Hello Seattle, I am an Albatross.

The iTunes free single of the week is a hit-and-miss affair.  The good ones have been great and the bad ones have been deleted from my library halfway through play one.  There’s a band called “Owl City” that a number of my friends have talked about for a while.  I never listened to their music, and never formed an opinion on the band until last week.

My little sister, Hannah Grace, is more of a music junkie than I ever was at 15.  Her favorite bands include Copeland, Eisley, Jason Morant, and Coldplay.  I love all these bands.  At her age I still thought P.O.D. was a good band and U2 was boring.  Hannah tells me the other day, “JD, you need to listen to Owl City.”  I had downloaded “Fireflies” as the free download of the week but had irresponsibly not listened to it yet.  I gave it a whirl once and was not excited, it was cheesy and poppy.  I like cheesy poppy though, so on a second listen I was really enjoying the music.  It made me happy.  I listen to less happy music than sad music.  I need more happy music.

On that thought I bought the rest of the album on iTunes by faith.  All week in my car and in my house, I’ve had it cranked.  This guy, named Adam Young, does all the singing, beat making, and produced the album beside Matt Thessien from Relient K.    It sound really good.  That’s what always gets me about the record.  How is it so full and balanced?  The sound is entirely electric, probably just a collection of clever Logic files.  But combined with great vocals and catchy love song lyrics, occasionally singing God’s praise, the music has got me.  It’s bothersome.  I should not like such cheesy pop music.  I do though.  Postal Service vs. Mae.  I love it.  Listen to “Cave In” or “Umbrella Beach” off the newest album from the band, “Ocean Eyes”.  It’s great.  Thanks that’s all.

My Exit, Unfair.

I’ve been enjoying the blog “Stuff Christians Like” quite a bit lately.  Its a cleverly satirical, unchurchy analysis of Christians and how we live.  It’s moving and hilarious.  This most recent post, however, wasn’t as funny as it was convicting to me.  

 

You see, “Stuff Christians Like”  has become a lot more popular than the writer ever expected, with thousands and thousands of people reading it everyday.  The author, a man named Jon, is always trying to deny that God is doing something through his blog, much like I deny that God is actually doing something through me, my music, my day job, or my relationships.  Anyway, he quoted a section of  The War Of Art by Steven Pressfield, talking about the struggle that artists of various types have with making their work their life and fully using their gifts.  This was convicting to me:

 

The Artist’s Life
Are you a born writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end the question can only be answered by action.

Do it or don’t do it.

It may help to think of it this way. If you were meant to cure cancer or write a symphony or crack cold fusion and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself, even destroy yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet.

You shame the angels who watch over you and you spite the Almighty, who created you and only you with your unique gifts, for the sole purpose of nudging the human race one millimeter farther along its path back to God.

(This part spoke to me the most…)

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution.

Give us what you’ve got.

 

 

I Love it.  Tell me what you think.

The Tourist.

It would be nice to have safe goals.  Goals that make sense and are readily achievable.  My goals will surely be my ruin because they are things I long for so much but are so risky and have such an overwhelming rate of failure. Professional music is an example.

 

Goals like that are all or nothing.  You make it, you make a name out of something, you sell some records, you have some good tours and maybe half a decade of success.  Then you’re done.  Now what’s the plan?  This is why my goals are unsafe and irresponsible.  Maybe I will grow up and be regular, with job interviews and health insurance and mortgage payments on a house that’s my own.  That would be okay.

 

That’s not the goal though.  I want it all.  I want to make enough money doing what I love so I don’t have to do something else as well.  Part time musicians want to be full time musicians.  Part time musicians with full time day jobs want to be full time musicians.  I love my day job, but I wouldn’t shed a tear to leave it if Capitol records knocked on my door.  Who would?

 

So that’s the story.  It’s a classic story.  Lots of people have that story.  That’s okay.  It’s a good story.

I don’t want to talk about You like You’re not in the room.

When a loudspeaker vibrates, it pushes the air around it in a specific way so as to give it frequency and amplitude.  When you “hear” music, it’s because the air in the room is moving and oscillating around you.  Your ears pick up the movement in the air and your brain tells you about it through some cryptic electronic pulses, right?  That’s not what it feels like, though.  Something in your spirit moves and churns as the music moves through you and inside you, giving you a feeling.  If this were not true there would be no “music”, only noise.

