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The Local Show will be four years old this fall, and we’re having more fun than ever. This spring, filmmaker Karl Sutton caught up with three artists featured at the show to talk about where they’ve come from, how they approach the creative process, and what role community plays in their work. This is “Part One: Origins.” Come back next week for part two.

Every time I start a new online class, I send my students an introductory email that includes the following “Word About Feedback”: I am working on the assumption that you signed up for this course because you genuinely want to improve as a writer. And if you really want to improve as a writer, you need criticism. You need encouragement too, but you need criticism a lot more. I used to put a lot of time and energy into softening my criticism so that my writing students wouldn’t get discouraged. I have decided that this not a good use of my time and not a service to my students. My critique of your writing will be direct and blunt—and, I’m quite confident, on-target. I should also say that if you’re further along the path as a writer, you can expect my critique to be even more direct and more blunt. I criticize because I care. I’m not joking. I trust that you care enough to take my critique in the spirit in which it’s given. If that’s not what you want from this course, please let me know. I realize that it can be hard to receive criticism. Offering up a piece of writing feels a lot like offering up a piece of yourself, so “There are a few things wrong with this piece” can sound like “There are a few things wrong with you.” Think of the strategies people use when dealing with personal criticism: they include defensiveness, self-loathing, people-pleasing, etc… There are other, healthier strategies too, including listening, reflecting, and, when necessary, telling haters to back off. Because writing is so personal, writers can be tempted to go straight to those less healthy strategies when they receive writing feedback. I find it helpful to try to think of my work as a writer the way a plumber thinks about his work as a plumber. Or, conversely, sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like if plumbers thought of their work the way writers think about theirs, as in the following skit: HOMEOWNER Could I speak to the plumber? PLUMBER Speaking. HOMEOWNER Yeah, hi. You worked on my bathroom sink faucet yesterday, and now it’s shooting water up to the ceiling. PLUMBER That’s just your opinion. HOMEOWNER No, it’s not just my opinion. I’m sloshing in water up to my ankles. PLUMBER Maybe you should open up your mind. You seem pretty stuck on your pre-conceived notions of how a faucet ought to work. HOMEOWNER I don’t think my mind is the problem here. Water is running down the hall. My kids are putting on their swimmies. I’m telling you, there’s something bad wrong with this faucet. PLUMBER (After a long pause) You know what? You’re right. There IS something wrong with the faucet. I am nothing but a big fraud. HOMEOWNER I don’t know about that. I mean, the last time you came out, everything was fine. And the time before that. All I’m saying is that this particular faucet is shooting water up to the ceiling, and I need you to come fix it. PLUMBER No. I quit. I’m not worthy to call myself a plumber. I’m going to become a writer instead. A decent plumber—one who cares about his customers and about his work—would devote none of his energy to self-justification or self-loathing or self-anything-else. He would crank up the plumbing truck and go take care of the faucet. No matter how much pride a plumber takes in his work, he understands that he is not his work. If something is wrong, he wants to know so he can fix it. If you write out of love—if you write because you love your reader and you love your material and you want to introduce them to one another—you will welcome well-informed criticism. Jonathan Rogers I realize that the work of writing is quite a bit more personal than the work of plumbing. Nevertheless, you are not your work. I know you put a lot of your self into your writing. But the writing is not you; it is something you make. That distinction is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it gives you the critical distance you need to a) edit your work and b) assess and benefit from any critique you receive. So now I’m going to ask you a personal question: why are you writing in the first place? If you are writing to express yourself or prove yourself or win respect or notoriety for yourself or for any other reason that includes the word self, it’s going to be that much harder to take criticism. As I said earlier, if you are writing for self, “There are a few things wrong with this piece” sounds like “There are a few things wrong with you.” But if you write out of love—if you write because you love your reader and you love your material and you want to introduce them to one another—you will welcome well-informed criticism. Anybody who can help you connect with readers is an ally and a friend. I said well-informed criticism. I suppose that’s where the real rub is. How do you know which criticism to take and which criticism to ignore? If someone gives you advice about punctuation or grammar, that’s pretty easy. Go look it up and see if they’re right. Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) is a great resource. I commend it to you. But what about advice/criticism/feedback about style or organization or sentence structure or diction or, really, anything besides grammar and punctuation? There’s a lot of bad advice floating around out there. More to the point, there are a lot of people giving advice who know a few rules but have only a tenuous grasp on the big picture of how writing works. You may be in a writing group with one or two of these people. You might have quit your writing group because of one or two of these people. To borrow some language from the counseling profession, you have to have a certain amount of yourself in order to know what writing advice to receive and what advice to reject. A while back I was talking to a person who told me that she had just finished writing a whole novel when somebody in her writing group told her she shouldn’t use the word that. So she went through and got rid of all the thats. But soon after she got through that ordeal, somebody told her that it was ok to use that, and she shouldn’t have taken them all out. So now she was in the process of putting them all back in. “I get so much advice, how will I ever know I’m done?” she asked. That writer doesn’t have enough of herself (or, one might say, enough of her voice) to know which advice to ignore. So she jumps right on whatever advice anybody offers. This isn’t going to end well. Be aware that the great majority of writing errors come about not because the writer knows too little, but because the writer knows too much. Because you know exactly what you're trying to say, your sentences will seem a little clearer to you than they will seem to the reader. Jonathan Rogers My advice is to judge every bit of critique/advice/feedback in terms of connecting with the reader. If you were to implement a given piece of advice, can you see how it would help your reader understand your point better or enter more fully into your scene? Will it lower barriers between your reader and your material? If you don’t see how a given edit will make your reader’s life better, don’t be too quick to jump on it. Having said that, let me also say this: if a reader doesn’t get what you’re trying to do, pay attention to that. The fact that you can explain yourself doesn’t count for much. It’s your job to communicate with your reader; it isn’t the reader’s job to figure things out. And before you say your reader/critic wasn’t paying close enough attention, allow me to remind you that they don’t owe you their attention. That’s something you have to earn. Be aware that the great majority of writing errors come about not because the writer knows too little, but because the writer knows too much. Because you know exactly what you’re trying to say, your sentences will seem a little clearer to you than they will seem to the reader. So if it hurts your ego to acknowledge that a critic or writing partner is right, remember that one of the great gifts the critic brings to you is the gift of ignorance. She doesn’t already know what you’re trying to say. It’s time for me to wrap this thing up, so let me say one last thing about critics. Just as there are writers who write for self-centered reasons, there are also critics who criticize for self-centered reasons. They like to hear themselves talk, or they like to show that they know more than you do, or they have hobby-horses they like to ride for reasons that are known only to them. This kind of critic may accidentally do you some good, but I wouldn’t take them too seriously if I were you. But there are also plenty of people who offer criticism because they care about you or because they at least care about writing and they like to connect writers with readers and connect readers with good stories and ideas. These people are your allies. Stick to them closer than a brother. May the Lord bless them and keep them and make his face to shine upon them and give them peace. If you enjoyed this excellent advice from Jonathan Rogers, consider subscribing to his weekly letter, The Habit, to receive lots more. In addition, a new section of Writing with Flannery O’Connor, Jonathan’s six-week online class, starts on June 25. There are still some spots remaining. You can register (and find out more about the class) here.

At the beginning of my twenty-ninth year, I got this crazy idea: to write a song from every book of the Bible before I turned thirty. But what began as a fun goal, perhaps just a way to end my twenties with a bang, changed the trajectory of my life. As it turned out, I absolutely loved writing songs from the Bible: delving into a passage, putting myself in each character’s shoes, trying to understand how this one small story connects with the whole, then coming up with a way to communicate that story with melody and rhythm and lyric. The songs from that year of writing eventually turned into the Blood + the Breath, an album that traces the theme of redemption from creation to the second coming of Christ (a la Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb but with an emphasis on Easter rather than Christmas). But, like any good story, the Bible demands to be read and retold again and again. So I kept on writing songs from scripture, looking at this same Story from new angles, turning the diamond to let each slant and gradient shine some new light. Four years later, I was back in the studio with producer Gabe Scott to record A Home & A Hunger. Like the Blood + the Breath, this new album journeys through scripture, with each song parachuting into a different biblical scene. But this time, the songs explore a new theme: the tension between the “already” and the “not yet” of God’s kingdom, the hope and the ache we feel in the space between. The songs for this album were written during a season defined by upheaval and transition. While writing these songs, we had our third child, made two cross-country moves, and walked through hard things with our church. We saw suffering up close with friends and family, not the least of which was my father-in-law’s struggle with ALS, a degenerative disease without hope or cure. The nightly news brimmed with violence and terrorism, anger over race and politics, and Christians getting tangled in the mess. Everywhere I looked, I found evidence that things are not as they should be. Meanwhile, God was using motherhood and transition to expose my own brokenness and remind me of my need for the gospel. I tend to be an “achiever” type, and God brought me low in order to help me run to this gift I could never achieve or deserve. I am just a narrator. And yet these stories from scripture have traveled through me, breathed life into my darkest places, brought me to a place of humility and then lifted me up again. In this way, they are my stories. And I know that they are intimately yours as well. Caroline Cobb As I wrote, I gravitated toward passages that spoke into these themes. Songs like “All is Vanity (Ecclesiastes)” featuring Jill Phillips and “Eve’s Lament” linger in the dissonance of the “not yet,” leaving us hungry for redemption. Songs like “Fullness of Joy (Psalm 16)” and “Behold, Behold (Revelation)” come from passages that point us to the strong hope we cling to, even as we ache for the Day to come. Songs like “There is a Mountain,” “The Two Lost Sons,” and “Only the Sick Need a Physician” explore the confidence we sinners can have in God’s “upside-down” kingdom: a “mountain only the lame can climb… a table only the hungry find,” where “only the beggar will have the currency.” As you can see, these songs are telling His Story, not mine. I am just a narrator. And yet these stories from scripture have traveled through me, breathed life into my darkest places, brought me to a place of humility and then lifted me up again. In this way, they are my stories. And I know that they are intimately yours as well. My prayer is that these albums would help you remember and rehearse this Story of ache and hope. I pray these songs would be a channel for the Word of God to live in you, that His truth would get into your heart and mind in the middle of your everyday: when you’re stuck in traffic, cooking dinner, driving carpool, changing a diaper, or working from your desk. And I hope you will be encouraged to keep telling this beautiful Story in your own way: turning the diamond, reflecting its light, revealing new glories at every angle. For a limited time, Caroline has made her album available for free on Noisetrade. Check it out here. And click here to learn more about Caroline Cobb and her album A Home & A Hunger at her website.

In case you missed it, Andrew Osenga is back with Season Three of his podcast, The Pivot. He kicked off the season with a fascinating conversation with rapper/speaker/activist Sho Baraka. They talked about Sho’s winding career path, from hip hop to insurance to musical theatre to Faith & Work conversations in Atlanta, and the years where speaking his mind became a liability. You can listen to Season Three, Episode One of The Pivot podcast here. And consider supporting The Pivot on Pateron here.

