ChristianityToday.com, perhaps the critic of Christian music with the largest audience, says these are the best “Christian” albums of 2005:
1. Switchfoot - Nothing Is Sound
2. Over The Rhine - Drunkard’s Prayer
3. David Crowder Band - A Collision or (3+4=7)
4. Mae - The Everglow
5. Sara Groves - Add To The Beauty (No relation)
6. 4th Avenue Jones - Stereo: The Evolution of HipRockSoul
7. Jars of Clay - Redemption Songs
8. Andrew Peterson - The Far Country
9. Bart Millard - Hymned No.1
10. Eisley - Room Noises
(Go to ChristianityToday.com for the complete list and “near misses.”
ThePDAdvisor.com (A website for those in the radio industry) polled its many reporting stations and compiled its radio play data to determine that these are the DJs’ favorite artists (or his/her boss, Mr. Program Director) for 2005:
ARTIST OF THE YEAR:
Casting Crowns
Jeremy Camp
Chris Tomlin
MALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR:
Jeremy Camp
Chris Tomlin
Bebo Norman
FEMALE ARTIST OF THE YEAR:
Nichole Nordeman
Natalie Grant
Joy Williams
GROUP OF THE YEAR:
Casting Crowns
MercyMe
Kutless
NEW ARTIST OF THE YEAR:
The Afters
Jadon Lavik
Joel Engle
So who impacted album sales the most in 2005? Do people buy records because they hear it on the radio or read about it in print or on-line? That list is coming soon. For now, which CD collection would you want for Christmas: The DJs’ or the Critic’s?
Excerpts from Rolling Stone’s interview this week with Bono:
Q:What role did religion play in your childhood?
A:I knew that we were different on our street because my mother was Protestant. And that she’d married a Catholic. At a time of strong sectarian feeling in the country, I knew that was special. We didn’t go to the neighborhood schools—we got on a bus. I picked up the courage they had to have had to follow through on their love.
Q:Did you feel religious when you went to church?
A:Even then I prayed more outside of the church than inside. It gets back to the songs I was listening to; to me, they were prayers. “How many roads must a man walk down?” That wasn’t a rhetorical question to me. It was addressed to God. It’s a question I wanted to know the answer to, and I’m wondering, who do I ask that to? I’m not gonna ask a schoolteacher. When John Lennon sings, “Oh, my love/For the first time in my life/My eyes are wide open”—these songs have an intimacy for me that’s not just between people, I realize now, not just sexual intimacy. A spiritual intimacy.
Q:Who is God to you at that point in your life?
A:I don’t know. I would rarely be asking these questions inside the church. I see lovely nice people hanging out in a church. Occasionally, when I’m singing a hymn like . . . oh, if I can think of a good one . . . oh, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” or “Be Thou My Vision,” something would stir inside of me. But, basically, religion left me cold.
Q:Your early songs are about being confused, about trying to find spirituality at an age when most anybody else your age would be writing about girls and trouble.
A:Yeah. We sorta did it the other way around.
Q:You skipped “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and you went right . . .
A:. . . Into the mystic. Van Morrison would be the inverse, in terms of the journey. It’s this turbulent period at fifteen, sixteen, and the electrical storms that come at that age…
Q:You never saw rock & roll—the so-called devil’s music—as incompatible with religion?
Look at the people who have formed my imagination. Bob Dylan. Nineteen seventy-six—he’s going through similar stuff. You buy Patti Smith: Horses—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins/But not mine . . .” And she turns Van Morrison’s “Gloria” into liturgy. She’s wrestling with these demons—Catholicism in her case. Right the way through to Wave, where she’s talking to the pope.
The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt. So the blues, on one hand—running away; gospel, the Mighty Clouds of Joy—running towards. And later you came to analyze it and figure it out.
The blues are like the Psalms of David. Here was this character, living in a cave, whose outbursts were as much criticism as praise. There’s David singing, “Oh, God—where are you when I need you?/You call yourself God?” And you go, this is the blues.
Both deal with the relationship with God. That’s really it. I’ve since realized that anger with God is very valid. We wrote a song about that on the Pop album—people were confused by it—“Wake Up Dead Man”: “Jesus, help me/I’m alone in this world/And a fucked-up world it is, too/Tell me, tell me the story /The one about eternity/And the way it’s all gonna be/Wake up, dead man.”
Q:Soon after starting the band you joined a Bible-study group—you and Larry and Edge—called the Shalom. What brought that on?
