I don’t listen to music very much. When I am driving, I prefer podcasts and talk radio because I like to engage ideas and argue\u2014yes, I argue with the car radio. I certainly don’t make a habit of going to concerts, but I was very excited about a concert last September at St. Andrews\u00a0 in Vancouver. Among the sold out crowd, I was delighted to see many former students who obviously have very good taste in music. The main act was Josh Garrels.<\/p>\n
I was first introduced to Josh Garrels at a New Year’s Eve gathering. The music playing behind a room full of conversations and it intrigued me. Even over the laughter and talk I could tell that this music was wonderful, so I asked the host, “Who is this?”\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s Josh Garrels,” he said.<\/p>\n
The next day I downloaded his most recent album\u2014for free!\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is called Love and War and the Sea in Between<\/em>. I laid on the couch and listened to the whole thing all the way through. I loved it! I found it brilliant musically<\/strong><\/span>; after all, it was the music that I found so wonderful the night before. I was delighted to find Garrels’ songs were equally beautiful lyrically.<\/span><\/strong> They are intelligent but also poetic. He avoids clich\u00e9; and the ideas are not simplistic. The words can mean one thing to you one day and two months later, they mean something else.<\/p>\n I was interested to learn a little more about this incredible musician so I did a quick internet search. I was shocked to find out that I had just downloaded Christianity Todays’ Album of the Year for 2011. I was surprised and delighted that this music I loved so much was created by a Christian. When you listen to it a second time there is no doubt that he’s a Christian artist.<\/p>\n Perhaps it was his faith that prompted him to give away the album I had just downloaded\u2014apparently he has given away well over 160,000 downloads. He gave downloaders an opportunity to “tip.” All these proceeds, over $70,000, went to a relief project\u00a0 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I think he will be blessed by his “first fruits” offering because there are a lot of people like me who downloaded the album when it was free, then bought his older albums and now eagerly await his next one.<\/p>\n I like Josh Garrels because he gives away albums and money. I love his lyrics because they are good and true and beautiful, honestly exploring love and loss and guilt and Grace and the mystery between. And I love Josh Garrels’ music.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t listen to music very much. When I am driving, I prefer podcasts and talk radio because I like to engage ideas and argue\u2014yes, I argue with the car radio. I certainly don’t make a habit of going to concerts, but I was very excited about a concert last September at St. Andrews\u00a0 in […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":147,"featured_media":971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,35],"tags":[],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-934","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-music","category-secondary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/147"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=934"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/934\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=934"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abbotsfordchristian.com\/insideout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}