WorshipCentral

Airplane loos, Chinese takeaways and old gospel.

(1) MORNING STAR

Jesus is the one who was, who invaded history to save us, who is: who is alive today, we can know him, and who is to come: he is coming back. One day everyone will see him and everyone will worship him. All around the world, wherever Jesus is being worshipped, we hear echoes of the future: songs of tomorrow, anthems of hope rising up all over the place. Jesus says ‘I am… the bright Morning Star’ (Rev 22:16), he’s coming, the kingdom of God is breaking out all around us: worship is the future sound.

This song started around a little tag I’d had for a while, that sounds similar to the chorus. After a few months the verse came together, and then came the hard bit of crafting the flow together. I’d been bouncing ideas off Tim, he’d been ruthlessly editing down my ideas to the good stuff, which is always a hard process. I spent ages trying to get the chorus simpler, as I wanted to keep it really easy and anthemic. There were lots of frustrating weeks where I knew we were about 95% finished, just tweaking the final word here and there. As this is one of the newest songs, I did not have much mapped out as we went into the studio. I had this little idea for a riff that I played to guitarist Alex Nifong, who started adding layer upon layer of sound. When we were tracking the song, we just kept things rolling at the end and the ad-libs just happened in the studio. I’m really pleased with how big it turned out.

(2) BECAUSE OF YOUR LOVE

Worship is only possible because of Jesus: it’s for Jesus, to Jesus, about Jesus. It says in Romans 5:8 that “but God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We love because we’ve been loved. Worship is our response to God’s incredible love for us.

I’d come home from church one night really excited about worshipping, and this little idea came really quickly. Later that week I was song writing with a good friend Hanif Williams and we sat on my sofa working on refining the lyric, chords and tightening up the chorus. The song was literally finished the week before we recording the album, so I only had a few days to think about the feel and check everything, which was actually quite helpful – it certainly focuses the mind! I wanted the song to be huge, a real anthemic celebration of God’s love. Once in the studio, this was actually one to the toughest ones to get the feel right. We tracked it once, but it was just not energetic enough for me, it just felt too predictable. So we started from scratch a couple of times, ended up keeping it really simple and explosive. Alex came up with this killer riff for the verses, and then the song fell into place.

(3) GLORIOUS

I can’t wait to see Jesus face to face: he’s risen from the dead, alive forever. The bible tells us that his face is brilliant like the sun. For now we see in part, with eyes of faith, but I know one day I’ll see him. For now my prayer is that I won’t turn my eyes away. I won’t get distracted with the stuff of this life, I’ll keep the eyes of my heart firmly fixed on the one I love.

The chorus and tag for the song came really quickly: I’d been away travelling in India with my wife for a few weeks, and I came back fresh to my guitar having not played for ages. I sometimes find that coming fresh is great for song writing. I found this chord sequence that felt like it really worshipped and just started singing the lines over the top. The verses were a lot harder, and I spent ages work shopping the song with my friends Luke Hellebronth, Ben Bryant and Tim Last. We tried loads of arrangements, and this song has definitely been gradually evolving. You can hear a demo Ben Cantelon recorded for Worship Central on the website. Ben added this great piano line that became part of the track. Once in the studio, it felt like it wanted to kick off even more at the end, so we re-worked the end sequence. It’s one of my favourite moments on the album.

(4) WORSHIP THE LORD

There’s an old call to worship the people of God have been singing for millennia. 1 Chronicles 16:29, again in Ps 29&96 – worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. When we come to worship, we stand in holiness because of Jesus, bringing our lives as everyday offerings to God. We’re not living for our glory anymore, but for the glory of the Jesus, the one name we want to make famous. That’s what worship is all about: seeing Jesus high and lifted up, seated on the throne of our lives.

I like simple songs – this has four chords and I find it really easy to lead with. It came about by splicing two half songs together and they just clicked. I’ve loved the old scripture for ages and had this idea for a chorus, then the tag was harder work getting right, but in the end the simple path worked best. We kept it really simple in the studio, just letting the song worship and not crowding it out too much.

(5) HOW LONG
Our worship cannot simple leave us with our heads in the clouds. When we look around us at the world, the reality is that we live in an imperfect, broken world, a world full of pain, suffering, disease and poverty. The future sound is also a lament: a desperate crying out for Jesus to return and remake the world. Mike Lloyd writes “do we long for the appearing of Christ and the putting right of the world’s wrongs? Or have we made our peace with the current compromised state of the world? Have we become so inured to the injustices of our world (because our lifestyles are so dependent on them?) that we harbour no hatred for them in our hearts? The amount we long for the appearing of Christ is probably the amount we oppose evil. If we want to ask ourselves how much compassion we have, we merely have to ask ourselves how much we long for the coming of the one who will heal all the hurts and bind up the broken-hearted.” (Café Theology)

