Listening Party: Rich Mullins

“The World as Best as I Remember It, Volume One” – 1991
“The World as Best as I Remember It, Volume Two” – 1992
“A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band” – 1993

In the summer of 2001, I drove between Nebraska and the west coast three times. I listened to the Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell series, “The Power of Myth,” on cassette. I listened to Caedmon’s Call, and I listened Rich Mullins. When inspiration struck, I stopped along the interstate and wrote down song lyrics, my first and last attempt at songwriting. By the time I settled in Chico, California, I had half a spiral notebook filled with songs for a music career I had no intention of pursuing. I can’t find the notebook now – lucky for you – but I remember that the lyrics were carbon copies (grossly inferior carbon copies) of the Rich Mullins songs I like best: songs about friendship (“What Susan Said,” from “World Volume 2″) , the open road (“The River,” from “World Volume 1″), nature (“Calling Out Your Name,” from Volume 1″) , and especially songs about the tension of dual citizenship, as in my favorite of all his songs, “Land of My Sojourn:”

Nobody tells you when you get born here
How much you’ll come to love it
And how you’ll never belong here
So I call you my country
And I’ll be lonely for my home
And I wish that I could take you there with me

“Land of My Sojourn” is from “Liturgy, Legacy,” Rich’s masterwork (though who knows how great “The Jesus Record” might have been if Rich had lived to complete it). “Liturgy, Legacy” was number three on Thom Granger’s list of the 100 greatest albums in Christian music. “The World as Best as I Remember It, Volume One” was the seventh greatest album on the list – right after U2’s “Joshua Tree,” whose improbable inclusion doesn’t seem fair to numbers seven through 100.

The earliest music videos I’ve seen for Rich’s music are from “Liturgy, Legacy,” a few of which I believe were made by Steve Taylor and Ben Pearson, the two filmmakers behind the “Blue Like Jazz” movie. I have found videos for “Hold Me Jesus”, “Creed”, and this video from “Here in America”:

A girlfriend once asked me which song I most wanted on the soundtrack to my life. My first choice was “The Color Green,” especially if I get to film in black and white in Ireland and wear a great overcoat:

CCM Presents: The 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music

“Never Picture Perfect” – 1989

Last night Kate and I went out for a very late dinner and to hear our Egyptian friend Moustafa sing at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Beaverton, a suburb of Portland. After a meal of lamb stew, falafel, hummus, pita bread, rice, baklava, and red wine, Kate and I reclined in our booth. A little buzzed, and completely full, we were mesmerized by Moustafa’s ballads, and ensorceled by the belly dancer moving around him on stage.

We have this huge adventure planned for next year, where we’re traveling around the country so I can write a book. But last night I appreciated the simple things: how pleasant it was to be out on a date with my wife, how I looked forward to seeing little Molly the next morning, and then to see my best friend for dinner on Sunday night.

The spell was broken when the belly dancer came to our table hoping that we might slip some cash into the waistband of her dress (I made Kate do it). But the thoughts about simplicity came back to me this morning when I listened to “First Family,” one of my favorite Rich Mullins songs. Rich sings about his own parents:

And now they’ve raised five children
One winter they lost a son
But the pain didn’t leave them crippled
And the scars have made them strong
Never picture perfect
Just a plain man and his wife
Who somehow knew the value
Of hard work, good love, and real life

Talk about your miracles
Talk about your faith
My dad he could make things grow
Out of Indiana clay
Mom could make a gourmet meal
Out of just cornbread and beans
And they worked to give faith hands and feet
And somehow gave it wings

Christians hear a lot these days about expanding our borders, dreaming big for Jesus – as if we’re not living out our calling if we don’t become missionaries, or start nonprofits, or write books, or win the church prize for most souls won for Christ. Isn’t there something to be said for living a small-scale life? Thinking small for Jesus? Being content with the little patch of earth with which we’ve been entrusted and then living with integrity there?

“Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth” – 1988

“Winds of Heaven” is the first of Rich’s truly great albums, along with “The World As Best as I Remember It, Volume 1″ and “Liturgy, Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band.” In the years when I wanted little to do with God and nothing to do with the church, when I stopped listening to Christian music, when the last thing I could sing was “Our God is an awesome God/He reigns from heaven above” – I kept coming back to the simple hope of this album’s best song:

So if I stand let me stand on the promise
That you will pull me through
And if I can’t, let me fall on the grace
That first brought me to You
And if I sing let me sing for the joy
That has born in me these songs
And if I weep let it be as a man
Who is longing for his home

I’ve written elsewhere about how I may have seen in Rich Mullins in concert at a week-long Bible camp called “Summer in the Son” but failed to pay attention. Listening this morning to “Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth,” I remembered another early encounter with Rich’s music.

I was going into seventh grade and I was nervous about joining the junior high Sunday school class at our church in Salina, Kansas. I remember walking alone to the youth building, which was located a block from the main church campus, my courage waning with every step. I considered skipping Sunday school altogether and walking to a nearby grocery store to buy some pop and jo jos with ranch sauce. Then I remembered my older brother was waiting for me. If I didn’t show, he would rat me out to our parents. I had to go.

