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Monday, December 15, 2008
A Good Word for Writers of Worship Songs


comments?

Hat Tip to Chris Seay on this clip.
posted by John David Walt | at 12/15/2008 06:26:00 PM

 

8 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

That'll preach! Thanks for the reminder.

12:29 AM EST  
Blogger ode2immortality said...

another good line from that movie

"You can't help nobody if you can't tell 'em the right story"

9:56 AM EST  
Blogger David Wofford said...

...more like advice for life. Good word

8:56 AM EST  
Blogger Dean Ober said...

now...take that same song...the song you'd play if it was your last song while dyin' in a gutter...and use it as an act of service to help people who don't exactly know the words they want to sing, sing. imagine having the integrity of not singing songs that don't help people sing (similar to songs that don't sell). imagine knowing English, and music, and the song you would play if it was your last song while dyin' in a gutter, proficiently enough within that model of serving people, and the band to follow your lead, imagine all of that coming together.... i see a whole lotta worship goin' on. =]

great illusteration of what genuine music looks like. thanks JD!

12:31 PM EST  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

How often do we stand in worship and sing what we aren't believing at the moment?
Perhaps the question for us might be: What song would you sing if you were standing face to face with the Risen Savior and could only sing one song that would let out how you feel about Him and truly worship Him?

Great clip, JD.

2:08 PM EST  
Blogger John D. Palmer said...

Ok. I've been pondering this post for a little while now. While I think I get the impact of the clip in and of itself, my spidey senses are tingling about the notion of how this may be a good insight for writers of worship songs. So before I Grinch this out, maybe someone could unpack its preachability for me from a writer of worship songs perspective.

9:52 AM EST  
Blogger John David Walt said...

jdp-- i suppose what i'm getting at is this notion of how so much worship music these days is "the same old thing" as the producer said about the first song they played. could we be falling into an easy form? i'm not sure--- i just like his word about "we can't market gospel." i fear that the machine we have created for worship music does at least two things-- creates a glut of the same kind of songs coming over and over again and creates a short shelf-life for any song.

i imagine we will soon be reaching the point where the record and radio industry will be saying, "we can't market worship."

there are a lot of positives of course.

so grinch on brother.

jd

6:39 PM EST  
Blogger John D. Palmer said...

Ok well if marketing is your point with this clip and the lamentation has to do with endlessly repetitive praise and worship chorus’s and how it makes for a short shelf life that’s one thing. I’m not sure if what is “marketable” has anything to do with the inspiration of a praise and worship song. I’m pretty sure it shouldn’t. Course I have a dimmer view of why the music from the ghetto of Christian music is chosen and its not because of the lyric’s. Marketing of Christian music today has more to do with the ability of the marketing agency to wrap up a group or individual in a pretty package and sell him/her to wide audience. Unfortunately I’m not sure it has anything to do with the musical acumen of the “artist” in question and I know of at least a few “artists” that end up starving rather than be packaged into something they aren’t.

My sense’s went off with the producers explanation for “bringing it home” when he remarks, very sarcastically, that “It ain’t got nothing to do with believing in God, it has to do with believing in yourself” And his earlier comment that plays on our “feelings” when he says in reference to a song “Something real, something you felt because that’s the kinda of song people want to hear. . . .thats the kind of song that truly saves people”

It seems to me that if this is what drives our sense of song writing that we are traveling a slippery slope of singing a song of praise and Worship to God that is written out of popularity and personal humanistic achievement and not out of a desire to give our all to God. The producer in this sense is not inviting us to honorably sing our songs for the Glory of God, rather the Glory of self and the adulation of others. If you or I could write a song that “saved” people then we would have quite the power and authority wouldn’t we? And if we did. . . .why would we need God?

5:51 PM EST  

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