Songwriting | Our Rising Sound

August 21 2008

John Mark McMillan interview Parts 3 and 4

Tagged Under : interview, John Mark McMillan, music, songwriting, video, worship

In late April John Mark McMillan did a concert at our church and he was nice enough to sit down for a video interview with us. I’ve previously posted part 1 and part 2 of that interview and now, finally, here are the remaining 2 parts.

In part 3 we discuss deeply theological issues like, can you be saved if you use a PC and how bad was I going to woop up on him in Guitar Hero. Incidently John Mark was too scared to pickup the axe(you know that’s true JM). We also discuss all his musical influences.

Part 4 we get a little more serious and discuss what the church is getting right or wrong in our worship, how John Mark remains grounded doctrinally in his writing and what some of the ground breaking worship songs were in his view.

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Congregational Songwriting: the submissions are here

Tagged Under : church, lyrics, songwriting, worship

A few weeks back I wrote a post here about an idea I had for our church and that was to let our congregation write a worship song, literally. This was sort of a group songwriting exercise taken to the extreme. I value worship songs that exposit biblical truth and also draw upon life experience to bring it into context. I see value in both and try not to use one to the exclusion of the other. The problem is that when I’m the only one writing songs for the church the life experience that I write through might not be relateable for others or might not necessarily impact others in the way it impacts me. This is why biblical truth in worship songs should be paramount and not the other way around because the only thing we find true unity in is the Holy Spirit.

So I wanted to give the church a chance to give testimony to the mighty works he’s accomplished in each person’s life that others might not know about. Thus giving glory to God and magnifying Him for the great works right before our eyes. I asked the church a question and requested responses from the congregation. The question was, “How has God’s grace changed your life specifically?” and here are some of the amazing responses I received:

Hearing the cry from the depths of my soul, God met me in my dark place and He saved me with His most honest embrace.
I lived a life full of shame, now God is using me to bring others out of a life of shame through His grace.
God saved me from my self destructive ways and is showing me His way.
I lay weak in the hands of grace and receive His strength.
God showed me His heart and healed a life full of pain, tears and fears.
Shame welcomed my sin, but it was God’s grace that lifted me up.
In my self hate I gave myself away, but God’s grace came softly to me and drew me by love and set me free.
God’s grace for me has drowned out the religious view I had of Him.
A life of mistakes and pain dramatically transformed by a hand of grace, too big to understand, that’s my Jesus that’s my King.
God’s grace has spared my life, literally.

Amen.

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Closing the gap between your taste and ability

Tagged Under : music, songwriting, video

Ira Glass, host of NPR’s This American Life, talks about the process of improving in creative work. His context is primarily video and radio work but I think everything he says here can be applied to songwriting and musicianship in general. There’s 3 major points I want to emphasize that I think are critical to successful songwriting and musicianship.

Good Taste - This is where so many Christian artists struggle. Whether it’s because they only listen to Christian music and have no creative influences beyond Tomlin and Michael W. Smith or just that they weren’t blessed with an ear for creative music it results in bad songs and bad playing. I’ve known a lot of worship leaders that knew nothing of music, were part of a great worship service and then desired to lead it. Read a chord chart, practiced a couple weeks and off they went writing and playing really bad music, but because they didn’t have good taste, they were satisfied.
Accurate Self Assessment - Assuming you have good taste now you need to be able to be critical and have accurate elf assessment so that you can accurately measure how well you’re doing or how much you need to improve. Without this good taste is meaningless because you assume that whatever you write or play is great. You’re off in la-la land and any critical thought is shoved out of your head as an attack from the devil himself. Self assessment is important in any role in our lives so that we can measure and have a road map for improvement, but this becomes more difficult in the arts because people get offended when their “artistic expression” is criticized. Rubbish! You can see a post here I wrote on proper perspective of creativity and why worship band members are so easily offended.
Perseverance and dedication - If you have good taste and you see that what you’re doing isn’t up to the level you desire you may, like many, get discouraged and quit. It’s important that we realize every successful writer and musician goes through this phase, some never get out of it, but we need to persevere and keep writing and playing. That’s the only way you get better. I know it’s hard when you feel like you’re writing a bunch of garbage, but learn from the garbage. Our mistakes are the best learning tools we have, but if you’re afraid to make them it’s going to be hard to improve.

With all that in mind, here’s the video.

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U.S. religion: even “Christians” see other ways to heaven

Tagged Under : church, culture, songwriting, theology, worship

Heaven There has been a lot of mention in various blogs about the recent survey report from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It was incredibly revealing, maybe not shocking though as many have seen the clear trends nationally and globally. But never the less, it was painful to be confronted with some of the facts. Here’s a few that caught my eye:

66% of Protestants believe there are other ways to heaven than through Christ
11% of Protestants who claim the existence of God is an absolute certainty, say it isn’t very important to their lives
27% of Protestants do not believe in hell

The survey results should be sobering for church leadership and certainly is for me. A professor from Rice University summed up the report in an article well by saying,

“The survey shows America is, indeed, 3,000 miles wide and only 3 inches deep.”

That is just a beautiful way of describing a horrific reality. It makes me examine what I’m doing as a worship leader to either contribute or combat this. Am I leading hundreds of people every week in singing a wide variety of songs that only go 3 inches deep? Do we sing songs that confront the notion that there is no hell, that there is a way to heaven besides Christ, or that Christ life, death and resurrection shouldn’t be that important to our lives? I sure hope so.

I think the important thing as a worship leader is to get prayerful and purposeful not just in our sets but in our leadership of our teams and songwriting. We focus a lot on unity, singability, melody which are all important, but what good is unity without truth? More specifically, essential truth. What the findings in this report tell me is not just that 66% believe in other ways to Christ, but that 66% feel comfortable showing up to church with that lie and aren’t confronted by truth.

