Sharing my own music for the season: Carols for Christmas (piano instrumentals)

Hard to believe it’s been a dozen years since I recorded a set of Christmas carol piano instrumentals which I inventively titled Carols for Christmas. My audience has probably changed a bit since then, so it’s worth a re-post.

It’s just over 30 minutes worth of music, all piano versions of traditional Christmas carols. There’s not a lot in the way of production - I recorded them using my Casio midi controller keyboard in single takes in GarageBand and did a minimal amount of editing to remove the clunky notes. The perfectionist part of me wishes I had another 80 hours to really refine and polish the arrangements and recordings; the engineer in me declared “good enough”. The engineer won the debate.

If you maintain your own music library, you can download mp3s from Dropbox here. If YouTube is more your thing, here’s the YouTube playlist.

Bullet Points for a Friday

  • Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
  • I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
  • Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
  • Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
  • This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
  • I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
  • Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.

Happy Friday, everybody.

Because I need more piano music...

Because I’m a sucker for trying out new piano music that I’ll probably never be good enough to play (or at least to play well), I just ordered this one:

A Russian composer writing jazz-styled preludes? Too much awesome.

Here’s a video of the composer playing one of them:

Jennifer Knapp: Kansas 25

I was an instant supporter of this album on Kickstarter and now I’m finally getting a chance to listen to it: Jennifer Knapp’s Kansas 25. Back when Kansas came out in 1998, college me was totally drawn in. Smart lyrics, catchy tunes, and a raw honesty that I didn’t hear in a lot of the other Christian music that was on the radio and for sale in the bookstore. I memorized the songs, sang them on my guitar, sang one of them in church, and spun that CD all the time in the car. I have often mentioned it as one of the three “perfect” Christian music albums ever. It’s that good.

Knapp, now 50, has been on a long road since releasing the original Kansas in her early twenties. She moved to Australia in 2002, publicly came out as a lesbian in 2010, recorded some other albums, and became an outspoken advocate for LGBT causes. There’s something incredibly meaningful about hearing her revisit these faith-filled songs in middle age. The miles have taken their toll - the voice is a little more raspy, the tempos a little slower - but the youthful expressions of faith still ring true all these years later.

If you supported the Kickstarter, you probably already have the download. (If not, find it in your inbox!) If you didn’t get in early, head over to Bandcamp where you can preorder it and listen as soon as it officially releases on May 17.

Pictures at an Exhibition for Guitar

I got to know Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition when I was in high school and my piano teacher assigned me The Gnome. I never got it mastered as much as I wanted, but it was such a fun suite to hack my way through. I listened to the orchestral version of it, and love the gong at the end, but overall I still prefer the piano version.

This video, though, has me reconsidering my opinion. Guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita has arranged the entire Pictures suite for guitar and it is amazing. He has captured both the feel and almost all the notes from the piano version. He varies playing techniques to create lovely textures of sound. And while I’m not up on all the modern classical guitarists, I think it’s safe to say that Yamashita has amazing skill.

Bringing joy to people IS bringing glory to God

Crisanne Werner has a lovely essay up on Substack today about her changing understanding of how the experience of music, and specifically playing music, relates to her spirituality as she goes through a sort of deconstruction.

I, too, have had music be a core part of my spiritual experience for most all of my life. As a worship leader in evangelical churches, I have far too many times heard (and probably used) the “audience of One” phrase that Crisanne wrestles with in her essay. But I love where she lands with it:

…music can, and should, bring glory to God. It shouldn’t be manipulated by false humility; it should have an altruistic motivation. But something that didn’t occur to me as a teen/young adult, was that bringing joy to people is bringing glory to God. Using music to evoke emotions that people otherwise wouldn’t have access to is a gift to them. A gift of love. It falls firmly under the umbrella of loving God and loving others. Other people’s music is that same sort of gift to me- my life, especially my spiritual life, is parched without music. And, despite the proliferation of electronic recordings, nothing moves the soul more than an in-person experience. … On that church stage this weekend, I was fully at peace with my motivation of helping the congregation enter beauty and joy. I was at peace with my audience being One plus three hundred.

I met Crisanne at a retreat last fall and quickly learned that beneath her quiet veneer was a depth of brave wisdom just waiting to come out. I’ve so enjoyed reading her Substack this year. What a treat.

Chopin Being Mean

I have hacked through the Chopin Ballades for years now. I started learning the first one in high school, and in adulthood I played through #3 and #4 often enough that I can, well, hack through them. I never spent the time working everything out and polishing; I just kept sight reading until I could blaze through it.