Last week, I got to sit down with Buddy Greene and ask him all about his new retrospective record, Looking Back, as well as the narrative of his musical and spiritual life and how they have informed one another. Our conversation was a delight and I am pleased to share it with you here. To learn more about Buddy Greene and his new album, head over to his website. Drew: When you were first really getting into the bluegrass tradition, what caught your attention? An artist, an album, a song? Buddy: There was one particular album, and many folks in my generation point to it: Will The Circle Be Unbroken by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. They came out with it in ’72 or something like that. I scoured this thing and played it over and over and over. It was my introduction to people like Doc Watson, Maybelle Carter… not only stars like them, but musicians like Junior Huskey played bass, Vassar Clements on fiddle. Musicianship was so virtuosic. Up to that point I had ignored country music or even turned my nose up to it, but I’d been getting into the blues ever since high school, with the Allman Brothers and folks like that. So the Allman Brothers were already proving to me that you need to know where your music comes from. When I listen to Fillmore East, the live album, Greg Allman would introduce songs and say, “This is an Elmore James song” or “This is a T-Bone Walker song,” and I was like, “Who’s he talking about?” He’s talking about pioneers of blues. As cool as I thought the Dirt Band was, the real coolness of this record was Jimmy Martin, Flatt and Scruggs, Merle Travis, Doc Watson. I could not get over them, and these were people twenty or thirty years older than me, had been around a long time. Masters of what they were doing. I was just enamored of that. That's the kind of musical world I want to inhabit—one where you're a member of this long tradition and you learn what's gone before you, you steward what you have, you add to it what you can, and you pass that along. Buddy Greene Drew: One thing that enamors me with music I love—I see it there on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album cover, it says, ”Music forms a new circle.” It’s almost like the communion of saints of bluegrass. There’s something so big about it. I hear it on your record too, when I hear these incredible musicians. Their skill is amazing, of course, but the thing that draws me in is not how good they are, but the hospitality everyone has for each other and the circle that’s formed in that. Everyone respects the fidelity of that circle. That’s moving to me and I wonder what your take on that is. Buddy: I notice that generosity you’re talking about in bluegrass music, players sharing what they know. That’s the way these guys learn. They go to festivals, hang out with their heroes, watch them play, get a chance to be in a jam session with them, ask, “how are you doing that?” I mean you can see this stuff on YouTube now, somebody’s posted some video of Kenny Baker showing Aubrey Haynie how to play some fiddle lick, and they just pass it on. And now Aubrey’s on my record, and he’s doing the same thing with young fiddlers coming along now. Drew: He’s nuts. There were so many moments when I thought, “I didn’t know you could make that sound with a fiddle.” Buddy: I know it. So everybody has those stories. And that’s the kind of musical world I want to inhabit—one where you’re a member of this long tradition and you learn what’s gone before you, you steward what you have, you add to it what you can, and you pass that along. And that’s in other music traditions, too. I just always felt like in rock and pop and stuff like that, there was always more of a competitive edge, this idea that “we are the gods.” But these bluegrass guys—for one thing, they don’t have that huge a mass market for what they’re doing. So they’re playing festivals and music clubs. You can see world-class musicians at a house concert in this genre of music. Drew: There is generally more of a focus on the individual “star of the show” in other genres than there is in bluegrass. Buddy: Well yeah! It’s what made me want to be a musician in the first place. When I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, I was like, “Listen to all those girls going crazy! These guys are on the top of the world! I want to do that!” And that eluded me my whole career! (laughter) But what I discovered along the way was just a love for music and a chance to get to meet some of these people, rub shoulders with them, get them to play on my record, make friends with them. You probably know Ron Block, right? Drew: Not personally, but I know who he is. Buddy: He’s a contributor to the Rabbit Room for one thing, but he’s also just one of the best banjo players on the planet and one of the best friends I’ve ever had. On Looking Back, most of the players are close friends of mine. We do a good bit of hanging out and impromptu playing from time to time. A lot of that was being celebrated there on that album. Drew: What inspired the idea to do an album like Looking Back, to chronicle this great accumulation of songs? Did it dawn on you one day that you should do it, or had you been considering it for a while? Buddy: Well there were a bunch of old songs of mine I wanted to revisit: songs that had been recorded on much earlier projects, from the late 80s, early 90s, that stood the test of time. I still wanted to play them, they held up musically and lyrically, and even maybe had a fresh application thirty years down the road. I love listening to those old records. The sonic value of them is like a time capsule: “Listen to that reverb!” “What a goofy drum sound!” But they were trapped in that time, in terms of a listening experience. So I wanted to take some of those songs, update them with new arrangements and a more mature voice, and hopefully a more mature approach to producing music. That had been on my mind for some time. Then after I finished the project before this one, I had talked to somebody about the possibility of doing a bluegrass approach to that idea. Somebody at a record label. And really, I have very little reputation in the commercial bluegrass world. Record labels are not beating down my door to sign me up for anything. But I know a few people in that world, so I was talking to one of them, and they said, “Yeah, let me hear what you’ve got.” So I called Bryan Sutton and told him what I had in mind, asked him to produce it, and he was down. The album became more than a revisit of earlier recordings—it became a retrospective on a whole life of making music. It helped me sum up my musical and spiritual journey. Buddy Greene Drew: And it’s a pristine-sounding record. Buddy: It’s a great production. I’m as happy with his production as anything I’ve ever been part of. He’s been doing a lot of work at Southern Ground studios, so he got me to come over there. We had two days booked in the studio shortly after that other project in 2016, and when we came out we had eleven songs tracked. And it was with this great band: Ron Block, Sam Bush, Bryan Sutton, Mark Fain on bass, Aubrey Haynie. And then me hanging on for dear life. (laughter) Drew: Well… you didn’t sound like you were hanging on for dear life. Buddy: Believe me, there were times when I felt that way. But I was delighted that I was in the middle of all that. The rough mixes sounded great and I was excited, so I sent them to the record label and kept waiting to hear back. I never did. By this time 2016 had already run its course, I was busy traveling, and so was Bryan. We couldn’t line up our schedules. Before we knew it the year was done. And whenever I listened to the rough mixes, I kept thinking of elements that were unfinished. I wanted drums on several songs, for instance. So when 2017 started I cranked it back up and decided to do another one of my self-released records. And it wouldn’t be a bonafide bluegrass project—it would be bluegrass-informed, but would incorporate drums, some soulful background singing, and such. There ended up being eighteen songs. I thought I’d whittle it down to a dozen, but the more I listened, the less I wanted to edit it down. The album became more than a revisit of early recordings—it became a retrospective on a whole life of making music. It helped me sum up my musical and spiritual journey. Drew: I got that impression from it. I loved reading each of the paragraphs you wrote in the liner notes about the songs. Hearing where they come from, what time they come from, and all the different people who wrote the ones you didn’t write. Like “Look Up, Look Down, That Lonesome Road.” Buddy: Isn’t that a cool song? Doc Watson’s father in law wrote that song: Gaither Carlton. I really am glad you liked that one. I’ll show you something here… Drew: Please. (Buddy rummages around for the record) Buddy: I’m a huge Doc Watson fan. I got to meet him, make some music with him, and he was so important in my musical development. And yet you don’t just say, “hey, I’ll do a Doc Watson song.” Drew: You have to tread lightly. Buddy: So here’s the album I originally heard this song from. Have you ever heard it? Drew: I have not. I’m excited. (The song begins to play) Buddy: When Doc died in 2012 or something like that, we did a tribute night at the Station Inn. It was me, Bryan, and a few others. We showed up and played some of Doc’s songs, and I thought if I get asked to do a song, I’ll throw this one out there and see what happens. Just me and Bryan did this song that night, and it became a moody moment in the set. Very moving to Bryan and me. When that was done, I thought, “I’d love to record that song one day.” When I was finally bringing all the elements of the record together, songs like that came up—I knew it was the homage to Doc that needed to be included. Jerry Reed was another huge musical influence of mine, and I was at a tribute concert for him after he died as well, and I was asked to do a song of his I’d never heard called “Big Daddy.” So that ended up on the record, too. I was in Jerry’s band for four years, which is what originally moved me to Nashville from Georgia in 1983. It was like a dream come true: first big break I had, on a hillbilly bus traveling around the country. Playing shows like Hee Haw with this huge, iconic country and movie star. By the time I got in the band, Jerry had already been in the business for twenty years. His star was starting to fade a little bit, but he could still have a nice six-piece band on the road, do TV specials, and make movies. He died in 2008 of emphysema. But being in his band was an apprenticeship I sorely needed. So I wanted something on the record that would tip my hat to Jerry Reed. That was one of the most fun moments on the record. It helped me talk about my career journey. And then songs like “Jesus Gonna Make It All Alright” never saw the light of day, but I played them all the time, especially in my early twenties. Every time I did, it was like hearing from home when I was in a dark, dark place. I was so far away from my faith, but that song was calling me home: “Buddy, come back!” So it’s such a monument to my spiritual journey. I was learning about being slave to sin, being in need of a gracious God who would love me no matter what I'd done, and an incarnate God who would die for me, rise from the grave, ascend on high, and send his Spirit who would help me be more than I was on my own. If that's true, I thought, then I need it. Buddy Greene Drew: I’d love to ask you—when listening to the record, I noticed it wasn’t just documenting your musical journey, but your spiritual journey as well. I’d love to hear about your conversion, the way those two things worked together, and how music and spirituality have been almost synonymous for you. Buddy: I’m from Macon, Georgia, a musical hotbed that’s produced Otis Redding, Allman Brothers, Little Richard, James Brown. When I was young and getting set free by The Beatles, I started learning about all this musical stuff in my community. I had a band at age ten, just jumped right in! Played baritone ukuleles before we could play full-sized guitars. In my early twenties, I played in this group called Uncle Ernie, and I was totally lost. We were this good-timing bar band playing for fifty bucks a night, drinking and smoking pot, carousing, total losers. I was a child of the sixties, drifting far away from church and thinking my parents’ generation had screwed up everything and we were gonna make it all better. But all I was really doing was partying, and I didn’t have much of a social conscience. By my mid-twenties I was already married and divorced, had made so many bad choices that I was just in pain. I wasn’t showing this so much with my peer group, but I was a lonely person, and I was starting to search in spiritual directions. My plan was to go to all these world religions and look for truth, then pick and choose what I liked. I started with Christianity because I figured I knew the most about it among the religions. So I read Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and I was immediately fascinated. I had so many questions reading those gospels for the first time as an adult. Then around that time, a born-again believer came into my life. He was hanging at these bars I was playing and he invited me to a bible study at his house. I was on the sly about it, but I pursued it, and it was a great place to land. It was almost like an AA group. Everybody would be hanging on the porch smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee, a bunch of hippies like me. One of the reasons I didn’t want to go to a church those days was that I didn’t want to be detected. I had grown up Baptist, and those services always ended in an invitation, an altar call, and I was not interested in that. I was interested in information. I didn’t want anyone to know I was searching. So in this bible study environment, we all felt the freedom to ask questions. Questions about pot-smoking, sex, subjects I wouldn’t have felt comfortable with in any other environment. Around that time I met my future wife, who was such a cut above me! And I felt like all I was proving was that I didn’t have what it took to be a better person. All these old patterns were in place. I was learning about being slave to sin, being in need of a gracious God who would love me no matter what I’d done, and an incarnate God who would come here, die for me, rise from the grave, ascend on high, and send his Spirit who would help me be more than I was on my own. If that’s true, I thought, then I need it. By my mid-twenties I was at least admitting to myself that I wanted the gospel to be true. And I prayed one night on my sofa, “If you’re out there, if this is true, please show me and get to work on me.” A short time after that I was admitting it to my wife as we were dating. She was kind of a dormant Christian, had drifted away in college. She was out there on her own like me, and she had her eye on me. She knew something was going on. I asked her to marry me pretty soon after that, she said yes, and within a short time I got that job with Jerry Reed, before we even got married. It all happened at the same time. So I moved up to Nashville a new Christian, a new husband, with the first real job in music I’d ever had, and I started going out into that old touring world still feeling very vulnerable. Those first few years in that band were a real proving ground for me being in the world but not of it. I didn’t do well, either. When the band misbehaved, I did some version of it myself, and I’d come home feeling guilty. But I had a good pastor back home who counseled me along and encouraged me to be faithful to God and follow his lead. So I prayed to God for strength against all the old temptations. “Lord, help me not to get stoned this weekend. I want to pass the joint to the next guy.” And I’d come home and hadn’t gotten stoned, and I would feel such a sense of victory. That’s what I was learning. Drew: That is so concrete. Buddy: It’s what led me to write songs about salvation, deliverance, and a faithful God in the midst of weakness. I started writing songs when I was in Jerry’s band. Something new was growing. And that’s when my own recording career began. The rest of the story is thirty years of me being a recording artist, a songwriter—I may not have a whole foot in the world of bluegrass, but I do have a toe in there. But as a result, I’ve gotten to play music with so many folks I enjoy being around, and that’s what I love. That’s the journey. You can learn more about Buddy Greene and his new record, Looking Back, on his website. Meanwhile, take a listen to his version of “Look Up, Look Down That Lonesome Road” here:https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/14-Look-Up-Look-Down-That-Lonesome-Road.mp3

Click through for this week’s edition of Jonny Jimison’s Rabbit Trails. Check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Sometimes, especially if you’ve grown up in the church, Scripture becomes so familiar that it’s easy to miss the beauty and poetry of those old words of life. So we look for ways to shift our focus—trying out a new translation, diving into an intense study, or learning ancient prayer practices that engage the text. And for the Psalms, there is nothing quite like hearing them sung. But how do you turn Bible verses into songs that feel worshipful, reverent, and… well… sound great? Thankfully, The Corner Room is doing just that, and their latest entry Psalm Songs Vol. 2 is a record we’re excited to commend to you. If you love what Randall Goodgame is doing for your kids with his Sing the Bible series, then you just may find Psalm Songs to be the perfect complement to your own worship life. I was grateful for the chance to chat with Adam Wright, the leader of this group, about their new record. Read on to get to know him, watch an acoustic performance of “Psalm 139:1-6,” then pick up your copy of Psalm Songs Vol. 2 at their website! Adam: I have been the minister of music at Cahaba Park Church for nearly nine years now (hard to believe!). Part of my job there is to plan the liturgy for our worship services each week, so I’m always looking for creative ways to thematically tie the service elements together. Back in 2013, our senior pastor, Murray Lee, preached a 16-week series on the Psalms. I thought, “Why don’t I try to set these to music? After all, these were originally sung!” The first week he was going to be preaching on Psalm 1. So with Bible, guitar and a voice memo app in hand, I began writing my first psalm song. Within two hours, I had completed the arrangement, and was more acquainted with this passage of Scripture, both cognitively and emotionally, than I’d ever been before. Over the next two summers, I set over 20 psalms to music! Each psalm song was shared in our services before each psalm was preached. In talking with people in our congregation, it provided a new and unique way to engage the text and connect with it on a more emotional level. With a good amount of material from two summers of writing, I decided I would record and release ten psalms set to music, Psalm Songs, Volume 1. The name for the ministry, The Corner Room, comes from the actual location where the music is produced. My church meets on a piece of property in Birmingham, Alabama that contains a historic house called the Carraway-Davie House. I was given two rooms on the second floor, one of which I’ve turned into a recording studio. It also happens to be in the corner of the house, hence the name, The Corner Room. Although I’m the primary writer and producer on these projects, I am thankful to have a talented team of friends and local musicians that help to make these projects great! Birmingham has a very rich artistic community and I enjoy being able to work with a wide variety of musicians from different churches. Jen: What’s your creative process like? Any challenges in setting Scripture to music without tweaking any words? Adam: For me, there’s an interpretive element to the process that precedes the actual musical part. First, I begin by reading the text and try to identify the psalmist’s intent (thanksgiving, lament, praise, etc.). For example, a slow and meditative setting of Psalm 100 would (in my humble opinion) miss the mark. This step informs the mood and style of each setting. I give this a good deal of thought before jumping into the music. Then, I think about form. My whole mission in writing these is that the words would stick with the listener. Song forms that are recognizable (verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge, chorus) tend to be more accessible for most people. I try to structure each song this way, but sometimes, the text dictates something different. Every psalm text presents different challenges and it’s become a very enjoyable process to structure them musically in a way that doesn’t compromise the intent. Within the form process, I look for repetition in the text that would lend itself to a chorus. For example, Psalm 67 has a section that repeats itself in verses 3 and 5: “Let the peoples praise you, O God! Let all the peoples praise you!” Psalm 8 begins and ends with “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” If there’s not an evident repetitive section, I usually try to find the main idea of each psalm and create a “chorus.” Once I’ve given these things some thought, I will pick up an instrument and a voice recorder and begin to craft a chord structure and melody line. I love listening to music with unexpected “twists and turns,” and I like to create moments like that in each song. Jen: What is your favorite Psalm/song these days? Adam: Psalm 139 has been a favorite for some time. I marvel that God knows me; that he cares about the minute and the mundane; that even though I rebel and choose sin time and time again, he extends grace and forgiveness to me and promises to make me more like Jesus; that he’s sacrificed his own Son to give me new life and make me his child. As the psalmist states, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” May God continually keep me in child-like awe and wonder of the deep, deep love of Jesus. Jen: You’ve also got an album of 1 Corinthians 13 (also great! We already highlighted it here.) What’s next for you? Is there another part of the Bible you’d love to adapt to music? Adam: The “Psalm Song vault” is nearly dry now. I’ve recorded most of the psalm songs that were written in those two summers. I’ll definitely continue to write Psalms to music, so there will be a Volume 3 at some point. I’ve also set several shorter passages of Scripture to music that I’d like to adapt into a “Meditations” project. I’ve set the first half of Isaiah 53 to music as well and would like to release that chapter as a 3-4 movement suite, similar to Love Never Ends. Whichever comes next, I feel compelled to continue to set Scripture to music, that it might cause those who hear it to know and engage Scripture more deeply. You can check out The Corner Room and their project, Psalm Songs Volume II, at their website.

