Breck Pappas called me this past Saturday to ask for a favor. Last summer he interned for a record label in Austin Texas, and one of the bands represented by the record label was travelling from a show in Florida back to Austin to participate in South by Southwest, a huge international music festival that occurs each year there; and you have to be really good to be invited. The band was going to pass through Mobile, and Breck’s boss had called him and asked if there were some sort of venue in Mobile with good acoustics in which they could produce a promotional music video. Breck immediately thought of All Saints.
I told him that I would be happy to meet them at the church and let them in. They arrived at about dark on Sunday evening. I was tired and intended to let them in and then come back in an hour or so and lock up. They looked like my children’s friends from Austin…It seems everyone in Austin looks alike, everyone somewhere in their twenties or thirties. We introduced ourselves and I let them into the church. Nice guys. They were of course awestruck by the church’s beauty. I gave them a little history of the place and its architecture while they unpacked their equipment. Just as I got to the door to leave, they began singing. I stopped cold in my tracks. There was no way I could leave….so with their permission I sat in the choir and listened and watched as they performed their artistry. Just one acoustic guitar and three voices…the drummer had a small camera with which besides shooting the video he recorded the sound as well. No microphones; just the rarefied acoustics of an empty church.
They played maybe four or five takes….each one better than the last….all I could do was just sit and marvel at the sheer beauty and power of their music…It was raw and perhaps naive, but it was so overwhelmingly honest…and these guys had real talent. I began to remember the words in Genesis that God spoke the creation into being in the very beginning; But I beg to differ…surely God brought the world into being through artful song. Dante knew this in the fourteenth century. He mused In his Divine Comedy that the spheres of heaven were moved by music. Indeed post modern physics has discovered that the most rudimentary element in the universe beyond quarks and strings is tonality. Music. Reverberations of the big bang, the very first note of the song of the universe. Shall we endeavor to sing along? Singing, I realized in listening to these young guys is a cardinal act of love. There was no denying that. Sing; Love….for the creation is still in its becoming…. “And when from death I’m free I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on, and when from death I’m free, I’ll sing on. And when from death I’m free I’ll sing and joyful be, and through eternity I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on, and through eternity I’ll sing on.”
Note: I have a copy of the video. e-mail me if you would like to see it. rector@allsaintsmobile.org
