"Christian" Music

It's been over a month since I posted on the blog. We were on vacation in Nova Scotia for the last three weeks of August, and although I had lots of time to sit and visit with friends and read and even play the guitar, I didn't take any time to blog. Now it's been so long and so many ideas have been swirling around in my head that I thought I'd just post whatever came to mind.

We discovered a new (to us) group a couple weeks ago, called the Welcome Wagon. The group is a pastor (Vito Aiuto) and his wife (Monique) from a church in Brooklyn, NY, and their music is a nice combination of traditional sounding gospel songs and indie pop a la Sufjan Stevens (a friend of theirs - I presume that the "Vito" of Stevens' "Vito's Ordination Song" is this Vito). The album is called Welcome to the Welcome Wagon, and contains a couple of originals and a bunch of covers from everything from 60s rockers The Velvet Underground (their probably-tongue-in-cheek song "Jesus" becomes a beautiful sincere prayer here) to old spirituals ("He Never Said a Mumblin' Word," about Jesus' silence in the face of his trial and death on the cross) to hymn texts reset to fingerpicked acoustic guitars.

Best of all the covers, though, is probably the bizarre "Sold! to the Nice Rich Man", which imagines Jesus coming from heaven to earth to the cross as a rich man entering a town and messing with everything as he buys their wonderful world by "paying the price" in full. Greatest line about the ultimate and costly claim Jesus makes on our lives and our world's violent reaction to it:

"A rich man came to our town and changed our minds, took our things, took our knives...tonight we fight!"

The song was written by Daniel Smith of Danielson (another new artist for us, and another friend of Sufjan Stevens, and himself the son of Leonard Smith, Jr., the writer of the worship song "Our God Reigns"), whose music I've just started listening to in the past few days.

The song that has meant the most to us so far, though, is an original by Aiuto called "Up on a Mountain." The song is simple and relatively spare, and is all about the trip "all the way down" Jesus made for us, that results in our assurance that we are "not alone." After talking about Jesus' loneliness in Gethsemane and his fear on the cross (at least I think it's about the cross in the second verse) comes this final verse:

Up in the heavens our Lord prays for you
He sent his Spirit to carry us through
So it's true that you're not alone
Do you know he came all the way down?

With The Welcome Wagon and Danielson (more later on them!) and Sufjan Stevens (though his songs are less explicitly Christian on the whole) I feel like I've been introduced to a wholly different kind of "Christian music", not nearly as predictable and much more alive than most of the Christian music I have heard in the past. It has always seemed a shame to me that Christian music should seem to lack the creativity you find in the more interesting artists working today. I guess I can't say that anymore.