In a recent interview with Terri Gross, the writer David Sedaris remarked, “I’m rarely the smartest person in the room. I have other qualities, but searing intelligence is not one of them.” David Sedaris is a hilarious writer and an excellent prose stylist, so it is tempting to chalk this up to false humility. But I’ve been pondering his remarks in my heart, and I think there’s a lot of wisdom in separating excellent writing from “searing intelligence.” What does “excellent writing” even mean? Because this is a letter and not a book, I’m going to grossly oversimplify: Excellent writing is technically proficient, at the sentence level and at larger organizational levels. Excellent writing gives the reader something he couldn’t have gotten for himself. Technical proficiency requires practice, and while I concede that it also requires a certain amount of intelligence, the threshold isn’t especially high. You can learn the technicalities of writing just as you can learn the technicalities of basketball. People who can make 80% of their free throws look like wizards to me, but only because I’ve never learned the basics of free-throw shooting–or, rather, when people have tried to teach me the basics of free-throw shooting, I have never followed up with practice. I am fully convinced that if you will simply pay attention to the world as it presents itself to you and write what you have seen, you can hardly help but give your reader ideas and images he has never considered before. Jonathan Rogers I’m not talking about the technicalities of writing this week, except to say that they are teachable and learnable, and to put them into practice requires commitment more than intelligence. But what about that other requirement of writing excellence, to give the reader something that he couldn’t get for himself? The great pleasure of reading is to have an idea or image put into your head that you would have never thought of yourself. Doesn’t that require searing intelligence, to come up with ideas and images that your reader has never considered before? In short, no. I am fully convinced that if you will simply pay attention to the world as it presents itself to you and write what you have seen, you can hardly help but give your reader ideas and images he has never considered before. To put it another way, if you see what you see and write what you see, originality will take care of itself. Last week one of my online students wrote a piece about the basement of the church where her father preached when she was a little girl. This sentence fairly jumped off the page: On Fridays, the basement echoed with the thump of the mimeograph machine as Dad printed the church bulletins, cursing under his breath at the spread of slippery purple ink. At that moment I felt that this writer was giving me access to a world that I otherwise had no access to. A preacher cussing the office equipment is something most of us won’t see first-hand. But this writer has seen it and remembered it, and when she offers it up to the reader, it feels as if we’ve been let in on a secret. If someone assigned you or me the task of writing about a church basement, it would never occur to either of us to depict the preacher quietly cursing a mimeograph machine. But once you see it in this writer’s story, it is entirely believable. Unexpected but believable. That sweet spot is the essence of what we call originality in writing. And the most reliable path to that sweet spot is to pay attention to a world that is forever serving up the unexpected. Later in the same piece comes another great image from the church basement: Martha brought cakes tasting of cigarette smoke, a pretty pattern swirled into the nicotine-tainted frosting. Again, unexpected but entirely believable. Was the preacher’s daughter being original when she depicted her father cussing at the mimeograph machine or a cake that tasted like cigarettes? In her mind, probably not. She was just telling what she had seen. But the reader experiences those images as fresh and original. The writer has given us something that we didn’t have any way of getting for ourselves. That kind of writing has nothing to do with intelligence. I’m not commenting on this particular writer’s mental capacities one way or another; she could be the next Einstein for all I know. All I’m saying is that this kind of writing doesn’t require towering intelligence any more than shooting free throws does. I don’t wish to oversimplify the very complex act that is writing, nor do I wish entirely to demystify a process that is mysterious. But as a writing teacher, I see my role largely a matter of helping my students relax into the confidence that their unique experience and their unique view of the world are the raw material for excellent, original writing. If you enjoyed this excellent advice from Jonathan Rogers, consider subscribing to his weekly letter, The Habit, to receive lots more. In addition, a new section of Writing with Flannery O’Connor, Jonathan’s six-week online class, starts on June 25. That’s less than three weeks away, and there is plenty of space remaining. You can register (and find out more about the class) here.

My two youngest children sit together on the floor in a bedroom. They spend their days playing beside each other with a myriad of toys, co-imagining worlds filled with talking construction equipment, neon-hued horses, and plot lines that range from pedestrian to strange and violent, often within seconds. It’s fun to stand around the corner and listen to them, but invariably, I have to intervene and referee a dispute. Kind words, and kind hands, I say. We share our things. We certainly do share our things. At least, that’s what I try to reinforce. Yet, amid the repetition and rote indoctrinations against covetousness, my wife and I also tell our children about the things we don’t share. Medical reports, for example. No, you may not tell the cashier why we are buying prunes. No, even two weeks after, you do not shout “lice” in a crowded room. This, of course, causes otherwise calm children to part like the waters of a frightened Red Sea, isolating the poor afflicted kid on the dry ground of pariah-hood. Then there are hats, speaking of that. You may never share hats with other kids at your school. It’s funny, coming up against exceptions you didn’t think about before, and I find myself subject to the same family sermons. Two churches stand along the interstate, for example. Here, they shall go unnamed, but know that they exist. Facing each other from opposite sides of the freeway, their buildings, which look to be of roughly equivalent size, once bore banners saying things like “Not Like Your Regular Church” or “A New Way to Do Church.” They seemed to be waging a subtle marketing war, telling thousands of passersby, “We’re not like them. Don’t go over there to that church. Our church is better.” To be perfectly honest, it infuriated me. The Church belongs to Jesus, and if he refuses to have even angels pull the tares from the wheat until the end of time, who are we to presume to take on the job here and now? I am not saying we ought to falter in our use of discernment—and oh! let us use good judgment in using the word judgment—but it often feels like we’re the Yankees trying to buy Babe Ruth (and everybody else), blowing through money to build the prize-winning team. This, of course, is not a biblical idea. It’s easy to pick on those two churches however, because it’s always easy to pick on Them. We know this to be true. I find myself tempted even in this writing to tell you what churches they are. Whoever Them is, we find slander and gossip about Them as easy to share as lice from a grade school hat. The problem is worse on social media, and I’m guilty of it. I have hung the sign out on the front of my public impression, saying, I am not those people. You are free to stand beside me; you won’t catch what they’ve got. Disconcertingly, in the Church, it is really not up to me. “The body is a unit, though it is made of many parts,” says Paul to the Corinthians. “We were all baptized with one Spirit into one body.” The holy catholic church. The communion of saints. The forgiveness of sins. This means that They are me, by the Blood of the Lamb. One body, one Spirit. I cannot by dint of my disgust or horror separate myself from them, nor they from me, no matter what one of us has done. I cannot hand the Bride of Christ a razor blade and ask that one arm cut the other. The Church belongs to Jesus, and if he refuses to have even angels pull the tares from the wheat until the end of time, who are we to presume to take on the job here and now? Adam Whipple What does this mean we are to do? When and if we share articles on social media or topics at the water cooler, where do we draw the line between being up front about our faults as The Church and slandering the Bride of Christ? When is it that we have moved from discussing these things within the Family of God to flinging our brothers or sisters out to the mob because they failed or thought differently? I do not know, but I do know that one action is the high calling of boasting about our weaknesses for Christ’s sake, while the other is certainly a sin. Assuredly, we all know various prominent personalities are going to say unbiblical things. We know that certain people are never going to preach on the evils of idolatry after wealth or on the exclusivity of Christ. Do we share those things in order to separate ourselves from those people? If there is a chance that they are actually believers—or even if they are not—do we do well to share their faults as though denouncing them from the guillotine scaffold? Certainly, the apostles had no problem calling out sin in the Body of Christ where they saw it. Yet, while I believe I have the Spirit, I am also not one of the apostles. When I share what some church or Christian is doing wrong in the public sphere instead of approaching that group or person with honesty and grace, I cannot claim to act in love. We believe so hard in earning the right to be heard with regards to, say, evangelism. Yet, with haste, we assume we have the inalienable right to be heard in regards to defamation. It cannot be so. I have never written a letter to a multi-millionaire televangelist. My prayers for politicians are far-between and paltry. I am ready to listen to my neighbor next door, but I cannot give a pundit the time of day in a clock shop. Yes, perhaps it’s a function of television and the internet, but that is no excuse for me. The Church is everywhere, and she is one Church, no matter how one arm pummels the other. Thanks be to God. I should be ready to share my own faults before I share the faults of others. My children are young now, but at some point soon, I shall have to begin to advise them in the use of the internet. They will interact with friends and acquaintances in the subconscious tattoo-ink of the ether. I hope they will act honorably; it seems now a dreadful thing to give such powers to a teenager with little conception of the consequences. Who knows what social media will even look like in that day? Yet the ability to slander has been and will forever be the same, and I can foresee conversations. Yes, I know that person did wrong. I know you are hurt and angry. No, you still may not irrevocably tell the whole world how wrong you thought it was. I will still be refereeing disputes, acknowledging the hurt done even while encouraging grace—let us hope. We don’t share hats with schoolmates, after all, but we do share kindness. Even if our friends have nits, we don’t shout ‘lice’ in a crowded room.

The first time I heard the band Frightened Rabbit was eight years ago, on a cruise ship in the gulf of Mexico. My husband and I had joined another couple on a five day Carnival cruise. We spent one day on the beach in Cozumel, and another visiting ancient Mayan ruins in Progresso, but the rest of the time we were on the ship. The main attraction for most cruisers is the ocean view, but for those who aren’t interested in wild seascapes, there’s plenty of entertainment to be had inside. And from the casino, to the dining hall, to the nightly shows, there are always drinks to be had. But on this particular trip I was the only one who hadn’t committed to abstain from alcohol, so we never ordered any. Until the last night after dinner when we were walking around looking at the ocean (again) and I decided to treat myself. I got a pina colada and walked to the bow of the ship to drink it by myself. My husband gave me his iPod and earbuds, with the perfect song cued up for me, “Swim Until You Can’t See Land.” I remember how the music sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. Epic ballad bands like Arcade Fire and fun. were still in the making back then, and while Frightened Rabbit was never really part of that scene, they still have the ability to sweep you away with one song. Part of their charm is Scott Hutchison’s heavy accent, but the music itself is haunting, blending mechanical and machine like sound with honest lyrics of everyday life. And while my romantic setting helped, there’s something about repetition that allows a line to really sink in. The last two questions rang in my head for days. “Are you a man? Are you a bag of sand?” Obviously I’m a woman, but I’d be lying if I said I’d never imagined myself floating alone into oblivion, on waves that stretch into eternity, like some indiscernible grey blob, apt to sink at any moment. A few weeks ago, Scott Hutchison walked out his front door and never came back. On purpose. Because he didn’t want to be found. I don’t know if he drove off in his own car, if he had a destination in mind, or simply set out on a walk alone. Other than his final tweets, he left no substantial clues or a notes behind, and though his friends, family, and fans held out hope for two days, his plan of self destruction ultimately succeeded. We all know people like Scott. They may not be artists, or write songs, or play guitar, but we’re still privy to their stories. They’re our friends, our brothers, our distant relatives and our next door neighbors. Sometimes they’re famous people and sometimes they’re just regular joes. Sometimes they’re candid about their struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies, and sometimes they’re not. Sometimes they wave white flags of surrender as they depart from this world and sometimes they disappear silently. We live with the knowledge of such hopeless endings and still, when someone we care for goes missing, we can hardly imagine this will be their story. So we send out calls for help as soon as we discover their absence. We cobble together timelines and eye witnesses. We search everywhere we can think of. We pray for miracles and angels and courage. We rally around the ones left behind and we wait, hoping to hear good news, crossing our fingers and banishing tragic endings from our minds, until we know for sure. But with every passing hour our hope fades, with every new phone call or false lead we begin to imagine the worst. That this temporary upheaval is now a permanent change. Which is where we find ourselves now that Hutchison’s body has been discovered. Now what, we wonder. I don’t know Scott personally so I won’t speak for his family and close friends. I can only speak as a fan. I’m sad the world will never hear a new song written by Scott Hutchison, or see another new drawing he’s made. I’m sad I’ll never get to see him perform again. I’m sad that his work and legacy may be overshadowed by the final choice he made. I’m sad that people who knew and loved Scott are hurting now, feeling confused and shocked, numb and angry, perhaps in danger of following those muddy footsteps themselves some day. Grief. It’s not easily measured in five predictable stages. It’s longer, messier, and more sorrowful than we want it to be, and the more we run from it the more it overwhelms us. Which is why I’m writing about mine now. That doesn’t mean I won’t have any left when I’m done with this essay; it just means that for now, I’m going to keep swimming. People battle depression and lose, not because they gave up or didn't fight hard enough, but because it's a disease, and even those who seek treatment and publicly share their struggles can still fall victim to its clutches. Janna Barber When I went to see Frightened Rabbit last summer, the crowd was made up people I don’t normally hang out with. I felt old and square in that group. Most of them were young and single, but there I was with my husband of twenty years—who works for a church—at a run down tavern lately turned concert venue. It was dark and dingy, and the air smelled of stale smoke. Everyone in the room was standing and we were merely ten feet away from the band performing on a three foot stage. There was one older couple down front, but they were quite the opposite of myself and my husband. For one thing they were Scottish, and they spent half the show yelling at the band members like they were long lost sons, finally come home for a visit. You could tell they were having a great time and that they loved the music, but they were messy drunk and emboldened by shared cultural history with the band, in a room full of (to their minds) foreigners. The most telling moment of the night came when the band played “Keep Yourself Warm” and the crowd joined along with a passion Sunday morning worship leaders would envy, as we sang, “You won’t find love in a/ Won’t find love in a hole.” The song makes obvious and graphic statements that on the one hand don’t need to be said, but on the other hand singing words like that out loud, with people who may or may not share the same values as me, lends prophetic depth to the lyrics. And that’s the real gift Hutchison gave to the world, truth. “Here’s what life is really like,” his songs seem to say, “for me, and lots of other people you know,” and because he never shies away from the grit and horror of the world, when hope shows up in one of his lines, it’s all the more powerful. Hutchison’s songs often decried the hypocrisy he saw in organized religion, but the hearts of the characters he painted long for redemption, for sacrificial love to be real, and I can only pray that Scott experienced that kind of love for himself at some point in his journey. I hate trying to pick favorite songs, but one I’ve listened to over and over is called “Nitrous Gas.” I love it because it demonstrates how difficult it can be to find happiness. How sometimes happiness feels like an outside entity, a foreign substance you can only ingest every once in awhile, when you stumble upon the good fortune of finding a full tank to hook yourself up to. Yet the singer confesses in the second verse, “Oh, where love won’t grow/Oh, I’ll build my home,” hinting that perhaps he’s somewhat responsible for his own state of affairs. It’s tempting to turn Scott’s story into some sort of cautionary tale, but I think doing so is a disservice to people who struggle with depression as well as those who love them. Like the music of Frightened Rabbit, real life is not simple, and there are seldom easy solutions. People battle depression and lose, not because they gave up or didn’t fight hard enough, but because it’s a disease, and even those who seek treatment and publicly share their struggles can still fall victim to its clutches. Suicide is the ultimate tragedy, and we wish we had more control over it, so it makes sense that we should use these situations as reminders to be vigilant; but I can’t be too proud to say that “but by the grace of God, there go I.” As one who’s often tempted toward despair, I no longer have the luxury of pride. Instead I try to live my life one day at a time. I do not feel like a dead bag of sand today, but there’s no guarantee tomorrow will be the same. And if it’s not I’ll have to decide whether or not to ask for help, whether or not to ignore the pain and hope it’ll go away, and whether or not to seek solace in a good place or a bad place. I wish Scott had chosen differently, but through tears I choose to believe the most hopeful line he ever wrote is still true. “All is not lost,” friends. I hope you can believe it, too.

