On Second Thought, It’s Not Just the Lyrics I Don’t Like

“Right. Um, Lord, um, we thank you for the music, the songs we’re singing. Um, we thank you for your bread of heaven, bread of heaven, feed me ’til I want no more, want no more, feed me ’til I want no more. So much, thank you very much to you God, please, amen.”

Miranda S3 E3 ‘The Dinner Party’ (2013)

 

I thought this was a cute music-related picture. When I was a kid I had a storybook in which one of the characters wrote a symphony based on the positions of birds on the telephone wires across from his flat.

In March of 2016 – gosh, it’s quite some time I’ve been maintaining this blog now, isn’t it? – I wrote a post called ‘I’ve Got a Feeling, or The Actual Problem with Many Modern Worship Songs’, in which I argued that there was a troubling tendency in the lyrics of worship songs written in recent years towards a focus on our reaction to God and his character and his works, instead of just him and his character and his works in themselves. I argued that these kinds of lyrics pulled out the legs from under the chair, as it were; they forsook any substantial articulation of the divine glories that were supposed to prompt the reaction, in favour of articulating the reaction itself at great length, as if that were what our relationship with God were fundamentally built around. I argued that this left us in danger of both a kind of works-righteousness, and of straight-up idolatry: presenting our feelings and actions in musical worship to God as if they were the key thing going on here, and meanwhile failing to ground those feelings and actions in proper reflection on any meaningful truths about the nature of the God we worship. I very much stand by what I said then, and the problem has certainly not gone away at all in the intervening years. But, as I’m sure you’ll be absolutely thrilled to know, I now have something to add to my complaint. In that post, I took issue with lyrics and lyrics alone, and indeed took care to stress that musical style is of no importance when it comes to glorifying God. And it isn’t. Except that some specific aspects of it, I’d now like to suggest, sort of are.

Have you ever seen a copy of, say, The Complete Mission Praise,¹ or another collection of sheet music of songs designed for collective worship, specifically one that includes both older and newer compositions? And if you have, did you notice that the older songs usually only take up one double-page spread – tune on the left, lyrics on the right – while the newer ones span so many pages that you have to sellotape several photocopied sheets together in order to be able to view the entire song without turning the page? Why so? I think it’s fairly evident that it comes down to musical structure. Old hymns have a series of verses, one after another, which all follow the same tune, so you only need to write out four or eight lines of music and you’ve got the whole song covered. A really edgy old hymn might include a chorus, but the format will still be a straightforward verse-chorus-verse-chorus-until-you-reach-the-end kind of setup, so you still only have to write out a limited number of lines that are then repeated numerous times. Newer worship songs, on the other hand, tend to work quite a lot like modern pop songs: something like, verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus chorus, or perhaps verse verse chorus verse chorus bridge verse chorus coda; and there’s often a bit of variation between one verse and another, or between repetitions of the same line in the coda, that sort of thing. All this means that you need a lot more sheet music to accurately codify the whole length of the song, even if the song itself doesn’t actually have that much content.

Trying to follow a modern worship song as written, therefore, can get quite unwieldy and confusing, as I can testify from having spent a few years in the music group at my parents’ church when I was younger. But we always did follow them as written, or else things would have got even more confusing. So-called ‘worship leaders’ are, of course, notorious in church culture for going back and doing the bridge one more time, randomly repeating the second half of a verse, skipping to a totally unexpected section of the song and leaving the poor soul in charge of the PowerPoint in a bit of a flap trying to figure out where they’ve dashed off to while the congregation shoots him expectant glances.² I think it’s fair to suppose that we’re all on the same page in wanting what’s up on the screen to match what we’re supposed to be singing, and it definitely doesn’t help with that for the person with the main microphone to indulge his or her own ideas about how the track ought to be remixed. That said, though, I kind of don’t blame him or her, because the nature of these kinds of modern worship songs is that they do lend themselves to spontaneous repeats and variations. The order in which the various component sections ought to follow one another is not obvious or clearly fixed the way it is with old hymns, and it feels weirdly and needlessly prescriptive to suggest that the song must always be played exactly as written.

That’s partly because, for songs like this, ‘as written’ isn’t really the original form of the thing. If you think about how old hymns were composed, it was usually a case of, someone wrote a poem with a fixed meter, and then begged, borrowed, or stole a tune that fitted that meter.³ Nowadays, things are different. The lyrics and the tune are, the vast majority of the time, composed together, which removes the need for the lyrics to have a fixed meter – fixed meters being generally less popular these days anyway. Instead, modern songs tend to approximate something closer to normal human speech. This is another reason why they take up so much space in Mission Praise; there’s a heck lot of syncopation, unusual lengths of notes, and different verses supplying different numbers of syllables to fit within the same musical phrase. I can tell you from experience that it’s often relatively difficult music to read if you don’t know how the song is supposed to sound. One definitely gets the impression that in most cases, the sheet music was only written down after the song was recorded, and I don’t envy the poor soul tasked with transcribing it.

