INTRODUCTION

This album is a bit of a risk for us.  With the attention that our last album, “Beautiful Things” brought to what we are doing, there was a temptation to take the safe route on this album and try to make a “Beautiful Things-2”.  We knew people liked it, and the easy plan would be to try to do it again.

That’s not what we did.

I think one of the primary reasons “Beautiful Things” resonated with people was its honesty.  It was true to who we were at the time, and we didn’t try to cater to a certain demographic or accomplish a particular marketing goal. It was simply music from our hearts.  For us to abandon that trajectory and try to make something that we think will be accepted by a certain group of people felt wrong.  This record, then, is the next step of our evolution. It is indeed music from our hearts, and our hope is that by staying honest with our craft it may help open the hearts of other people as well.

I’m actually really happy with how this album came together.  It feels like a complete work to me as opposed to simply a collection of random songs.  It has a narrative arc to it.  One song by itself is not complete without the rest of the album.  This is risky in a culture that promotes singles and 99-cent song downloads.  It’s risky in a culture in which people don’t often sit down and actually critically listen to music very much.  Music has too often become background noise in our culture. It sets a mood, but don’t make me pay much attention to it!

This album is not that kind of album. It’s an album that for me is best listened to in a candlelit room with a glass of wine.  There was a lot of work that went into this album, and a lot of subtlety that will be missed if the album is just played as background in the midst of life’s noise.  So to get the most out of this album, here’s what I recommend:  Get to a place where you can listen without distraction, and listen to the whole album one time through.  Then I recommend that you read the descriptions and interpretations of the songs on this album, keeping in mind that mine is but one interpretation, and you are free of course to have your own.  I recommend this because I think it may help you recognize some of the nuances of the narrative’s direction that you may not have heard the first time through.  After that, listening to any of the songs at your leisure will be more meaningful, because the songs will be part of the larger perspective, the greater whole, if you will.

My hope is that this music will find its audience, because I think there are people out there who will connect with it in a meaningful way.  I know it does that for me.  And to those of you who are long-time fans and friends, thanks for sticking with us as we continue in this strange and quite enjoyable journey.

THE SONGS

Let there be

The beginning of any album, poem, film, or book can tell you a lot about the work as a whole.  This work begins with a tribute to the beginning itself.

It was a fun experiment to attempt to paint a musical picture of the beginning of the universe.  Lisa and I had tried several ideas for this song before she finally came up with the right vibe.  We liked the idea of building the song from nothing to everything with the climax being those ancient and famous words, “Let there be light.”

From our perspective, the Genesis account of creation was probably not intended to be a literal scientific description of the beginning of all things, but rather a grand poetic gesture of worship to the Creator.  Taking our cue from this interpretation, we didn’t try to be too scientific or literal with the description of these primordial conditions, but rather sought to create a tension of this “darkness” and “void” becoming light and being.  In penning lines like “angels toil and crack open scrolls of ancient dreams”, we are even venturing from the original poetry of the biblical language largely to demonstrate that this is simply an imagining of an event of which we only have vague notions.  Simultaneously, it could be used as a prayer for more practical circumstances, speaking light into darkness.

Musically, we basically tried to score the story of the song.  It begins with formlessness and void.

Pretty much everything else on the record is intentional musically, and generally makes some sort of sense theoretically, but in playing those intro parts, I truthfully wasn’t thinking anything.  I just played formlessly to Lisa’s singing, trying not to be too obvious about the idea or be so dissonant as to detract from her words, but still vaguely void of rhythm and proper harmony.

I remember hearing Damien Rice’s “9” album years ago and enjoying how his wasn’t the first voice that you heard.  I thought that for this album, people would be expecting my voice when they pushed play for the first time, and I liked the surprise of hearing Lisa’s first.   It is only a few lines into the song that the voice changes though.  It is into the chaos that the voice of God begins to appear, bringing some direction to the chaos.   I went back and forth a bit with who should sing as the voice of God, whether it be Lisa, or me or someone else.  We ended up with a boys’ choir to appear in the first chorus as the voice of the Genesis God, who says “let us…”  I liked the purity of the boys’ voices as well as their plurality.  As their voices enter, the band begins to have some sort of unity musically.