“If you want to be a writer, be a reader.” This may be the most commonly-offered writing advice of all. And it’s good advice as far as it goes. But encouraging writers to read has always felt to me like encouraging teenage boys to eat three meals a day and maybe a couple of snacks. People who want to write tend to be people who are already reading. I think. Right? So if you want to write and you don’t already read voraciously, you should probably start. But for me—and, I suspect, for many of you—the big question isn’t How do I read more? The bigger question is How do I stop reading and start writing? Or, to put it another way, How do I flip the switch from consuming to producing? One challenge you face as a writer is the fact that you can justify almost anything as part of the writing process. Reading is an important part of the writing process. Staring out the window can be part of the writing process. So can going for a walk. Or taking a nap. But, as you may have noticed, each of these activities is also an excellent method of procrastination. For a few years, I wrote in a home office that had a window communicating with the kitchen. As my wife was rounding up lunch for the kids or washing dishes or otherwise industriously tending to her business, she would often look through the window and see me staring off into space, in apparent idleness. This was not a recipe for marital bliss. But what was she going to say? Staring off into space is indeed a crucial part of the writing process. (On those occasions when I decided a midday nap was an important part of the writing process, I at least had the decency to nap in the corner of the office that my wife couldn’t see while she was washing dishes.) If your goal as a writer is to justify your habits of idleness, I have good news: you can justify almost anything as “part of the writing process.” You call it staring out the window? I call it ideation. You call it napping? I call it hitting the reset button. You call it googling obsessively? I call it research. You call it checking Facebook several times an hour? I call it…actually, even I can’t come up with a justification for that one. But if your goal as a writer is actually to write, you’ll find very little satisfaction in that kind of self-justification. You’ve got to flip the switch from consuming (and/or idling) to producing. That’s not always an easy thing to do. But I have a few thoughts on the subject. First, acknowledge that all of those habits—reading, taking a walk napping, staring out the window, googling the date that dynamite was invented—can indeed be “part of the process.” And while you’re at it, acknowledge that there is plenty of mystery in the process, and it’s hard to know whether a given instance of, say, out-the-window-staring, is helpful or mere procrastination. But now that you have acknowledged these mysteries, draw a clear distinction between “the process” and actually producing. Writing means getting words onto a page. If you aren’t doing that, you aren’t writing. It’s important that you have some time every day when you forget about everything else—including “the writing process”—and put words on a page. I find this very difficult, by the way. When I’m supposed to be writing, it’s hard to resist the temptation to read one more article for context, or do one more Google search to find out some important fact that seems very important at the moment. It’s part of the writing process, I say to myself. The correct response at this point (and I should admit that I don’t often give the correct response) is to say, Yes, that is indeed part of the writing process. When this allotted writing time is over, I may return to that part of the writing process. But the part of the writing process I’m working on right now is actually writing. I should also mention something that I’ve mentioned more than once in the last couple of weeks: in order to stay present in the act of writing—in order to keep the pen moving—you have to give yourself permission to write badly. To wrap up, I will pass along a method that I learned from my friend Doug McKelvey. (Doug is the author of Every Moment Holy, a book you must have…though they sell so fast that Rabbit Room Press is having a hard time keeping them in stock, so you may have to be patient). If you find yourself paralyzed by the self-imposed pressure to produce, try this: Turn off your Internet connection (I use a program called Self Control, which shuts off all Internet, email, etc. for a set amount of time). Silence your phone and put it out of reach. If you need coffee, fill up a large Yeti or something that will keep you from needing to get up for refills or warm-ups. Then sit down at your desk and say to yourself, “For the next hour I will not get out of this chair. I can write, or I can not write, it doesn’t matter. But I can’t do anything else.” If you write, great. If you don’t write, don’t beat yourself up about it. But you have to do it again the next day and the day after that. If you can stick with that commitment not to do anything besides writing during your writing time, I think you’ll find that you’d rather write than not write. You will have flipped the switch from consuming to producing. If you enjoyed this excellent advice from Jonathan Rogers, consider subscribing to his weekly letter, The Habit, to receive lots more.

This whole thing—and by that I mean all of creation, from the outermost galaxies to my kitchen table—swirls around a Jewish man from the first century. He was born of woman, was a refugee, was more or less homeless, and lived a relatively short life. But his presence on the planet all those years ago changed history, and I believe he was the incarnation of God himself. You can pick up Resurrection Letters: Volume I in the Rabbit Room Store and listen to “All Things Together” here:https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/09-All-Things-Together.mp3

Chances are, if you listen to much Christian music, you’ve come across Christa Wells’ songwriting without even knowing it. (She wrote Natalie Grant’s big hit “Held,” along with songs for Plumb and Ellie Holcomb.) But Christa has been quietly crafting her own singer/songwriter indie pop songs for years, even though she feels most at home behind the scenes. Recently I had a chance to interview Christa for CCM Magazine. We had a great conversation about community, making vulnerable art in the middle of personal struggles, and pushing against the “go big or go home” mindset. Some Advice to Young Songwriters: I would also say on a more philosophical level—because we all tend to be intimidated and think “I can’t do it as well as so-and-so, so why bother?”—remember that we all have a very unique voice. Not just singing or writing style, but your whole life history, your particular knowledge of language. You’re going to intersect with a specific group of people and have a sphere of influence that nobody else has. So, I push back vehemently against the “go big or go home” mentality where there’s one definition of success and a higher value placed on people with a bigger platform. That’s my soapbox for young artists: write what you write, say what you say, and don’t worry about what other people are doing. You just keep making the work and hope it matters to somebody, and find some joy in it along the way. You can read the full interview at CCM. Christa’s new EP Velveteen is out and it’s wonderful. Listen on Spotify, and learn more about her on her website.

