Jaybrams.com

text-fessional for September 30, 2007

The bad news is Amy will officially no longer help me in this venture. Her and the spouse have moved on to pursue the direction God has been molding him for over the past year or so. She had “sorta” stepped down from the worship team a few weeks ago, but she was still sort of a consultant. In fact 3 Sunday’s ago, when I could not be there, she was kind enough to help the youth fill in… so she will be missed, but they’re on an exciting journey and its good for them.

The good news is this week was pretty cool for me. My wife was kind enough to sing with us. She is an awesome vocalist, and we haven’t had the opportunity to lead together since 2005… It was dandy. In addition to her:

Josh was there with his trusty electric
James was there with his trusty drums (and mallets)
Logan was there with his trusty hands to play percussive instruments
I was there with my bro-in-laws acoustic… considering switching back to mine. His is better unplugged, mine handles a sound system better… probably going back this week.

We are missing something… oh yes. Bass. Now the awesome thing is my wife can play bass. But it is less than awesome because we didn’t have a spare one laying around… So onto the lineup without bass:

Revolutionary Love - Crowder - Key of A - Capo 2 with G-Fingering. Needs bass. Needs work on lead fills, but I didn’t take the time to show Josh what was up so that was my bad. Went pretty well. Transitioned directly into

Here is Our King - Crowder - Key of A - Capo 2 with G-Fingering. Needs bass. Lead fill over verses that Josh engineered sounded tasty. After the big ending on Revolutionary Love, I went straight into the chorus of this one. Easy transition. Percussion and Josh drove the music in the verses. I decided against actually listening to the original to get all the verse timings down correctly because I figured the verse timings are odd enough that no one in the audience would remember anyway, so I thought “i’ll just make the timing up the way I like it.” … This would not have flown had Amy been there, which is probably a good thing… but alas, i rebelled.

Bring it down end on a soft chorus (how cliche, but it works) and then transition into:

Before worship, I made anyone in a black chair move to a green chair… they did. After this song, I told everyone to sit. And they did.
SO MUCH POWER!!

Jesus Paid It All - Alex Nifong (sp?) - B - Capo 4 with G-Fingering (go figure!). Survived without bass. Driven by percussion until the tag at the end. The wife sang it cause she sounds 137 times better than I do. After V1, Chorus, V2, Chorus, V3 we go into the best part of the song… the tag “Oh Praise the one who paid my debt / And raised this life up from the dead”

We built this slowly. I started vocally an octave lower than when its “big” with just acoustic. Enter percussion. Enter Electric (softly). Enter cymbal swells with mallets. GO BIG. Jump an octave, full drums, full electric, full percussion… enjoy.

We proceeded to then do a Goo Goo Dolls song *gasp!* called “Without You Here.” I am convinced that if this guy isn’t saved now, he is one of the most enlightened non-Christian musicians in America today. Listen to his album “Let Love In.” There is so much positive and faith-inspired content… So I explained that to me this song is about a guy searching and discovering what God’s Love can do… “Love can heal the pain / Truth is never vain / It turns strangers into lovers / and enemies to brothers” … and once that is discovered, it is easy to see how empty you are without God’s love… “Now, now that you’re near / There’s nothing more without you / without you here” I really cannot say for certain if he writes these songs with God in mind, but they can still speak to us.

And that was that…

Volume was much better than previous weeks. Participation from the students seemed to be better as well.

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Category : Church, Empyreal, Music, Sundays, X:Worship, Youth