As the arpeggios begin, we were trying to create that tension that must have been building before everything burst into space and time.  Whatever the beginnings of movement towards those first moments were, we are left to imagine, but as the violin slowly fades in with that tension, we have expectation that something is going to happen here.

When the words are finally spoken, “Let there be light”, the creation begins to breathe for a second.  The air is inhaled into the lungs, and what is exhaled is everything that is the creation.  So we gave that musical “big bang” everything.  There are quite a few tracks going right there… Big drums, strings, horns, boys’ choir, gang vocals…etc.  If there’s ever a time to get a bit indulgent with “yeah, add another track”, we felt the creation of the universe was the time to do it.

Let there be

Darkness hovering

Grasping everything it sees

void empty

Absent life and absent dream

Let there be

Angels toil and crack open scrolls of ancient dreams

Countless worlds of his

Brilliant stars and breath and stream

Let there be (light)

Where there is darkness

Let there be light

Where there is nothing

Let there be light

Brother Moon

As the final notes of “Let There Be” have reached the end of their sforzando, the flutes enter with a new mood.  Dark, epic explosions of rock and heat give way to the tiny flutterings of new life.

The inspiration for this song was born on my trip to Assisi, Italy last year.  I took a week of silent meditation in the hills where St. Francis lived.  In St. Francis’ Canticles of the Creatures, he speaks in wonder of the created order and his understanding of the creator’s face shining through it.  Much of the “Brother Moon” verse lyric is lifted straight from Assisi’s words, even though some poetic license is taken.  (For instance, “brother sun” felt more cumbersome to sing than the alliteration of “sister sun”, so the gender was switched there)

The chorus is simply an exclamation from the poetry of Epimenides that it is in “Him that we live and move and have our being.”  This gives way to the outro of the song that continues that exclamation by claiming that this creator is the essence of everything good and beautiful.  More than just a claim that “the guy in the sky” is good or beautiful, this is attributing that which is good and seen to part of a greater whole.  Rather than attributing characteristics to a god that we already have a concept of, it is the praise of a wonder-filled creature, seeing that the reality in which we live and move and have our being is in essence good and beautiful.  This Reality can be seen and experienced all around us.

These are not simply the philosophical musings of a mystic, but something that I experienced very personally and truly in Assisi.  In the silence, I discovered a freedom as I drank in the beauty of Reality.  At one point, I even found myself on top of a hill dancing like a child (or perhaps some sort of lunatic).  I was free from the concerns of pleasing others in an attempt to keep my ego from being injured, so free that my normal anxieties and fears could not overpower the joy that I was finding in my heart.  This song is an attempt to put a sound to that joy and freedom.

Musically, it would have been easy to fill this upbeat song with normal instrumentation like electric guitars that would easily “drive” the energy.  But I tried not to go in that direction.  In fact, as I recall, there are no electric tracks on this song, but there are well over a hundred tracks of other instruments, from piccolo flutes to giant bass drums, representing the endless variety of the universe around us.  As the various vocal parts circle the listener’s head when the band’s last chord fades out, one can imagine hearing the voices of all of these elements of creation (moon, sun, earth, wind, etc.) singing the praises of their creator.
Brother Moon

Brother moon

Shine down your light on us tonight

Show us the love of God

Sister sun you bring out the day

You’re shining the light of God on your face today

Maker of it all

You provide it all

In You we live

In You we move

In You we have our being

You’re glorious

You’re holding us together all together

Brother wind your clouds and your storms

You’re breathing the breath of God in your lungs for us

Mother earth, you’re giving us life with God’s open hand you always provide

For us

Maker of it all

You provide it all

In You we live

In You we move

In You we have our being

You’re glorious

You’re holding us together all together

You are everything good, you are everything beautiful

You are everything, you’re everything

Crags and Clay

Up to this point in the record, we have borrowed a lot of the metaphor and imagery from other sources.  In “Crags and Clay”, we attempt to create some imagery of our own, and the poetry of the verses is something I have come to really enjoy singing.  The imagining of the drawn lines of the creation, i.e. the horizon, the mountains, etc., all reflect the artistic masterpiece that this world is.  The intersecting of these lines, the chaos of it all, somehow comes together in this tapestry of beauty, intricately and woven together.