Three things impressed me most about the youth building. First, there were no folding chairs, only couches and bean bags and overstuffed chairs. Second, the walls were covered with posters of CCM artists like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, and dcTalk, which I liked better than the posters in my old Sunday school rooms that used made up words like “kidventure.” Third, the youth group had a collection of tapes we were allowed to check out. I was ecstatic; all fears allayed. Over the next few years, the tape library would expose me to artists like Geoff Moore and Steven Curtis Chapman and Whitecross. But that first morning, I checked out two tapes: JC and the Boyz, “Never Give Up”; and Rich Mullins, “Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth.”

I had never heard of Rich Mullins. I checked out the tape because I wanted to know why the singer put his dog on the cover. And I don’t remember what I thought of the music, or if I ever listened to it at all. I brought the tape back and didn’t think about Rich Mullins again for several years. In fact, when I was seventeen I wrote a short story about a girl who gets stuck in an elevator with an angel and a demon. The story wasn’t very good, but I thought the title was very clever: “Winds of Heaven, Stuff of Earth.”

“Pictures in the Sky” – 1987

My two year-old daughter, it turns out, can’t get enough drum machines and synthesizers. I’ve never seen Molly dance as wildly or as energetically as when we listened to “When You Love,” the first song on “Pictures in the Sky.” It makes me wonder about the appeal of Rich Mullins to new generations. I stopped my sister-in-law just now as she was going into our basement and asked her how familiar she was with Rich’s music. Six years younger than me, she was just 13 when Rich died. My sister-in-law remembers singing a few of Rich’s worship songs in church youth group and in chapel at her Christian college, but she never went much past that. She’s not alone. I’ve met a number of younger people who know little about Rich’s music and life beyond “Awesome God” or “Sometimes By Step.”

This is too bad. Complaining about vapid lyrics is a time-worn pastime for some listeners of contemporary Christian music. Mullins, in contrast, brought substance and poetry to his writing, as in “Verge of a Miracle”:

Clung to a ball
That was hung in the sky
Hurled into orbit
There you are
Whether you fall down
Or whether you fly
Seems you can never get too far
But someone’s waiting to put wings
Upon your flightless heart

The Kid Brothers of St. Frank, a foundation set up by Rich’s family, recently announced that it would no longer be offering grants to ministries that work with at-risk children because the royalties from Rich’s music have dropped to an insufficient level. However, it should be noted, Kid Brothers was able to sustain itself for eleven years from those royalties, six years longer than the family hoped when forming the organization. And as I write this, Molly is dancing around the living room to “Screen Door” like a true enthusiast. So maybe there is a remnant.

Here is Mullins performing “Screen Door” live to the tune of the Cup Game.

“Rich Mullins” – 1986

Rich Mullins’s self-titled album was released when I was nine years old and when Rich was about

the age I am now, 31. While some of the songs on “Rich Mullins” sound distractingly outdated – I didn’t care for drum machines and synthesizers when they were in fashion; they are that much harder for me to get past now – it is extraordinary to hear the extent to which the end is prefigured in the beginning. The most startling bit of foreshadowing comes in the song “Elijah.” “When I leave I want to go out like Elijah,” Rich sings, “With a whirlwind to fuel my chariot of fire…and it won’t break my heart to say goodbye.”

Rich Mullins died twelve years ago today in a car accident north of Bloomington, Illinois, a month shy of his 42nd birthday. To mark the anniversary, I am listening this weekend to all eight of Rich’s solo studio albums, as well as “The Jesus Record” demos, which he recorded in an old church shortly before he died, and “Canticle of the Plains,” the soundtrack to a musical Rich co-wrote with Mitch McVicker and David Strasser. I invite you all to listen with me. Then record in the comments section below your thoughts about the music and the man.

As I listen to “Rich Mullins”, one word that keeps coming to mind to describe the spirit of Rich’s music is the word “abandon.” The word “abandon” originally meant “to bring under control” and then later came to mean “give control to.” Rich’s songs range from the intense to the intimate, singing without restraint as he abandons himself to the words and the music. But more than just style, Rich’s songs strike me as accounts of the hard ongoing work of bringing our passions under control. This is done by ceding greater control over our lives to God. One theme running throughout this record is the willingness to give up anything -  our comfort, our possessions, even our lives – in service to the Kingdom.

The album is bookended by two examples: “Show me a someone who knows how to struggle/Who isn’t caught in the hold of his luxuries./I just need to see someone who was made for trouble,” he sings in the opening track, “A Few Good Men.” The last song on the record, “Save Me” (memorably covered by dcTalk’s Kevin Max on a Rich Mullins tribute album, see video below), also demonstrates Rich’s gifts as a poet:

Save me, save me
Save me from my contempt for the things that make me strong
Save me from any value I could put a price tag on
Save me from Soviet propagandists
Lord, save me from Washington
Please save me, Lord save me

Save me, save me
Save me from the slick pop sounds
Laid down in virgin vinyl grooves
Save me from any woman who would be turned
On to the aftershave I use
Save me from trendy religion that makes
Cheap cliches out of timeless truths
Lord save me, please save me
Save me