Michael Jackson, regardless of what he had become in the latter years of his life, was a talented performer – this medley of several Jackson 5 songs shows just how talented he was, even at a young age.

He doesn’t take himself too seriously. I dig that. Life is too short to be a prima-donna musician.

Paul Brandt (Wikipedia) is a country artist, and for many, many years I really disliked country. I probably even said that I hated country music when I was in my 20’s. Sometime in my early 30’s, I started to enjoy some country music. One of the key artists to re-shape my feelings about country music was Paul Brandt. I really liked his music because it wasn’t the twangy “My dog got run over by a truck” stuff I thought of as being typically country. The first album I bought by Paul Brandt was This Time Around, his 2004 release. I liked it, and picked up a few more of his albums – and I discovered a song that blew me away, completely and totally: When You Call My Name.

To quote from this song, “the way that it moves me, it’s simply amazing”. Just like “World’s Apart” by Jars of Clay, this song impacted me in a big way when I first heard it, and it still does today. First, it’s live – the whole album it’s from, Small Town and Big Dreams, is live. Live music has a…realness that studio music can often lack. It’s raw, it’s pure, and it’s real (assuming there aren’t a rack of pitch-correctors back-stage). Paul Brandt’s voice is powerful, pure, and very real. I’ve heard him sing live (sadly, not this song), and his voice really does sound that good. Next, layer on some great playing/singing by the band, especially the background vocalists – one of which I think is his wife, Elizabeth. There’s also a male background vocalist that adds some great texture to the song. There are wonderful harmonies layered everywhere in this song – it’s amazing to sing along with – and some phenomenal mandolin and bass playing.

For me, the real power though is in the words. Music is poetry put to melody, and like all poetry, the interpretation is often left up to the reader or listener. When I close my eyes and listen to this song, I hear the cry of the created to the Creator. I hear the ache of a spirit, once broken, made whole.  I hear the gasp of amazement from a soul who hears his name spoken from the lips of Eternity. I hear the tears of joy falling on a face of someone who’s been forgiven, head tilted upward toward Pure Love. When You call my name.

[you can listen to the entire song here]

“When You Call My Name”, Paul Brandt

Give me a moment
To try and explain it
And how it has changed
The man that I am
Life has a way
When you try to arrange it
Of makin’ a fool
Of the best laid plans

Guess what I’m tryin’ to say
Is you took me by surprise
One word is all that it takes
And forever’s on my mind
It happens every time

I hear the sweetest sound
My world stops turnin’ round
Like I’m on Holy Ground
When you call my name
It sets the sky on fire
Burning with my desire
Stronger deeper higher
When you call my name

The way that it moves me
It’s simply amazing
Yeah somehow it seems
Much bigger than words
When you call my name
Angels start singing
The most beautiful sound
That I’ve ever heard

And it starts all over again
This feeling deep inside
A blessed chain of events
A heaven sent desire
It happens every time

I hear the sweetest sound
My world stops turnin’ round
Like I’m on Holy Ground
When you call my name
It sets the sky on fire
Burning with my desire
Stronger deeper higher
When you call my name

When you call my name
Ahhhhhhhhhhhh
When you call my name
Ooooooooohhhh
It happens every time

I hear the sweetest sound
My world stops turnin’ round
Like I’m on Holy Ground
When you call my name
It sets the sky on fire
Burning with my desire
Stronger deeper higher
When you call my name

I hear the sweetest sound
My world stops turnin round
Like I’m on Holy Ground
(call my name)
When you call my name
It sets the sky on fire
Burning with my desire
Stronger deeper higher
When you call my name

One of the joys in my life, one of the great blessings, is to discover music that connects with me on such a deep level that I can listen to it over and over again, reading the lyrics and be impacted by them every time. I wanted to share some of those songs with the readers of this blog; to shine the light on some great music that you may not have heard.

One of those songs is “World’s Apart” by Jars of Clay. The first time I heard this song, the lyrics hit me like a thunderclap. The beauty of music, of any poetry, is that the interpretation of the lyrics is left to the reader – but in my case, the fact that the first line is an admission of responsibility for our own actions is powerful. I believe pride, and the endless repercussions of pride, are at the forefront of so many things that are wrong with the world today. People hurt other people because of pride. People refuse to forgive others because of pride. Pride blinds us to our own faults, our own limitations, and our own mistakes. Blinded, we often cause harm to those around us. Pride limits us from learning, from growing. Pride keeps us from admitting when we’re wrong, or admitting when we’ve wronged others. And pride, in so many different ways, keeps us from admitting that we need something bigger than ourselves. In my own life, I often struggle against pride – I strive to be humble of spirit, sometimes succeeding, often times failing. Check out the lyrics to this song below…

[click here to listen to a 30 second sample of the song]

“Worlds Apart”, Jars of Clay

I am the only one to blame for this
Somehow it all ends up the same
Soaring on the wings of selfish pride
I flew too high and like Icarus I collide
With a world I try so hard to leave behind
To rid myself of all but love
to give and die

(more…)

I remember hearing this song on the radio and thinking it was a catchy tune melody-wise, but the lyrics pack quite a punch – I’ve believed for a long time now that the way we treat our celebrities in Western culture is twisted and often-times cruel (and I’m rarely any better). As a society, we hold these famous people to almost impossible standards, scrutinize their every move, and when we finally grind their sanity down to a thread and they finally snap, we all stand and watch shaking our heads and saying “Tsk, tsk, I guess they just couldn’t handle the pressure.” It takes a remarkable person to survive being famous, and with the advent of the Internet and 24 hour news channels, there’s no place for them to hide from their “fans”. I can’t imagine the isolation and loneliness that most famous people must feel.

