If this means watching fewer films, so be it. Only go to see the few that interest you. Don’t go and see everything that comes out of the off-chance some of it might be good.

No only will you save quite a bit of money, but you’ll expose yourself to a whole raft of new things you’d never have though of finding before. After all, when you turn off your shitty radio station, you have time to fill the silence with something new. And believe me, with the amount of stuff out there, you’ll find something new and interesting before you know it.

As a society we’re quite tolerant of things that don’t last. For most things, that’s fine. History will sort it out. But if everything is impermanent, if everything is disposable, if everything is crap, where’s the 10% that history can sort out?

You Shouldn’t Like Everything originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-11-06.

There’s something about your initiation into something. A different world of, say, adulthood, or a realm of things previously hidden. Jars of Clay made me think “wow, you can do that?” with music.

Since then, we’ve parted ways a bit. Where Jars of Clay has gone the way of accessible, Christian-friendly music, I’ve been plumbing the depths of the odd and unusual.

This would be where I used to nose the ceiling a bit, but let’s just admit there’s different kinds of music for different kinds of people. And that’s a good thing. Not everyone like Sufjan Stevens, and not everyone likes Kelly Clarkson. That’s just the way it is. I like music with adventure. That’s just who I am. My taste in music isn’t magically better than yours, but please don’t take it badly if I suggest a few diversions from the tried and true. Again, that’s just who I am.

This was were it all began. Strings boiling to the surface, fantastic grooves, obtuse or at least semi-opaque lyrics, and great tunes. The production here was obviously done on a shoestring, but none of the songs falter for it. Even its most celebrated child, Flood was an oddly monochromatic journey, an almost-minimalistic acoustic rock song unlike any I had heard before.

This album changed me. I don’t mean to be melodramatic. It really did. I still listen to this release, not simply for the nostalgia (listening to MWS’s “Change Your World” was built for that, I think), but also because it’s really, really great music.

There must have been so much pressure on the group after the phenomenal success of their debut. It must have been awful trying to make music under that much pressure. But they did.

I’ll admit, I didn’t like “Much Afraid” when it first came out. I listened to it but didn’t buy it. It seemed a radical departure from their sound (though I imagine they’d say their first album was the radical departure). It wasn’t, at least to me, very Jars of Clay. Real drums? Regular tunings? No strange lyrical and musical twists?

Years later, I’ve come back and looked “Much Afraid” in the face. I can see why they named it that. I can see how much time and effort they poured into the record trying to make it solid and original, and I like it for that. The standout songs–not the obvious radio hits–are far better than I remember them. Overjoyed in particular is a wonderful tribute to the craft of songwriting.

I’m sorry I didn’t get it for so long. I really am. But I’m glad I came back to this (and I have to thank Laura for that, mostly; she insisted on listening to it even when I didn’t feel like it), and as time has worn on “Much Afraid” has gotten better and better.

I think every band has this record. They’re sick of the grind, they’re sick of the pressure, and they bring in a well-known producer to make a different sort of album. Of course, I hadn’t exactly had enough time to get used to any particular Jars of Clay sound, so they didn’t really have a left field for me. Then “If I Left The Zoo” came out of, and defined, their left field.

I get it. I do. You want to throw a curve ball. Some of the best music I’ve heard (“Kid A”, anyone?) comes out of left field. But for me, this records felt, and still feels, over-produced. As if they’re trying to hard to be different and original and weird and quirky. I don’t like it. I really tried to like it when I first bought the record, but this is one record that really, really didn’t improve with repeated listens. And now, staring down the barrel of history, it hasn’t improved with time, either.

I realize I’m not supposed to like this album. It’s straight-up radio-friendly pop. There’s nothing challenging about it. It’s smooth like wine from a box is smooth. And yet I love it.

Don’t confuse me with a hipster, here. I don’t like it because I’m not supposed to like it. I like it in spite of that. Maybe it was what I was going through at the time, but a lot of these songs hit a chord of unrequited love and longing. The songs still bring me back to that place, to a shadow of those feelings.

