Recently in Christian music Category

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.

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.

Christian rockers The Wrecking are under consideration to have their song "Our Feet Don't Touch the Ground" used in the upcoming Twilight movie "New Moon."

Joanne Brokaw over at Gospel Soundcheck, an admitted fan of the band, has details on how to vote to get the band's song into the movie.

What other songs do you think would be a great fit for the movie?

I am glad to hear several Christian radio stations remind contemporary Christian music fans that it has been one year since the tragic loss of Steven Curtis Chapman's daughter Maria Sue Chapman. Over the last year the Chapman family has bravely shared publicly--on shows like Larry King--the difficulties in their journey through grief, while at the same time somehow remaining a truly inspiring picture of faith. Now, on the anniversary of her daughter's death, Chapman's wife, Mary Beth has written a beautiful and heart-wrenching post on her blog.