God was always reminding the Israelites of the story they were dropped into at birth. The story that began long before they were born, before their people were even a people; the story that would continue long after any individual had reached the end of his or her life span. Old Testament scripture records those repeated remindings of identity, calling, and sacred responsibility, until those scriptures themselves became a perpetual reminder. The New Testament writers likewise spent significant ink to remind the universal community of believers of who we are in Christ, of where our hopes are anchored, and of where our own little lives and this bigger thing called history are going. Apparently, our true names and stories are things easy for us to forget, to lose track of, to walk away from. Perhaps the gift of encouragement mentioned by Paul in Romans 12 is a thing evidenced mostly as a penchant for reacquainting folks with that main narrative and with their true identity in light of it—a perspective that dramatically alters how we experience the potentially discouraging details of our existences. Sometimes the giving and receiving of that sort of encouragement happens naturally and spontaneously. But I would argue that, for most of us, it doesn’t happen frequently enough. It’s easy to let days fade into days while important things remain unsaid, sometimes until a loved one is on their deathbed and we suddenly feel the weight of that accumulated silence. One often hears at funerals words that might have encouraged the deceased had they been spoken days or years or decades earlier; words that might have named them and reminded them of their identity and place and purpose in the bigger story. So maybe we should be grateful (even if begrudgingly) for those special days and milestone events that force us to step up to the plate (or podium) and speak those necessary and life-giving words that we might otherwise never muster enough “gumption” (as we termed it back in East Texas) to articulate. My three daughters participated in a homeschool tutorial from sixth through twelfth grades. The tutorial families together organized annual graduation ceremonies for seniors. Much of it was what you’d expect from a graduation: the procession of scholars, the playing of “Pomp and Circumstance,” the tassels and gowns, the commencement speaker, etc. But the core of the ceremony was a bit unique. Each graduate’s parents would in turn leave their seats in the audience to ascend the stage steps and take the mic, while their child rose from their seat among the other graduating seniors and met their parents center stage. As they moved to their places a quick photo-montage-video of the student (typically stretching from newborn to present day) would play on the overhead screens. There’s something powerful about seeing a life compacted in that way. Maybe because you realize how much hope and hurt and love and heartbreak happened between those two momentous moments of birth and graduation. Or maybe it’s because you’re watching other human beings at the cresting of a fulcrum, blinking and looking back at a whole season of life that is now suddenly gone and over and irretrievable save as memory. Once the video ended, the guy running the sound board would switch on the mic and the parents would have 3 or 4 minutes to address their kid. Oh, and good luck controlling your emotions when you’re facing your own son or daughter in such a moment. In one way it was awkward, yes. Gloriously so. And with such a diversity of parents and styles of parenting you never knew what you were going to get. Over the years we even witnessed a couple of cringe-worthy moments. But most parents recognized the beauty of what that brief little window might be, and took it as an opportunity to speak things that mattered. Things that you don’t want your kid to march off into life never having heard because, well, there was just never an obvious moment to speak them. Things that you’ve gradually stored up in your heart as this human being has grown before your eyes from an infant to a near-adult. Beset by doubts, fears, insecurities and lies of dazzling variety, each of us desperately needs others to repeat back to us our truer names, to remind us of the bigger context we were born into, to bring us back again and again to that wondrous story and to locate us somewhere within it. Doug McKelvey In such moments there are a lot of laughs, a lot of tears, a lot of hugs. For most of the kids, it is clearly meaningful, and the awkwardness of it is actually part of what makes it endearing, even for those participating, because there’s an implicit understanding that the saying of some things matters more than our own passing discomfort in speaking or hearing them. Maybe it’s different for extroverts, but for someone with my duck-and-cover instincts it is no small thing to stand in public and choke up as I peel back self-protective layers so that I might speak truthfully to my daughter of her own story, of things that are born of love and sorrows and hopes deeply felt. My first time taking that stage with my oldest daughter Anastina I had the good sense to know my own limitations and to play to my strengths. I’m not blessed with the ability to speak off the cuff, so I wrote out in advance what I would say to her. I saw it as an opportunity to remind her of her story, to speak to her her true name. To trace for her some of the dominant threads and themes of her life from her earliest years till that moment of graduation and transition. I stumbled into the format by happy accident but, realizing in hindsight that it had been a good thing, when my second daughter Ella graduated two years later, I set out to improve upon what I had done the first time around. And by the time my third daughter Callie graduated this past May, I was tending toward poetry and I think I had found my groove. Unfortunately, I peaked just as I ran out of daughters to graduate. I share these three pieces that I spoke to my girls at their graduations, in the hopes that some of you might be inspired to find appropriate moments in which to remind your own children, or other family members or friends, of their stories, of the redemptive threads woven through their lives. We are, after all, stewards of one another’s stories. And we would do well to see ourselves as such. For such stewarding is a most essential part of what it means to live in community. Maybe as we in the Rabbit Room continue to mature as a community, it’s a mutual service we can find ways to be even more mindful of. Beset by doubts, fears, insecurities and lies of dazzling variety, each of us desperately needs others to repeat back to us our truer names, to remind us of the bigger context we were born into, to bring us back again and again to that wondrous story and to locate us somewhere within it. [2013] Anastina, You were only a few years old when you told us your favorite verse in the bible was: Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array. Your heart was already resonating, from the earliest age, with the beauty of the complexity of creation, and with the act of creating it. It meant something to you, that the heavens and earth were created. That there was a loving and creative mind at work who had thought of and made all these things, and who continued making them. It moved you that this was a story we were living in, and the storyteller was crafting it. And oh, how you loved stories and making. A thirst for created beauty and the desire to re-tell that beauty through your own creations was a part of who you were from the beginning. Chesterton wrote: “Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not been broken in two by time; he is not two men [or young women!], but one…” To see you now as a graceful, intelligent, talented, beautiful young woman, graduating, stepping into the next season of life, moving forward to further hone your ability to serve your Creator and to serve people by serving the kinds of stories that bring life, hope, joy and beauty into a world that has forgotten them but so desperately needs them now more than ever—as your parents and sisters and other family and friends, this brings us great joy. You still love so much of what you loved as a child. That is a great strength. Chesterton also said: “If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.” You were born to do such work Anastina. You were created and gifted for this purpose. To work with God. To bring the touch of eternal beauty into places where it has been lost, neglected and even forgotten. Believe that. And trust that as God has created you for his purposes, he will also equip and strengthen you and will order your steps. So as one chapter in your own story ends and another begins, go with boldness, humility, and the love of your family and friends. We are with you. Congratulations! [2015] Ella, Chesterton wrote: “When one hasn’t a touch of the poet, one stands some chance of being a poem.” And yet you, dear child, have somehow emerged as both poet and poem. You are a gifted artist. You create beauty. And yet you are, in your winsome and graceful personhood, like a living poem as well. We knew we were dealing with a very creative soul early on. I remember when your older sister came running to us in tears saying you had just slapped her, and you pulled out your pacifier and stated with full sincerity: “I didn’t slap her. I just high-fived her in the face.” We knew we were dealing with a very merciful soul when we saw you at a tender age, up in the rope netting at the zoo, leading by the hand a frightened little girl you didn’t even know, younger than yourself, speaking sweetly and gently to her “It’s okay, don’t cry. We’ll find your parents. They’ll be down here waiting for you somewhere.” You have always been sensitive to both the beauty and the brokenness of creation. The impulse to create beauty and to heal brokenness have always been, for you, like breathing. You can’t not do them. And you do both naturally and reflexively, almost without thinking. Creating beauty and addressing brokenness are like the inhaling and exhaling of the same breath to you. This makes sense, as both are anchored in a love and a delight in a creation that was declared good by its Maker, and is therefore worth the costly work of grieving and of redeeming. The courage of your convictions has also been remarkable to witness over the years, especially in one so young. When you believe something is true or right, it does not remain merely as head knowledge. You immediately and permanently order your life around it. That is rare. That is so rare. Don’t stop doing that. “Seriousness is not the opposite of joy, but of superficiality,” Brennan Manning wrote. And you have been very serious about joy. So serious about it that when you encounter places in the world where joy is overshadowed by sorrow and oppression—places like the Nuba Mountains, or the cell where Miriam Ibrahim was unjustly shackled—you are moved to acts of compassion. Don’t stop doing that either. DO remember that a deep and abiding joy is the only enduring root of active mercy, for nothing else will long sustain against the darkness and the temptation to despair. So cultivate your joy, child, and do not neglect it, that your mercy might be deep and enduring all the days of your life. Go. Create beauty. Extend mercy. Your world needs both. Creating beauty is an act of mercy. And acts of mercy are themselves, deeply beautiful. The inhaling and exhaling of the same breath. Breathe in beauty. Breathe in joy. Breathe in delight. Breathe out mercy and melody and life and compassion. Steward your gifts, and your passions. “This world is dying,” Thomas Merton said, “of a contrived joy.” Go, child, and live—in this world—a life that is a poem about a real joy; a poem of seriousness and delight. And go into this next season of your life knowing that it has been and continues to be a delightful and serious joy to both of us to be your parents. [2017] Albert Einstein said: “I want to know God’s thoughts. The rest are details.” Therein, Callie McKelvey, lies your path from here. You were born into a family steeped in stories and poetry, a family more shaped by words than by numbers. And yet, you came to us without words for those first few years of your life. Specialists called it apraxia. But maybe it was something more than just a neurological condition. Maybe it was preparation for what was yet to come. You came to us without words but with a wild instinct for wonder, a precocious and preternatural ability to concentrate and to consider the world around you, storing up all things that you could not yet speak of— storing them up for later use, as one might deliberately gather stones for the building of a tower one day beside the sea. You made use of your early silence. You became a ponderer, a connecter of the far flung dots, a soulmapper, a hunter of deep order and harmony— and we, your family, did not even know it yet, for you still could not speak of it. You labored intensely for years, mastering speech, learning to give voice to your thoughts, and only then, did we who loved you so in your long silence, also begin to get an inkling of how deep those channels had been carved in your wondering soul, of how deep those still waters now ran. You learned language, and with it, poetry, which you loved as an expression of the eternal yearning— and yet you did not find that poetry expressed only in words. You heard it calling as well from other quarters of creation; you found it in music, you felt it in dance, you heard it whispering from from the night sky and from the balanced equations that described the mysteries of the movements of particles and planets. And once receiving such summons you stepped beyond the frontiers already cleared and cultivated by your parents and siblings. You surprised us, Callie. Sensing that there was that same poetry written in the stars flung across, and brooding in, the depths of that infinite expanse you came naturally to a love of physics as the language in which that poetry was best expressed. You were born into a family more shaped by words than by numbers but you came to remind us that the numbers were also an elegant expression of that same poetry and mystery, and that the great poets and the great theologians and the great composers and the great astronomers were all always reaching for the same thing, whether they knew it or not. Astronomer and theologian Johannes Kepler wrote: “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.” We have loved being your parents, Callie McKelvey, grateful for the privilege to observe and participate in the journey and the story of your life to this point, to see how you have been shaped, by a crafting through circumstance both good and hard; To see the diamond-formed gifts that have now been entrusted to you: the resolve, the empathy, the love of the pursuit of truth and beauty and wonder, the willingness to walk a good, hard path that denies neither the deep joy nor the deep sorrow of life as a pilgrim and a stranger journeying through a landscape shattered, yet in which there remain these scattered evidences of a lost glory and these wild rumors of a fairytale redemption that has somehow already begun and is also yet to come and for which you personally yearn and labor already bearing the tension of the now-and-the-not-yet within your own heart. So let that right and holy tension ever shape and define you in this path. Go and be that astronomer who finds that she can trace God’s thoughts amongst the stars. Go and be that poet, who labors to translate the language of the great mysteries into human expression. Go and be a woman of mercy and creativity and concentration and conviction, leaving behind you across this short span of life, many lamp posts to light the way for pilgrims yet to follow, and many signposts pointing them onwards. Annie Dillard wrote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Go and spend your days, Callie McKelvey. Invest them in the pursuit of the passion and the delight that your Creator has uniquely crafted you to be the bearer of. Do that, and you will do well in this life, dear daughter. But not only will you do well, you will also do good. #GKChesterton #community #milestones #DougMcKelvey #Story #encouragement #Stories #graduation #FaithfulPresence

Click through for the second edition of our new Rabbit Room comic strip, Rabbit Trails. Check out more of Jonny Jimison’s work at his website.

Begin with the end in mind. That’s Habit 2 of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In most human endeavors, this is excellent advice. In large matters and small, beginning with the end in mind helps ensure that the steps you take move you in the right direction. I heartily commend this advice to you…in all areas of your life besides writing. This letter is Part 2 of a series about getting started on a new story or essay. Today’s advice is this: Be willing to begin without the end in mind. And if you do have the end in mind when you begin, hold it very loosely. Of the four novels I’ve written, only one ended the way I originally thought it was going to end. You can’t be sure how a story ends until you get into it. As I said last week, you have to trust that once you get the pen moving and the neurons firing, good things are going to happen. Trying to have everything figured out before you get started is often just a kind of procrastination; for me it is, anyway. Your insights grow and change as you write. There are things you can’t possibly see or understand until after you have been writing for a while. Too much figuring on the front end of a story or essay can be a waste of time. At some point you have to dive in and see what happens. As Flannery O’Connor put it, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” And sometimes insisting on knowing the end from the beginning is worse than a waste of time. If you’re overly invested in some particular ending, or in some particular point you want to make, you may be shutting yourself off to your best or truest ideas. One reason to write is to sort out what is true; you don’t always know what’s true (or truest) at the beginning of the writing process. I see this principle at work in a lot of my students’ academic essays. In a five-page paper, a student writer will go along tepidly and uninspiringly for about four and a half pages, and then, around the next-to-last paragraph, she says something brilliant and wise and true. Then the paper is over—just when it was getting good. How does this happen? How is it that the same person can write poorly for four and a half pages, and so brilliantly for half a page? Actually this shouldn’t surprise any of us. You can’t really expect to have brilliant ideas until you’ve written a few pages (maybe more than a few). The student’s mistake wasn’t to write four uninteresting pages; the mistake was to turn in four uninteresting pages. (And the mistake behind that mistake, one suspects, was to start writing the night before the paper was due). Those first four pages of lackluster writing are just a part of the process; they are nothing to be ashamed of. The path to the good stuff often goes through the dull and self-evident stuff. Keep the pen moving, and prepare to be amazed at the ideas that come to you. People ask me sometimes about my “process,” and specifically whether I write from outlines or whether I write from the seat of my pants. I will now answer that question, but with this necessary caveat: describing my process isn’t the same thing as giving advice. When it comes to getting the pen moving, you’ve got to do whatever works, and what works for one writer won’t necessarily work for another. (I find it very difficult, for instance, to compose on a computer. I have to use pen and paper; sometimes I even compose emails with pen and paper before typing them in.) But I digress. Here’s my “process” for getting started: I usually write from an outline. That outline usually turns out to be wrong. So I have learned to give myself just enough of an outline to get the pen moving, but I try not to belabor the outline because I know it will probably turn out to be wrong anyway. So, once I have a quick outline, I start writing. I write until an interesting or compelling idea makes its way out—hopefully an idea that will give rise to other interesting or compelling ideas. Then I reorganize around that idea, often dashing off another outline (which will also probably turn out wrong). I take great comfort and great confidence in the truth that the writer doesn’t make meaning. The writer recognizes meaning and gives voice to it. Sometimes you recognize that meaning before you start writing (sometimes, indeed, that recognition is what sets you to writing). But I encourage you to be open to the likelihood that the most important recognition will happen only after you’ve written for a while. Be willing to begin without the end in mind. If you enjoyed this excellent advice from Jonathan Rogers, consider subscribing to his weekly letter, The Habit, to receive lots more.

I’ve been attending a liturgical church for the last several years, and it rings all my word-nerd bells. The language is so beautiful and rich, and every service rehearses the story of salvation, culminating in Communion. Revelation 5 contains one of the most beautiful and dramatic scenes in scripture, and is centered around the question, “Is anyone worthy?” The resounding answer is, “Yes! And his name is Jesus.” That’s what this whole album is about. You can pick up Resurrection Letters: Volume I in the Rabbit Room Store and listen to “Is He Worthy” here:https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/08-Is-He-Worthy.mp3

An endorsement blurb from Johnny Cash graces the back side of Nashville Skyline, Bob Dylan’s 1969 album recorded in Music City: “Here-in is a hell of a poet,” said Cash. And for such poetry, a half century later, Dylan would receive the Nobel Laureate for literature. But, really, so what? “What is poetry’s role when the world is burning?” asks no less a poet than Chris Wiman. This question haunts me: When there is so much madness and violence, so much war and hostility and environmental degradation, is artistic expression anything but an indulgent diversion from reality? Ironically, this concern informed Dylan’s early work: “The thing about rock’n’roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough,” he says. “There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms…. But the songs weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way.” Folk music “was more of a serious type of thing,” with “more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural…” So, for Dylan, it was the poetry of the Americana folk tradition that gave him a greater capacity to see and understand reality. It was not a diversion from the burning, maddening world. It provided a capacity to see the world more clearly, and to envision new possible worlds. In this way, Dylan is but one more poet in the line of the great poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins who insisted that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God,” and that “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” From his earliest song-writing days, such a vision of the world—a vision of the world charged with the grandeur of God—seems to have driven much of Dylan’s lyrics, evidenced beautifully in “Lay Down Your Weary Tune.” But the “seriousness” of the folk tradition is more than its sacramentality. The acoustic folk genre would inform an eschatological and prophetic edge to Dylan’s writing, too.  These edges would persist beyond and through Dylan’s electric rock-n-roll conversion, too. Robert Hudson’s delightful new book on Bob Dylan and Thomas Merton plays out this “prophetic” element. In his monastic hermitage in the latter part of the 1960’s, Dylan’s music played for months on The Monk’s Record Player. Merton—himself one of the greatest voices for Christianity in America in the latter part of the 20th century—insisted that “Bob Dylan is one of the most important voices in the country.” It’s worth noting that Merton made such a judgment precisely in the midst of all the burning and lynching and blood-shed of the 1960’s. For Merton, says Hudson, the “prophetic” entails at least two aspects:  one, its capacity to tell the truth in a way that others are either unwilling, or incapable.  Commenting on the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, Merton said: “All true poetic genius tends to generate prophetic insight. The poet cannot help but listen to awakening voices that are not yet audible to the rest of men.” The “prophetic” also entails the capacity to see and speak before its time: “Poets and poetic thinkers,” said Merton, those “who construct myths in which they embody their own struggle to cope with the fundamental questions of life—are generally ‘prophetic’ in the sense that they anticipate in their solitude the struggles and the general consciousness of later generations.” Merton saw Dylan, undoubtedly, as “prophetic” in such ways. And Dylan has been, undoubtedly, “prophetic” in taking up many of the particular themes of the Hebrew prophets of old.  The machinations of wealth and power do, after all, remain persistent through history. Thus Dylan, in both his folk and electric days will bemoan the plight of the poor, in the likes of “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” or “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine.” And yet his visions were not merely moralistic in an individualistic sense. Singing at the March on Washington—when Martin Luther King, Jr. would famously declare “I Have a Dream”—Dylan would lament the assassination of Medgar Evers in “Only a Pawn in Their Game.” But the villain was not simply the wicked choices of one evil man, but the manifestation of systems of hatred that give rise to such violence. Or on war, similarly: Dylan would stand in unflinching judgment upon the military-industrial complex with “Masters of War.” But he had the capacity to see, with the Apostle Paul, that “our enemy is not flesh and blood.” Thomas Merton himself, in parallel, had written in a letter to Bobby Kennedy’s wife: “It seems to me that the great problem we face is not Russia but war itself. War is the main enemy….  Unless we fight war, both in ourselves and in the Russians… we are purely and simply going to be wrecked by the forces that are in us.” Thus in Dylan’s great classic “God on Our Side,” which is first and foremost about the piety by which we justify our warring, the final prayer is to be delivered from war itself: “If God’s on our side, / He’ll stop the next war.” Among these sorts of “prophetic” elements, judgment-laden eschatological strains are woven, too: pointing to some coming reality, desperately needed in the midst of the fires of history. “Blowing in the Wind,” “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” “Slow Train Coming”—all these evoke a longing for, and an assurance that, the broken will be set right: Dylan insists that there will be some coming judgment upon the burning, and upon those who burn. So we return to the question with which we began—what is poetry’s role when the world is burning? And Dylan reminds us again that such a question is not a cynical one, but a prescriptive one. It is quite possible for our artistic endeavors to be escapist, art that is, quoting Wiman again, “not steeped in the world.” But it is also possible—still quoting Wiman—to do “art better at theology than theology is.” In other words: Precisely because the world is burning is there so much art to be done, so much poetry to be written, and so many songs to sing. On June 7th at Lipscomb University, the first Tokens Show of the 2018 season will be a theological exploration of the work of Bob Dylan, featuring Pulitzer Prize winner and current U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K Smith, Tobias Wolff, The New Respects, Matthew Perryman Jones, and the writer of this article, Lee Camp. Learn more about the Tokens Show at their website and grab tickets here. Listen to Odessa Settles sing Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changing” here, or Lee Camp sing Dylan’s “God on Our Side” here.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of the sheer variety of work The Rabbit Room is up to. If you want a bird’s-eye view of all that has come to pass in this first quarter of 2018 and all that is in the works for the rest of the year, join Pete and Andrew Peterson for this highly informative, highly entertaining video. News regarding Hutchmoot, Rabbit Room Retreat, Homeschool Conventions, Every Moment Holy, and much more awaits you. If you’re interested in supporting this work more intentionally, consider becoming a member by clicking here.