I love old gospel and spirituals – they’re simple songs born out of the most harsh circumstances. I love the honest intimacy loads of those songs have – they’re incredible. Spirituals, like the blues, tend to obey a basic musical form of repetition and return to the basic note. So, I’d started writing the chorus and the verses for a really simple spiritual when our friends at Tearfund approached us to say they’d love to use a song for their Justice Campaign celebrating the abolition of slavery in the UK and William Wilberforce’s anniversary. This one seemed like a good fit, so I worked on the lyric with justice as more of a focus. At the time, I was reading Mike Lloyd’s book, Café Theology, where he writes an extra-ordinary chapter on the final victory of God, which massively influenced this song. In production, I really wanted the song to build to this musical cry of desperation and hammer on the door of heaven. There’s a real place for our cries and intercession in worship musically.

(6) NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE

Songs are often a journal to what has been going on in our lives: at the start of the year this was a real prayer for me. My wife and I were desperate to start a family, our church were struggling with a lot of opposition to our plans to restore and reopen our sister church in our parish, St Paul’s Onslow Square. I kept coming back to this scripture that the angel says to Mary ‘for nothing is impossible with God’ Luke 1:37. I started writing this song about the awesome power of our God, who comes to earth, born of a virgin, dies, comes to life, risen and invincible.

Looking back a year later, God has blessed us with the most incredible series of miracles: we reopened St Paul’s last September, and six months later we’ve seen the place grow from just a handful of us meeting on a Sunday to over seven hundred worshippers, many of them young people, coming to three services. To top is all, the week we launched the new service at St Paul’s, my wife gave birth to a beautiful, miraculous little boy and we called him Kester (old Scottish for Christopher), which means one who carries the presence of Christ. We’re learning that the risen Jesus is in our midst and nothing is impossible for him.

We’d worked on this song together as a team: I came away from a ministry time in which one of our pastors closed the service with the quote ‘For nothing is impossible with God’, and we started singing it over the ministry. Originally it was a much more intimate idea, but I was meeting up with Hanif to write and he really was like ‘nah, this need to be LOUD’. We pushed it up a bunch of keys, sped it up, added a simple verse melody and then started working on the lyric. There’s a lot of stuff crammed in: the incarnation, resurrection, omniscience of God, and sometimes there’s a danger that too many ideas make a song heavy, so we stuck with a simple ‘awesome God’ refrain and a very simple chorus. Tim helped iron the song out and tweaked the tag section to give more energy. We then took it to our band and work shopped it. You can hear an early demo which Hanif did on worshipcentral.org

(7) EVERLASTING ARMS

Worship is a bittersweet symphony. Many of us have loved and lost along the way. I lost my Father shortly after he led me to Christ at the age of 18. He dropped dead of a heart attack the next year. I remember sitting on the plane on the way home to bury him, tears rolling down my face, calling out to God to help me make sense of this. God spoke to me really clearly that day: I pulled open my bible and the pages fell to Psalm 2:7 where it says, “You are my son, and today I have become your Father”. I’ve been trying to live in the reality of this ever since. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is that God has not just redeemed us, but adopted us, chosen us to be his children. Even in the times of life when everything falls apart and there’s no song to sing, God holds us in his everlasting arms. That’s really what the future sound is about: our prodigal hearts coming home to rest in the everlasting arms of our Father.

I actually wrote this song on a plane to America – how strange is that! I was playing around with 70’s piano samples I had on my laptop in Apple’s Garageband, and found this beautiful chord sequence by accident. I sat listening to it on my headphones, and suddenly had this idea for a melody line for the verse and chorus. I remember sitting in the airplane toilet singing the vocal line into the mic on my laptop. When I came out I had several very strange looks from the passenger and crew.

I took the demo into the studio and we all piled in one night after a Chinese takeaway to play around with the song. It turned out as a massive jam session, quite honky-tonk and gospel. Originally this was going to be a big long fade out, but something really happened in the end choruses and we wanted to preserve the whole thing. Trevor Michael, who produced the album, kept saying ‘I can really hear a gospel choir on this’ and it really works. For me it just became a bit of a live worship moment, captured in the studio, and I’m really pleased with the result.

FUTURE SOUND

The title was settled quite early on, taken from the lyric in Morning Star. Lots of the songs are about the return of Jesus, and worship being the future sound, so it seemed like a cool title idea. The whole cover came about because we wanted to do something a little bit retro, as a pun on the future. Stew Smith came up with the idea of my head in an old TV, and dropped the Walkman in there as a nod to the 80’s. I was also quite keen not to just go for something a bit different, rather than the classic ‘photo’ on cover. I love simple design, so we kept it very clean and easy.

Anyway, there’s a little behind the scenes on how things came together. Enjoy!

Future Sound