How great is.
I am going to write about an old buddy, and then I am going to use my relationship with her as a reason to discuss a song that she may not have ever liked, and may not ever. Or maybe she does. I don’t know; there are too many important things of trivial note for us to talk about someday before I ever ask that question.
She was one of my favourite people to talk to about many things; amongst many favourite things to talk about was music. We have different yet overlapping tastes and an open-minded affinity to fresh melodies. This might sound like an obvious thing, but it’s not: most people get hung up on the music they listened to in high school or college and from then on, will compare all contemporary music against the brilliant tunes that were being made at that time. For some, that time would be Glenn Miller or Etta James, or the Beatles or Fleetwood Mac, or Guns ‘n’ Roses or Roxette, or early Modest Mouse or Dave Matthews, or the Hives or Mos Def, or…the list goes on. It’s all relative to what era you were in school, but the intensity of those years means that whatever you were listening to at the time probably has special significance and therefore is way better than anything since.
I have long appreciated the rugged, unaffected, authentic devotion to her own taste. That means two things:
Falling in love with something when nobody else seems to love it.
Falling in love with something when everybody else seems to love it.
To love something simply and only because you love it and feel a connection: It feels obvious, but it is so easy to be aware of the tastes of others and to adjust your own accordingly; to distance yourself from something that perhaps has too large a fanbase. It feels harder to share something special with…(what seems like) everyone.
That being said, it is also a very special thing to fall in love with a piece of music or art and to gain a whole higher level of love for it because someone else shares a connection with it as well.
I am sitting on a couch, recovering from a certain injury, after baking brownies and drinking coffee with my wife (another music-heavy relationship), and a song just came on via a Spotify playlist I made. This song was sandwiched between a wonderful Crowder song and a wonderful Jon Foreman track. It is one that many people have heard and many people love.
It is the 2004 Chris Tomlin classic How Great Is Our God.
Chances are if you have attended some sort of Christian church service or evangelistic event in the last fifteen years, or listened to any sort of contemporary Christian music, you have probably heard this song. It is very popular.
And it is really good.
Our kids play it together on guitar and ukulele, and sometimes on a Friday night I plunk it out on piano in our dimly-lit living room as the house slumbers, and I still get goosebumps and feel contemplative and warm when I hear it. Like seven hundred million other people do.
“…it also is the fifth most popular worship song today.” (Wikipedia)
I don’t listen to radio, aside from NPR and a local classical station, and I am very picky about what “Christian” music I listen to; the artists I listen to that provide me a spiritual score for the days I need it tend to be less Chris Tomlin or Lauren Daigle and more
Johnny Cash, Townes Van Zandt, Mahalia Jackson,
Waterboys, Jon Foreman, Pedro the Lion,
Joseph Arthur, Sigur Ros, Moby,
Michael Nyman, Philip Glass…
and so on. But I have also heard a couple extremely popular Christian artists working within the genre who I have been very moved by; most notably David Crowder. Listen to Blessedness of Everlasting Light or his handclap-filled remix with Bill Gaither of Because He Lives. Beautiful - and a quick poke through his catalog shows his talent for arrangement, experimentation, and genre-mashing places him in a place Sufjan Stevens might occasionally nod appreciatively at.
Sufjan and Crowder. Two unique and talented musicians who (I believe) make music for themselves first and invite audiences to follow along with their creations and like…or not like.
Then there’s somebody like Chris Tomlin. I met, talked with, and shot a video with him in 2003 in Nashville during the Dove Awards (Christian music’s version of the Grammys). That would be a year before How Great came out and became a worldwide smash. I don’t remember a whole lot, except that he was quiet, had a nice smile, and carried an energy that struck me as being down to earth and a spiritual vibe that came across as authentic.
What right do I have to judge or interpret the legitimacy of a person’s “spiritual energy?”
None. Yet I did and do.
I haven’t really listened to anything else of his. He probably has some other good songs. I may have heard some and they didn’t grab me. His style is not one that I’m drawn to. But he did this song, this magnum opus that has brought meaning and joy to millions, including myself. Which means it is a target to make fun of.
For every action, a reaction. For every culture, a counter-culture.
Yet for every counter-culture, there is a counter that. So does being counter to counter-culture swing you back to the mainstream? It’s a see-saw, a precarious balancing act and one I’ve never been good at. I do better just doing my own thing and guessing that sometimes I’ll be in step, in rhythm, in a cool zone, and sometimes I won’t be. But it’s wonderful to not have to worry or think about those things. Except when I’m writing about those very things.
One of my interests, and possibly gifts, is paying attention to things that frequently go unnoticed - or perhaps, bringing the trivial or mundane up to a greater level of importance than it might have had otherwise. I am grateful for the things and people that make life beautiful; the heralded and the unheralded, and
I’ve realized more and more how much I appreciate being around those who beat their own rhythm. Who like that which is not popular, and that which is popular, who love what they love and are who they are, because they are driven to be themselves. To be a unique individual who is both part of community and separate from it.
You cannot judge the “quality” of a person by their preferences or who they listen to.
But what a person soundtracks their life with does say a little something about what they value, the degree of internal self-confidence they possess, the appreciation and connection they have with aesthetics, and can be a general clue to their philosophy of living (whether they would articulate it as such or not).
It is so easy to work hard at two opposing things:
Fitting in
Being different
But the people I am most influenced and inspired by are those who rock their own beat, whose preferences and tastes are (first) shaped internally, and whose hearts and minds explode with a unique signature that isn’t driven by a need to be different or a need to fit in…
…it’s driven by a need to exist as a unique individual on the face of this universe and to share that uniqueness in an authentic and beautiful way that is in competition with none. That simply thrives.
So for the time being, I shall be content with sharing my connection with How Great Is Our God with a mere 700 million other people.
How good is that?
Yet I do wonder.