Of course, the sheet music isn’t the only resource at our disposal if we want to know how a new worship song is supposed to go; we can just track down the original artist’s recording – or any of the numerous cover versions; it’s often quite hard to work out who actually wrote the thing – on our favourite online music-streaming platform. And then we can hear it the way he or she sings it. Because that’s what tends to happen on the original recording: the tune is carried and conveyed by one individual voice. And these songs make sense when they’re sung like that. They were composed by, like, one guy with a guitar, and therefore that’s their natural home. The weird timing works in that context, because, as I said, it approximates human speech, as by one individual. The lack of a predictable structure works in that context, because nobody needs to know which bit is coming up next except the one who’s deciding; and because we’re used to pop songs that have a bit more variety in their structure than simple successive verses and choruses can provide, so that’s the sort of thing we prefer. And even – this is where we collide with the point I made back in March 2016 – the focus on a personal reaction to God sort of works in that context, because this is an individual articulating her own experience. If she feels as if there’s a fire burning inside her or whatever, great, bully for her; it’s perfectly plausible that she genuinely spent a good long while in meditation on God’s excellence and felt moved to write this song describing how she feels about it as a result. But the thing is, she shouldn’t suppose that she can bring the rest of us along with her.

 

One guy with a guitar.

Old hymns were designed to be sung congregationally. They have fixed meters and predictable structures so that they’re nice and easy for everyone to join in with. Tunes with regular, unsyncopated timing, and a nice melodic melody in which every note is distinct, are easy to pick up on and sing correctly, and what’s more their regularity helps to keep everyone together. And once you’ve got the tune down pat, it’s straightforward to grasp how every verse is going to fit into it. There’s no unexpected variation in timing or tune that feels you leaving daft for enthusiastically belting out the wrong variant. And it’s just one verse – or verse plus chorus – after another, so that you never feel in the dark about what’s going to be coming up next. The person in charge of the PowerPoint is having a dreamy time, and as for everyone else, there’s no awkward lapsing into silence when you’re not sure how many times the last line is going to be repeated, or missing off the verse line of a verse or chorus because you weren’t expecting it. You can just sing.

This means that congregations actually sound better when they’re singing old hymns, or new hymns that follow the same format. They know what they’re doing, and so they can do it well and wholeheartedly. The modern stuff, by contrast, leaves them uncertain, and much as ‘uncertain’ isn’t really a great trait for any music, it’s surely an especially bad one for music that’s supposed to be praising our wonderful, unchangeable God and assuring our brothers and sisters of the sure and steadfast hope we have in him.

After all, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing when we sing together: we’re supposed to be singing this stuff to one another, just as when we administer truths about our Lord to one another in any other way, for our edification. Both the bits of epistle that specifically command the singing of hymns take care to emphasise this. “Be filled with the Spirit,” Paul writes in Ephesians, “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.” And then likewise in Colossians, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.”⁴ The songs we sing should thank God, but it’s also vital that in them we address one another, that in them we teach and admonish one another. The whole assembly sings to the whole assembly so as to benefit the whole assembly – so that they might learn more of who God is and be thankful to him.

So when you’ve got all these modern worship songs that are written by and for one guy with a guitar, when the tune approximates normal speech so closely that it’s quite hard to get a handle on how it actually goes, when the ‘worship leader’ is in charge of which bit comes next and the congregation is left floundering at every transition – I’m just not sure it’s the best recipe for genuine edification, you know? And on top of that, as I’ve alluded to already, I don’t think it’s any coincidence that these modern songs tend to come with lyrics that focus on a personal encounter with God and personal feelings, which it’s unfair to assume are true of everyone in the congregation at a particular time. Unfair, and unhelpful: feeling obliged to sing things that aren’t true isn’t going to do anyone any good. What will actually establish our brothers and sisters in the faith, what will comfort them and build them up and strengthen them for the tasks God has for them, is if we address them in song with teaching and admonishment, namely truths about who God is and what he’s done for us. That’s stuff we can all sing, all the time, because however changeable we are, he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Whatever our feelings, we can all sing the same things about our Lord. By the whole congregation, for the whole congregation.

So as it emerges, my problem with modern worship music isn’t, after all, restricted purely to the lyrics. I also have a problem with the typical tunes and structures, because I think they lend themselves to one guy with a guitar better than they lend themselves to a whole congregation of saints gathered for one another’s edification. But that’s not a separate issue to the lyrics; on the contrary, it’s a symptom of the same disease. We’ve forgotten what the singing of psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs is for, the mutual edification of the saints, and so it’s no wonder that the songs we’re writing aren’t geared towards that purpose, either lyrically or musically. So if we only manage to remember what our songs are supposed to be for and start taking that seriously, then I anticipate that improvements both lyrical and musical in nature shan’t be too far behind. Hope, as the saying goes, springs eternal.

Footnotes

¹ They’re pretty expensive, so you know, I wouldn’t rush off and buy one just in order to get a fuller grasp of the point I’m making: https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780007563432/mission-praise-two-volume-set-full-music/. Apparently the book’s got so fat now that they’ve divided it into two volumes. That should stop it falling heavily off the music stand quite so often.

² For instance: https://babylonbee.com/news/skipping-cd-player-fills-in-for-sick-worship-leader.

³ For example, did you know that the tune to which we sing ‘Thine Be the Glory’ comes out of an oratorio by Handel about Judas Maccabeus? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p1BedwyFKY Well, I say it was about Judas Maccabeus. It was ostensibly about Judas Maccabeus. But it was actually about the Duke of Cumberland’s recent victory at Culloden over the Jacobites. Make of that historical analogy what you will.

⁴ Here’s the Colossians: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+3&version=ESVUK. I think this means that writing worship songs is a kind of teaching ministry.