 

I wonder sometimes if our worship is like this to God.  If it’s noise and not music. We spend a lot of time on our tone and our technique to make a sound that pleases our ears.  We then put a catchy melody over it and sing it to our friends at church.  We call this our “worship”.  At the end of the service, after the message, you’ll hear the speaker commonly say  something like “I’d like to invite the band up to lead us in worship as I close in prayer.”  What does that even mean?  

 

Apparently I lead worship now for a college church of 250-300 kids.  This is a recent development in my life and I’m pumped about it, but I don’t know if what I bring to the table as far as a “worship leader” is what these people need.  To me music is still a sound.  I still give music an absolute value based on how much my spirit likes it when it comes into my brain through my ear canals.  I guess everyone does that.  

 

Singing is still new to me.  I have this fakey push-the-high-end style of singing that shows I’ve never had training.  My pitch is unstable and I think I’m probably hard to sing with.  I get nice compliment after nice compliment on my singing every week after service, and I just want to look at these gracious people and say “You’re really nice, thank you.  But seriously I have no idea what I’m doing.  I play drums.”  I cannot wait to get to a place where I sing from my heart to God like I’m looking right at him.  Like it’s something that will make my insides collapse if I don’t do it.  I want people to read that desperation on my face and in my voice and I want them to follow me and belt it out like they mean it, to a God who really meant it when he gave his life.  That’s what I think a “worship leader” does.

 

I don’t want the sound I push into the diaphragm of a microphone, though a maze of cables, and into the air through some muddy JBL’s to be a noise to people.  I don’t even want it to be a “good”sound.  I want it to pierce into hearts and move minds out of complacency.  I want it go right through my friends and into their spirits, causing them to cry out to the God who is mighty to save.  I want it to be a wonderful listening experience, yes, but I am more concerned about it reaching that soft place in them that is full of gratitude and compassion, causing them to worship right into God’s own ears.

 

Singing along mindlessly to a worship song is noise, don’t do that anymore

 

Crying out from your heart in desperation and thankfulness is worshiping God.  

 

I pray all the time that I, as some new worship leader, will cause the second to happen inside my friends.  I want anthems of praise to our God to ring in our heads for days and days, mechanically bringing up feelings of adoration and thankfulness even long after the set is over.  For my inheritance Lord, help me lead your people into a beautiful romance with you through a clever, creative soundtrack of praise.

Love Is Only For Poets.

My blogging has been lacking at best lately.  All I’ve got for you tonight is a list of fantastic music I’ve been listening to lately.  The list is album, band. 

 

1. “On Your Side” by Magnet
2. “Oracular Spectacular” by MGMT
3. “Your Love Never Fails” by Chris Quilala, Kim Walker, and Melissa How 
4. “Catch For Us The Foxes” by mewithoutYou
5. “Close To Paradise” by Patrick Watson
6. “Fall” EP by Jon Foreman

 

This is the music that’s provided the soundtrack to the last couple weeks.  ”Your Love Never Fails” might be one of the most sincere, moving, and most creative worship albums I’ve heard.  Kim Walker is amazing and her music gives me chills.

Hallway Of Leaves.

I’m in a constant state of questioning my whole life.  There is almost nothing I hold on to tight enough not to leave at the drop of a hat if God’s will suddenly came clear.  Nothing in the world would bring me more joy right now than to hear a voice suddenly in my room, “JD, this is God.  You are called to missions, go to (insert country)” or “JD, this is God.  Music is what I have for you. It glorifies me and you have my blessing in it.”  I would instantly clear everything else in my life out of the way to run headlong into God’s spoken plan.

 

But that’s not how this works, is it?  Instead I struggle through his will for me.  Through expensive and exhausting trial and error I find out in little ways what his plan looks like.  My lack of faith is made clear in this, I am afraid of my future.  I’m terrified that I’m gonna mess it up.  I look up from my bench in the Lory Student Center food court at hundreds of other kids who are working like crazy to build futures for themselves.  They bustle about, eating Panda Express as they highlight portions of lecture notes they took this morning.  Full of ambition, full of motivation.  Looking down at a Grilled Stuft Burrito (Taco Bell’s greatest work IMO), I battle through thoughts like “They’re probably way ahead of me”, and “What am I even doing here?”

