Edge | Vol 1

The other day a friend loaned me a monumental CD. Earlier that day my wife had been visiting her and had mentioned the significant impact this music once had on my life.

Anyone remember Psalty the Singing Songbook?

Just shy of thirty years ago my family was on our summer holiday. I had just hopped out of the bath, all five-years-young of me, and went to the lounge to dry and get in my jim-jams. In the era of cassettes, the last song of Kid’s Praise 2 happened to be playing. The song went, “In my life Lord, be glorified”.

As I lay in the lounge by myself, without knowing what the words to this song actually meant, the melody and lyric, like a wind from another world, shot to my soul. I began to sob. And sob. And sob. I remember being enthralled by Something.

A year or so later the same thing happened. As I lent over the pew at church, once again I wept as Something was happening in me as the music played and the people sang. I now know that it was Jesus, coming to me dressed in music, robed in rhythm and melody.

And today, like a favourite pair of jeans, He keeps coming to me, coming to us, wearing the praises of His people.

I stumbled across on old journal the other day. Across one of the pages I had written in large “CHRIST’S PRESENCE IS MY HOME!!!” Music has always made me acutely aware of Him. And being with Him is like being at home. The best kind of home:

We release this collection of song in the middle of advent, celebrating the incarnate Son, the one not ashamed to set His foot on terra firma making this fallen world His own and recreating it from the inside. As we do so, it’s not that His coming necessitates the inviting of Him into our hearts, but Truth sings that His advent has invited us into His.

Our hope is that these songs, like a favourite pair of jeans for your soul, will remind you that indeed home really is where the heart is at, for His heart is with us. In the surrounding of the Fathers love…

Here’s my Home.

We have an old hymnal. It’s real old… to the point where it’s falling apart. I picked it up about a year or so ago and as I read it, it struck me that maybe thematically there were lyrical places that we just didn’t venture into much anymore. Lofty, majestic themes – The Trinity, God in creation, providence, the Ecclesia. The hymns were old, but they felt bold. Simple, yet profoundly deep.

The first couple of lines of one particular hymn instantly arrested me, “Earthly pleasures vainly call me… nothing worldly shall enthral me, I would be like Jesus.” Maybe in my valid pursuit of Christianity being about the ‘whole of life’, about living life in its fullness and not about some Church program or ministry per se, maybe somewhere along the way ‘real life’ began to mean ‘normal life’, as in, ‘like everybody else’. Maybe I’d even taken on some of the same values, perspectives, priorities as everybody else. Maybe in the process my spirituality had become naturalized… more about becoming a better person, rather than pursuing ‘The’ person. ‘Holiness’ was reduced to ‘do your best, accept the rest’.

Scripture is clear – we have one ultimate pursuit – to be like Jesus.

Thank you James Rowe (1865-1923). Your inspiration lead me home.

We have spent the entire day setting up one of the largest recording setups that I’ve been involved in so far.

There are numerous people shuffling around taking care of last minute preparations for the next day’s adventures.

Some have said this is a journey of ten years in the making – for myself perhaps even longer, taking me back to a bunch of years ensconced in a choir environment, discovering the beauty and joy of this mysterious thing called worship.

It is also the end of lent and we have tried to observe that tradition in the best way we know how.

…to put it another way, there has been a lot of build up to this moment.

I wander into the ‘machine room’ of the studio (which is also handily located nearly an hour away from any real technical assistance) to discover the computer off.

I thought this strange and went to the power switch, as you do. Upon switching said computer on, there was a rather large bang, followed by a smell familiar to technicians – the smell of something being fried, along with the computer heading back into the land of dreams.

This of course is disastrous and the ramifications of the predicament are large.

There is basically no other options for us to be able to record successfully this weekend other than this beat up old Apple Mac G4

So I do what all technically challenged people do and turn it back on just in case…

The computer succeeded in firing up and until recently has sailed on as if none the wiser to any malfunctions it should have had.

I joked during the following few days that there must have been two little wires hanging loose with information jumping the proverbial gap to make it work.

Well, it turns out I may not have been that far off in my outlandish suggestions, with the drive having been recently serviced showing an incredible amount of burn marks. The serviceman said‘ I have no idea how this has been working’.