There’s also a subtle nod here to our last project “Beautiful Things” in the lines “All praises to the one who made it all and finds it beautiful”. This song is a reflection of our view of God as the great Artist who certainly must take great pleasure in his work.

Musically, this song is built of a hemiola, a rhythmic device that superimposes one kind of meter over the other.  It is sort of like the intersecting lines of creation that are all so different, but somehow they come together. The song rhythm may feel odd at first to the listener, but after repetition it starts feeling more natural, and is actually all just in 4/4 common time as a whole.

It ends with Lisa’s voice singing “fearfully and wonderfully and beautifully made.”  I think in a world full of plastic surgery and magazines and film constantly bombarding us with what is beautiful; women in our society have an especially difficult time with self-image.  Beauty in our culture is valued in terms of beauty over and against other human beings, and it is based on the small variations of specific physical features.  However, human beings as a work of art in and of themselves are exceptionally and beautifully made.

If our girls grew up finding their value and their beauty in their humanity rather than their measurements, we would have a healthier society.  I want our baby girl, Amelie, to grow up knowing she is beautiful, but not just beautiful compared to other creations of God. I want her to know that she is beautiful primarily because she is a creation of God.

Crags and Clay

Standing up from crags and clay

The peaks of earth

In full display

They break the lines

That break the sky

That’s full of life

Full of life

The chaos of creation’s dance

A tapestry, a symphony

Of life himself

Of love herself

It’s written in our very skin

All praises to the one who made it all

Who made it all

All praises to the one who made it all

And finds it beautiful

Soil is spilling life to life

Stars are born

To fill the night

The ocean’s score

The majesty

Of sculpted shore

Mystery

All praises…

Fearfully and wonderfully and beautifully made

The Fall

The Fall is one of my favorite songs on the album.  The first three songs are intended to bathe the listener in wonder and beauty.  In The Fall, there’s not even an instrumental intro to buffer the change in direction of the album’s narrative.  It just begins with the lament “the fall, the fall, oh God, the fall of man…”

I really like the lyric of this one, and it is here that we find the thesis statement for the whole album.  “Nothing, there is nothing yet in truest form, we walk like ghosts upon the earth, the ground it groans.”

As magnificent as creation is, how can we help but notice the destructive side of it as well?  Beauty exists, but so does evil.  People have goodness in them, but they also can have extreme darkness in them, and this fruit is found “in every eye and every hand.”

This song is a lament to this creator that we’ve been singing to up to this point.  “How long must we wait…?” is a question that comes from deep in our souls. Why is the world so messed up?  How can there be so much beauty and so much ugliness?  If you are there, God, why aren’t you doing anything about this?   Or are you?  Is this dark night actually part of a larger, beautiful story somehow?  The longing expressed in the line “turn your face to me” is a longing for understanding, for things to be made right, for this creator to not hide himself, as it so often seems he does.

We were tempted musically to make this become big again, but we resisted.  In fact, I can see us building it a bit more when we do it live; but for the record, we wanted it to feel kind of sad, but not necessarily tragically sad.  Absence can actually be a testament to presence.   I only long for those that I love, and I only love those who have been present with me in some way.  If there was no one to love, there would be no one to long for.  It is this mixture of emotions that “The Fall” explores.  There’s still a beauty to it.  The melody is one of my favorites on the album, and I think the strings and the oboe at the end are just gorgeous together.  It represents so well what I often feel internally.  Mixtures of love and fear, courage and cowardice, wonder and complaints… It’s not really the way I would prefer it to be, but that’s how it is, and I’m learning how to be content in the night.

The Fall

The fall, the fall, oh God the fall of man

The fruit is found in every eye and every hand

Nothing there is nothing yet in truest form

We walk like ghosts upon the earth

The ground it groans

How long, how long will you wait

How long, how long till you save us all, save us all

Turn your face to me

The light, the light

The morning light is gone

And all that’s left is fragile breath in failing lungs

The night, the night

The guiding night has come

Uniting lover with his bride

More precious than the dawn

How long must we wait

Turn your face to me

When Death Dies

“When Death Dies” taps a little into my Puerto Rican side.  (I’m half Puerto Rican, which for some who may wonder, may explain my larger than average booty.)  The rhythm of the acoustic line is still a bit complicated for some of my more Caucasian band mates to feel correctly.

