The Word in the Wind (2001)

UPDATE: Here is an excerpt from an older post I thought I would rerun, since the songs on this CD are based on the lectionary texts and themes of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Some additional info that may be of interest: I am not the first to set Thomas Hardy's poem, The Oxen, to music. Ralph Vaughan Williams did so before me, but my guitar-based arrangement (DADGAD) is obviously quite different from his choral anthem. Other tuning info, for anyone so inclined: Your Desert Snow (DADGAD), Strange Bedfellows and Living Bread (both standard tuning, Capo 2), Grace Upon Grace (standard, Capo 4).

EXCERPT: The Word in the Wind consists of mostly guitar-based songs and a few instrumental tracks (fourteen tracks in all), written in seminary and during my first pastorate, and recorded about ten years ago (2001). Several of the poems recently published in The Just, Quiet Wind are set to music here (see, e.g., Psalm 1, Living Bread, There is a Reason); the songs are inspired by texts from the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany cycle of the liturgical year, while their sequence reflects the progress from prophetic (Isaianic) expectation (Your Desert Snow, Strange Bedfellows) through the nativity (Grace Upon Grace, The Oxen, Christmas Joy, Innocents' Day) to the call to discipleship (Baptism at Nuweiba, The Response, There is a Reason, Deep Blue Heart, Believers Leap). Like its precursor, A Soundtrack for the Close of the Age (1991), The Word in the Wind may be only loosely described as a concept album, but here the concept, if it is discernible at all, will be most apparent to those who are accustomed to reading, telling, living, and rejoicing in the gospel of salvation according to the Christian year; in the case of instrumental tracks, however, even listeners who have this leg up will have little more than a title, a mode, and a mood, to go on. ...