And that’s the ball game. If a song can make you feel without feeling manipulated, it’s good. It’s really that simple. (Of course, not all music is built to make you feel. Steve Reich can pretty much fill up that corner of the room by himself. But feelings are a really, really great shortcut to the logic of living.)

Furthermore is how Jars of Clay does a retrospective. It’s really cool. I love it when bands release two, three, even four versions of a song. I love to examine a piece of music from all angles, like a well-designed automobile or an elegant woman. Getting these stripped-down versions of classic Jars of Clay songs was a fitting gift for the band’s fans, I think. And most of them worked very well, except for the songs from “Eleventh Hour”, which sounded pretty much the same.

If I could ask for one thing, I’d be that every band’s retrospective delivers like “Furthermore” did.

And I guess this is how Jars of Clay does a worship album. I’m sure this bad boy was stipulated in their contract somewhere. There’s a lot of faint praise to be had for this album. If I say it stands head and shoulders above other albums in its genre, that’s hardly a compliment.

It’s solid, I guess. Some of the hymns sound awkward being shoe-horned into modern tunes. Also, it’s hymns, right? I don’t listen to Jars of Clay to hear somebody else’s songs.

I’m probably not alone in having a hard time figuring out what this album is supposed to be. There doesn’t seem to be a grand thread holding it together. More than anything, it feels like a collection of songs someone happened to have lying around, and a lap steel & slide someone else had just learned to play.

Not to say there aren’t any great songs on here. There are plenty. A couple stinkers, but a lot of really great music. I’m hoping that “Who We Are Instead” improves with age like “Much Afraid” did. I really do want to come back to this a few years down the road and appreciate it more then than I do now.

Ah, “Good Monsters”. How I hate you.

This is where Jars of Clay and I really parted company. I can’t stand the sound of this record. It completely turned me off of Jars of Clay. I hate to say it, but it’s true: This album is the point where I went from being a peripheral fan to not being a fan at all.

More uncharted territory for the band, yes. But not all uncharted territory is good territory. Nothing about this record plays to the band’s strengths.

I listened to it a few times, pained, and I’ve never gone back.

When Derek Webb released “Stockholm Syndrome”, I wasn’t sure what to think. How could someone seemingly so deep in the countryside of acoustic music ever release an essentially electronic album? Of course, Derek always finds ways to surprise (and sometimes shock). It worked for him.

It kind of worked for Jars of Clay. Where they lean on electronica heavily, the album succeeds. Where they drift back into saccharine adult contemporary pop, it doesn’t.

I really need to listen to this album again. Maybe even a few times, just to get a grip on what they’ve done and what they’ve tried to. But you know what? I’m not terribly driven to do it.

It’s not that I’ve gone somewhere odd. I still like the same sort of music I always did. Caedmon’s Call still manages to crank out great albums after all these years, albums that play to their strengths. I haven’t started to look down on anything that isn’t semi-ambient metal drone.

Honestly, I don’t think it’s me. I think it’s Jars of Clay. I think they’ve taken the inventiveness of their earlier music and traded it in for a sort of comfortable living deep in the sleepy hills of the Shire. (Third wall: I almost typed “shite” there.) While the rest of the music world is doing things and going places, they’re just sort of meandering along, making smooth song after smooth song.

If this depresses you, you’re not alone. It’s been a long time now; I’d love to plead with Jars of Clay to see the art in themselves.

Jars of Clay: A Retrospective originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-08-19.

I get this a lot when talking about worship, and I see it in myself too. I lean towards new music. I like to sing songs that reflect my comfort zones, songs that exist in my vernacular.

There’s something disconnected about that, I think. Something off. I mean, we don’t exist apart from the rest of church history. Why would we sing only our own songs? Why not the songs (and Psalms, too; remember that Israel is as much a part of church history as the early church) of our forefathers? We have their faith, after all. We use their theological terms. We rest our faith at least partly on the tradition passed down through history. So why do we so quickly jettison one of the great traditions of the church, namely the songs?

