Category: Music

You Have Been Warned! (In the best way possible)

The Warning, three sisters from Mexico who dared to dream big.

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From a recent video released by The Warning

I love and appreciate music. I used to be a classic rock guy but my horizons have been expanded, and I mostly listen to contemporary music these days. I played guitar for a number of years and even led worship, but that was B.C. (before children). I was also a board member for a music foundation that built out and operates a venue for live music. I even booked the venue for about a year before COVID.

In the process of booking the music venue, I was constantly searching out new music. I focused on people writing and performing their own music. I looked for artists with a good enough following to fill a 200-seat venue but not so big that they were priced out of our range. I booked many, many acts, some of which have outgrown our space. At least one musician I booked went on to play for crowds of tens of thousands.

I tend to gravitate toward new folk, “new grass,” Americana, and indie rock, but I appreciate good music of all kinds. I go to live shows outside of my listening sweet spot to support young artists and appreciate their music. I like people who are not what I expect them to be, musicians who are authentic and who defy stereotypes. I also like a good story

All of these characteristics define a young group out of Monterrey, Mexico called “The Warning.” I will say now, “You have been warned!” which became their catchy promotional phrase when they were young – and not without reason. I can relate from experience that their rabbit hole is deep and winding!

The Warning is comprised of the three Villarreal Velez sisters who were raised by good parents who love music and introduced them to classical piano lessons, music of all genres, and Rock Band (the video game) when they were young. Daniela and Paulina began playing Rock Band when they were 8 and 6. They played it for hours and were driven to get perfect scores. Daniela (Dany) always played guitar and Paulina (Pau) insisted on the drums. Their little sister Alejandra (Ale) was “just a baby” (3) as she watched her older sisters play.

The girls became rockers and begged their father to buy them the real instruments they were playing on the video game. He obliged, signed them up for music lessons, and told them they had to give it at least 6 months. He had difficulty finding someone willing to give a 6-year-old drum lessons – a very small 6-year-old at that. The parents, Monica and Luis, captured their journey on video, part of which is the source material for a short documentary, Mayday in the Making, embedded below.

The girls took to that challenge their father gave them in the same way they were driven to achieve a perfect score in Rock Band. They shifted from piano lessons to guitar and drum lessons, and they practiced constantly.

Ale developed the same love of music as her older sisters, watching them play rock band and taking classical piano lessons herself. Though she was originally drawn to the harp, she fell in love with the bass guitar, and she began bass guitar lessons at 7 or 8 years old.

The sisters didn’t take long before they realized they could start playing music together, and they became a band. In fact, Ale had only been taking bass lessons for two months when they performed together for the first time in front of a live audience at a school Christmas celebration. Their father built them a state-of-the-art studio in the basement, which I imagine was half for sound containment and half to support his blossoming musical prodigies.

This may seem like an odd article on this website, but I do have a page devoted to music with perhaps a dozen articles I have written on music/faith themes. I have been inspired to write about the Warning, but I need to step up the stage first (pun intended) with an introductory article.

Continue reading “You Have Been Warned! (In the best way possible)” →

The Shining City, The Waning Light & the Howling Wolves

To those looking for a home that would be free

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I became an adult in 1978. I actually met the first George Bush at a political rally in Iowa in 1980. I supported Anderson in the primary because of his anti-nuclear stance, but Ronald Reagan won the primary. The first presidential election I voted in was 1980 when Reagan was elected to the White House.

By 1989, I was in law school (married with three children). I don’t remember Ronald Reagan’s exit speech from the White House. Life was pretty full for me then, but I have heard it since then, and I read it again tonight. These words I have copied from that speech as it is published on the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum website:

“You know, down the hall and up the stairs from this office is the part of the White House where the President and his family live. There are a few favorite windows I have up there that I like to stand and look out of early in the morning. The view is over the grounds here to the Washington Monument, and then the Mall and the Jefferson Memorial. But on mornings when the humidity is low, you can see past the Jefferson to the river, the Potomac, and the Virginia shore. Someone said that’s the view Lincoln had when he saw the smoke rising from the Battle of Bull Run. I see more prosaic things: the grass on the banks, the morning traffic as people make their way to work, now and then a sailboat on the river.

I’ve been thinking a bit at that window. I’ve been reflecting on what the past 8 years have meant and mean. And the image that comes to mind like a refrain is a nautical one — a small story about a big ship, and a refugee, and a sailor. It was back in the early eighties, at the height of the boat people. And the sailor was hard at work on the carrier Midway, which was patrolling the South China Sea. The sailor, like most American servicemen, was young, smart, and fiercely observant. The crew spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck, and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, ‘Hello, American sailor. Hello, freedom man.’

