PETE//HUEY

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  • 40×40 // 13 – A Praise Chorus (2001)

    At friend Dave’s 40th birthday party last weekend, one of the first tracks on the generated ‘Indie Rock 2000s’ playlist was Do You Want To? by Franz Ferdinand. When we were roommates over two decades ago, the first two Franz Ferdinand records were on heavy rotation in Dave’s CD changer – along with Floggin’ Molly and Dropkick Murphys – and though I was never a massive fan, the time we went to see them in November 2005 was one of the all-time great concerts in terms of crowd participation. Those art-rockers knew how to work a big room; the bounce for that song was something else.

    It got me musing on other great gig moments. I’ve never been a massive gig-goer – certainly not arena-sized ones where you’re basically watching a big screen. Foy Vance was on the BBC recently getting misty-eyed about the Rotterdam Bar;1 it is incredible that we used to be able to wander across town and, for the price of a pint, sit in that wee dark room and watch artists like Foy or Duke Special doing their thing. Other favourites from that era included the Frames at the Ulster Hall, Dave Matthews in the Waterfront2 – sonically, a perfect match of artist and venue – Oppenheimer in a beer tent3, and Bell X1 at the old Mandela Hall. Then I stopped: the best Mandela Hall gig of all (in my time): Jimmy Eat World.

    For a long time, Work sat at the top of my last.fm all-time charts (before they were destroyed by my children’s access to Spotify); but as I mused on, there’s only one choice: the collision of lyrical precision and genius with the sweaty guitars of A Praise Chorus.

    The most recent time I saw Jimmy Eat World, it was getting to that slightly annoying stage where you could barely hear the band over an entire room full of people shouting every single word back at them – but on reflection, this is really just a testament to how, for a very specific age bracket of millennial, this band were seminal. That swell of guitars and the perfect production mix of vocals over the top – there’s so much going on, as the live video above hints, but on the album, Bleed American, you can hear every part.

    A later post in May-time will pick up on the music that has been adopted by our kids, but Jimmy Eat World is gladly one of those which our eldest, the drummer, has studied. Long may it continue.

    1. RIP. There’s an appropriate Facebook page of people sharing memories here. ↩︎
    2. For the DMB fans: what a setlist that was. ↩︎
    3. ‘When the city’s awake, you wanna go down to the subway to make your way… UPTOWN…’ An amazing live band. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 12 – Everything You Want (1999)

    When the poster went up outside the Drama department, I walked past it a few days before putting the whole train of thought together. A couple of months earlier, under Bob’s guidance, I’d managed to scrape together enough to buy my first ‘proper’ guitar – a left-handed, dreadnought Tanglewood with a pickup – and had been schlepping it around, still in its cardboard box, to play for youth fellowship and the like.1 But it hadn’t had a proper outing. Eventually, I walked past the poster enough times to think, ‘Well… maybe that would work.’

    At the school open evening, weirdly enough, the pieces came together. Bob was a natural ‘yes’. My friend Caroline’s little brother Bill, who was a few years below but already known for being up for the craic, didn’t take much convincing. We needed a bassist. Friend John said yes, only problem is, he said, I don’t really play. That’s alright, we said; we’ll teach you enough. It’s just one song.

    So we turned up to the launch meeting for this year’s school Stars in Yer Eyes contest, confident and ready to go. A bunch of nerds (plus Johnboi) playing Wheatus’ Teenage Dirtbag. Lead singer’s got glasses, an electro-acoustic guitar and a bucket hat. I own all of these things. People would have a great laugh at it. Home crowd, popular song, what could go wrong?

    The head of drama stuck on a tape of last year’s finals to let everyone get an idea what the standard was like. Then she played the winning finalist from the previous year. This one would be hard to replicate, she said. Definitely don’t try singing this song for a year or two, she laughed.

    It was, of course, some fellas from somewhere singing Teenage Dirtbag.

    Filing out of the room at the end, the sheet was on the table for signing up. Names. Artist. Song.

    Absolute pivot to covering whatever I was singing in my head that week – Vertical Horizon’s Everything You Want.

    Still a great song: only completely on electric – and also, the brilliant lead singer, Matt Scannell – completely bald with a goatee.

    Apart from that, a dead match.2

    Listen, it’s a great song; one of those ones that signals the turn, at the end of the century, melding together the best parts of grunge production and muddier guitars with pop timing and hooks. This sound of a mix personifies a huge part of the music of my teens. But we didn’t look or sound, really, anything like them.

