Yesterday, we released our new live album “A Creation Liturgy” as well as my new book “The Crowd, the Critic, and the Muse: A Book for Creators.” Yes, as some of you astute readers have already noticed, there is a bit of a creation theme going on… So, here’s the truth of the matter: I wrote the book because a lot of these ideas about art had been stirring in me for a long time and influencing the way that I make music. As I write in the book, I have discovered that the roots of...

I don’t really like the term “worship music” for some of the same reasons I don’t like the term “Christian music.” Worship is an offering of your self, a loosening of grips, a heart open wide, not a genre of music. Worship can be experienced through anything. For Brother Lawrence, worship was primarily experienced through washing dishes. For Mother Teresa, worship was primarily experienced in bandaging wounds and kissing lepers. Anything can become worship, including music, and even ...

Okay, so we’ve been busy working on some things, and we’re excited to finally announce everything that’s going on. This Fall, we will be releasing the first ever live Gungor album. It’s called “A Creation Liturgy”, and it features a bunch of songs that are, well, somehow tied to creation. It was recorded live on our Spring tour, and even though most of them are songs that we’ve released before on our studio albums, there’s something about the live energy of these recordings that ...

While crafting is important for most songwriting expressions across genres, it is particularly important for congregational music.  The songs we sing in our churches don’t just express our theology; they help form it. When we write songs for people to sing as a spiritual act of worship, those songs soak into people’s souls. The words that we ask them to sing help shape their view of God, the universe, and themselves. So, why is it then that a lot of congregational music often seems to be...

I get asked a lot about how I write songs. Here’s the short of it… First of all, creating is creating. We are human beings, and we have no ability to create ex-nihilo (out of nothing.) All we can do is order something new from what already exists. We can take words and form a sentence. Take paint and canvas and form a painting. The same is true with songwriting. It starts with some raw elements, and then the creative process is simply forming those raw elements into a song. So before y...