(This was originally published in The Molehill, but since that’s currently out of print and quite a few folks at this weekend’s Wilberforce Conference asked about it, I thought I’d post it here.) My grandmother asked what kind of books I liked to read. “Fantasy novels,” I said. I probably had a Dragonlance book hidden in my backpack, next to the Walkman with the Tesla tape, the TransWorld Skateboarding mag and the Trapper Keeper with a Camaro on the front. “Isn’t that sort of thing for girls?” she asked. She tilted her head back to better see me through her glasses. “What do you mean? There’s nothing girly about them.” “Hmm.” She went back to her game of solitaire while I tried to tone down my defensiveness. “Granny, I’m serious. Lots of my friends read them, and I don’t know a single girl who does.” “Well, I guess times have changed,” she said with a sad little shake of her head. We went back and forth for a few minutes before I realized that when I said “fantasy” she thought I meant romance, the steamy kind—you know, the paperbacks with the scarlet covers and flowing scripts, always with a ravished woman wrapped in the arms of a blonde dude with breeches and riding boots and no shirt, muscles so big he could snap the ravished woman in half, and from the way she’s looking at him it seems she wouldn’t mind so much if he did. His name is probably Dirk. No wonder my grandmother looked worried. “No, Granny,” I said with relief. “Fantasy novels. Swords and dragons and stuff. The less romance the better.” That wasn’t strictly true, because in Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Tanis Half-Elven and elf princess Lauralanthalasa (I’m not kidding) had a thing going, but they had to keep it quiet because her people mistrusted his half-humanness and it created all kinds of romantic tension, plus the War of the Lance interfered and all. But mostly there were dragons. And dwarves. And magic weapons and dungeons and taverns teeming with thieves and adventurers. I remember Christmas morning 1987 when I tore the wrapping paper off of several Dragonlance books—books that I swore to my dad weren’t the same as Dungeons & Dragons games, though it turned out they were. Almost exactly the same, in fact, but in book form. Even more startling, I didn’t turn into a devil-worshipping delinquent, nor did the books spontaneously combust on the holy ground of the church parsonage. To the contrary, I’m in my forties now and I still remember the warm tingle in my fingers when I first held those pulp paperbacks. I can still smell them. If I close my eyes I can see the cover painting by a guy named Larry Elmore. It featured the aforementioned Tanis Half-elven, Caramon the warrior, Goldmoon the barbarian princess, Flint the dwarf, and Tasslehoff the kender standing in an autumnal vale with a red dragon coiled behind them. The whole gang was looking at the camera, so to speak, as if waiting for me to step into the book and join them. Now it all seems so cliché, but at the time I didn’t know and didn’t care. I filled notebooks with drawings of those dragons, talismans, old stone doorways, and walking lizards called Draconians. I thought about those stories in class, and read them after I failed tests, and talked about them with my brother and our nerdy friends while we built skateboard ramps in the garage. The books lifted me straight out of the mossy pines of North Florida and plopped me down in a magical world, just as surely as Lucy stepped through the wardrobe and found herself in Narnia. My young mind crackled with longing, though I wouldn’t have known to call it that. I merely said to myself, “Man, that’s so cool,”in an awestruck whisper. Not long after that, at my older brother’s behest, I read David Eddings’s The Belgariad, a five-book epic fantasy about a kid named Garion who eventually learns to speak a secret spy language with tiny movements of his fingers. If that weren’t cool enough, he also saves the world by recovering an orb. I wonder how many times an imaginary world has been saved by the recovery of an orb? I loved these books almost as much as I loved the Dragonlance Chronicles. Around the same time I read Stephen King’s It and The Talisman (which he wrote with Peter Straub), both of which ought to be considered fantasy novels, and neither of which are as good as I remember them. My brother also got me hooked on David Gerrold’s The War Against the Chttor series, which launched me over to the somewhat parallel genre of science fiction. The Chttor books raised the bar and lowered it at the same time. Gerrold is, as they said in my neck of the woods, one smart dude. He used the Chttor books not just to tell a story with the usual spaceships but also to philosophize, which is one of the best things about sci-fi. The books explore everything from war tactics to ethics to religion to sexuality—but to my relief, there were also plenty of guns, zombies, and wormy critters that wanted to eat the world. I felt my mind expand a little while I was reading them, but it also sank a few notches into the gutter. Even so, there were moments of bliss when I closed my door at night, switched on the reading light, cracked open the paperback of A Rage for Revenge, and could almost hear the hiss of the pressurization system kicking on as I stepped onto the space transport. Gone were the humid bedsheets and the oscillating fan and the mossy trees of Florida, gone was my nascent fear that I would be miserable for the rest of my life, gone were my failures; I was saving the world, baby, and I might not make it back alive. Then I’d wake on the ugly green couch in my room to the sound of my dad stomping through the house singing “Rise and shine, give God the glory-glory” in full preacher voice. It was time to embark on another day of school, another day of facing what felt like an enormous waste of time—except for those few minutes between failures when I could duck through the trapdoor of my book and emerge into a world of real beauty and real danger, which meant real heroism and the possibility of real purpose. I was hungry for it. Maybe even starving. Every time we drove the thirty minutes to Gainesville, the nearest town with a mall, I headed straight for Waldenbooks. When I got to Waldenbooks I headed straight for the fantasy/sci-fi section, which at the time boasted only a few shelves. Always with a tantalizing fraction of that same tingle I felt on Christmas morning in 1987, I ran my fingers over the spines of all those paperbacks: Anne McCaffrey’s The Dragonriders of Pern, Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain Chronicles, an ever increasing number of Dragonlance books (now there are about two hundred), the D&D spinoff Forgotten Realms (which I never cared for, though the covers were killer), Stephen R. Lawhead’s The Pendragon Cycle, Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World, Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, and of course, towering above them all, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—a book I hadn’t read, which caused my brother no end of consternation. I had seen the animated films seven hundred times, so I didn’t think I needed to read it yet. (Don’t be angry. Tolkien, for me, came later.) But hobbits aside, I stood in the aisle at Waldenbooks and yearned, I tell you. I was drawn to those book covers like a deer to a salt lick, and like a salt lick they only made me thirstier. I couldn’t get enough. In those days, I was restless without a book in my hands, without the hope of some new story around every turn to enliven my deadening senses. Unlike most of my friends, I didn’t want a truck or a job or a scholarship; I wanted a horse and a quest and a buried treasure. But there were no real quests anymore. Not in my town. So I had to make them up. And that led to a series of hijinks that I’ll write about when I’m old and most of the witnesses are dead and the statute of limitations has run out. But I left out something significant when I told you about my conversation with Granny Peterson: when she asked me what kind of books I liked to read, the prevailing feeling I remember is bashfulness, just a few inches shy of outright embarrassment. I was standing in her front room with my hand on the table where the grownups always played canasta, and I stared at the linoleum floor, wishing she hadn’t asked me that question. Ask me about something else, I thought. Anything else. Skateboarding or girlfriends or grades or Jesus. Leave my stories alone. My craving for those tales occupied a private part of my adolescence; they represented my loneliness, the only antidote for which was the seemingly impossible dream that life could be lived alongside trusty companions and in defiance of great evil. I looked out her window and saw crabgrass, old trucks, clouds of mosquitoes, and gravel roads, a rural slowth that drawled, “Here’s your life, son. Make do.” But my books said, “Here’s a sword, lad. Get busy.” A persistent fear sizzled in my heart, a fear that there existed no real adventure other than the one on the page, and that I was doomed never to know it. Doomed to a life of failure. There’s that word again. I felt called to adventure but saw no way to get there, so instead I read about adventures and kept that dream alive by keeping it to myself. How do you explain that to Granny? How, for that matter, do you explain it to anyone? Sooner or later, I had to abandon the salt lick. I needed water. Sometime between adolescence and my diploma, I discovered music, and music was the horse that bore me safely out of town. Music was the call to adventure, however self-serving and reckless that adventure may have been. It was also the doorway through which the object of my quest entered my heart. In the summer of 1993 I was a foundering young man chaperoning at a youth conference called CIY (Christ in Youth), when one morning on a hillside by the chapel, I watched the sun rise on the green mountains. They were more beautiful than any landscape I had imagined existing in Krynn or Prydain or even Middle-earth. They were real mountains. My CD Walkman was on repeat, and again and again I heard Rich Mullins sing the lines, “I see the morning moving over the hills / I can see the shadows on the western side / and all those illusions that I had / they just vanish in your light.” The sun was rising on me, pushing the shadows of my failure and fear farther and farther away until the whole world was bright and peaceful as only an Appalachian dawn can be when you’re nineteen and weeping with the surety of true forgiveness and true love. What I was looking for all along had found me instead. Not once did I suspect in all my sketching and reading and aching to enter the stories I read that Jesus was calling to me through them. Jesus was mostly an idea. There was church, the life I was supposed to long for, and then there was the life I actually longed for. You see, I was the victim of what I call, “imaginational segregation.” On one hand there was my compulsion to be a Christian—a cultural and familial paradigm that I happily ascribed to and had little reason to resist—and on the other I nurtured a mostly secret affection for what were, more or less, fairy tales. Looking back, the same was true of my obsession with comic books and films and music. In each of those art forms I encountered a world that seemed more vivid than the one I was in. I wanted to enter that beauty. And I decided the only way to engage it, apart from my imagination, was to create it. I could draw, or play the piano, or write. If I could make something beautiful, maybe I could forget for a few moments how drab I was, how useless I felt, how lonely was this dull and lifeless life I had been given—and that dull life included Christianity as I understood it. I was, of course, projecting my disappointment with myself onto everything else—everything but the world in my mind, built out of song and story and that terrible, secret longing. The grass was oh-so-much greener on the Other Side. The mountains were taller and the water was sweeter and the stories were better, too. But that morning when I was nineteen on the hillside in East Tennessee, things were different. Life itself—the one I was actually living—for once outshone the life I had yearned for. The Maker of this beautiful, broken world ambushed me. He had lain in wait for the perfect moment to spring: the perfect song at the perfect hour of the day, the contrition of my hungry heart, the intricate staging of the beauty that had led me to that dewy lawn, and his holy, brooding spirit draped over the valley like a mist. “Drink,” he told me, “and thirst no more.” I’m not saying this was my actual conversion, but it was a salient moment that perhaps marked the end of a season of struggle. When the shadows cast by my disappointment and self-hatred were banished by the light of the forgiveness, the acceptance, and the infinite affection of Christ, I could see the world around me for the miracle it was. I could see myself as a miracle. Scripture tells that when God looks at a Christian he sees Christ’s righteousness—in a similar way, the Christian is now free to see Christ in everything. Even himself. I was gloriously alive, and I was at home in the palm of God’s hand. So I abandoned fantasy. I had no need for it, so I thought, because the world I was in pulsed with loveliness. I was wide awake to God’s presence. I cried when I sang in church. That was a new one for me. The Bible became fascinating for the first time since I had read Revelation at church camp to see how imminent was the apocalypse in order to gauge my remaining party time. Now I read it because it felt alive. I read it to know the God Rich Mullins seemed to know so well. And you know what? It worked. During the first few weeks of Bible college the story of the Old Testament lit up my imagination with stories of battle, espionage, love triangles, deception, failure, heroism, and the promise of redemption; mine was an imagination well-prepared for the invasion of the Gospel story. The soil had been fertilized in my youth with a hundred tales that had taken root and grown but had born no fruit; those old stories withered, then decayed and composted, readying the ground for the life-giving seeds that were coming. I feasted on the meat of the Bible for four years. I don’t want to give the impression that I was a model student, or that I rejoiced in writing papers on the problem of evil or the kings of Judah. In many ways I was still the bonehead I always was. And yet, I no longer felt that awful lack of purpose, which is, I suppose, a lack of hope. Now there were songs to be written. There were concerts to play. I wanted to tell people this story that had changed me, and through the lens of all my newfound hope, the world and every person I met seemed to shimmer with God’s presence. I read commentaries, I read every class syllabus, I read the Bible, I read papers. I was eating meat, meat, meat, and more meat. Then at the beginning of my senior year, with a bit of leftover student loan money burning a hole in the pocket of my chapel slacks, I accidentally bought The Chronicles of Narnia from the college bookstore. I was hunting for the semester’s textbooks when I spotted all seven paperbacks in an attractive slipcase, much like the set I grew up with. I stood in the aisle with an unwieldy stack of textbooks and three-ring binders in one hand, while with the other I experienced a familiar tingle in the tips of my fingers as I ran them over the books that contained the magic of Narnia. I remembered the word I heard that morning on the mountain: “Drink.” The books went home with me, and I showed them to Jamie (to whom I’d been married for about a year). “For our future kids,” I said, but that wasn’t the whole truth. I had read so much non-fiction in college that I was craving something light and non-required. Somehow, during my last semester of school, even though I was doing a steady stream of concerts and I needed to complete an internship and twenty-two hours of credit to graduate, I managed to read C. S. Lewis’s story of Aslan and Narnia for the first time since childhood. I read it all the way from the wardrobe to the last battle. I thought of it as a literary retreat, indulging some of my childhood reading tendencies to give my brain a rest from academia. But instead, I experienced something much deeper. The reintroduction of fairy tales to my redeemed imagination helped me to see the Maker, his Word, and the abounding human (but sometimes Spirit-commandeered) tales as interconnected. It was like holding the intricate crystal of Scripture up to the light, seeing it lovely and complete, then discovering on the sidewalk a spray of refracted colors. The colors aren’t Scripture, nor are they the light behind it. Rather, they’re an expression of the truth, born of the light beyond, framed by the prism of revelation, and given expression on solid ground. My final days in college were spent studying the books of Ezekiel and James in class, writing song lyrics in the margins of my syllabi, and reading, at last, The Lord of the Rings, that exquisite spray of refracted light. And now we come to the point. Tolkien’s story bears many similarities to those I read in high school (mostly due to their imitation of him), including the lure of escapism. In the same way the Dragonlance books had whisked me out of high school, Tolkien’s books transported me out of college for a few precious minutes each day. But whether it was because of my own awakening to the beauty of life through the saving truth of the Gospel or because of Tolkien’s own faith and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit while writing The Lord of the Rings, when his story ended the world around me held more possibility, not less; it was brighter, not duller; my eyes were clearer, not dimmer. Tolkien and Lewis, both in their own way, lifted me out of this world to show me a thundering beauty, and when I read the last sentence and came tumbling back to earth, I could still hear the peal. I hear it to this day. God allowed the stories to lift the veil on the imaginary world to show me the real world behind it—which ended up being, in the end, the one I was already in. Tolkien and Lewis held the fabric of Narnia or Middle-earth in one hand and clutched ours in the other, building a bridge so we could set out for perilous realms and return safely with some of the beauty we found there. The ache we feel when we read about Frodo’s voyage from the Grey Havens, the ache we feel when Lucy hears the thump of solid wood at the back of the wardrobe is telling us that yes, there’s another world. But the stories that awaken us are meant to awaken us not only to the reality to come but to this world and its expectant glory. Too often we retreat into the pages of our longing only to return disconsolate to the kitchen or the classroom—we’re escaping from and not to. A few years ago I dug out a few of the fantasy novels I loved and found them mostly empty. Not only have my tastes changed (the quality of the writing left something to be desired), but they strike me as a way to pass the time rather than enrich it. The accoutrements of fantasy and science fiction still hold their appeal for me; dragons and quests and epic tales are appetizing seasonings, but seasonings don’t make a meal. Nowadays I read more broadly—novels that take place not in Hogwarts but in Iowa (which I have learned is no less magical). I’ve been enraptured by stories about moths and watermelon harvesting and bridge building, and non-fiction about city planning and hurricanes and explorers of the Amazon. There’s so much out there to read that I’d never answer my grandmother’s question with: “Fantasy novels.” If I someone asked me today, my answer would be, “Good books.” The same is true of music: “Good music.” Is that a genre? That doesn’t mean I don’t have a soft spot for dragons. I believe the Lord used those books to pique my desire for another world, to exercise the muscle of imagination (if not prose), and even to comfort a lonely kid. I’m sure God’s doing the same for kids all over the country, even now. I’m not ashamed to admit that when I go to Barnes & Noble I still visit the fantasy section first. I still run my fingers along the spines and study the cover art. And I still feel that 1987 tingle. Sometimes I even read some of those books. I tell myself it’s just for fun, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m on the hunt. Somewhere out there, there’s another Tolkien. Somewhere out there, men and women with redeemed, integrated imaginations are sitting down to spin a tale that awakens, a tale that leaves the reader with a painful longing that points them home, a tale whose fictional beauty begets beauty in the present world and heralds the world to come. Someone out there is building a bridge so we can slip across to elf-land and smuggle back some of its light into this present darkness. I’m always looking for that bridge. If you wanted to, I suppose you could call it a quest.