This past week I decided it was time to actually sit down with #4 and work it out more carefully. Today I got to this pictured section which, when sight reading, had always thrown me for a loop. Practicing the right hand by itself, I finally realized what makes it such a pain.

It’s 6/8 time. On the first line, the bass has gone to triplets in each eighth note. Then on the second line, the right hand picks up triplets per eighth, while the left switches to sixteenths. Ok, that’s 3 against 2, no big deal.

But while the right hand is in triplets, the pattern written (as indicated by the eighth notes on the up stems) is a four-note pattern, almost an Alberti pattern. So, you have what is by pattern a four-beat pattern, played as triplets against two in the bass. My brain wants to interpret that as four against two, which is very simple. But it’s not - rhythmically, it’s 3 against 2, but the 3s are logically and musically grouped in sets of four. This one is gonna take my brain a while to work out.

A Hymn Aptly Chosen

One of the fun things about attending a church in a new and unfamiliar tradition is that things that may be common, old hat, or even tiredly predictable to lifelong participants in the tradition are new and can bring delight to us newbs.

Current example: yesterday morning I thumbed through the worship booklet before the service and saw that the gospel hymn was familiar: Eternal Father, Strong to Save. I know this one primarily as “The Navy Hymn”, could probably sing the first verse from memory, but I’m not sure I’ve ever sung it in church before. A bit of an odd choice, I thought, but it’s at least fun to sing.

And it was, indeed, fun to sing. It’s in a good range, it’s got some fun harmonic progressions, and for being a small and older congregation, there are still some good harmony singers belting it out.

Then the deacon started into the gospel reading and suddenly the reason for the song selection became very clear.

Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Matthew 14:22-33

Well played, Father Brian. Well played.

Fast Car, or, why I'm crying at my desk this morning

“You’ve got a fast car, I want a ticket to anywhere…”

If you’ve been a pop music fan at some point in the last 35 years, you’re probably now hearing an acoustic guitar riff in your head. Tracy Chapman’s song Fast Car came out in 1988 and was a Top 10 hit. It’s a wonderful song.

I heard Fast Car for the first time about 3 months ago when a social media post linking to a YouTube of Chapman playing the song in front of a restless crowd at Wembley Stadium came across my feed.

I listened to it, mostly impressed at a 24-year-old enthralling a huge crowd with nothing but an acoustic guitar and a microphone. I was probably doing something else at my desk at the time, and didn’t really listen to the words.

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago when my wife and I were out for a weekend and had dinner on a bar patio listening to a guy play acoustic covers. He played Fast Car. I mentioned to my wife that I’d never really heard the song before a month or two ago. She was incredulous. “You don’t know this song?” It’s about that time in any such conversation that my insecurity and shame creeps in.

I grew up in a fundamentalist homeschooling household where we weren’t allowed to listen to “secular music”. Classical was OK, and the Christian radio station was fine when it played softer stuff (and tolerated when it played “rockier” stuff), but other than that, nope. By the time I was 17 or 18 and had my own car I could turn on whatever radio station I wanted, but by that time the legalism was pretty well engrained in my young soul and my only comfortable dalliance with “secular music” was the old-time country music I played on the piano as part of the impromptu band at Rinky Tink’s ice cream shop during open mic nights.

If you’re my age (mid-40s), all that music you grew up hearing in the late 80s and early 90s? I know none of it. Michael Jackson may as well not exist for me. I was scandalized by my cousin’s U2 Achtung Baby poster, both because it was a “secular” rock band (joke’s on me: they’re probably the most Christian rock band of the last 40 years) and because it had the word “baby” on the poster, which undoubtedly referred to some girl they were interested in, and being interested in girls was wrong until you were old enough to get married.

I was a lonely 12-year-old, and 13-year-old, and heck was just without friends and pretty lonely for a lot of my teenage years. I was 12 years old and desperate enough for help that I called in to donate my own hard-earned funds to the Christian radio pledge drive when the reward premium was Charles Stanley’s book How to Handle Adversity. I anxiously waited for the book to show up, convinced it’d have answers for me. When it finally did, I read what the good reverend from Atlanta suggested: 1) Pray. (Check, been doing that lots.) 2) Lean on friends for support. Well… shit.

I still looked to music to soothe my soul, but the music I listened to as that angsty just-barely-a-teen was music that told me everything would be OK and you shouldn’t really feel sad because God. (Glad’s song Be Ye Glad and Steve Camp’s Love That Will Not Let Me Go come to mind.) There was eventually some CCM music that hinted at it being OK to be angsty - Michael W Smith sang Emily (“on the wire/balancing your dreams/hoping ends will meet their means/but you feel alone/uninspired/but does it help you to/know that I believe in you?”) and then later on a duet with Amy Grant on Somewhere, Somehow (“somehow far beyond today/I will find a way to find you”) - but I felt ashamed to listen to them and feel that way. (They’re still guilty pleasures.)