A:We were doing street theater in Dublin, and we met some people who were madder than us. They were a kind of inner-city group living life like it was the first century A.D.
They were expectant of signs and wonders; lived a kind of early-church religion. It was a commune. People who had cash shared it. They were passionate, and they were funny, and they seemed to have no material desires…
But it got a little too intense, as it always does; it became a bit of a holy huddle. And these people—who are full of inspirational teaching and great ideas—they pretended that our dress, the way we looked, didn’t bother them. But very soon it appeared that was not the case. They started asking questions about the music we were listening to. Why are you wearing earrings? Why do you have a mohawk?…
Q:What draws you so deeply to Martin Luther King?
A:So now—cut to 1980. Irish rock group, who’ve been through the fire of a certain kind of revival, a Christian-type revival, go to America. Turn on the TV the night you arrive, and there’s all these people talking from the Scriptures. But they’re quite obviously raving lunatics.
Suddenly you go, what’s this? And you change the channel. There’s another one. You change the channel, and there’s another secondhand-car salesman. You think, oh, my God. But their words sound so similar . . . to the words out of our mouths.
So what happens? You learn to shut up. You say, whoa, what’s this going on? You go oddly still and quiet. If you talk like this around here, people will think you’re one of those. And you realize that these are the traders—as in t-r-a-d-e-r-s—in the temple.
Until you get to the black church, and you see that they have similar ideas. But their religion seems to be involved in social justice; the fight for equality. And a Rolling Stone journalist, Jim Henke, who has believed in you more than anyone up to this point, hands you a book called Let the Trumpet Sound—which is the biography of Dr. King. And it just changes your life.
Even though I’m a believer, I still find it really hard to be around other believers: They make me nervous, they make me twitch. I sorta watch my back. Except when I’m with the black church. I feel relaxed, feel at home; my kids—I can take them there; there’s singing, there’s music.
Q:What is your religious belief today? What is your concept of God?
A:If I could put it simply, I would say that I believe there’s a force of love and logic in the world, a force of love and logic behind the universe. And I believe in the poetic genius of a creator who would choose to express such unfathomable power as a child born in “straw poverty”; i.e., the story of Christ makes sense to me.
Q:How does it make sense?
A:As an artist, I see the poetry of it. It’s so brilliant. That this scale of creation, and the unfathomable universe, should describe itself in such vulnerability, as a child. That is mind-blowing to me. I guess that would make me a Christian. Although I don’t use the label, because it is so very hard to live up to. I feel like I’m the worst example of it, so I just kinda keep my mouth shut…
Q:How big an influence is the Bible on your songwriting? How much do you draw on its imagery, its ideas?
A:It sustains me.
Q:As a belief, or as a literary thing?
A:As a belief. These are hard subjects to talk about because you can sound like such a dickhead. I’m the sort of character who’s got to have an anchor. I want to be around immovable objects. I want to build my house on a rock, because even if the waters are not high around the house, I’m going to bring back a storm. I have that in me. So it’s sort of underpinning for me.
I don’t read it as a historical book. I don’t read it as, “Well, that’s good advice.” I let it speak to me in other ways. They call it the rhema. It’s a hard word to translate from Greek, but it sort of means it changes in the moment you’re in. It seems to do that for me.
Q:You’re saying it’s a living thing?
A:It’s a plumb line for me. In the Scriptures, it is self-described as a clear pool that you can see yourself in, to see where you’re at, if you’re still enough. I’m writing a poem at the moment called “The Pilgrim and His Lack of Progress.” I’m not sure I’m the best advertisement for this stuff.
Q:What do you think of the evangelical movement that we see in the United States now?
A:I’m wary of faith outside of actions. I’m wary of religiosity that ignores the wider world. In 2001, only seven percent of evangelicals polled felt it incumbent upon themselves to respond to the AIDS emergency. This appalled me. I asked for meetings with as many church leaders as would have them with me. I used my background in the Scriptures to speak to them about the so-called leprosy of our age and how I felt Christ would respond to it. And they had better get to it quickly, or they would be very much on the other side of what God was doing in the world.
Amazingly, they did respond. I couldn’t believe it. It almost ruined it for me—‘cause I love giving out about the church and Christianity. But they actually came through: Jesse Helms, you know, publicly repents for the way he thinks about AIDS.
I’ve started to see this community as a real resource in America…
(Excerpted from RS 986, November 3, 2005) Read more here. Or better yet, buy the magazine. This is the longest most in-depth interview I’ve ever read in Rolling Stone and well worth the read. Much to think about on music, life, faith and family.