For some years now I have operated under the suspicion that people are lonely most of the time. I may be incorrect, and it would be a pleasant surprise to find the opposite is true. But I tend to hold my supposed rightness about things pretty close, so in any case it will take some convincing. When I sift through the moments in my life where I felt most supported, connected, known or loved by others, or when I participated in such nearness with someone else so they might feel such love, and when I realize the vast number of those moments despite their paradoxical inability to be usefully quantified, it’s unclear to me whether God is nourishing my belief that loneliness is dangerously prevalent and togetherness its cure, or whether He has been thwarting my understanding of reality from the start—or my start, anyway. This past Monday evening He was at it again, either deepening my perception or proving me wrong. If you tuned into my recap of our last Supper & Songs, you may remember it felt like a victory more because the house didn’t collapse and the pasta cooked in time than for any reason related to intimate interactions or mountaintop experiences. We did it, and that was the first rung of the ladder we needed to know we could reach—having done that, this Supper & Songs was a success more because we already knew we could “do it,” and were able to focus with more purpose on our part in the event: extending our songs to one another and to the audience gathered there, and doing it whole-heartedly. Isolation has little power over me at times like these—when beloved characters in my world have opened their home to strangers and friends alike, and their home feels like my home. When one community mingles with another over a meal, and I am reminded what it will be like never to miss anyone or feel the absence of a friend again, when division is a forgotten concept. Then I notice one person sitting alone for a time before some other guests wander over and eat with him, and I wonder if he feels welcome and wanted or if the sensation of being on the outside has taken a toll that can’t be remedied. And there’s one gentleman who doesn’t appear necessarily comfortable when our host prays over the meal, and I see played out in my imagination how healing or how alienating this night might end up being for him. And there’s a young woman who came to the show by herself, and for a heart-stopping second I am perhaps more nervous than she is that she will continue feeling she is by herself. This home and the people I know who are crowding it have made me feel so safe and so cherished countless times before that the thought of someone not feeling they have a place at this table makes me almost too antsy to eat with everyone. And again, I feel the loneliness is everywhere, and we are starved for relief from it. Of course I had no real way of identifying whether anyone felt this way without asking outright, and as the night wore on it became clear that people felt comfortable, a part of something, invited into it. It became clear as they fawned over watermelon and feta salad without reservation, exchanged stories of where they were from and where they were headed, and sang along with songs we taught them. Long before the music ended it was apparent we had succeeded in more than cooking pasta this time around—people were together. We were not alone, even if some of us felt certain we were before the ice cream sandwiches were passed out and the music began. For me, Supper & Songs flies in the face of succumbing to loneliness, which can persuade us that our need for care and closeness with another person or group is too abysmal to be met, so we may as well quarantine ourselves and be spared the ache of unfulfilled hopes. I was reminded on Monday that, whether people feel generally alone or not, coming together is a must. It fights off separation, both manufactured and natural. It celebrates love and spreads life. In feeling connected to others myself last Monday, I stopped my anxious watchfulness and slipped into just being myself, free to be free. We were never meant to be alone, and it’s good (to say the least) to be involved in work that restores that truth to me. I am hopeful that it continues restoring that truth to everyone who comes through the door next time as well. You can learn more about Supper & Songs and The Orchardist here. And learn more about guest artist Jordy Searcy here. Christopher Williams hosted this last Supper & Songs show. Visit his website here.

By now, many of you may know that the Internet blew up last weekend over Childish Gambino’s music video for his new song, “This Is America.” As of the time I’m typing this, five days after release, the video has racked up over 63 million views and probably about as many think pieces. Childish Gambino is the musical alter ego of comedian and actor Donald Glover, known by many for playing Troy on the TV show Community, and soon to hit movie screens as Lando Calrissian in the new Han Solo film. Childish Gambino seemed to start out as a silly side project, but in recent years has gained Glover critical traction with his most recent album Awaken, My Love! which garnered several Grammy nominations and wins. Glover has now capitalized on this positive wave with a stunning video capturing the plight of contemporary African-American life. I should note that I am probably the least qualified person to write this type of piece, in that I rarely listen to rap or hip-hop music. I’ve listened to some Lecrae, and more Propaganda. I’ve dabbled in Kendrick Lamar and Chance and Kanye. Nevertheless, I was stunned when I casually came across the video while scrolling through social media and decided to watch it. I’ve watched the video and listened to the songs multiple times since then, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Note: this video contains some graphic and disturbing violence as well as graphic language. There are certainly many things I could say about this video politically and culturally, but as I mentioned, you can go and read one of the 63 million think pieces already written about the video to delve into that. I want to focus on the ways that Glover tells an excellent visual and musical story. Musical Storytelling In part, Glover is commenting on American culture and our propensity to whiplash between violence and entertainment, and how we distract ourselves from cultural chaos. One of the ways he does this is through the music itself. “This Is America” starts with an upbeat African-style chant and guitar-picking riff while Glover sings, “We just wanna party/party just for you”. The song then abruptly shifts into a growling ominous trap-style bass riff while Glover raps, “This is America/Don’t catch you slippin’ up”. Then the song jumps back into a Gospel choir sounding chorus. The song keeps jumping between these two poles of light and dark throughout, whipping us back and forth tonally. Lyrically, the lighter sounding parts of the song include cliche dance party lyrics, while the darker parts include lyrics like “This how I’m living now/Police be trippin’ now/Yeah, this is America/Guns in my area.” In this way the music and lyrics reinforce each other tonally. Visual Storytelling The visual storytelling of the music video adds a whole collection of other layers to the song. As in the song itself, the video shifts tonally between upbeat dancing and violence, such as when Glover shifts from exaggerated dance moves to shooting a guitarist in the back of the head at point blank range, or when he jauntily side-steps into a room and then mows down a black Gospel choir with an AK-47. Before you have time to even process what’s happened, you’re distracted by Glover and his crew of dancing black school children. Again, the point is to make a comment on how we in America shift from horrific acts of public violence to whatever the newest trend on social media is. The other fascinating thing about this video is that, while we are being distracted by Glover’s dancing, there are layers of storytelling going on in the background of the video. I had to watch it several times to start noticing the added details. The entire video takes place in a vast empty warehouse, so that as Glover is dancing and moving around, we also see a chaotic scene evolving and playing out behind him, a scene which evokes ghetto landscapes, police shootings in recent years, the resulting riots and protests in response to some of these shootings, and the spectre of one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Death, riding in the midst of the destruction. This is a video that bears, nay, requires repeated viewing to truly appreciate all the important details going on. I am amazed at how Donald Glover has created a timely, powerful music video that speaks to contemporary America, yet stands on its own as a piece of art that doesn’t come off as preachy. One hopes that it will continue to resonate and spark powerful conversations in our divided culture. To delve deeper into “This Is America,” consider checking out some of the articles listed here.