    After winning through the heats (!), alongside future-housemate Julie absolutely smashing Sarah McLachlan’s Angel and Leaky from General Fiasco and a bunch of lads killing it with Sum 41’s In Too Deep (the guitar sound was perfect), we came back for the regional finals. Regionals were different. Heats had been 100% based on the audience vote – if you were ever to see the video of our performance, filmed by someone on their pocket digital camera… well, you can’t make out much, but you’ll hear the shouting. (Alright, I’ll stick it in the footnotes.)3 Home crowd came good for us. But in the regionals, they’d brought in actual judges. And the question came backstage beforehand: ‘So… have you made any effort to look more like the band this time?’

    I felt like saying, no offence, but if I’d actually done that, I’d have been sent home from school the next day for violating the uniform code.

    We missed out on the nationals by one place. All of us were beaten by a girl from another school who, and I’m not exaggerating here, sang Aretha Franklin in blackface. It’s 22 years ago but someone needs to still be hanging their head in shame over that one. Still, the two other acts from our school went to the nationals at the Waterfront, and did us all proud. Rumours backstage were the judges did us dirty, deliberately rating us near-last because, you know, we didn’t actually resemble the artists we were impersonating in any way, shape or form.

    This song makes in on 40×40, not just because it’s a great song – and it is – but because it also marked the beginning of a period of complete addiction to live performance. A period where I would conspire (no pun intended) to be in as many bands, gigs, live situations as possible, chasing that high. And it happened again, though maybe not with such purity on more than a couple of occasions.

    There’s no happy ending really; years later, also with Bob – beautiful symmetry there – I came off a little stage in Belfast and said to myself, this is done. That was about 12 years ago, and it was; and it was the right decision. But wow: does sitting here, thinking about that spring night in 2004 give me the chills. What a roar.

    1. This guitar was first smashed by baggage handlers in Dublin airport on the way to Romania, then smashed again seven years later by baggage handers on the way to West Africa. Moral of the story: buy a case that actually fits your guitar. Then, leave it safely at home and just borrow one when you get there. ↩︎
    2. Found the photo from the local paper. Just a bunch of kids. I have inexplicably left the house wearing a homemade t-shirt, advertising a web cartoon/story series I used to publish on Geocities. Look, the 2000s were wild, folks. ↩︎
    3. Found it. Someone filmed the whole performance. You can’t hear the band, but you sure can hear the spectators! ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 11 – Chinese Satellite (2020) and Found You (2019)

    Another week, another arbitrary rule is bent. Two (companion) tracks this week.

    This week six years ago, in March 2020, the Thing happened. In our house, it was a weird one (OK, so it was weird for everyone). At work, we officially sent everyone home on the 20th, but I had already been working from home for a couple of days because we’d already taken the kids out of school sick. Then the Thing officially happened, and that was it. Most of our staff were furloughed; I would occasionally call down to work to wave at my boss across a room and check the buildings were OK, but once we had (as safely as we could) dealt with all our students and their belongings, we were done.

    My main memory of the first working-from-home phase of the Thing – the bit with the amazing weather here in the UK – was sitting in our front box room, at a makeshift desk, waving across the road at our neighbour PM, sitting in his box room at his makeshift desk, before we both went back to pretending we were just working like normal human beings.

    I pulled up my last.fm profile to see what the comfort music was. A lot of John Mayer. A lot of Nickel Creek. A lot of John Mark McMillan. All these have been mentioned already. But then, at some point, the combination of Youtube Music and Spotify started throwing up new things: some of which, in my head, are now forever enshrined as the soundtrack to the thing,

    There were three albums which dominated for a while. The first, Sean Watkins and the Bee Eaters, This is Who We Are, already got a hat-tip in a previous post and a couple of footnotes in this series.1 But then we morphed into June, and Phoebe Bridgers launched her incredible sophomore album, Punisher. The singles from it are brilliant – but I love Chinese Satellite the most.

    Lockdown. Looking out the window. Feeling numb. Crunching up eyes and trying to make the figures in Excel work so that we can get to the end of Q4 without having to max out an overdraft. Pitching budgets and contingency plans on Zoom. Listening to staff on Zoom for that one time a week they log on. Standing out in the garden in glorious sunshine thinking, this isn’t so bad really, but then remembering that it really is.