….

The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the ‘shining city upon a hill.’ The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

Ronald Reagan’s shining city is the United States of America that I grew up with. Tall and proud, blessed by God, and teeming with people in a grand melting pot from every nation in the world. The harmony and peace were not always evident, but freedom stood firm against any assault.

“And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” My ancestors entered those doors at various times between the late 1700’s and late 1800’s with the will and heart to make better lives for themselves.

Many people come here today with the same hopes and dreams, but our windswept shores were rocked by 9/11, and “the freedom man” was cowered. We have retreated behind self-protective ideologies and our light is waning behind the walls of our fear.

Perhaps, my favorite band over the past several years or more is Watchhouse (formerly Mandolin Orange). I am a sucker for a good mandolin solo, and Andrew Marlin is a virtuoso of tasteful mandolin solos sprinkled effortlessly and seamlessly at the right times over compelling melodies, poignant harmonies and simple but profound lyrics.

One of my favorite Watchhouse songs is Wolves. It tells a new story. I will leave the embedded video of a live performance of the song with the lyrics to follow and some hope that we can find the harmony to our the values that once made us a better nation.

There she stands, so tall and mighty
With her keen and watchful eye
And the heart of a mother
Holding out her guiding light
It’s a hard road to travel
It’s old rock from end to end
The sun, it rises on her brow
And sets upon the great expanse

Everything’s so great, can’t get better
Makes me wanna cry
That I’ll go out howling at the moon tonight

There she stands, so tall and mighty
Her gaze facing the East
At her back our doors are closing
As we grin and bare our teeth
On the wind the wolves are howling
She cries to draw them near
Well turn around, turn around my darling
Oh, the wolves are here

Everything’s so great, can’t get better
Makes me wanna cry
But I’ll go out howling at the moon tonight
Yeah, I’ll go out howling at the moon tonight

To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice

What is the obedience God desires from us?

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I became a follower of Jesus in 1979, though I was a wild, untamed stallion when I was first confronted with the Lordship of Christ and verbally submitted to him. I wandered down my own paths in the year that followed, leading me to a breaking point and more complete surrender. (A cycle I have unfortunately repeated more than once.)

Over the following two years, I was about as surrendered to God as I have been my whole life. I was all in – or as all in as I was capable of being at that time, perhaps. During that time, I became a big fan of Keith Green. I even saw him in concert in Des Moines Iowa in 1981 or 1982. He died in a place crash within a year or two after that, and his impact and memory has faded.

When I saw him in concert, though, his radical Christian commitment had been a huge impact on me, and that impact carried with me beyond his death. Thus, my daily reading today recalls to my mind these lyrics by Keith Green: 

To obey is better than sacrifice
I want more than Sundays and Wednesday nights
If you can't come to me every day 
Then don't bother coming at all

Keith Green was a musical child prodigy who was radically saved by Jesus. He used his great musical talent and platform to become a prophet of sorts to young Christians at the time who wanted an authentic faith.

I was very drawn to a monastic, cloistered life at that age that Keith Green represented, like a modern Essene. The truth is that I had long been drawn to that kind of thing going back to the book, My Side of the Mountain, that I read in grade school (about a boy who leaves his parents to hollow out a summer home in the trunk of dead tree in the Catskills).

That book seeded in me a longing for something authentic and pure. The idea took root in me that I could not find “it” in the bustle of the world. I needed to escape to solitude, self-reflection, and devotion to a simple life.

In a poignant moment in my senior year in college, I faced up to that longing and desire that ran deep in me, and I made a conscious decision to follow Jesus into the messy clamor of human society. Jesus often escaped to the mountains and the wilderness to be alone with God, but he always returned to the highways, and byways, and the public squares where people live.

Still, the Keith Green spirit of uncompromised obedience to Christ and Christ alone left an imprint on me. His prophetic insistence on radical commitment carried me forward in those early years of my journey with Christ.

Now, I find myself some 40+ years down a road that has taken many twists and turns. That road has taken me through long and winding wilderness areas that were darker than I care to dwell on. It has taken me to the other side of those dark times into the light of a new day, more weary and (hopefully) wiser for the experience. I am still following Jesus as best as I can, but I have a slightly different view of Keith Green’s words today. I hope I can give this the nuance it deserves.

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Diving for Pearls in the stories of Dustin Kensrue and Mark Driscoll

Dustin Kensrue’s music is as good as ever, but it comes with the melancholy of what used to be.