The tricky part of this song musically was to not take it all the way Latin.  In the initial demos, I used a tumbaou bass line that really made it feel Latin, but it felt a bit out of place with the rest of our music, so we kept experimenting with different feels.  We finally locked into one with McKenzie the drummer and my brother David, the bassist, right before McKenzie was about to leave the studio.  We had already tracked a different groove and it felt cool, but I just didn’t get that ugly, scrunchy face when I listened to it yet.  And I wanted it!

So when we finally landed on that groove, and saw all the ugly, scrunchy faces in the room, we knew we had found it.  I’m proud of this song musically because I really haven’t heard anything like it before.  The combination of the Latin rhythms with the sweeping string lines and really gritty bass and drums, and the flutes and the programming and everything else… It’s like a weird, experimental recipe that somehow ended up tasting good.

By the way, the drums on this track are recorded by one mono microphone in the room.  And we tracked a lot of the stuff through an old tape delay machine, which is what gives it that old, imperfect sound.  Also, when the strings and the flutes do that fast ascending scale into the melody of the bridge, I like to imagine that I am Burt Reynolds in sunglasses, driving a red convertible around a curvy road in the cliffs of Highway 1 overlooking the Pacific ocean in an 80’s action movie.  Just saying.

Lyrically, this song is about resurrection.  Coming out of “The Fall”, and its mindfulness of death and darkness, “When Death Dies” expresses the hope of redemption and of dead things coming alive again.

When death dies

Like the waters flooding the desert

Like the sunrise showing all things

Where it comes flowers grow

Lions sleep, gravestones roll

Where death dies all things live

Where it comes poor men feast

Kings fall down to their knees

When death dies all things live

All things live

Like a woman searching and finding love

Like an ocean buried and bursting forth

Where it comes flowers grow

Lions sleep, gravestones roll

Where death dies all things come alive

Where it comes water’s clean

Children fed

All believe

When death dies all things live

All things live

Let Church Bells Ring

We live in a culture full of cynicism.  We’ve seen the leaders that we trusted fall; we’ve seen the wizard behind the voice, and we were disappointed.  I have noticed with a lot of my friends that grew up in the Christian church that those who are reflective often have a particularly difficult time with not becoming jaded and cynical in the light of all of the visible hypocrisy and shortcomings.

In fact, I know some people who have become so jaded that they freely spill it on others wherever they go.  It wasn’t enough for them to have lost their own song, it’s like they are trying to rob others of theirs as well.

This is a song to the jaded – and not just the jaded in others but also the jaded in me.  A song inviting the listener to relax… let it go… and don’t spill your cynicism onto others.  Instead of allowing all of your unanswered questions to fully consume your joy, just enjoy the dance.  To me, that’s largely what faith has become. Yes, I have my doubts and questions and everything else, but at the end of the day, it’s not what questions I have in my mind but whether I’m going to join the dance or sit on the outside and sneer.  I’d rather dance.

Musically, this song is scaled back quite a bit compared to others on the album.  The acoustic part is actually fairy difficult to play though.  It’s a 3-over-4 pattern that seems like it should be in a more complex song, but somehow it works for me with the simplicity of the song.  It helps it not be too kitschy with the song’s simple and almost childlike chord progression in the key of C.  It’s the complexity conforming to simplicity for the sake of the joy of the music.  That’s what this song is all about to me.

I originally was going to just have this song be vocals and acoustic, but John Arndt, who helped me with most of the string arrangements, was really hearing the strings and flutes coming in at the bridge, and I’m glad we went that way with it.  When those strings come in, I imagine the old man and the children all dancing in this innocent waltz-like circle together.