    I want to believe,
    Instead, I look at the sky, and I feel nothing
    You know I hate to be alone
    I want to be wrong

    Phoebe Bridgers, in this incredible song summing up her struggles with agnosticism and faith, capturing the hole inside every human being. I’ve used it in a sermon. But I’ve absolutely felt it.2

    But we’re going for a double-A-side this week, because there was another album I was obsessed with just before Punisher came out. I think this ended up in my suggested listening because of a sonic link, somehow, to FRMR’s Inver 3 – the incredible Amish/Appalacian-space-exporatory sonic experience that is Silicone Boone’s The Reaches, and the best track on it – Found You.

    Again, the whole album is really a single piece, and rewards careful listening, but Found You seems particularly profound to me. It also includes the answer to Phoebe Bridgers’ prayer as it points to the truth of something bigger than us which provides meaning, purpose, and a reason to be – even in a moment when it felt like the world was changing forever.

    Well I ain’t worth much, my face is far too common
    You could stack me up, still I’d be forgotten
    I’ve never found a place among the chosen
    Ahh but I rode the wave that gives the world its motion
    Yes, I found you

    You’re why we leave home
    Why we’ve always roamed
    Why we’re not alone

    1. But it’s great. Another mention for their cover of Graceland, but the whole album is one that rewards listening to it as an album. ↩︎
    2. Phoebe Bridgers’ first album, Stranger in the Alps, is good, but the 2019 concept album with Connor Oberst, Better Oblivion Community Center, is great: the lead single, Dylan Thomas, should really be on 40×40. Now it’s here, I can add it to the Spotify playlist regardless. ↩︎
    3. FRMR will be the subject of a future entry in this series, so we’ll not say too much for now. ↩︎

  • Handling Conflict and Controversy in Ministry

    Greatly appreciated some of the wisdom in this podcast/video from Ligon Duncan and Matt Smethurst: thinking about the character and posture behind handling conflict and controversy well.

    One of the most helpful lines is around recognising how those of us in leadership positions handle conflict is how important the tone and calm of how we receive and process moments of controversy. Words matter. Language matters.

    Similarly, towards the end they have a very important thought about grumbling.

    Though speaking to the US context, there’s a lot of good here. I appreciate a significant number of ‘voices’ in the public ministry sphere preaching humility, grace, and triaging theological issues. Recommended.

  • 40×40 // 10 – Closed Hand, Full of Friends (2013)

    This week, with 17 March on the horizon, the thought passed through my mind of celebrating some of the Celtic-punk that my friend and uni roommate loved blasting at all hours.1 But then local media this week has been blanketed with the marketing for Foy Vance’s new album, The Wake, and that started the internal debate about a favourite Foy song – and the winner was the opening track from 2013’s sensational Joy of Nothing, the triumphant Closed Hand, Full of Friends.

    The pounding, urgent piano riff throughout is one of my favourite sounds in all music.

    I met Foy, briefly, around about 2011; I say, ‘met’ – I nearly took his head off as I span around with a big camera bag over my shoulder, not realising he had just slipped through the stage door behind me. He took it well and we had a quick chat. I was fascinated, some years earlier, when he had popped up (almost uncredited)on the original Organic Hymnal EP released by the mass, Bangor-Elim-adjacent Rend Collective Experiment:2 Vance sings an incredible vocal line on the closing track, Send Me – in fact, although I haven’t been including two videos in-post in this series so far, you should here it.

    Foy, the preacher’s son, sang this beautiful, aching track of faith; a faith he openly wrestled with and, by his own account, is tied up on the relationship with his father which dominates his music. From memory, he took the compliment but didn’t want to delve into it too much then and there. His first full album, Hope, was huge – the fact that, when we were undergrads, we could walk across town to see Foy and others in The Rotterdam,3 and his music had ended up being on these big US TV shows, was an inspiration.4

    Foy Vance has many, many great songs – at this exact moment, this is my favourite.

    1. Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys. And if you think you’ve never heard of them, what about this one from the FIFA 2005 soundtrack? Flogging Molly’s 2004 album Within A Mile of Home (Spotify link here) is worthy of your time. ↩︎
    2. Rend released two EPs before they were signed, and some of the tracks made it onto the first major release. The launch night, in the Black Box, felt like it had as many people on stage as on the floor – I can’t remember when it was, but it was absolute chaos. A band I was in had previously supported Numinous, which original Rend lynchpins Steve and Gareth Gilkinson had been part of, but the styles were… different! ↩︎
    3. The Rotterdam (RIP) was mad. You had Foy Vance and Ken Haddock on one night; you might have had Duke Special the next. And these people were actual musicians, in this brilliant, tiny, dingy pub in Sailortown. We didn’t know how good we had it. What a loss. ↩︎
    4. See also: the moment Bell X1’s sumptuous Eve, The Apple of My Eye was on Grey’s Anatomy or whatever. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 09 – Easy Lover (Live) (1990)

    Twenty years or so ago, an existential question came up regularly. I was the frontman of the band I was in almost by default; didn’t it seem a bit weird having the short, hairy guy doing the singing? Shouldn’t he be tucked away behind the drum kit or something?