 

I want to be excited and ambitious about what I’m doing.  I want to be overwhelmed by it.  I want it to feel like music feels.  Music is inside and outside me.  All around.  It makes me so excited, it gives me a feeling nothing else does.  In late August this year I blogged about my shameless musical soundtrack, a principal I stand firmly behind.  I need my education to be something of that degree or else it will always just fall to music as a “back up plan”.  Not okay!! But God is good and he says in Jeremiah 29:11 that his plan for me is good.  I need to put more faith in that.  Really.

 

Struggling through God’s plan for my life now will leave me more satisfied and more thankful when it finally becomes clear.  When I’m settled with a job, a house, and a family, I know I will look back and be glad that everything happened the way it did.  Yes it’s hard on my mind right now, but that will prove worth it later.

 

Happy Thanksgiving, by the way!

Strange and Unprepared

Some nights call for thinking a lot.

 

I’ve found that most nights are like that these days.  I love that my future’s options are so numerous and so promising, but I wish they made any sense at all.  How can it be that I am effectively picking my future tonight?  I have to register for spring classes now and I am completely clueless.  I haven’t auditioned for music school yet, so I can’t register for those courses.  I’m not acutally enrolled in any of the Engineering schools, so those courses are all off limits as well.  I’m certainly welcome to continue registering for physics classes, but I hate physics now and would have to retake the hardest class of my life to pursue that.

 

Some people have knew exactly what they were going to do with their lives when they were in high school.  I have a number of friends studying exactly what they said they were going to when we walked out of Ponderosa High for the last time two years ago.  They’re doing great in their majors and loving what they’re learning.  I also know of people who knew their destinations from a young age not just because their interests lined up with their talents, but because God had really told them what he had planned for them.  Tyler Goerzen for example.  Beloved guitar player, best friend of mine in high school, bearded thrift store genius, my sister’s first love, etc…  Means a lot to me.  He knew long before it came time to register for Fall 07 classes that he was called to be a pastor.  Not just because his dad was a pastor, and not just because he’s in love with the word of God, but because in addition to those things he’s received prophetic conformation of the calling on his life on multiple occasions, not to mention a miraculous and incredibly convenient full-ride scholarship to the perfect Bible School for him, Azusa Pacific University.  Ask him to tell you the story some time.  It’s not like he even wanted to be a pastor that bad, he just knew he was called to that because it was built in to him and God ordered his steps accordingly.  Everything was set up and well executed for him to get a pastor’s education, which will certainly lead to God-ordained pastorship.  I hope I get to play drums at his huge church in the future.

 

As for me?  A different story. I understand that not everyone gets a situation like Tyler’s, and I understand that in the same way God ingrained a pastor’s heart into Twyler, he ingrained a musical worshipper’s heart into me.  This will probably lead to a lot of worshipping, and maybe worship leading in the future.  But I can’t lay claim to that calling’s ability to provide for my needs and the needs of my future family.  God has never clearly spoken to me about my calling,  thus I don’t know how much weight I can put on the passion I have to become a profession.  I have got to learn something else as well.  Unfortunately, The time to decide what I will learn passed 45 credits ago, and now I have a 2.7 GPA’s worth of 100-level Math and Science credits that I don’t know what to do with.  I don’t like math or science, I like music, but I cannot be selfish about this. 

 

I need clarity of mind.  I need direction.  I need to hear the voice of God, and I need for him to speak to do that.  I also need to know within the next few days so I can get accepted into whatever school, music or otherwise, and register for the classes that will be required.  I’m not actually that stressed.  Instead I just feel, as the recent Copeland song sings, “Not good or bad, only strange and unprepared”.  

 

I feel like I should have done music from the start.

I feel like I should have gone to Bible school from the start.

I feel like I should have declared a major right away regardless (lift and seperate) so I wouldn’t be so behind now.

I feel like I might need to take a semester off to figure things out, although that terrifies me because 

I feel like I might never return to school.

