Monday, April 21, 2008

Narrative in music

Tim over at Tale Spin has a really interesting quotation from a folk singer about a lot of contemporary song writing. Essentially the point is that much of contemporary song writing focuses on "the personal landscape" and it gets boring.

I was thinking about this last night when I went to a concert of well known Christian singer-songwriter. I like a number of his songs but realized last night that there are two big differences between singing a couple of them at church and listening to twenty of them in a concert. The first is that in concert you have all the extra keyboard/electric guitar/drums and reverb and frankly that gets old fast (or maybe it is just me getting old fast). The other big difference is that when you get 20 of them in a row you realize that none of them tell a story. They are all about the personal relationship with a mighty God and they don't even tell a story about that relationship. And after a while they all start to sound the same.

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