…So began our ‘miracle’ weekend!

Grant and Evan record some alternative percussion for “Your Love is a Song”

Writing worship songs is a funny old thing. There’s something about the language churches use in their songs that gets them in a state. There’s some kind of pendulum in the building and it’s hard work finding the right swing.

Sometimes we yank that thing too far to the left. As if we were guilty of the ‘old language’ of the past. The Thee’s and Thou’s and calling Jesus by his real name and mentioning the way His salvation makes us feel. So we write these songs that aim for originality, and somewhere in the process we forget that we are composing Sacred Things, ending up with a delightfully obscure lyric that references a slight emotion towards an unnamed person who we suspect is the saviour of the universe.

And sometimes we don’t yank it nearly enough. We rest on what we have already. The old language, the old songs. And as much as these songs are great and good, sometimes the language within them is so familiar they have lost their power to invoke any kind of imagination and you might as well be singing Gaelic folk songs.

There is a middle-ground here somewhere. A place where that pendulum swings just right. Because innovation in worship is not about the future, and it’s not about the past. It’s about a conversation between the two.

And sometimes this can be the hardest thing about writing worship songs. We are called to make new things, to press into the future, to find new words for our community. We are called to express our story in the biggest and most creative sense possible. God’s people were always meant to be among the leaders in the field of creative thought and design.

The problem, I think, comes when we mistake this call to creativity as a command to cut ourselves off from our past, to negate it, write it off and see it as irrelevant.

As the playwright said, “What is past is prologue.” – the great challenge of writing new worship is in mastering the fine balance between acknowledging who God is, who God was, and who God is going to be. Because He’s all three; past, present and future.

With this album, we want to get the swing just right. We realize that God is speaking to us, and as much as we can, we try to transcribe the new message – in our words, in our colloquialisms, our every-day speak. But we realize that there were also those who went before us who were doing the exact same thing, and their songs are a part of our prologue.

It’s totally fitting that when we first sat down to record this album, pressed that red button (or spacebar as modern technology dictates), the first song that came to mind was H.S. Welcome.

That’s short for Holy Spirit Welcome, we had to stop short of calling it H.M.S Welcome, which was Al’s pick for the title.

Holy Spirit Welcome is a tip of the hat to some kind of liturgy I guess. Maybe even a benediction. There’s something beautiful about those songs of old and their simplicity. A stanza of 4 lines, simply repeated as if some kind of mantra. Nothing fancy, just telling it like it is.

Because sometimes that’s all you need to get the pendulum going. A welcome, in plain terms. A recalibration, in plain speak, to save us getting caught up in our own words and losing sight of who’s really in the building.

- Luke

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It was important to us that this recording was not merely the process of tracking a list of songs until they were deemed perfect. We wanted to take our expression of worship into a studio environment with no preconceptions of what it should be and basically see what happened.

Throughout the course of the Easter weekend we had many times where we would meet and pray and then worship some more while my good friend Steve ably pressed record and facilitated the rather large team,

It was clear right from the start that God was with us.

H.S. Welcome is the opening track on the album. What was recorded is actually the very first thing we played – if you listen carefully you will hear lots of bits and pieces still going on in the background – instructions being whispered to the control room, guitar sounds being sorted out and the clinking of cups of Al’s glorious coffee.

This wasn’t a take of a song as such, but a very real prayer from our hearts that Holy Spirit would be welcome here, during this recording.

We attempted to do another version of the song after this  – but it became clear that trying to get things better from a technical point of view was not the main thing.

What we recorded on the weekend has been left largely un-replaced, barring main vocals and additional instruments, and I think as a result what you get is a true snapshot of what happened for us that weekend.

I’ve likened it to being on a worship camp, if there is such a thing.

This is not music to listen to as such, but to worship with.

There were many moments of tears for us during this recording, but not tears of sadness. More like the emotion you have when you see someone receive a prophetic word you know will change their lives, or finding someone healed. More like the emotion of a friend who comes to know Jesus for the first time.

Or even those wandering back to the home they know so well, at the end of a long absence.

This is not perfect, nor will it be everyone’s cup of tea, but I know that God is in it and I pray that we all experience something of His beauty and love while immersed in the album.

- Nic