Giving the saints of yesteryear a voice in the goings-on of the modern church is a good exercise in continuity that we’re missing out on. Hymns and psalms aren’t just for the grumpy old people ossifying in their seats. They’re for everyone; they’re a way of saying that we place ourselves firmly in the flow of church history, that we’re not modernist snobs who think we’ve got the best music ever invented.

There’s another question, about why we assume that people jumping around and showing energy and “getting into” the music is always a good thing, or why we assume the Holy Spirit is synonymous with adrenaline, but I’ll leave that for another time.

Worship music originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2010-04-14.

First off, Herik Jose doesn’t have an album per se, but he sure does have some great music. IDM-influenced with gorgeous vocals and strong melody lines, you can think of him as Postal Service without the bluster and bad metaphors. Free downloads too, by the way.

Jack Penate is a lot of things, but subtle isn’t really one of them. Ballsy dance-rock. “Be The One” stands out on Everything Is New.

I want you to listen to Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit because I they’ve mastered that sort of bluesy slow rock that goes well with whiskey and cigars. Also, great to play along with.

John Paul Keith and the Four One Fives (what’s with all the “and the numbers”?) are throwbacks to another, much more awesome time. Some clear 60s influences here. Awesome music. If it doesn’t force you to get up and dance your legs off, you’ve got problems. Or fewer legs than you should.

Oh dear Kanye West. You’re so ubiquitous that I won’t even link to you. Normally your albums have one, maybe two good songs on them. And then you come out with this. Autotune notwithstanding, 808s and Heartbreak is very, very good. “Paranoid” is wonderful, as is “Love Lockdown”. “Heartless”, though, is clearly the stand-out track.

If you don’t like Ohbijou’s “Beacons”, you clearly have no soul. This is the kind of pop music heaven should be filled with. Perhaps a touch too pitch-perfect, but still. Listen and weep.

Some New Music originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2009-08-25.

Being part of the whole thing, though, has led me to some observations about our team in particular (observations that would probably be pretty boring to most people, on the whole) and observations about worship teams in general. The general observations are what I’m most interested in, and I think you might be too.

Most worship teams are awful. Just completely awful. They’re awful for several reasons. First, they don’t have the skill as musicians. Second, they have no concept of what it takes to make a good worship team. Third, they don’t have any concept of good music.

My personal opinion is that if you aren’t any good, you shouldn’t play. You’re going to distract from worship, not aid it. After all, isn’t that what worship bands are there for? It’s an aid, to lead in worship, to help the church as a whole worship God. What form that takes is largely irrelevant (though of course there are excesses I won’t even touch on here). The fact is, if you’re distracting people from worshipping, you’re being counter-productive and should remove yourself from the team, or be removed from the team.

This doesn’t happen often enough because team leaders don’t understand what makes a good team and what makes good music, two things I think are closely related. A lot of bands simply throw as many people as they can must up on stage and get everyone to play their hearts out. Though this might seem like a great idea (what’s better than people playing their hearts out?), it usually isn’t. It takes a lot of practice and a good deal of synergy to work as a team, to understand what each other is doing, and especially if you don’t have a lot of time to practice, to know each other well enough that you can predict the direction of the music.

That becomes more difficult the more people you have in the team. Fewer in this instance is almost certainly better. If you have a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer who are really tight, you don’t need to throw in a percussionist, a pianist, a vocalist, and some interpretive dance. Not only will this make playing together, really together, harder, it’s going to make everything harder. The more instruments you have, the more setup is involved, the harder it is to mix well, and the worse the band is going to sound as whole. It’s just really hard to have seven people making great music.

Not only that, every song has a different feel and a different way it can be played. Some songs are guitar-driven and should stay that way. Other songs are keyboard driven, hymns in particular, and no matter how you try and spice them up, they should stay keyboard driven. When you have six, seven, eight people, everyone has the tendency to play at once. Not only does this generally make an awful din, it does disservice to the songs you’re playing.

