Over the course of the last five years, I’ve composed a series of posts entitled Famous Songs You’ve Never Heard, which were meant to highlight music that hadn’t been heard by nearly enough ears in my world.
Over the last five years, I’ve managed to compose five entries.
I haven’t quite hit the caliber of diversity I want from this project, extended as though it might be, and I might never actually hit it. But what I can do is give you a hint of what I want it to be, long term, when I decide to actually write long-form again.
So here’s another project interlude meant to shake me out of a proverbial creative stupor. Here’s ten songs, and snippets about what each of those ten songs mean to me, over the course of an adulthood of listening to music. I’m giving myself exactly as much time to write about the songs as it takes me to listen to them. The thoughts will get out, and then the piece will be done.
The perpetual warning: my background is Christian music, in all the extensive variety of definitions that “Christian music” might mean. The songs that land here aren’t exclusively Christian – there’s a strong indie influence as well, songs that a grown-up college radio DJ might find and cherish – but if you seek out common threads, you’ll find them, and you’ll find them in Jesus-music, from the word go.
As is often the case, Radio U has been Where Music Is Going for much of my adulthood, and they get credit for a lot here as well, starting with the first track.
I spent much of my early CCM days as a White Heart burnout, and there are plenty of stories to tell about how many events of my college days centered around one White Heart concert in Fort Wayne or another White Heart concert at Taylor U. I never got to see White Heart play with Gordon Kennedy or Tommy Sims, though; the definitive White Heart lineup, the one at the center of Emergency Broadcast and Freedom, escaped me.
So listening to a very prog-rock influenced track on Radio U one fine summer afternoon was a breath of fresh air, and when I found out the band behind it was longtime session and studio hand Jimmie Lee Solas and old White Heart guitarist Gordon Kennedy, I was all-in.
Dogs Of Peace have recorded two albums, and those albums are twenty years apart. That’s my kind of recording schedule.
I have spoken of my deep affection for LAUNCHcast and the music I discovered through that service before. When I talk about those fine days of discovering music, the time I heard Elizabeth Elmore’s main band for the first time is the moment of discovery I most look back on with fondness. The snare and the guitar just sucked me right into this song, and the moment Elizabeth Elmore opened her mouth, I was a fan forever – not merely of Sarge, but everything that came after as well. The Reputation is an even more underrated group.
I would probably still be a fan even if I was the man she was singing about. Her songwriting pen was always wicked and smart.
This song. If any song was worth a whole article on its own, it’s this one. I honestly don’t know if I could recall all the details, though.
I heard this song for the first time at the old venerable Decatur, Georgia music venue Eddie’s Attic. Kevin was opening for Vigilantes of Love, but he sang like he wanted the bill all to himself. The songs tore me apart, completely.
For this song he brought a local legend up – for the life of me, I can’t remember his name – but someone who it would be found later was dealing with cancer and didn’t have long. “No Place” is a prayer, a song that’s earnestly searching for peace and confident that peace had been found. The harmonies on that song will always be a place I long to return to.
And that pleading in the middle. The apostle wrote about groans that words cannot express once.
Another LAUNCHcast discovery, from the genre that would come to be known as Americana, this time with the haunting electric guitar. I have a thing for haunting electric guitar, even more so when the lyrics haunt as much as the guitar.
Sometimes I run out of things to say just because I’m so taken by a twenty-year-old song all over again.
This was a discovery I made at that finest of Christian music festivals, Cornerstone, back in 2001 or so. I walked past the stage where four fine merchants of this new sound called emo were playing – I think I was with Eaton – and my attention was seized immediately.
I immediately sought out everything that Brandston had ever done, and when a new Brandtson album came out the following year, and it sounded a thousand times better than anything that I had heard on that stage, it was all over. Deep Elm records, and I am deeply fond of them.
“I’m writing my anthem to this sixty-cycle hum” is, if I interpret it correctly, the finest lyric about alternating current that has ever been written.
Some songs are songs that I just listen to when I have teenaged angst entirely too late in life, and there isn’t really much more to say about it. I cherish this opening track from Faulter’s only album so much.
There’s so much to be said about the driving guitar and drums in the first verse breaking down to the syncopation and groove in the chorus.
Far and away the most obscure find on this list – and I’m super grateful for an Iowa music festival clip from 2007. I have both albums this track appears on, if you want to hear a clandestine studio version from an album that’s long since out of print.
One of the best things about the old Cornerstone Festival were the side stages where literally anyone could set up and play and sell their wares. Of all the bands I’ve heard this way (and with all love to Luminate and the song that I cherished that they never released, “And So It Goes”), General Sherman (of all the band names for a Southern boy!) is the band that stuck with me for the long haul. Dana, on guitar, was the one who wound up having the larger measure of success with a later band, Parlours, But it’s Becca’s voice, singing lead here, that I always wanted to hear more of.
Somewhere in a dark corner of the internet there’s stuff I wrote about hearing General Sherman for the first time in 2006 or so. I don’t know if I’ll find that dark corner of the internet again.
The least obscure on this list follows the most. Still, I have had exactly one conversation about the Jimmy Eat World EP that fell in between Futures and Chase This Light in my life, and it was about that person’s unawareness that this EP even existed. Maybe this is stretching “you’ve never heard”.
But this is an essential inclusion for a single reason: an extended guitar solo, in the mid-2000’s. Such unicorns were thought to be dead with grunge, I gathered. I cherish this. I cherish this so much. I cherish it so much more because the solo absolutely SOARS, and without the kind of virtuosity you expect of the classic rock guitar hero; the textures and the crescendo are simply everything. I can’t recommend this song highly enough, even if you’ve heard it.
The track I most looked forward to hearing from the album that was being worked on when I wrote the first entry in this series. I cried the first time I heard the recorded version, and I will never be ashamed of that.
I’ll finish this top ten with the guy responsible for my rediscovery of hip-hop. There were many directions I could have gone here, but this project from last year that detailed a relationship, warts and all – not merely from a Christian perspective, but from a distinctly African-American Christian perspective – enraptures me in so many ways.
Sho Baraka is a creative force, and his songwriting partner (but not his life partner!) Vanessa Hill compliments his vision perfectly and contributes vocal perfection. The product is something with a depth of maturity I haven’t heard from the art form before, a tale of genuine appreciation of husband and wife for one another.
I deliberately left others off this list that I could have included, and that should have more said about them, because I have incomplete thoughts gathered here and there, and I want to turn those thoughts into full stories and reflections one of these days. For now, though, I hope you hear something new that draws you in, and gives you a new musical vein to explore.
Another fine mess. 