It’s also worth mentioning Jason Morant’s guest vocal appearance on this song.  I am so honored that he would do that for us.  He was a worship leader years ago, and one that I was quite inspired by, actually.  We were signed to the same label and went through a lot of the same experiences and even social circles. I’ve had meaningful conversations with Jason over the last year or two, and he has become a dear friend.  I wanted him to sing this song with me because we have dealt with some of the same issues and faced similar doubts and jadedness.  After recording this for us, he told me that singing this song was helpful for him. May our jaded hearts be healed, Amen.

Church Bells

Let church bells ring

Let children sing

Even if they don’t know why let them sing

Why drown their joy

Stifle their voice

Just because you’ve lost yours

May our jaded hearts be healed

Amen

Let old men dance

Lift up their hands

Even if they are naïve, let them dance

You’ve seen it all

You watch them fall

Wash off your face and dance

May our weary hearts be filled with hope

Amen

Wake Up Sleeper

Just when you thought you may have the album figured out… Come on, we are Gungor; we need to keep you guessing! While the last song dealt with seeing the downfalls of our religious powers and institutions, yet remaining free from darkness and cynicism, this song addresses those shortcomings a bit more directly.  After all, Jesus wasn’t simply all about just telling everyone to get along.  He directly confronted the powers of his age, sometimes with the prophetic fury of acts like physically throwing their tables over in the Temple.

This song puts music to that side of Jesus’ message.  When Jesus spoke most of his nice, comforting words like “blessed are the poor”… or “don’t worry about tomorrow”, etc., he was primarily talking to a group of people on the underside of power.  He was talking to the poor. To those who had fallen short in their weaknesses, Jesus said things like “neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.”

But he wasn’t always so gracious toward those with power and religious authority.  He would say “Woe to you Pharisees…you whitewashed tombs…you brood of vipers” and so on.  The Pharisees of Jesus’ day worshiped a religious system, a book, or a law more than they did the very Spirit of God.  They worshiped their own place and thoughts and understandings of God rather than simply worshiping God.  This seemed to infuriate Jesus.

In my opinion, this hasn’t changed much.  Much of the Christian world right now worships the Bible more than it worships God.  If you go to the website of a typical protestant, evangelical church right now, there’s a good chance that under the belief section you will come across the Bible before you come across any language about Jesus.  You will probably find more theology about what you need to do to go to Heaven than you will about following the teachings of Jesus, or the Kingdom of God, or anything like that.

I feel like much of modern American Christianity should actually change its name to something else, maybe something like Bible-anity.  As a whole, we’re rich, we’re arrogant, we’re judgmental and we’re dead inside.  Sounds like the Pharisees to me.

This song is a call to repentance, a call to wake up.  It’s an invitation to join the poor and the sinner and the broken once again that we may come alive and join with God again.

Musically, this song is a bit aggressive as well.  The song starts with the friendliness of the beatitudes towards the poor and oppressed, and the folk instruments do well to compliment that message to me.  Banjo, mandolin, acoustic guitar, fiddle… the kind of stereotypical instruments of common, simple folks, people that are blessed and loved by God.  Than the angst starts building in the pre-chorus as the time signature changes to 7/8.  It opens up to a yell, “wake up!”

As the band builds and the song becomes more layered and complicated, the desperation for things to change is heightened.  Finally, right when it appears we’ve hit the ceiling musically, we bring in the synth bass. It’s interesting to note that as grand as these sections become, that there is no electric guitar involved. Once again I resisted the temptation to take the easy way of rocking out.  Instead I experimented with different textures; for instance, a flute going through my pedal board.  I distorted it and added tremolo and other love on it, so it kind of sounds like an electric guitar, but it’s actually just a sweet, plump, middle-aged lady from Colorado playing a crazy flute part with not nearly enough spaces for a breath.   She was winded by the end.

