Paul O'Donnell: July 2009 Archives

Spend a little time with Todd Agnew and you spend a little time with everyone in his life. Perhaps it was in those long hours he's clocked alone in his van, over the course 13 years as an indie artist driving from gig to far-flung gig, that Agnew developed the habit of conversing with people who aren't there. In our hour-long interview yesterday, the Christian singer-songwriter turned aside repeatedly to address his wife, his children, bandmates and the producers on his new, much anticipated album, "Need."

Clearly, too, a lot of driving time was spent thinking about God, since nearly every pantomimed conversation ends up with some lesson Agnew has learned about his relationship with Jesus.

Take his marriage, for instance. A bachelor until he was 37, Agnew says by the time he married last year, "the road was more home than home," he says. "By the time you're 37, you're disfunctional." But through his wife's loving eyes, Agnew has discovered parts of his personality someone traveling solo doesn't see for himself. "I'll say something about myself, and later my wife will tell me, "You know, that's not true. You're not like that."

It's not exactly Dylan going electric, but when Christian singer/songwriter Derek Webb turned techno on his latest album "Stockholm Syndrome," it was reason enough to pay attention.

That's not why "Stockholm Syndrome" is making headlines, however. After hearing the album, Webb's record label, INO, refused to release one of the songs on the album, a scathing critique of how evangelicals approach homosexuality. "I had been working under what was a delusion," Webb told me in an interview, "that although technically you could call me a "Christian artist," it's got nothing to do with how I make art, where I live, what I do." Read on for more on why Webb wrote the song and why the label's move shocked him.

Nobody seems to know where it came from, or when it started. But today, like every July 21st, is National Junk Food Day, a chance, according to tradition, to gorge on foods that are bad for you without a bit of guilt. Enjoy it while you can. Or make that, if you can.

In the United States--where New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg pushed through rules requiring fast-food joints to display just how bad their fare is for you--and elsewhere--in Britain, teachers have begun treating empty-calorie snacks like contraband. And it's not just what junk food does to your body, but to the planet, that you're taking responsibility for when you bite into that Big Mac.

Jimmy Carter, it seems, believes in the separation between church and rock. The former president, whose 1976 White House campaign saw both performances by the Allman Brothers Band and the introduction of the term "born again" to the Washington media's lexicon, has revealed in a new book that he became disenchanted with Bob Dylan after the singer was converted to Christianity. Writes Kevin Mattson in his history of Carter's "malaise" speech, "Jimmy Carter's favorite rock musician now refused to sing the songs the president most enjoyed . . . [those] written before Dylan found Jesus."

A few minutes of footage from the making of Derek Webb's new, stunningly successful album, "Stockholm Syndrome" explains a lot about what Webb, the consciously controversial Christian singer-songwriter, is up to with his latest release. In the docu-video released last week on Webb's personal site , along with the album (which comes out, minus a crucial track from INO Records in September), Webb discusses some song lyrics with his former bandmate and current producer Josh Moore. Moore, lighting a cigarette, asks. "Well, what specifically are you talking about?"

"Nuthin'," says Webb, before mentioning unleaded gas, Indian casinos and bad credit, and finallly citing the Founding Fathers: "giving up security for freedom."

In his career, Webb has repeatedly given up security--of the Dove Award-winning band Caedmon's Call, which he quit in 2003; of a recording career safe in the Christian niche--for the freedom to be what he wants to be. Right now, that looks like an evangelical Justin Timberlake, with a nearly bald head and a fluting R&B voice, who adds crispness to his exacting techno songs by pronouncing "sex" as if it still had the power to provoke.

What do the Beatles, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Whitney Houston all have in common? Ken Mansfield. A former record executive who raced through the '60s and '70s on big expense accounts and marijuana-scented tour buses, Mansfield worked for them...