BODIES OF WATER

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The Journey Is Our Home is an album of songs for people to sing in church. The story is this: I (David) and Meredith and Anna and Kyle all started playing music at a church in our neighborhood (Church of the Resurrection). I mainly play folk songs and hymns, but eventually people encouraged me to write some songs for everyone there to sing, so that’s what I did, and the album is recordings of those songs. 

And of course I should remind you, we’ve been making gospel music for years (this is our sixth album, eighth if you count the Music Go Music stuff, which isn’t gospel…very worldly actually), BUT lots of those gospel songs from our past are abstract, violent show-stoppers that nobody but us would ever want to sing. Or listen to.

Ed. note: When you make violent, apocalyptic religious music, there’s something for everyone to hate. Religious people don’t want to listen to songs about angels killing people or animals full of demons. And of course everyone else doesn’t want to listen to religious music. Is this the least popular genre of music in the world? YES!!! Nothing else even comes close. 

Anyhow, it worked, kind of; most of these songs (but not all) are sung in a real church by real people, and the Spirit moves through and among all of us. It’s easy to forget that lots of music is still functional. And not just in that it’s used to sell phones or hot dogs or whatever (although that’s fine, I don’t mind a good hot dog sale song), but that people make it to serve a purpose in their community. And that could be all kinds of things, but in this case it’s to help everyone draw near to God and each other. 

So if the songs exist for the people to sing together, then why make a record? So that you can hear it. And because we like making records. Also, this year I got this app that shows all the info about who listens to your music on spotify, et al. I saw all kinds of interesting things. For one, there are certain far-flung cities where lots of people inexplicably listen to our music; Lagos, Istanbul, Tel Aviv, Warsaw, places we haven’t been to and don’t understand. To think that even a few people in Lagos are listening to our stuff is both humbling AND makes me feel like it’s better to just put stuff out and trust that it will find the people who need to hear it. This philosophy also just kind of accords with the reality of my life; I don’t have enough time to spend too much of it on anything (did you know Meredith and I have 3 young kids?) ESPECIALLY not fine-tuning a bunch of music. So if I tried to make a record that was all perfect and ship-shape, it would never get done. And then what would our fans in Istanbul and Warsaw do? Jump off a bridge probably. Well I don’t want their blood on my hands. 

Another note: all these songs are in flux. They’ve already evolved beyond the way they sound on this record. But don’t worry about it; why would you want them to be the same anyhow? Relax. Also, as we were going we added stuff that we thought would spice up the recordings: things we could or would never do in real life. For example, the guitar and saxophone on that first song play the exact same thing, can you hear it? That was difficult to play, BUT even if I could play it with ease (I didn’t play it with ease, I had to work at this), why force everyone in the church to stand there and listen to this shredding? 10% of the people would be like “Yeah so sick” and the rest would be checking their phones and/or leaving.

So yeah, we’re just putting the record out and not worrying about how people sing them in real life. They’re basically folk songs that change over time and the recordings are a snapshot. And if you show up at the church expecting it all to sound like this record, get ready to be relieved or disappointed (depending on how much you like the record) because it won’t. But you will meet some nice people and there’s free coffee.