I say this as a keyboardist who finds himself almost always superfluous. We have a lead guitarist/vocalist, a backup guitarist/vocalist, another vocalist, a bassist, a drummer, a percussionist, and a keyboardists. Personally, I think that number of people is absurdly hard to make good music with. The leader of a band of that many people is going to have to be good at arranging music and the players themselves will have to practice a lot. Barring that, people are just going to have to sit out a bunch of songs. The leader is going to have to tell his band that they can’t all play at once, that some people are just going to have to sit out some songs, and that if they want a pleasing sound instead of a jumbled cacophony, they’re going to have to put some limits of who’s playing what when.

Of course, this doesn’t happen for a variety of reasons. It goes back to leaders not knowing what good music is, or leaders simply not wanting to hurt feelings or cause conflict. I mean, sure, it’s possible that you’ll find eight people in your church who can play together naturally and not sound like a bunch of monkeys beating on tin cans, but how likely is that?

Some worship teams aren’t awful, of course. If you do it right, you can make really, really good music and aid in worship at the same time. You can be innovative and fresh without being obtrusive and annoying. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, mostly at churches who have an artistic vision for their worship teams, who have a large talent pool, and who have leaders who aren’t afraid to tell some people to stop playing or dial it back.

If I could say one thing to worship teams around the world it would be this: Bigger isn’t better. Bigger is almost always worse. Think about what you’re trying to do and do that. Put some thought into it. Make a structure and build around it. Figure out what style of music you want to play and then do what you have to in order to play that music with skill and restraint. Don’t just throw people at a stage and hope that they’ll work well together. Figure out what works and go with that. If something isn’t working, don’t do it. If you don’t know what good music is, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know how to co-operate, don’t be in a band. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t lead a band, for goodness sake!

In the end I ask this: Is the tendency toward bigger bands really better than a solitary pianist or a three-piece acoustic band? If it isn’t, why are you doing it?

Observations on worship teams. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2009-01-19.

In any case, I figure if I can subject myself to “The Rite of Spring” at the TSO and have to deal with music that hasn’t any meaningful harmony or structure, the least I can do to achieve balance is imbibe a great deal of music that’s nothing but.

There is still good in the world. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-12-09.

Bullet Points for a Friday Afternoon originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-10-03.

Things I think about whilst doing dishes… part the second. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-22.

Things I think about whilst doing dishes… originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-19.

Scatterbrain – Ogg Vorbis
Scatterbrain – MP3

Everything I record these days seems to have a ringing noise at the high end… anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem?

Scatterbrain originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-08-18.

I have written the greatest post-rock ever!

Except it’s just me and my electric guitar and my foot pedal and my microphone and Ardour and Hydrogen and Jack on Ubuntu. But it works!

Hey look, I’m Pelican, Explosions in the Sky, and Sickoaks. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-05-28.

Last.fm and my scrupulously collected statistics to the rescue. I present for your consideration the top fifteen or so.

1. Philip Glass
2. Band of Horses
3. Sufjan Stevens
4. The Books
5. Boards of Canada
6. Snow Patrol
7. Derek Webb
8. Radiohead
9. Death Cab for Cutie
10. Iron & Wine
11. Modest Mouse
12. Bright Eyes
13. Steve Reich
14. Grandaddy
15. Andrew Bird

That Boards of Canada is on that list surprises even me. I had no idea.

My Favourite Bands originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-04-14.

Bullet points for a Wednesday Morning. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2008-02-20.

• Ubuntu, the best operating system for me, bar none. Seriously, try it out, see if you like it.
• Hydrogen, a wonderful little drum machine. One of my favourite applications.
• Ardour, a digital audio workstation. Free, open-souce, and I’m pretty sure I’m only using about 1% of its functionality. Is better for me than Audacity was ;)

With no further ado (as none is needed) I present the song as both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis.

Ghetto (OV)
Ghetto (MP3)

This work is licensed as per:

Ghetto (it’s a new song, it’s been too long, etc, etc) originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-12-23.