Wake Up Sleeper

Rejoice all you who are poor

The kingdom is yours

The kingdom is yours

Rejoice you jaded and torn

Both sinner and saint

The kingdom is yours

woe to you religious teachers

Rich and worshiping your book

woe to you who use His name to justify the souls you took

Wake up, wake up

Oh sleeper from the dead

Wake up

Rejoice you lonely and lost

You sick and despised

All will be made right

Rejoice you cynics and freaks

Those searching for peace

All will be made right

Even you religious teachers

Separating us from them

Heaven’s found inside us all

So turn and come alive again

Wake up…

Awaken us, awaken us

Open our eyes and wake us

(let your church now wake up)

Ezekiel

Ezekiel 16 is a relatively graphic chapter in the Bible.  It is a prophetic railing against God’s people for selling themselves as a whore to the world and leaving their first love.  With the direction of the narrative of the album thus far, I thought it would be appropriate to write a song from this chapter of the Bible.  Plus, I figured no one else I know would be crazy enough to do that, so why not us?  There are plenty of people putting nice chapters in the Bible to music, but who is scoring the dark and dirty prostitution chapters? Gungor is, that’s who.

If you think the lyrics “naked” and “blood” and all of that in the song are over the top, you really should read the chapter.  We really scaled back the gore and the sexuality.  Trust me, we made it about as family friendly as that chapter can get.  I feel as if music about God is most always referred to as “safe” or “positive” or “encouraging.” There’s nothing wrong with that sort of music of course, but I feel like allotting all of spirituality and God to those small boxes of human emotion and content rob us and make faith shallow.  After all, the Bible is not always just “positive and encouraging.”

Anyway, the meter of this song is a bit tricky to figure out, so I’ll help you out.  It goes back and forth from 9 to 8.  The drum groove kind of helps it lock into place and feel like there is some sort of a ground that you are standing on by feeling like it stays in 4 for most of it.

One musical highlight to point out in this song… I like how the music builds within the emotion of the lover.  The cellos slide up their glissando, shifting the emotion of heartbreak into a sort of righteous anger – the kind of anger that is based in love.  The lover is angry because his love is so deep for her.  Paul Maybury’s layered drum tracks here reflect the heightened pulse of the passionate, jealous lover.

After the storm calms back down a bit, the true heart of the lover is exposed in the longing words, “come back my love.”  I think that this should be the true prophetic heart towards the church in our culture – a broken, human institution that has been marred and perverted and twisted into something barely recognizable sometimes; but still, she is the bride.  Her beauty remains hidden under the shame and the scars, and she is still worth fighting for.

Ezekiel

I found you naked

I found you lying there in blood

Your mother left you

Your father threw you out unloved

I clothed your body

I washed the blood and earth from your hair

I gave you jewelry

I gave you everything I had

I gave my heart

My heart, my love

I gave my heart

My heart, my love

You became mine

You were a stunning bride

The world they saw you and how you loved their eyes my bride

You broke my heart

My heart, my love

You broke my heart

My heart, my love

You sold your body exposed yourself to all my love

You slept with strangers; you gave them everything we had

Come back my love

My love come back

Come back my love

My love come back

Vous Etes Mon Coeur (You Are My Heart)

In this song, we wanted to go even deeper into the lovers metaphor, borrowing inspiration from things like the poetry of St. John of the Cross and Song of Solomon.  The heartbreak and anger of the last song has turned more sentimental here.  The softness of their lost love is remembered, and we hear the poetic words of the lover searching for his bride saying that he would “scale the highest clouds, scour wooded valleys, roaring torrents, whispering gales.”

Our decision to sing the chorus in French was based on our desire to fully dive into that romance of this song.  After all, is there any language as romantic as French?  It also made it feel old and cinematic to me, which is a vibe that we were going for on a lot of the album. In English, the chorus would be translated, “you are my heart.”  We decided to use the more formal “etes” rather than “es” because we liked how it sounded in the song better; and “etes” is a bit older and formally poetic.

When the female voice enters, I love how high and fragile it is.  This girl that is bashful in approaching her lover after all she has done…  She still loves him though.  She remembers his grace to her that merits her adoration.  His love is so strong and pure and selfless that she can overcome her fear and shame and run back to him. It’s a bit over the top romantically, but I like it.  Once again, like a love story from an old French film or something.

Musically, we were going for simple and beautiful.  The classic sound of the tremolo of the mandolin with the strings and flutes in the modulation takes me to a moonlit gondola, the lovers together again at last.