FROM BILLBOARD MAGAZINE: Startup digital music company BurnLounge wants to democratize the music retail business.
The Web-based service provides the music library, e-commerce tools and business management software for virtually anyone to own and operate their own digital download store. The company’s founders hope to recruit everyday music fans, allowing each to decide which acts they want to feature and promote, as a sort of digital guerrilla marketing
play.
“It’s the reincarnation of the corner record store,” BurnLounge president/COO and co-founder Ryan Dadd says. “This whole concept is about the next generation of retail. It’s about marketing to affinity groups, to people with shared interests.”
BurnLounge is essentially a digital store franchise. Regardless of operator, each store has the same look and feel, and all carry the BurnLounge brand. All also have access to the same music library, pricing and transaction system, powered by partner Loudeye.
What sets each BurnLounge store apart is the programming that the individual operator chooses. The service lets users decide which bands or songs to feature on the home page and each genre page, as well as create and promote customized playlists.
It also provides a host of digital marketing tools. These include an instant messaging application that supports all popular IM communities (such as AOL, MSN Messenger and Yahoo; chat rooms; and message boards), DVD presentations, posters, letterheads, gift cards and a quarterly promotional magazine.
“In the music business, we’ve always known that personal referrals and relationships lead to sales,” says Stephen Murray, BurnLounge president of entertainment and co-founder. “The problem is there’s been no way to quantifiably track that transaction.”
That, he promises, is possible with BurnLounge. The company hopes to capitalize on this by marketing the service to artists and their managers, fan clubs, street-team marketing groups, labels, music retailers and others with a large audience of music fans. Radio personality Rick Dees is one, and he is an investor in the company.
BurnLounge offers these companies its top-level Music Mogul service, which allows them to set up their own digital music service as well as operate an online chain of stores. Music Mogul operators invite others to open franchises under their oversight via the Affiliate level of the service. These affiliate members then invite individuals to open their own personalized stores…
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To learn more check out BurnLounge.com’s beta site and this promotional video
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What remains to be clarified is whether or not independent artists outside the five major label system will be sold on BurnLounge sites. If so, then this could go a long way to replacing major label distribution channels as the downloadable single continues to increase in popularity. And why would I, the consumer, want to buy music from a BurnLounge site and not from iTunes? Will I have to find a BurnLounge affiliated site that sells the songs I’m looking for? If so, why not shop at iTunes where almost every major label song I want is all in one place? What are your thoughts? Great way to make some money and purchase music OR redundant and more complicated version of iTunes?
I listened intently tonight as Andrew Peterson fit more truth and inspiration in five songs than most of us writers can fit in a entire evening. He, I, George Rowe, Ronnie Freeman and others performed a benefit concert in Nashville for hurricane relief efforts. While every performer was great to hear and see, it was Andrew’s lyricism that awed me most. And it was this song, “The Penny Song”, that struck me hardest, a song that tells by showing - the hardest kind to write. Andrew’s gift is letting his listener see meaning in the minutia of life through his microscope eyes. Enjoy this dose of pure brilliance from the lyricist I want to be when I grow up:
THE PENNY SONG
by Andrew Peterson
I’d give you all of me to know what you were thinking
And if I had one wish I’d wish I wasn’t sinking here
Drowning in this well, oh can’t you tell?
I can’t pick myself up off the ground,
Well I’ve been face down and pushed aside.
Well you know I’d rather just turn tail and run
than lie here in the sun and watch you pass me by
Cause I ain’t worth a dime.
But If only I could stand up straight, I wouldn’t have to lie and wait,
I could up and roll away, never be ignored
I’ve got a feeling that I’m something more
than just a piece of copper ore, turning green and looking for
The reason I was born.
I’ve been around since 1964, in banks and bottom drawers
And on railroad ties. I’ve been passed around and cast aside
Skipped and flipped and flattened wide, Spun around
And thrown away and left alone to lie
But If only I could stand up straight, I wouldn’t have to lie and wait,
I could up and roll away, never be ignored
I’ve got a feeling that I’m something more
than just a peice of copper ore, turning green and looking for
The reason I was born.
But I heard about a penny found, lying underneath the couch
By a woman who was kneeling down, looking for some change.
Then the woman danced around and called her friends all over town
Told them what was lost is found, it’s another penny saved.
And so I find that all this time beneath the surface I could shine
Like all the gold a king and queen could measure
even a penny is a treasure
Pick up Andrew’s latest CD “The Far Country” in stores everywhere.