Bebo Norman’s song really nails the issue, and some YouTubian has put the song to a collection of video clips and included the words to his song. I defy anyone to watch this and not feel sympathy for Britney Spears.

Emails like this make all the work on my album art project (completed with lots of help from Ashley) worthwhile:

“I just stumbled upon your album page this morning, and I felt compelled to tell you how awesome you are. I have an obsession with album art too, and when I put my iPod on Cover Flowand something is missing, I die a little inside. I have been searching the internet for months [for] a couple [of] fairly random album covers (Big Shiny Tunes 7 and Now 4) and finding them both at the same time, in supreme quality, was the best the [thing] that happened to me all week. Uploading all those covers must have been a killer project, but because of it my iTunes library is nearer to perfection. Thank you, oh random internet stranger, for helping me on my quest to a
flawless Cover Flow.”

And that reminds me, I have to update it – I haven’t uploaded new images in almost a year now and I’ve added quite a few more CDs to my collection since then. I loves the music!

Nearly a decade ago, in January 1999, I went to visit a friend from my childhood (Brock Harris) in Los Angeles. Brock was teaching a group of high school students something called “A Capella”. I knew that A Capella meant voices only, but it never occurred to me that someone could take modern pop songs and perform them purely with vocals (at age 24 my musical horizons were more limited then they are now). What I saw blew me away – a bunch of young adults, not that much younger than me (most were 18 or so), blending their voices into amazing sounds. The group was called No Strings Attached, and I still listen to their album to this day. Sadly, that seemed to be the only CD the group put out.

Fast forward nine years later, and I enjoy A Capella more than ever. I think it’s partially because it’s nothing but the human voice – no technology beyond a microphone, no vocal auto-tuning (listen to the

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and

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) for sloppy vocalists, no layering of the same vocalist over and over so they sound fuller…it’s pure vocals, pure music. I tend to gravitate toward college and high school A Capella because they pick cool songs, and have great energy. I recently stumbled across A Capella videos on YouTube, and not surprisingly, there are a lot of them (especially from this guy). This video caught my eye today, and spurred me to finally post about this topic. Check it out:

I tend to prefer all-female, or mixed groups (great female vocals = heaven), but that all-male group video was just too good to ignore – when the rather short, and somewhat rotund fellow steps up to the microphone, you expect a certain type of voice – not the powerful bass-heavy vocals that comes out of his mouth. And it gets even better when he kicks it up to his higher range…simply awesome! If you want to check out more college A Capella, the BOCA albums are a good place to start.

If you watch TV, even the commercial-skipping type, you can’t help but have heard the song “1234″ by Feist, featured on the Apple Nano commercial. You know, the insanely catchy one where’s she’s dancing around in the sparkly blue outfit:

Based purely off the video, I thought maybe Feist was the band name for Zayra off Rock Star: INXS, then I remembered that Zayra couldn’t really sing and Feist clearly could. I bought the song because I thought it was catchy, but didn’t really look into who the group was. Then last week I read an article talking about how Feist was really Leslie Feist, and how she was in a high-school band called Placebo. A bell went off in my head, because when I was in high school (Bishop Carrol in Calgary) there was a band called Placebo that a friend of mine was in (I didn’t know Leslie very well though, more like a friend of a friend). A quick Google image search brought me to this picture:

Hey, I recognize her! I did a bit more searching and found this video of Placebo performing live, which confirmed it: I did go to high school with her! The bass player in that video is named Elescia (not sure about the spelling of her name – it’s been a while!), and I went to junior high school with her. The guitar player is named Keiran, and his dad was the art teacher at our high school. I recognize the drummer as well, but I can’t remember her name. What a small world – crazy! I wish Leslie well – go Calgary girl go!

I started off today blogging about something that made me sad, but I want to end today by posting something that put a smile on my face and lifted my spirit: some incredible a capella music. An incredible song (Phil Collins is a fantastic song writer) performed by some incredible vocalists. A capella music is pure because there’s nothing but the artist and their voice. Turn up your speakers! Heres the “official” music video.

I love music. I really love music. Silence can be nice, silence can be helpful, but when I don’t feel like silence I want to be awash in music. I stumbled, quite randomly (saw it in an Oprah commercial), across a musician by the name of Emmy Rossum, and the clip I saw had something to do with YouTube. I checked her out and this is the song I found:

Enchanting, yes? Perhaps not musically everyone’s cup o’ tea, but I really liked it. The fact that the song feels like it’s all one big introduction, but the song never “starts”, leaves the listener with an unfinished feeling. Lest anyone think that she’s a studio-diva with a rack of auto-tuners to fix her vocal sloppiness, here’s a video clip of her performing live – and her voice is solid.