Vous Etes Mon Coure (You Are My Heart)

Where have you hidden yourself oh my beloved

You fled having wounded

I pursued but you had gone

In search of you my darling I would scale the highest clouds

Scour wooded valleys, roaring torrents whispering gales

Vous etes mon coure

When you first regarded me

Your eyes filled me with grace

Thereby again my eyes

Merited to adore you

vous etes mon coure

This is Not the End

(Commentary by Lisa Gungor)

There are two ideas that are woven throughout this song.  The first is a sense of determination born in the middle of anger – something had happened to us that felt unjust, leaving our spirits a bit defeated and raw.  It felt as though we were meager little ants who were discovering that the traditional way of digging into the earth is bogus.  But in spite of the discovery, we were still forced to succumb to the great ant tradition – clawing and scraping, shoving dirt into our mouth and spitting it out again.

So there I sat at the piano, trying to express the emotion of it through melody (admittedly feeling sorry for myself), when I suddenly felt this rise of determination …“this is not the end of us.”  What is life if there is no resistance?   If we don’t ever feel opposition, we probably aren’t saying anything.  Branching out from the normal verse 1, verse 2, chorus, bridge, etc., the song naturally formed into a series of choruses with musical breaks going from 5 to 6 chiming in between, giving it this sort of dancing forward feel.

The banjo and glockenspiel give the song a bit of a lift, pushing the song into a fun (party-like) yet resolute feel. Gradually, the gang vocals join in, giving rise to this anthem of determination and hope (anytime I sing this song, I envision people dancing and singing at the top of their lungs with a mug held high in one hand and the other waving wildly…sort of Irish style).

The other thread in this song is along the lines of “The Fall.”  I grew up with this vague, hazy perception of heaven, a less-than-real place.  I thought heaven was somewhere else, up in the clouds, and one day I would be so light (or ghostly) I could sit on that cloud.  But what if it is more real than the world we know now? In “The Great Divorce” C. S. Lewis paints this picture of the grass in heaven hurting people’s feet because it is more real than they are.  Everything is more solid, more vibrant and alive.   In all of the chaos, we have glimpses of true love and true peace, a sort of whisper of what is to come. Maybe we are the ghosts, and one day our eyes will be opened to what is real.

This is not the End

This is not the end

This is not the end of this

We will open our eyes wide, wider

This is not our last

This is not our last breath

We will open our mouths wide, wider

And you know you’ll be alright

Oh and you know you’ll be alright

This is not the end

This is not the end of us

We will shine like the stars bright, brighter

You are the Beauty

The last several songs on the record were intentionally emotional, leading us eventually back to where we came from.  We started with wonder and joy, walked through lament and anger into remembrance and hope, which leads us back to wonder and joy.  Isn’t this mixture of emotions true of the human experience after all?

We experience all of these mixed emotions all of the time.  Our joys are tinged with sorrow, and our pain is rooted in passion and love, which brings us great joy as well.  In “You are the Beauty”, we return to the goodness of life.  The hope of the last song has led us into unmitigated celebration and joy, claiming all that is good and true and beautiful as gifts and reflections of the Divine.

Musically, this song is an explosion of fun and celebration and even a bit of silliness.  I laughed quite a bit in the construction and recording of the whole outro of the song, which moves among modes, styles and time signatures with a sort of childlike freedom.  It’s not necessarily cohesive, except perhaps in the fact that the non-cohesion is kind of the point.  It’s just kind of outrageous moving from recording the fast clicking of my pedal board case’s latches, to a fairly amorphous guitar solo, to a dirty organ transitioning to a new time signature, with some circus-like lick repeating over the top of it.  Life is crazy.  But it is wonderful.

You are the Beauty

Love, love, love of mine

You have caused the sun to shine on us

Music fills our ears

Flavors kiss our lips with love divine

You are the beauty

You are the light

You are the love, love of mine

Breath and sex and sight

All things made for good in love divine

Every Breath

The sound that you hear at the beginning of the final track of “Ghosts Upon the Earth” is the sound of some of the first heartbeats that we heard of our baby girl.  Lisa and I had actually tried for years to have a child.  We had even tried various medical procedures, and it just never happened for us.  We had resigned ourselves to the possibility that we would never be able to have children of our own, and then one day, while visiting the doctor for something else entirely, we found out that Lisa was pregnant.  Lisa is a very demonstrative person even in normal circumstances, so let’s just say… everybody anywhere close to that vicinity definitely heard the excitement in that little exam room.