    To which one can at least reply: but Phil Collins.1

    Even though this week’s track originally appeared as a single two years before the range for this project, we will expand the rules a little for this bait-and-switch because the primary – and best – exposure to this and many other Phil Collins tracks comes through the vehicle of the Brit Award-nominated Serious Hits… Live!, an album that I borrowed from my father a few decades ago and kept around.2 Collins walks a very fine line between cheesy 80s idiosyncrasy, and some of the tightest and finest pop production you are ever going to hear. The massive Serious Hits tour came at the height of his powers: a massive production, and a band with the chops to match the theatrics.3

    Collins, as a person and as a musician, is as divisive as the film American Psycho – which features a legendary monologue about his work – but this music simply slaps.

    Around about 2010, we had a group ski trip to France, unironically soundtracked, depending on which car you were seated in, by either the audio album of Dylan Moran’s Monster, or Phil Collins’ Greatest Hits. This was after the Cadbury’s advert featuring the Gorilla and In the Air Tonight, so Phil was in the mid of 20-somethings beyond the long-term listeners. But for me, the live recordings of these songs simply out punch the studio versions: there’s something about the energy. Even though Easy Lover comes late in the track listing (track 14 of 15), the energy carries through thanks to a late run on the album that includes, You Can’t Hurry Love into Two Hearts into Sussudio – that’s a lot of funk for Side 2!

    I love it: a tight band, a hyped crowd, and a group of vocalists having the time of their lives – I hope it brightens your day too.

    1. This is as far as this comparison legitimately goes! ↩︎
    2. I was less successful in shoplifting his Graceland LP, but mentioning Paul Simon gives me an opportunity to get You Can Call Me Al onto our Spotify playlist by including it here, so you’re welcome. ↩︎
    3. After you’re done here, you can stick on a remastered version of the entire concert film here. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 08 – Girl of My Dreams (2000)

    Dr H’s birthday present gift to yours truly in 2007 was a little left-field, but not really: tickets to see Harry Connick, Jr., on his ‘My New Orleans Tour‘, at the Waterfront Hall. Harry Connick became embedded somewhere in my mind from repeat watches of Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner’s great When Harry Met Sally,1 for which he provided the soundtrack album at age, what… 22?2 So off we went to see Harry and marvel at his patented screen-based sheet music system.3

    At some point, Harry calls forward trombonist Lucien Barbarin to play a couple of solos. Then Barbarin sits down on the edge of the stage, and sings the old standard Girl of My Dreams, his legs swinging, with a big grin on his face – and had the whole Hall eating out of the palm of his hand. It was sensational, and it looked so easy.

    After purchasing the album and scouring its depth, it became clear that Barbarin was an absolute legend of New Orleans music in his own right. To his credit, Harry Connick packed his band out with pros, which either speaks to ego or to respect for the tradition – I’m going to choose the latter. But Barbarin, this tall, gangly, serene gentleman with this unassuming manner and silky voice, stole the show.

    He was duking it out with a couple of other New Orleans musicians to make this list – Trombone Shorty4 an extremely close number 2 – but my love of this song alone places him on the list. An absolute treat.

    1. ‘You’re going to have to find a way to not express every feeling that you have every moment that you have them’ is an accurate summation of my 20s. ↩︎
    2. Also, for years he was the official, non-Buble soundtrack to Christmas in our house with Harry for the Holidays. ↩︎
    3. You have to remember, kids, this was a couple of years before the iPad launched. Every member of the band had a screen in front of them, Connick had one discreetly on top of the piano, and there was a guy at stage left running everyone’s scores – but crucially, the system was programmed in such a way that each instrument’s score ran simultaneously across each piece of music. And it’s jazz, so they were clearly only paying mild attention to them. Screen-operating tech, you were the true star of the night and I doff my black A/V hat to you, sir. ↩︎
    4. Let’s take a minute for Trombone Shorty. This guy was performing on public stages before he was in high school. We saw him first on the Hurricane Katrina-themed Christmas episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. For the couple of years I spent in vans and cars driving to far off work gigs, the whole Backatown album was a mainstay on for months. Hurricane Season is the track to get started with, but also his Tiny Desk Concert is a delight. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 07 – Flightless Bird, American Mouth (2007)

    In moments of darker humour, I have sought to unsettle a person by remarking that, regardless of what opinion they have formed of me thus far, they should know that I was present at the national premiere of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Reeling from this information may send an individual judging me in a different light, but don’t blame me: blame my (then) long-term girlfriend and her coping mechanisms.

