We’re inclined to think that life is like jazz: Random, but somehow, making strange and beautiful music. So much of life doesn’t jive like cool jazz riffs. The harmony is lacking and the beat is off. Maybe we imagine God somewhere up beyond outer space, holding the earth–and all things–in...

I don’t like 95% of Christian pop music. It’s mostly crap. Worship music is even worse. It’s crap because it’s regurgitated, copy cat, completely uninspired junk. I mostly fault the Christian music industry wanting to play it safe all the time, but I also fault artists who...

Mairi Morrison & Alasdair Roberts Urstan (Drag City) There is a bar called the Caledonia, on the far edge of College Street, in Toronto. It’s a new bar, and I had my first outdoor drink of the season there a couple of weeks ago. There, one of the bartenders chided me gently, because I ordered...

NOTE: This is a meditation I presented in worship at University Baptist Church, Starkville, MS. It is inspired by a song, “Burden of Belief,” by Daniel Bailey, and the Gospel of John … FULL SCRIPTURE TEXT:  John 20:19-29 (NLT) “My Lord and my God!” Thomas exclaimed. Then Jesus told him, “You...

New Years Day, 2012 My brother and I were driving in our rental car on back roads in the Catskills in New York. Our Google map wasn’t helping much. For one last stab before giving up, we tried an unmarked road and, fifty yards down it, found the street sign we were looking for. We wound up the hill...

Plants and Animals The End of That (Secret City) Plants and Animals are arguably Montreal’s second-finest indie rockers after Arcade Fire. I’ve been trying to get a feel for their third full length, The End of That, for a couple of weeks now, and I just can’t. Here is the best I have yet...

Todd Snider Agnostic Hymns and Stoner Fables (Aimless) The idea of Nashville as slick and inauthentic, the place with dudes in 300-dollar blue jeans stringing tourists along and shucking them out of money, is well known; and so reviewing a Todd Snider album is an exercise in trying to avoid writing about...

Lucero Women & Work (ATO) I am staring at what appears to be a photograph of three truckers, two lumberjacks, and the frontman for an emo band reclining on a curb in front of a mildly seedy arcade, so this must be the new Lucero album. Lucero being a band with whom I am only tangentially familiar,...

It’s been said that all a worship leader needs to have is a pure and righteous heart, and if they have that quality of holiness, things will magically turn out like the Brooklyn Gospel Tabernacle — the worship will be angelically flawless. Finding musicians and singers who are passionately “on...

Dale and I became fast friends a few years ago because of our love for the music of that Missouri band of rural hippie farmers known as the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Their song “Beauty in the River” is one of my favorite all-time hymns (of the “not-actually-a-hymn” variety). there’s a...