There are few things that can inspire wonder like the birth of a child – the intricacy and beauty and messiness of it all.  Life is so fragile and so precious.  These are the thoughts we start the last song of the album with.  It’s a reminder to remember that every moment is a gift.  Every breath is miracle.  The same love that called the cosmos into existence beats inside my chest with every heartbeat.  It’s all a gift.

What does one do with this gift though?  Clutch with white knuckles and try to hold on to it?  That is useless.  We cannot control when we were born, and we cannot control what will finally take our lives from us.  It is not clutched, greedy fists that lead us to peace and joy in this life.  Instead it is surrender.  It is letting go of the control and the fear, and offering all we are in love, accepting any pain that might accompany it, all as a part of this beautiful gift that is life.

Musically, the song is kind of a bookend for me, in some ways ending like we began.  It starts very quietly and simply, expressing love and thankfulness.  But then we bring back the boys’ choir.  This time, the boys enter with words reminiscent of the young Samuel in the Bible as they sing “Here I am Lord”.

In the face of such an enormous and magnificent universe, one can either create illusions of grandeur for himself or admit his insignificance in time and space with humility.  One can go through this life attempting to gain control or trying to gain life by holding on tenaciously; however, she will then certainly lose it.   Perhaps it is actually only in the “losing” of one’s life that one can truly find it.  This has been my experience.  The times that I have been truly happy, truly at peace, are those times when I have relegated my illusory control back to the loving hands of my creator.  It is here that my eyes are clear enough to see the gift of life.  It is here that I can separate the angst and the doubt from my heart.  In this place, angst and doubt can work their purification in my mind from the idols and illusions that I hold on to, and faith is free to grow in my heart, making me free.  It is here that the album ends.  Open hands, open eyes, open heart.

Every Breath

Every breath

Every moment life beats in my chest

Springs up from your hand

Creation resounds

With every color and every sound

Your love is calling

I will love you with all of my heart

I will love you with all of my mind

I’ll love you with all of my strength

Love you with everything

Every breath every moment life beats in my chest

Let my life praise you

I will love you with all of my heart

I will love you with all of my mind

I’ll love you with all of my strength

Love you with everything

(repeat)

Here I am Lord

All I am Lord

Here I am Lord

I am yours

CREDITS

Producer: Michael Gungor

Assistant Producers

Lisa Gungor

John Arndt

Mixed by: Craig Alvin

Recording Engineers:

Craig Alvin

Chad Copelin

Michael Rossback

Michael Gungor

Lisa Gungor

Jared Fox

Mark Zellmer

Travis Brigman

String, horn, and choir parts arranged by John Arndt and Michael Gungor

St. John’s Boys Choir conducted by Andre Heywood

Michael Gungor: Vocals, guitars, banjo, mandolin, piano, acoustic bass, programming, glockenspiel, drums and other raucous noises

Lisa Gungor: Vocals, piano, glockenspiel, the smallest hands of the clapping, kitchen utensil bashing  and sleigh bell ringing

Jason Morant: Guest vocals on Church Bells

Brad Waller: Background vocals, raucous noises, pedal board latch shredding, the fastest of the clapping, and electric guitar bowing

David Gungor: Bass and propecia consumption

John Arndt: Piano, sweat pants and misdemeanors

Josh Harvey: Background vocals, bass lining, tattoo proselytizing

Michael Rossback: electric guitar

Dwan Hill: organ

Rob Hajacos: fiddle

Extra “gang” vocalists:

Bre Mertens

Jaime Mertens

Justin Bullis

Sophie Miller

Strings:

Double Bass: Don Harris

Cello: Cara Slaybaugh

Viola: Isaac White

Viola: Rinata Van Der Vyver

Violin: Aubrea Alford

Violin: Ilya Goldberg

Horns: Jennifer Kummer

Jenny Doersch

Flutes: Karen Morsch

Oboe: Donovan Gorb

Drums: McKenzie Smith

Paul Maybury

Daniel Grothe