    Part of that coping mechanism was, for a time, an attachment to a song that appears near the end of the original Twilight film – Iron & Wine’s quietly epic Flightless Bird, American Mouth.1

    Next week is our fifteenth wedding anniversary2, in the twenty-first year of our relationship – but of the handful of songs that I can say with any certainty that my wife actually enjoys, this one is right up there. For our first anniversary, which we celebrated a very long way away from here, her gift was a hand-illustrated card adorned with the lyrics of the song – I was certain I had a photo, but cannot find it.

    Our first dance was Come Fly With Me.3 Our first home often reverberated to either Mumford & Sons’ Sigh No More or Paolo Nutini’s Sunny Side Up (also a favourite of her children for a long time).4 But Flightless Bird – ostensibly a story about the loss of innocence and the wafer-thin line between dream and failure – remains her theme tune in my head.

    For what it’s worth, I think we’ve fallen on the right side so far.

    1. I’ve included the track in the body of the article, above, but maybe the best way to enjoy it is through the lens of Song Exploder Episode 243, where Sam Beams talks Hrishikesh Hirway through the process from demo to production – a great episode. ↩︎
    2. Just last week, I found this little clip on Vimeo from behind-the-scenes at our wedding – everyone goofing around during the signing of the register whilst the wedding guests were all listening to our lovely friends singing in the church. ↩︎
    3. This counts as a Sinatra reference, so I get to shoehorn in a mention of my favourite Sinatra-related piece of pop culture ever: John Mayer, on David Letterman, covering In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning. ↩︎
    4. My brothers-in-law made up our wedding band, along with the wonderful pre-Ferna Ferna, and the mythical, amazing Rick on trumpet. They absolutely smashed Paolo Nutini’s Pencil Full of Lead out of the park. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 06 – Superman (It’s Not Easy) (2000)

    This week was heading in a different direction; but the news on Thursday of the passing of the actor James Van Der Beek weirdly resonated. One of those actors whom millennials weirdly probably saw a huge bunch of his body of work: Varsity Blues, The Rules of Attraction, in later years Apartment 23, and of course, Dawson’s Creek.

    Dawson’s Creek sits in a weird emotional space: I have seen less than half of it, yet the character of Dawson Leery resonated so definitively (Film school? Check. Spielberg obsession? Check. Inability to articulate actual feelings in any healthy way? Check check.) As a piece of television, it sits in a bracket that I wouldn’t knowingly let my own kids watch; but for this teenagers in the late 90, the actual characterisation, stylised as it was, tickled that love of smaltzy American comedy drama deeply.1

    (I actually have a Spotify playlist called Joey, Through the Window.)2

    Of course, a key element of these shows was always the soundtrack. I studied with someone who ended up being a music supervisor for TV later in life – talk about your dream job. And I realise now, skimming the Wikipedia pages for the Dawson’s Creek soundtrack albums, that this allows me to tangentially jump right into the great forgotten musical genre that kids today just don’t get – the homemade mix tape (or in our generation, CD).

    I had a friend in school who was an enthusiastic purveyor of mix CDs – and they were dominated by this same sub-genre of 90s/00s American adult/contemporary/soft rock music. His compilations became a primary source of a whole host of tracks – not music that would ever bother the UK Top 40, but music that was nonetheless often familiar from TV, movies, and music television. A prime example – all of Five for Fighting’s America Town, but particularly the lead single Superman.3

    The SFX of the music video have not dated well – but this is prime, ‘As heard on…’ music; no-one cares about the video.4 Moreover, John Ondrasik provided teenage me with ample ammunition for tiny subgenre of piano-led soft rock which, as a pianist first and foremost, was always welcome.5 I remember playing covers of this all over the place in my late teens.

    Those mix CDs supplied all sorts of introductions – Dave Matthews Band, Goo Goo Dolls, Barenaked Ladies, Joan Osbourne, Avril Lavigne… basically a huge block of the contents of my Last.fm for the late 2000s. Perhaps we’ll unpack a few more here as the weeks go on.