I signed up for Columbia House Music Club when I was 17 and somehow snuck in a Bryan Adams best of CD. I presume I only knew his name because his Everything I Do (I Do It For You) song was a big enough hit it got played at my (apparently not quite so fundamentalist but still fundy enough we sang Christianized lyrics to Friends in Low Places in chapel) summer camp. Adams’ songs rocked (which I loved) but shocked me and had me feeling bad about listening to them. OK, a song like Kids Wanna Rock was ok because it was just about restless kids. But Run To You was about… sex. We can’t be talking about that, now. Nope. Skip the track.

It took me well into my 20s to finally let myself listen more broadly to “secular” music, my fundamentalist self surprised to find that Bono was a Christian and U2 was singing amazing stuff, that Win Butler was wrestling with his own spiritual ghosts in his songs for Arcade Fire, that it was OK to just enjoy music that wasn’t written about God because it was good music. And in some ways it was fun to have so much music backlog to discover, since aside from Simon and Garfunkel I didn’t really know much of anything of pop music.

But it also means that, for a music guy, I’ve got these big gaps of music knowledge that I’m ashamed of. I try to soak in as much information as I can so I don’t appear to be uninformed, but that façade only lasts so long.

Part of me doesn’t really want to hit publish on this post, because eventually my Dad will read it, and he’ll apologize again. As he’s realized the past couple years how much damage that fundamentalism did to all of us he’s been really broken by it, and apologized over and over. I’ve forgiven him. I’m a dad, too, and have already had to apologize to my kids for the damage that kind of Christianity did to them before I came to my own realization. (I am glad, though, that they’ve grown up with Coldplay and Adele and Arcade Fire and then felt the freedom to find their own music regardless of what genre label it falls under. We’re slowly undoing that mess.) But aside from guilt and forgiveness, I am finding that to start to heal I have to acknowledge the pain of that teenage boy. It was real. It shaped who I am today in a ton of ways.

You got a fast car
I got a plan to get us outta here
I been working at the convenience store
Managed to save just a little bit of money
Won’t have to drive too far
Just ‘cross the border and into the city
You and I can both get jobs
And finally see what it means to be living

You got a fast car
Is it fast enough so we can fly away?
We gotta make a decision
Leave tonight or live and die this way

So I remember when we were driving, driving in your car
Speed so fast it felt like I was drunk
City lights lay out before us
And your arm felt nice wrapped ‘round my shoulder
And I-I had a feeling that I belonged
I-I had a feeling I could be someone, be someone, be someone

Lyrics from Fast Car by Tracy Chapman

13-year-old Chris would’ve felt every word of this song. Would’ve felt less alone, knowing that other people experienced the same ache. But Chris didn’t get to listen to that song when he was 13. And Chris didn’t stop and really listen to this song until this morning. Which is why 46-year-old grown man Chris is sitting at his desk this morning in tears, listening to Fast Car on repeat.

Podcast Recommendation: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

For a long time my podcast listening has been almost exclusively nerdy tech podcasts mixed up with nerdy theology podcasts, with an occasional news or true crime mixed in to liven things up. Somehow I have almost entirely bypassed any that were music-related. (I did listen to a couple episodes of Song Exploder right after it debuted, but it just didn’t hook me.)

Somewhere along the line, Rob Weinert-Kendt on Twitter started linking to A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs by British host Andrew Hickey. It took me only a couple episodes and I was hooked.

The format of the podcast is one song per 30-ish minute episode, but each episode covers far more than just the titular song. Hickey provides background on the artist, the influences that formed that artist, stories about the creation of the song, and so on. You come away from the episode having learned a lot not just about a particular song but also about the developing music scene in the Americas (and, once you get in a ways, in Europe). He starts with the first inklings of what would become rock music as they emerged in the big band scene. (Episode 1: “Flying Home” by the Benny Goodman Sextet.)

500 episodes is a significant feat for any podcast, and setting out that goal in the title of your show seems rather ambitious, but I’m willing to bet that Mr. Hickey has all 500 songs charted out, and the moxie to see it through. He’s currently up through Episode 157 (“See Emily Play” by Pink Floyd), and is publishing a lot of bonus material for Patreon subscribers. I’m learning a lot as I go, so even if some interruption keeps the series from completion, it’s still been an excellent investment of time.

So, if you’re interested in rock music, A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs is highly recommended.