Ben Shive wrote and recorded this one for his first record several years ago, and I told him immediately that I wanted to record it for Resurrection Letters: Vol. I. It’s not only about our resurrection on the last day, but God’s promise to return and make all things right again. It’s such an honor to cover a song by one of the finest songwriters I’ve ever known. You can pick up Resurrection Letters: Volume I in the Rabbit Room Store and listen to “Rise Up” here:https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/12_Rise-Up-1.mp3

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Taylor Leonhardt, whose album River House has thoroughly caught the Rabbit Room’s attention with its lyrical subtlety and invitational, spacious production style. Whether you are already familiar with this album or new to the scene, this interview will have something for you. Taylor Leonhardt will be joined tonight at the last Local Show of the season by John Tibbs, Andy Gullahorn, and Jill Phillips, and there are still a few tickets left. You can grab them here at the Rabbit Room Store. Drew: I’d love to get some backstory on how you got into music and songwriting. What’s that story for you? Taylor: Music was always on in my childhood. My parents will say I’ve always had an inclination towards music, and I always loved listening, especially to whatever my dad was listening to. Then in middle school, two things happened: first, I was singing in the congregation one day and a woman leaned over and told me I should be in the choir. That was the first time I realized people liked how my voice sounded. I tried out for church and school choir because of that comment, so that was an essential thing for me. The other thing is that we moved from big city Houston to a small town in Texas, and it took me a little while to make friends. So I hung out at home a lot and my dad would pull his guitar down from his closet and play me Creedence Clearwater Revival and The Eagles, old country like Don Williams, Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, and so on. I would just watch and pay attention, and one day it clicked that if I learned how to play guitar, I could accompany myself. There was also something really compelling to me about listening to words being sung—it occurred to me that I could write my own songs, so I got my dad to show me standard guitar chords, and from there I looked up chord charts for all kinds of songs and figured out how to play my favorites. It was truly a hobby until college, when I started taking it more seriously, and I would play gigs and open mic nights with friends. I was a bit reluctant there, because the performance aspect scared me. I had grown up in choir, but it’s more vulnerable to sing alone. But I grew a little bit of confidence, and then there was one very significant moment when I was leading worship at church and someone said, “Hey, we just went to this thing called a house concert, and we loved it! We really want to host one, and we want you to be our first artist.” So I agreed and played all the songs I had! That night I felt something profound, this deep sense of the delight of God. I felt his pleasure that evening and realized I was connected to something much bigger than me. I was very nervous but it was also such a joyful time. From that point on, I decided to pursue music. Drew: Your story reminds me of conversion stories—some people have one specific life-changing moment they can point to and others speak of it as more of an ongoing process. It’s cool that you had a specific day where your pursuit of music began. Taylor: It was helpful for me to remember later on how I felt that day. At the times when I’ve been less sure of my craft, I’ve been able to think back to how I felt at that first house concert. And I’ve done so many house shows now—every one of them is different, but they always foster deep connection. Drew: So you said five years ago you began pursuing music seriously, then you released your first full-length record last fall. What’s the story between those two points? How have the past five years led you to River House? Taylor: Well first, I was aware that I needed to grow in my craft as a writer, so before I recorded an EP, I set out to discern what I wanted to say and how to say it. I was fortunate to meet some people in Raleigh who are excellent writers, like Christa Wells and Jess Ray. The two of them became close friends and I’ve received so much wisdom from them. Then I recorded an EP and Jess produced it. At first, I merely wanted some demos to have some songs recorded, but not necessarily in a professional way yet. We started recording in this fledgling home studio Jess had set up, then about halfway through we realized it sounded really good. So we decided to put a little more time and money into the project and made the demos into an acoustic EP. As soon as I released that in 2013, it opened the floodgates for me with writing. I got tired of old songs so quickly and all I wanted to do was write new songs. From there, I had a year and a half or so of some pretty intense inspiration. I had about twenty songs I really liked at that point, which we whittled down to what ended up on River House. Drew: It seems that your story is so interconnected with the stories of others surrounding you. I love that because I think that’s really the way it works: when we’re pursuing what we love and learning who we are, that tends to happen in community. I’m sure you’ve heard the Rabbit Room mantra, “Art nourishes community and community nourishes art.” I wonder if you have any specific stories about discovering your voice, where that was happening in tandem with the encouraging voices of others, in the context of friendships and relationships. How have you most powerfully seen art and community interact in this symbiotic relationship? Taylor: I remember telling friends and family at some point that I was working a lot with these two other artists in Raleigh, that we were playing a lot of shows together and such. Because at this point, Jess and I had gone on several tours together where I would open and back her up or vice versa, and the same thing with Christa. I enjoyed that so much because I’d rather get in the car with a friend or two than by myself. I loved it and would tell folks about that and sometimes get the response of, “Aren’t these people technically your competition?” It made me realize that I had never thought to look at it that way, to see others as competition. I had lived a lot of my life with the intuition that everyone can be your teacher. We all have something to give to each other. I have felt that in my friendships with those two women especially, Christa and Jess. There may be times where I take a supporting role with what they’re doing, but then there are other times, like when I was recording River House, when I was deeply supported as well. It was in the process of crowdfunding and making that record that I most felt how people are so happy to be part of what you’re doing. It’s special to invite others in. It’s such a joy to listen back—albums act as these really cool pieces of my life, documenting the help of all the folks who were involved. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it looks like to celebrate other people rather than compete with them. It’s that whole idea of a Kingdom economy—in God’s world there’s no lack. We can celebrate other people and share in their joy because that doesn’t mean there’s less joy, life, or love for us. I’ve seen that fleshed out in my music community here in Raleigh, as well as in Nashville with the Rabbit Room: a real delight in celebrating others and pointing out the good work being done. Drew: One of my favorite professors has pointed out that the very act of singing together almost has to be a celebration of each other. For me to sing, for my voice to occupy the air around us, doesn’t mean that your voice can’t occupy the same air. Our voices help each other and the harmony that’s achieved is more than the sum of its parts. With River House, that was something that struck me as I was listening: there’s a subtlety to the songs and their delivery, on your part as well as on the part of all the musicians involved. There’s so much space, and I think it’s one of the real virtues of the record. Was that purposeful? I know often it’s not at all, then you look back and see it’s there. But did you notice that sense of hospitality and spaciousness developing as you worked on the record? Taylor: That’s so interesting that you’re hearing that, because from the beginning I did want the songs on River House to be all about making space for people and inviting them to reconsider who God is, what they’ve imagined him to be like versus how he’s revealed himself. From start to finish, those songs are very much about God becoming more than just an idea I’ve mentally assented to. When we actually listen for him, we come face-to-face with him and see that he’s real, that his heart beats. One of my favorite lines from a song recently is Andrew Peterson’s “His Heart Beats.” Every time I get to that line, it’s just amazing to think, “he has a beating heart!” I wanted to make space for myself and others to hear God. The songs are invitational in that way. We didn’t sit down at the beginning and try to make the songs musically spacious as well, but I do think the musical form naturally followed what our hearts were after to begin with. We were just trying to let the songs be what they wanted to be. “Spacious” is a word I’ve heard used to describe the record a lot, and I’m very glad it has been that for people. Drew: One song that serves as a great example of this is “Would You Be Well.” I was about halfway through the song when I realized, “This song doesn’t have a chorus!” Not that songs have to have choruses, of course, and if it had any kind of refrain, it would probably just strain the song and make it try too hard to say what it’s saying. But instead, each verse ends and then puts you in this instrumental space afterwards to let those words you’ve just sung sink in. And that’s very effective. Taylor: Sometimes I try in the writing process to squeeze more out of a song than I should, maybe add a pre-chorus or bridge or something, and I do remember wondering if that particular song needed a chorus. I wrote it for someone in my family who had been far from joy for a long time. I wanted so badly to have the right thing to say to him, a solution, but I didn’t. There was no magic word that would make him well, but what I could do was hold that space for him. That song became a prayer. So I think it’s fitting that when you get to the part where you expect a chorus, the words stop. Drew: It works so well. One thing Pete Peterson has talked about, and I think this is a great observation, is that we really neglect the work that comes after releasing a project, whether it’s a book or album or whatever. We put so much effort into the making of it and the releasing of it, but then after that, the shape of the work shifts. It’s not over just because it’s released; you really have to sustain it and fight for it, make sure people hear it. You released River House in September of last year, so it hasn’t been a year yet, but you’re rounding that corner. I would love to know how the shape of your work has shifted since putting this full-length album into the world. Taylor: That’s such a great question. I appreciate it because I think people often jump to the next thing too quickly. I’ve already gotten lots of questions about when the next record is coming out. I’m not there yet at all. I’m still just laying in the middle of this one! When I released my EP I was ready to jump into the next project, but with River House, it’s been around eight months and I still feel like I’m right in the middle of it. We did the release show, and then I really wanted to do a tour, so I planned a fall house concert tour with Carly Bannister. For most house show tours I’ve done, I’ve been more of a supporting artist, so it was new for me to take the reigns on booking. I learned so much and discovered that my songs were really finding a home in people. Then in the spring, I jumped on this International Justice Mission tour with Jess Ray and ForBrothers. The shape of my work has looked like getting these songs in front of people who haven’t met them or met me yet, and it’s been a joy. I also love the way that songs take a new shape after their release. They live in such a specific place in your soul, then when you share them, you give up your rights of interpretation. I love hearing how particular songs are connecting with others in unique ways that I may not expect. I still feel very much inside of River House creatively—I haven’t written very much since. The common fear writers have is, “Have I written my last good song? Are there any more?” So I have glimpses of that fleeting fear, but life has proven so far that there are always new expressions around the corner; it’s just hard to think of them before their time. Drew: Everybody’s always in a certain season of life, and it’s no use trying to live in another one. Taylor: Right. I think the best advice I’ve ever received is to simply be faithful to what’s in front of you. When I worry too much about the next album, how long it will take to put out something new, when I’ll be able to play at larger venues, whatever the thing is that you can target as you look at other people’s progress and compare yourself—not that there’s no place for making real goals—but there’s always such great peace and good medicine in asking what’s in front of me right now, what audience the Lord has given me, what are the songs, and be faithful to that. I love playing house concerts, these smaller, intimate shows we’ve been doing, and I think it will continue to look like that for me for a little while. The shape of my work has felt like going into new living rooms and churches, making friends, and doing it again and again. You develop relationships along the way, come back and visit people, and so on. I like that vision for a music career, and I’m glad to be in the middle of it. You can listen to the opening track from River House, “Everything,” below and purchase tickets for tonight’s Local Show here.https://rabbitroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/01-Everything-1.mp3

I grew up in the foothills of North Carolina. My childhood was surrounded by winding creeks, endless tobacco fields, and those mystical mountains always on the horizon. I could see it all from the car window on my way to school and from the back deck of my parents’ yard. I could see that the world was big and beautiful; it was wide and deep, full of mystery and wonder. But I could see it—from the car, from the deck, from books and movies and photos—only as others went on ahead of me. You see, I was born with a disease called Spinal Muscular Dystrophy, which renders me disabled and bound to a wheelchair. And while my parents were amazing in giving me unique experiences and being creative with accessibility, there were just some things we hadn’t gotten around to yet, namely those open, endless fields. I shared this thought once with my friend Tom on an early summer road trip. “If I was able-bodied,” I told my friend, “I’d pull my car off the highway and just take off on foot into those fields.” “What then?” he asked. “Then,” I said, “I’d get out to the middle, and I’d stand there. That’s it. Just stand, by myself, out in the open of opens—no interference, no distraction, just the field below and sky above. I think then, maybe—just maybe—I could finally feel free. I could breathe deep, calm my heart, clear my head.” We decided to get a group of guys together and backpack around Europe. The trick, though, was that I was the backpack. Kevan Chandler This was my dream, and I had imagined it a thousand times. The run through a field, the walk through a wood, standing out amid the color green. I had stretched my mind past breaking to set myself there, day after day, night after night, dream after dream. This was the closest I would come, I figured, to that experience this side of eternity. But Tom had something else in mind. Two years ago, he and I had a crazy idea. We decided to get a group of guys together and backpack around Europe. The trick, though, was that I was the backpack. Tom and three other friends carried me in a specially designed backpack for a three-week adventure none of us would ever forget. We danced in the streets of Paris, we explored an ancient monastery off the coast of Ireland, and we even hiked the English countryside. Our host in England was a man named Mike. He boasted a long neck and even longer nose, looking a lot like Wallace from “Wallace and Grommet,” and he had the accent to match it. He was a property manager for his little town, so everyone knew him and treated him a bit like a godfather for the area. As we passed through town with him in the afternoons, he’d shake hands with everyone we met and greet them by name. And when we were out without him, the townsfolk called us “Mike’s friends” with smiles and pleasantries. Mike also volunteered with the National Trust, helping tend to the land around his childhood home, so one morning, he decided we should go for a hike to see the area. A six mile hike that promised woods, hills, valleys, fences, cows, and a pub at the end. So, we set off. We crept through woods draped in gray haze, and I could’ve sworn I saw Robin Hood slip between the trees. We hopped over old fences from one pasture to another. And the guys steadied one another as we scaled muddy inclines, cows watching us from their lounging spots in the grass to our left. Mike, Tom, and two others took turns carrying me in the backpack as we saw the great world of English legend and lore. “Nearly there,” Mike announced as we broke through another forest edge. He pointed to a knoll up ahead. “Just over that hill we’ll head back into town.” I was on Tom’s back for this last leg of the journey. And as we crested the hill, bright and green, Tom paused and looked around. The woods stood at our backs and to our right, fields to our left, and before us, maybe a mile down the hill, stood quietly the town and pub. Above us, the sky was a striking blue with tattered white clouds passing by like driftwood. “This will do just fine,” Tom said. I took a deep breath and agreed. It was a beautiful sight. But that was only half of what he meant. “Guys,” he beckoned, and the others came to help dismount me from his shoulders. They set me, in the backpack, on the ground, feet in the tall grass, my arms resting on my knees, facing the town ahead and the hill country beyond. Then, they left. “Where are you guys going,” I asked as they moseyed off behind me. “We’ll be over by those trees,” Tom called back. “When will you be back?” I asked. “In a bit,” he said simply. “We’re in a field, man. This is your chance.” I was suddenly alone. By myself. In the open of opens. As my friends’ voices trailed off behind me, I settled at last into the truth of where I was sitting, of what I was doing. And it may not have been my exact vision—running into a field and, of course, standing. But I was in a field and I was alone. I took in a deep breath, scanning the horizon, the sky, and even the grass around me. I let my sight sink into the trees, and I watched the clouds like they were passersby on a city street. The town below lay tranquil while beyond it the hills brimmed with centuries of life. And though they were still far off, as such places have been all my life, they were tangible now because I was among them, part of their existence. I was sitting atop one of their number and so I sat atop them all. And on this hillside, my heart calmed, my head cleared, and I felt free. We hope to demonstrate that life is full of possibility and hope, that disability doesn’t mean inability. Kevan Chandler Since returning from Europe, I have been working with Tom and dozens of volunteers to make this experience of freedom a reality for other folks with disabilities. A lot of this starts with redefining accessibility as a cooperative effort, people helping people. An amazing example of this is in the work of a nonprofit called Show Hope. They work tirelessly in care centers to serve orphans who live with severe disabilities, specifically in China. The team and I have the privilege of visiting these care centers this year, in August and September, to spend time with the children and be an encouragement to them, as well as the staff and their surrounding communities. In meeting with these kids and their caregivers, we hope to demonstrate that life is full of possibility and hope, that disability doesn’t mean inability. We all have limitations, but through creativity, courage, and community, we can move beyond those limitations and embrace our full potential. We are excited to take on this new kind of adventure, giving back to others, but we need your financial help to make this happen. Join us by following along on social media and spreading the word. We want you to be part of the experience, part of the story. You are invited to help “carry Kevan” and in doing so, carry so many more. [Learn about about We Carry Kevan at their website here. And click here to visit their GoFundMe campaign and help them get to China.]