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I recently spent some time listening to Dustin Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming. I like his music, and the new album is good. The first song I heard, though, reminded me of the rumors that he has walked away from orthodox Christianity:

When I left town, I was swept up
With the visions of a man from Galilee
Along the way, I lost my bearings
I got swallowed up by sins of certainty

The heart of sedona

The words to this song triggered a desire to research the truth. Kensure was an impactful Christian musician who wrote the worship album of the year not to many years ago. I wondered, therefore, why he walked away (if indeed he did).

I learned that Kensrue was a former worship leader for Mars Hill, the failed church that rose to the heights of evangelical influence with many campuses, only to collapse with the failings of its erstwhile leader, Mark Driscoll.

Listening to the song, Heart of Sedona, off Kensrue’s new album, Desert Dreaming, gave me pause. The words seem to confirm the rumor, and the story seems all too familiar lately.

His music is as good as ever, but it comes with the melancholy of what used to be. Or maybe it never was. It’s hard to know how to process the deconstruction of someone else’s faith.

Given the back story (involvement in a failed church movement), I suspected his “deconstruction” (and many other artists who seem to have followed a similar path) may be symptomatic of some malady that has infected Evangelical Christianity.

My entre into Kensrue’s story begin with the article, It’s Not Enough: Dustin Kensrue’s Turning Away, which is where I learned that Kensrue was intimately involved in the toxic environment of the Mars Hill church movement led by Driscoll, a controversial and polarizing personality.

I had heard of the rise and fall of Mark Driscoll and the Mars Hill Church, but I did not jump on the curiosity bandwagon when people associated with Christianity Today produced the podcast, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill. I only heard about it, and I had listened to a discussion of the podcast on another podcast. Therefore, I finally felt a need to hear it firsthand to gain some perspective.

The podcast describes the talent and bravado of Mark Driscoll, who was also polarizing and toxic and seemingly proud of it. Driscoll was staunchly reformed in his theology with a cultish personality and a flair for the dramatic. He attracted people on the edges of faith in the notoriously countercultural Seattle area. I summarized some of my thoughts on what I learned in Keeping It Real for the Church: Talent in Tension with Character)

I have also gone back, now, through the tweets highlighted in the article I noted above, and I have poured over Dustin Kensrue’s Twitter (X) feed to gain further insight. These things give me additional food for thought in considering the “deconstruction” of Dustin Kensrue as it relates to the American Evangelical Church.

Though I have spent considerable time researching these things, my thoughts remain preliminary and exploratory. I am not certain that I have gained sufficient perspective to be clear or certain of any conclusions, but all this seems to confirm my sense that the story is symptomatic of a problem with the American Evangelical Church.

In fact, the original article I found, itself, seems to be symptomatic of issues in the American Evangelical Church. These issues may also be reflected in current American culture, affected as it is by social media. I apologize for the length of this article, but I am afraid I do not do much more than scratch the surface here.

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That Wrecking Ball

The song, That Wrecking Ball, hits home particularly with me today as I listened to it for perhaps the 100th time

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I love the music of Watchhouse, (fka Mandolin Orange). Watchhouse is Andrew Marlin and Emily Frantz (sometimes with a band). Their newest, Album, Austin City Limits Live, is a great example of their music.

I don’t always understand the meaning of all their songs and their lyrics, but I resonate with their music. I am not a lover of the postmodern theory of interpretation. I think that we should strive to understand the artist’s original meaning, but that doesn’t mean we can’t get our own meaning out of the songs written by other people

Artists like Bob Dylan seem to enjoy being purposely obtuse. Many musicians have written hit songs with gibberish for lyrics. Then, there is the Beatles tune, I Am the Walrus, that pushes this art to a more eloquent, absurdist extreme.

But songs that connect best with us, I believe, are the songs that have real meaning, and especially real meaning to us. We can even find that in a Bob Dylan song.

I am probably not being completely fair to him by saying he was purposely obtuse. I think he was going for meaning in most of his songs. It’s just that the meaning, perhaps, is not as easily articulable apart from the lyrics and the song.

Art often isn’t rational, in the sense of logical syllogisms. Few of us would likely call logic art. Artists often credit a muse inspired meaning that is not immediately clear, even to the artist. Artists sometimes channel inarticulable meaning into music and song.

I can understand the intuitive creativity of an artist, though I am not an artist. Artists have the ability to connect with people around the edges of the penumbra of their own understanding where the ability to articulate meaning becomes ineffable. Some artists have the gift of being able to communicate elegantly, clearly, and poignantly in their music.

Watchhouse is one of those artists. The song, That Wrecking Ball, hits home particularly with me today as I listened to it for perhaps the 100th time. (Not today. I have only listened to it a few times today.)

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