    1. We’re going to come back to this, but for me this is an arc typified by the content of T4 on Sunday afternoons – your OC, your One Tree Hill – but also widens to include everything that I watched on Channel 4 in summer terms when we were on revision leave – Ed (that’ll be mentioned again), E.R., weirdly Without a Trace purely in terms of scheduling. Was Joan of Arcadia in that bracket too? The other big time block was RTÉ2 (then Network 2) on Monday nights, with a prime comedy slot including Scrubs, That 70s Show, Friends – so much incidental music. This emotional arc probably runs well into adulthood and at least as our last big box set start-finish watch, Friday Night Lights, a decade after everyone else. ↩︎
    2. The only feature-length screenplay I ever completed (outside of undergraduate work) was partly inspired by a moment in an episode of Dawson’s Creek. True story. Though it was otherwise mainly inspired by my attempt to profess my undying love for someone… via email. I found it on an old hard drive last year (the screenplay, not the email), re-read the first few pages, and died inside all over again. ↩︎
    3. Superman is on Vol.2 of Songs from Dawson’s Creek, along with Teenage Dirtbag: there’s an epochal life story involving that song coming much later in the year. ↩︎
    4. Wikipedia says it was featured In a key sequence on Smallville. Yep, that fits. ↩︎
    5. I know people love it – I do too – but you can only play A Thousand Miles so many times. Though you should watch Vanessa Carlton’s ‘The Story of…’ minidoc for Vice – a rough ride. ↩︎

  • 40×40 // 05 – How He Loves (2005)

    Sometime, maybe around 2009, I was sitting awkwardly at a low-key concert (some kind of coffee bar style thing), when a musician friend, Andrew, ambled over.1 He’d been in the States for a year with his bandmate Steven,2 and had come back with a bunch of war stories which I enjoyed hearing. And he mentioned that Steven’s brother-in-law was this up-and-coming singer-songwriter who, in Andrew’s opinion, was the real deal.

    A while later, I remember driving to work on a Sunday morning with the iPod hooked up to the car stereo, and a song I didn’t know came on from some freebie sampler collection (remember those?). And I sat in the car until the song had finished, and played it again. And again on the way home. I found the CD sampler, which had embedded video files (again, remember those?), so stuck it in the computer. And when I watched the video – there was a glimpse of Andrew, bouncing around in his blue T-shirt in the background – and I realised, ‘Oh: this is the guy?’

    ‘The guy’ was John Mark McMillan; the song, ‘How He Loves’; and in my opinion, the rulebook for contemporary praise and worship, such as it was, had been torn up forever.

    In my lifetime, contemporary praise – aka What We Sing At All The Things – had rapidly evolved from Graham Kendrick and friends, through to the rock orientated – but less geared for corporate singing – more acceptable end of American CCM music. I enjoyed seeing both Third Day and particularly David Crowder Band in that period; but even at by the early 2000s, the emergence of the behemoth Hillsong Music was shifting things up to a level of slickness that would lead to a backlash.

    John Mark McMillan is not contemporary Christian music by any stretch – rather, like the Switchfoots of this world, a musician who writes about what matters to him, and what matters to him are often big questions about faith. But his talent is in mining a vocabulary that puts into the air words that sound real – not the limited range of the corporate Christian machine, but like the best poetry, words that paint a portrait of a heart and mind processing life in the presence of an infinite king.

    The hunger of such music drew a line, however indirectly, to the explosion in stuff like Housefires a decade later3 – which of course, then led to the machine taking a turn, like so much of our culture, to more ‘authentic’ sounds in praise and worship. But throughout his body of work,4 McMillan has continued to innovate and find words to express meaning for his journey, and it is always heartening to me to go back and hear a range of songs that sound like a man crying out, in praise, exploration, or grief5 – or, like life, very often a mixture of all these things – and very many other voices joining in.

    1. Andrew’s got a good back catalogue, both as a band leader and a solo artist, but a personal favourite is this soaring performance with the Ulster Orchestra, reworking a track from his eponymous album. ↩︎
    2. The genius multi-instrumentalist, Mr Stephen Williams, of Sons of Caliber, Jude Moses, and of course – John Mark McMillan. ↩︎
    3. These days, this kind of ↩︎
    4. Let’s pick a few: Death in Reverse (2018); Borderland (2014); and Death in His Grave (2010) are three great tracks from three great albums, but there are many more. ↩︎
    5. How He Loves has a significant back story, stemming from a tragic accident, and leading to a difficult third verse which McMillan rarely performed live as the years went on. But the story, as he tells it in this song story video, is beautiful. ↩︎