I have no desire to lead such weak and sanitized worship that the flesh and lies of the enemy aren’t offended. In the coming weeks I’m going to start a series of posts on how our phrasing and word choices in worship lyrics can contribute to essential biblical truth. No ambiguous language, no vague interpretation, no confusing imagery.

If you have any examples of worship songs you feel do this I’d love to hear them in the comments.

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Letting the congregation write worship songs…literally

Tagged Under : church, grace, Life Connection Church, songwriting, worship

John Mark McMillan at Life Connection Church At Life Connection Church we very much value songs written specifically for the local congregation. That doesn’t mean that they won’t have any relevance outside of our church, but just that it was written with our body prayerfully in mind. I believe that’s not only how the best songs are written musically, but spiritually I think that’s where the greatest gift is to the kingdom, in building of the local church.

Recently I’ve been examining ways to get my church body even more involved in our songwriting process. As a worship leader and elder I’m aware of the larger spiritual issues impacting the body, and as my role as discipleship leader I’m privy to more personal issues on a smaller scale as well. But in order to bring in everyone something else had to be done.

The idea is this. We will write a song around a theme and ask everyone in the body to submit a 1 sentence response to a question around that theme. The song’s lyrics will predominantly be made up of these responses. First up we will tackle grace. The question to the body is this…

How has God’s grace changed your life specifically?

Huge question I know, so many aspects to grace so I expect a wonderful wide spectrum of answers. The goal is to answer personally(can be anonymously) and not generally. An example of a general response would be, “He took this sinner and made me clean“, a personal response would be, “He took my life of drugs and death, and gave me a life of purity and hope.”

I’ll then take these answers and shape them poetically to fit musically, rhyme etc… I’ll probably write a chorus that captures the entirety of the submissions, but if someone submits something that God puts heavy on our hearts then we may very well use it for the chorus as well. I don’t really know what to expect out of this exercise, this is new ground for me.

By God’s grace at the end we’ll have a skillfully crafted song of worship that glorifies God by demonstrating the life saving, transforming, empowering impact of God’s grace in our church body, by our church body. I’m incredibly excited to get started on this. I’ll keep everyone up to date on how well or poorly this experiment goes, should be fun.

Let me know what you guys think, am I nuts?

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John Mark McMillan Interview Part 2

Tagged Under : interview, John Mark McMillan, songwriting, video

I continue my discussion with John Mark on his songwriting technique and John gives us a little teaser on his upcoming album. Make sure to catch part 1 if you haven’t already. Once we release all the parts (there will be 4 I think) I’ll collect them into a single post. The free John Mark album giveaway applies for all post on the interview. So refer to part 1 giveaway rules and link up on this post.

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How to write a mediocre worship song

Tagged Under : Bob Kilpatrick, church, how to, songwriting, tips, worship

Scott over at Scotteriology posted a great article by Bob Kilpatrick on How to write a mediocre worship song. The church certainly is full of them and this article gives you sage advice on how to write your own bad, errr mediocre worship songs. My favorite tip:

Number Ten- Never; ever rewrite your song after the first draft. If you hit a lyrical block, you can use the words “really” or hallelujah” or “to the Lord” very effectively to keep the song moving. If you must rewrite, do it when you’re tired, depressed or angry. Don’t throw away the first draft, just in case the song inadvertently improves.

I hear all too often from “songwriters” in the church, “I wrote this in 10 minutes” as if that’s something to brag about.

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How to properly use simile in worship songwriting

Tagged Under : church, Come Thou Fount, Delirious, how to, John Mark McMillan, Kanye West, Kevin Prosch, music, Psalms, R Kelly, simile, songwriting, tips, Violet Burning, worship

sim·i·le
A figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as, as in “How like the winter hath my absence been” or “So are you to my thoughts as food to life” (Shakespeare).

A powerful tool of writing and one not much used in modern worship is simile. Metaphor is more commonly uses in modern worship songwriting and we’ll discuss that later, but for now I want to focus on simile. Psalms is full of simile which is no surprise since much of it was originally written as music. Simile helps us associate an abstract idea or theological view with a concrete illustration which helps us define and explain the abstract. Quite simply, an effective simile helps us understand a big idea by comparing it to an idea we all are very familiar with. Simile can also be purely poetic where the object being compared doesn’t require further explanation but the writer chooses to for lyrical clarity, imagery, style and/or conformity. Ideally both should be accomplished.

Let’s summarize things a simile should accomplish and then we’ll look at some examples.

Bring clarity to a big idea or theological view through comparison of a concrete idea or object
Poetically describe a topic so a congregation can sing the same truth through different lenses
Provide a fresh view of an old idea or truth that helps the congregation sing in spirit and truth
Support song topic

Things a simile should not accomplish:

Create confusion through inaccurate, inappropriate, incomplete comparison
Create multiple avenues of interpretation due to an overly vague, or abstract comparison. We should be singing the same truth not reaching different conclusions because you chose a really vague and inaccurate way to describe something.
Use so many fresh views that nobody is quite sure what is being described anymore. Similes should support the song topic, not distract from it.

Let’s look at an intriguing example in Psalms 39:11.

You rebuke and discipline men for their sin; you consume their wealth(beauty) like a moth– each man is but a breath(vanity). Selah

This is great usage because it paints such a vivid picture of how the wicked’s beauty and wealth are consumed. A moth eats bit by bit, leaving holes as it eats. David is a little preoccupied with his enemies not being crushed and dealt with as he’d like. So David talks a lot about this topic and this line does a lot to describe how God is working through David and helps describe an abstract idea of God consuming wealth with a concrete idea of how a moth consumes.

It was really challenging finding modern examples of good simile but I found some great ones after the jump.

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