Baggas' Blog

I can’t get enough of this worship band from California at the moment. Their music just takes things in a different direction compared to say Hillsong (and I’m not criticising them for a second, just emphasising the differences). There’s a lot more freedom and spontaneity in their worship, often resulting in 8-9 minute tracks! There’s a real life and energy in the vocals – I love the little “haha” laugh leader Kim Walker often does when she’s singing, like worshipping God is actually something that’s fun to do, that makes her laugh. It just seems so genuine.

I’ve posted some of their tracks before, but here’s a couple more from their second to last album “Your Love Never Fails” The first is the title track, that I just cannot stop listening to. The second features the brilliant vocals of Kim Walker – especially in the second half it is phenomenal. I love the semi-goofy stage presence she has also, like she’s just worshipping God in her own way, not trying to impress others. Listen out for her laugh in there too… I love that song but somehow the lyrics of the second verse still seem a little inappropriate but judge for yourself. Regardless, I am hooked on this band at the moment. Just wish we could introduce new songs a little faster at church – there’s just so much I would love for us to do!

For more, browse YouTube, check out their website, or even better, get hold of some of their CDs for yourself. Brilliant!

Thanks goes out to John for sending me this video. It’s a pretty funny rendition of what happens when corporate advertising mixes with Christian worship :

I’m not sure about the rest of this guy Tim Hawkin’s clips though, “Cletus Take the Reel” might appeal to fans of Carrie Underwood, but at all costs avoid the “I Don’t Drink Beer” clip – it’s just plain bad on so many levels ;P

On a similar topic, this reminded me of another great worship related “info-mercial” : Me Worship…

And to round out this triumvirate of worship related humour, how could I neglect this classic song “Jesus is a friend of mine” by Sonseed! (the thing is I still can’t decide whether this was intended as a joke or not? but it’s hilarious nonetheless)

One of the great things this year at Warnbro is we’ve been much more pro-active at introducing new songs. I’ve been trying to bring at least one new song each month, and I believe that’s a big part of why we are starting to see a resurgence in the worship..

Psalm 33:3 is a bit of a motto of our team… (in fact the whole of Psalm 33 is pretty cool)

Sing to him a new song;
play skillfully, and shout for joy.

So here’s a sneak preview of a song that a few of us are getting into at the moment, which may be one of the next cabs off the rank…

Actually it’s not a new site – it’s an old site with a new home. Karl’s phenomenal worship guitar blog (easily the best of it’s genre) has finally got it’s own domain : guitarforworship.com I was just updating my blogroll and thought I might as well mention it here also. So if you like guitars or worship music or especially if you do both, then make sure you go and pay Karl a visit! (Liking U2 also comes in handy as well).

Long term readers of my blog (if there are any who didn’t give up years ago) will notice the increased frequency of posts lately. Looking back at all the twitter summaries and not much else I’ve decided to put a bit more effort into keeping this blog ticking over in a more interesting fashion…. oh and it’s providing me with yet another distraction to keep me from my Masters study (assignment due next week, exam in 2.5 weeks) – epidemiology is just too dry to maintain my interest for more than 15 minute blocks I’m afraid….

So for your entertainment tonight, here’s the current track playing on my CD changer (I have been enjoying a U2 marathon this week, but Zooropa just finished and I couldn’t be bothered getting up off the couch to put the next one on – Pop). I like this CD of John Mayer and this track is an awesome slow romance number – but the album cover is a shocker – just reminds me of some bad picture of Robbie Williams from the 90′s – and what’s with the super-size record company logo on the front?! – anyway, close your eyes, try and think of anything but that picture of John Mayer, and enjoy the song…

I posted this on the Warnbro worship blog but I love it so much I’m gonna put it here as well (plus I wanted to test that posting YouTube Videos works with my new blog install..)

The music is inspiring and I like the comments he makes at the end… Enjoy.

One of my guilty pleasures in life is that I really like country music. Don’t know why that feels like something to be ashamed of but it does – maybe because Perth is decidedly not a country music city (although it sometimes feels like a big country town but that’s another issue..) I never was much into it until 2007 when we visited our friends over in Nashville in the USA. As Nashville is the Mecca of country music I decided to acquire a taste for it – started listening to Keith Urban, Alison Krauss and a heap of others and discovered I loved it. I think if you set your mind to it you can acquire a taste for just about anything – for example this year I decided to acquire a taste for beer. I’ve never been a beer drinker my whole life but decided to give it a try – so while spending a couple of weeks in Queensland for Uni with nothing else to do except lie on the beach and skip classes I made a concerted effort to learn to like beer and was successful… but I like country music more. In addition to the above artists another one of my favourites is Brad Paisley – that guy writes some great songs and is an amazing guitarist!

One of the other things I am into (aside from country music and beer) is playing worship guitar in our band at church, but I’ve never found a way to combine the two (country and worship that is – hard to combine beer and worship…) until now…

Wash Away is a recently released album from a guy called Don Poythress who is a top songwriter in the Nashville scene, having written for quite a few big names in country music. He is also a worship leader at his church.  I really like this album for a number of reasons, and not just because it has a strong country flavour.

Firstly the songs are interesting. Often with worship CDs lately I find there’s 3 or 4 songs that grab my attention and then a lot of more mediocre, less memorable ones. On this CD almost every song has something interesting about it, even the songs I am less keen on still hold my attention. There is a creativity in the music that grabs me – partly it’s the lyrics, partly the song structure, and partly the instrumentation. Every song is different. They don’t all sound the same. There is plenty of musical space – but also plenty of moments of musical virtuosity (for want of a better word) that inspires me as a musician. For example the mandolin introduction on “The Faiithful Love of Jesus” is exquisite – I really must pick up my mando more and put more effort into learning it. And there’s plenty of nice slide guitar, acoustic, and of course distorted Telecaster licks on the album also.

Lyrically the album is good also. I think it’s probably hard to be original as a worship songwriter but Poythress does a good job of creating some fresh and inspiring songs which range from up-tempo country rock to more hymn like songs. Some of the ones I like best are Expectation, Fill Me Up (greater slow song – powerful lyrics), and A Thousand Generations (up tempo but interesting lyrical theme…) The title track is really good as well.

If you haven’t yet acquired a taste for country music, try not to let that put you off this CD. The songs could easily be reworked to de-countrify them for any sort of worship setting. I’m glad I thought outside the box of the usual suspects for worship music, and I would encourage you to get on your boots and do the same – it’s well worth the ride…

I continue to not be too active here in this blog due to study/family/ministry/work/facebook etc, although have been a little more involved in our worship team’s blog here : http://wccworship.wordpress.com/

In the process I’ve recently discovered a few brilliant worship guitar blogs that have really got me inspired. Here’s a few of them :

• Guitar for Worship
• Guitar Praise
• Worship Guitar Guy
• Les Paul Player Doctor

They are all now fixtures in my newsreader and all are excellent, but I’d recommend the first one especially. This dude has a mountain of good material, loves U2, and is pretty damn funny too. So if you’re into that sort of thing, check it out. In the meantime I’ll be off hiding out in facebook as usual.

Worship Guitar Guy – cool blog this. well presented with some useful posts. Just wish he would update it a little more consistently than he does. But for church guitarists, it’s definitely one worth checking out.