Hello again

Hi, it's been a while. I haven' posted in over a month, and really, who cares?

If your interested in indie rock, I recommend Sufjan Stevens. I recently bought his album "Illinoise," which is an album in tribute to the state of Illinois. It's got some history, and the music is soft and folky, with plenty of banjo, trumpets, violins, percussion and acoustic guitar. It has pretty great harmony too. Also, the titles of the songs are really great, for instance, "A Short Reprise for Mary Todd, who went Crazy, but for Very Good Reasons," and "Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois," and "In This Temple As in the Hearts of Man for whom He Saved the Earth." It's a sweet, sweet CD. Deborah doesn't like it because it has a song about a serial killer called "John Wayne Gacy, Jr."

I also got a CD by a group called Page France, entitled "Hello, Dear Wind." It's quite good. The instrumentation is minimal, with mostly acoustic guitar and bells. They use a mixture of biblical and non-biblical imagery, and they reiterate their images throughout the album. The lyrics seem a bit hippyish, but they're quite good nonetheless. Here's a bit of lyric from their song "Chariot": "Come and marry us/ to the blushing circus king/ And dance like elephants as he comes to us/ Through a fiery golden ring/ With a violin and a song to sing/ As he brings for us our wings/ Now he's one of us/ He plays the tambourine/ He breaks the bread for us/ and sings."

In more music news, we've a new hymn book from Canon Press. It's called Cantus Christi. It has songs from all through Christian history, and it focusses on the psalms. It has a kind of psalm I've never heard of, namely a "through composed" psalm. It has four of them, I think. For these psalms, the composer took the text of the psalm, and composed music for the whole text. Therefore, the music can't be used for any song other than the one it was composed for. The hymn book came with an audio CD, which we can use to learn the songs and can sing along to. It also has psalms as regular songs, and psalm chants. It's a great book.

It was nice chatting with you. Drop us a comment if you're lonely. We'll do our best to comfort you.