John Mark McMillan is a Keith Green-U2-My Morning Jacket Mashup

Friday December 19, 2008

Categories: Christianity, music

When I became a Christian in 1993, I became a very radical Christian. (Read all about it.) On some days back then, the only music I could find worth listening to was this odd 1970s worship legend named Keith Green. He had big bushy hair and a big bushy beard--from 1994-1999, we were basically twins--and he wrote these Elton-John-style, eerily radical songs about Jesus. To wit:

There were reports of Keith Green getting under his piano and weeping in the middle of concerts. Back then, that was the kind of concert I wanted to be at. I'd have been likely to get up on stage and join him under the piano.

Soon after my Keith Green fandom, lots changed for me, including a total loss of faith, and then a gradual piecing back together. Long story, of which my book (there's that nagging Amazon link again) really only addresses the very beginning.

Well, a couple weeks ago, a friend of mine who is one of the most talented musicians I know called me and told me to download "The Medicine" by John Mark McMillan as soon as I could open iTunes. He said it'd remind me of the first time I heard Delirious?, which was this crazy popular worship band in the late 1990s. But the Delirious? craze missed me entirely, so when "The Medicine" started with its U2-meets-My-Morning-Jacket-flanked-by-Pete-Yorn sound and lyrics straight out of Jeremiah and Isaiah, all I could think of was Keith Green. It gave me chills.

Check out these lyrics:

The Lions in the street bend their heads

For the reckoning day
Cause the interstate's giving up her dead
For the reckoning day

Would you come alive everybody
Would you come alive everyone
Get up out of bed for the sound of the song unsung

Bury all your guns in the sand
Cause the temperature's changed
and the blood shot eye of the sun
stains the bones of the slain

Would you come alive everybody
Would you come alive everyone
Get up out of bed for the sound of the song unsung

As many a person has pointed out, there's a lot of sentimental, self-focused Christian worship pop floating around these days, just as there has been for decades (some would say "since 19th century hymnody," but that's another story). John Mark McMillan is a tonic for that sentimentality. Every now and then he strikes a theological note that rubs me wrong, but more often, his independence, conviction, and vision are like something out of Flannery O'Connor.

If you like American rock and he's not on your radar, put him there.

P.S.: If I wasn't won over by his sound, I would have been by this interview where he answers the "What are you listening to" question more or less as I would:

I really love the Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and My Morning Jacket. I've had a love/hate relationship with Ryan Adams for years that I can't seem to shake and which is probably a little too obvious. I'm always down for some Springsteen, and lately, believe it or not, I've been digging on some classic Guns' N' Roses and a little Thriller era Michael Jackson.

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