 

But almost more than anything, I feel like I need to hear the voice of God.  Any word right now would mean everything to me.  Any little whisper of his will.  Any hints he could give me.  I mean really, just give me the first letter of the major you want me to pursue.  Talk to me in a way that I won’t question.  Forgive the lack of faith I display by asking that.  I’ve chosen you over any other, and I would lay down my life for any cause you see fit to apply it in.  Music is in my heart, but providing is on my mind.  Here is your servant, his only joy is to see you glorified.

It’s a funny way I find myself with you.

Copeland has always possessed the number three slot in my top bands.  This weekend they might have even clenched second with their new album “You Are My Sunshine“.  It’s as good as old Copeland at least, maybe even better?  It just sounds so good.  It’s amazing feel-good music, without too much poppyness or cheesyness.  The guitar work is clever, but the way the bassist and drummer are so tight blows my mind.  Throughout the whole record, they give it that round, smooth rhythm feel.  So great.  Most of the vocals are recorded in stereo, which I always love, but to boot Aaron Marsh does these clever self-harmonies that would put Eisley to shame. A female vocalist named Rae Cassidy Klagstad joins him suddenly on three songs, and this might be my favorite part of the record.  Her voice is so crazy and fitting to the album.  It’s like Eisley meets Bjork almost, really different.  First time she came in it caught me off guard and gave me the chills.  Every time I hear it now it gives me goosebumps.

 

My little sister and I are going to see Copeland tomorrow at The Marquis theatre in Denver (a stage once graced my Cameron At Bay and Young America).  I’m absolutely pumped.  You know how now and then, like maybe once a month if you’re lucky, a new album will really just take you away?  That’s what “You Are My Sunshine” is like for me.  I’m gonna listen to this a lot this winter.

 

I keep stalling out.

Falling behind is an awful feeling.  How did I get here, all tied up?  Pride hurts like hell, head hurts from thinking, heart heavy inside from not feeling adequate.

 

I keep stalling out, I just can’t keep up.  There’s alarming doubt, am I good enough?  But you keep coming around to convince me it’s still far from over.

 

I don’t know why I thought I could do something like this.  Why did I assume I was cut out for it?  Why didn’t someone tell me that getting a degree like this was really really hard?  I would have to quit everything else in my world at this point to get by in this field of study.  Maybe I need to do that.  I trust God, but I don’t trust myself even a little.  I do not understand what I’m learning.  The math is way over my head but everyone else gets it.

 

Sean’s recent post was heavily convicting the other night when I first read it.  I’m created to be a musician.  Music makes sense to me.  Physics is like a language I don’t speak.  It would be an amazing blow to my pride to bow out of the program and chase music, but if God opposes the proud and gives grace to the humble, maybe there will be grace for me?

 

I say all these things all the time.  This thought process is alive and spinning in my mind all the time, even though I never act on it.  I claim that I want to drop out, but I won’t.  At least not for now.  Can’t imagine the repercussions of a decision like that.

 

Pray for me, friends.  I’m a fool for having such ambition without the natural capacity to achieve it.

I have a shameless soundtrack.

I’ve just recently noticed how important the soundtrack to my life is to me.  You know what I’m talking about.  The songs that are always in your head.  The songs that make you feel something wherever you are.  Songs like “Reset” by MuteMath, or songs like “At Your Feet” by Jason Morant.  They play all the time and they give you a certain walk when you go somewhere.  

 

My soundtrack is shameless.  I BLARE music in my mind.  All the time.  Everywhere I go.  Sometimes it’s music of my own creation.  Never recorded.  Sometimes never even played.  But it exists in my head for God and I to enjoy.  Other times I’m looping a guitar part I’m working on for a song the band’s playing on Sunday.  For example I’m trying to conquer the guitar solo in “Walk the World” by Charlie Hall for this worship night we’re having on Friday.  The solo is GREAT but way above my level of guitar playing.  Today in Calc class my teacher was wearing a MuteMath shirt, so naturally the whole lecture I was re-playing MM shows I had been to in my head.  The intensity, the creativity, the light-smashing.

 

Music is better to me than any drug.  It’s a high that never goes away.  This is why it is imperative to listen to good, wholesome music that honors God and pushes the limits of human creativity and expression.  It becomes your soundtrack.  It becomes you.