been a favourite songwriter of mine for 25 years. She is a poetic songwriter and has easily used her word-smithery to author books as well as songs. You can keep up with her work, ideas and product at https://carolynarends.com

ELBOW - GIANTS OF ALL SIZES

Elbow fascinate me. I would not call them a favourite band but I have so much appreciation. Their last record Little Fictions didn’t cross my radar but I have loved Seldom Seen Kid and The Take Off And Landing Of Everything. This one is up with those.

There is a near eccentricity about Elbow’s beautiful layering of instrumentation and then of course Guy Garvey’s lyrics are on the poetic end rock lyrics. Garvey’s love of Joni Mitchell explains his rather unorthodox lyrical shape but it plays havoc with melodies. That might just mean that Elbow records need more listens, a little harder work. 

Garvey’s subject matter, introspective honesty and social and political astuteness is what makes Elbow a vital, almost urgent, listen.

This is where Giants Of All Sizes is exceptional. His father’s death and the birth of his son is the personal arc of the story. Garvey has said "Jack's arrival really helped me through Dad's death, because it made Dad's death part of things, rather than the end of things. And it made my own life part of things, rather than the point of things.” We all need such perspective.

World issues get a wrestling with too. Empires, my favourite, reminds those of us stressed about Brexit that every day across our globe is an end of the world for some. It is sensitivity sobering and a agin a perspective shifter. 

White Noise, White Heat moves close to protest music. This is all about Grenfell Tower and the injustice that the poorer communities in our societies suffer. Garvey sees himself as “some Blarney Mantovani with a lullaby when the sky is falling in”. 

The opening line of the entire record is “And I don't know Jesus anymore”. I am not sure that it is a statement of lack of faith in Jesus as much as a line that speaks into a culture of deep dark uncertainty. Elbow throw us into a vortex of grief, personal and societal. They also bring us back to lover and child as the place to find stability and hope through the tossing about. 

It makes for an album that allows Elbow’s dramatic near prog sound to ebb and flow. Garvey holds it all in with his honest poetry.