In that vein, let me comment.

There are several important factors to take into consideration here. First, I don’t think young people today have less of a moral bent than their parents. But let’s assume they do for a second, and ask where this dubious shift in morality comes from. Obviously, parents shoulder part of blame, as does society at large for situational morality. Yet, one can point to the big media companies who have for years put out product that glorifies every manner of immoral behaviour (showing, of course, these companies’ lack of moral fibre: they’ll do anything to make a buck, sell anything as long as it turns a profit), and I think you’ll feel a lot less sorry for them as they lie in the bed they’ve made. I think we call this, “sowing the seeds of your own destruction”.

Whether or not today’s youth have no moral compass, while an interesting question, is less pertinent to me than simple market economics.

When I buy something, it belongs to me. This is a central understanding in most of history’s transactions, except where otherwise stated, or where it’s obvious that you have to give it back.

When something belongs to me, I can do what I like with it, within reasonable limits. This is true of everything I own, from my house to my car. However, when media companies sell you something, they seem to believe it is still theirs, that they can tell you what to do with it, and even though you never have to give it back, that they can somehow control its use. This runs against human nature, though, and they should be thoroughly unsurprised when people invent tools to enable them to do what they like with what they own. This is one market, the ability to do what I like with what I own (device-shift, share, lend, et cetera).

Another market is in obtaining media. Right now the easiest way to get media is on the internet. Content owners saw this coming and did nothing to corner this market, for whatever reason. Another market a black/grey market sprung up to distribute media. When the content owners eventually came to their senses they were relegated to a ghetto of their own making, and with the lackluster efforts thus far, will continue to be. Not to mention that the media distributed by these content owners tends to be low-quality and locked into a specific device/format. Doubly ironic is that file-sharers can get a better copy (and keep in mind that this has not been historically true in many other black/grey markets) and a copy that they can do with as they see fit. Those who keep the law are penalised by the content providers and legislators who give them an inferior product, and those who break the law are rewarded by better availability and a better product.

The media companies have done their monopolies unimaginable harm in not taking the internet seriously. Much like IBM ceding control of the entire personal computing market to Microsoft, the content providers have dropped the ball so hard and so far that they seem unable to even find it to pick it up again. If anything, they seem to be hellbent on securing their place in the dustbin of history.

People take the path of least resistance. This isn’t about morality. It’s about the who will provide the best market for goods. And the content providers still don’t get that.

Add to this that (obviously) illegal and immoral are not bound at the hip. Plenty of things become illegal without being immoral. And when media companies begin to (obviously) buy the allegiances of politicians to see draconian laws made to limit how people may use what they have purchased, the immorality of file-sharing (for instance) becomes even more of a grey area.

The causes of this “moral shift” are many and varied. The internet is not an easy thing to adjust to, especially for monopolies (see Microsoft as an example). However, if the content providers made a better product, if they had more availability, and if the price was reasonable, they would be doing a roaring business on the internet. This is not a hard concept to grasp, and not a terribly difficult thing to implement in these days of almost-free bandwidth. The question become whether or not they’re not giving the market too little too late.

Human behaviour is economic behavour, and the content providers are stuck in a decade-old market with very few paying customers.

Illegal != immoral originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-12-22.

Well, for the most part, anyways. There’s one line in one song that really poked me in the head when I was about 18: Caedmon’s Call singing This World. The part that says, “And the least of these look like criminals to me, so I leave Christ on the street.”

That might be it. I can’t be sure; my memory is a terribly threadbare fabric. But that’s the first thing I can honestly point to. Maybe it woke me up a little bit, I don’t know. Can’t you see why “this world has held my hand and has led me into intolerance” might do that?

This is where it began. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-25.

Here’s an idea for Google. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-24.

What? (MP3)
What? (OGG)

I don’t know what to put here. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-21.

The beginning of another bit of music. originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-10-16.

Rockbox originally appeared on We Should See Other Blogs on 2007-09-18.