What's New
Upcoming Clairmont show on Friday, April 24 at the Palace Theater in Bryan. It will be a benefit concert for International Justice Missions, and we will be sharing the stage with this guy.As I had talked about in a previous post, I have recently begun a new commitment to investing more time in learning about the music that I am buying and listening to on a consistent basis. This is purely for the sake of knowing what artistic message I am singing along with and what I am allowing my body to positively respond to. For me to get very into a song or an album that is speaking against the Holy Trinity is putting myself at a struggle with the Spirit inside of me.
And again, this is not my campaign against secular music. I love a lot of secular music. I am specifically talking about the songs that express a blatant message against God and Christianity.
As a part of this new commitment, I wanted to encourage anyone reading this to follow suit. So I figured it would help to clue you in on some of the talented bands I am looking into. Some will be Christian and some won’t, but none of them will have a blasphemous message towards the Kingdom.
The first band that I’d like to share with you, is a husband and wife duo from Lawrence, KS called Mates of State. This indie-pop band has been around since 1997 and is defined by their catchy dance rhythms, prominent organ sounds and very powerful vocal combinations of melodies and harmonies.
They are the perfect example of a hard working band that simply loves to write and perform good music, and if you ever see them in concert, you may have a chance to meet their two kids.
Their latest album, Re-arrange Us, came out in May of last year and has had a very good response; however, the album that made their fanbase came out in 2003 and is entitled Team Boo. So if you are looking for some good music to buy, go check them out. You can sample full mp3’s from both of these albums on Rhapsody.com.
Sometimes I like to keep up with the latest news within the music industry. This particular story caught my attention this week:
Teen pop star Miley Cyrus was so devastated that her fellow Grammy performers wouldn’t chill with her backstage, she left the ceremony early!…
There’s a band Miley Cyrus would be “freaking out, crying, on my knees” if she met, she tells the DJs. (I think we can relate to that much, Thom Yorke is dreamy.) She goes on to say she asked her manager to pull every string so she could just meet her heroes. Radiohead’s response? “We don’t really do that kind of thing.” It’s difficult to be sure, because Miley speaks really fast and doesn’t enunciate, but it sounds like Radiohead rebuffed her to her face. Which means I can see why she’d be upset (though you’d think this #1 superfan would know that Thom Yorke is a little shy?), but she doesn’t have to go on the radio and play a ten-minute game having everyone guess who dissed her. ~courtesy of Stereogum
I don’t expect you to make it more than 30 seconds through this interview — simply for the shear pain and agrivation that comes with hearing Miley Cyrus talk — so I’ll give you a brief synopsis.
1. Miley Cyrus proves that spending your entire childhood and adolescence as a tool for the entertainment industry results in having zero ability to form an intelligent English sentence during a 10-minute conversation.
2. The radio DJs hung on every “like, you know?” and “and stuff.” as if it were poetry — which leads us as the listener to believe that the show hasn’t quite reached its prime yet.
3. A young male fan is brought onto the show where he precedes to break down and cry on the air, attempts but fails to explain the episode of Hannah Montana that he saw the other day and really liked, and actually proves himself to be a better speaker than Ms. Cyrus.
4. Miley states that she hates Pop music — which begs the question: how little can you know about the career you are in and still be successful?
5. One of the DJs admits to not knowing who Radiohead is. Nice. Been in the music biz much? Although, American Idol doesn’t really touch on those kinds of artists, so I guess he’s not to be blamed.
6. And finally, Miley reveals that Radiohead, while they are her favorite band of all time and the sole inspiration that got her into the music business, are “weirdos” because they refused to meet her at the Grammys upon her assistant’s request. In her words, she was going to tell everyone she could in order to ruin the band and their reputation; however, instead it inevitably served as incredibly great press that only affirmed to their fanbase why they loved the band so much to begin with.
I’m not at all surprised by this whole thing. I just hope that by the time I have a daughter (God willing), the entertainment industry can churn out a decent role model for her.
They really do grow up too fast.
After having Jackson, I don’t know why I never posted some pictures and the baseball card stats on here, but now that he is almost three weeks old, I’ll give you a chance to see how fast this kid is growing (much to the dismay of his parents).
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Jackson Alexander Steele
Birthday: February 21, 2009 1:59 p.m.
Weight: 8 lb. 13 oz.
Height: 20 in.
R/L handed: I don’t think he even knows he has hands
Hobbies: Pooping, Eating, Sleeping
Likes: ?
Dislikes: people playing with his feet, not having a shirt on
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Jackson Alexander Steele (at his two week check-up)
Weight: 10lb. 3 oz.
Height: 21 in.
R/L handed: he’s really good at pushing daddy’s kisses away with his right hand
Hobbies: Pooping, Eating, Sleeping
Likes: Getting his head rubbed, listening to mom and dad play rock band, bright lights
Dislikes: Nickleback (no kidding. several times that he has started crying while lying in his crib, Nickleback has been on the radio. good jackson, good.), feeling hungry
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See, now right there he looks like he is just asking for kisses.
Since 1994, I have always been completely in love with music.
The year 1994 is not some arbitrary guess either. That year was very specific to the actual beginning of my music fanaticism.
Why is that?
Because in February of 1994, a punk rock band from San Fransisco released their third full-length project, entitled Dookie — an album title that was sure to catch some eye-rolling from earlier generations.
Being a dorky third grader who only wore three pairs of pants to school (red, black and teal sweat pants — black went with everything, red and teal went with nothing), I had no prior knowledge or interest in Green Day. The truth was that everyone else really liked them, and well…let’s just say…over 99% of kids who wear sweat pants to school pretty much always do what everyone else does.
Well thanks to this desperate need to fit in, I persuaded my mom to take me to the mall and walk me in to Sam Goody to buy me a Dookie cassette tape. Thankfully she did not come across the three f-words and the hidden track about masturbation; otherwise, she surely would have shut down the whole operation.
Well we took it home, and it didn’t take long before my mom discovered the curse words and proceeded to bleep them out via a method I like to call “selective dubbing”.
But it didn’t matter to me. I was hooked.
I would listen to that cassette over and over again. Even after bedtime, I would disappear underneath the covers with my Walkman and headphones and listen to that tape.
Rebellion, that is the essence of punk music.
It was with Dookie that I discovered how emotionally powerful music can be, and it had nothing to do with the words. I had absolutely no clue what any lyric meant on any song from that tape. I was effected simply by the music. A combination of blazing guitars, fast drums and catchy melodies did things to me. It literally stirred awake emotions in me that I hadn’t actually felt before.
This is not me being poetic.
I vividly remember feeling all of this when listening through those songs.
My point in telling this story is simply to say that music effects me in a very tangible way. It was that way then, and it is even more so that way now, and I believe in different ways, everyone experiences this. When something clicks with you in a song — whether its a catchy melody or just a thick, powerful guitar riff — your body responds.
You may get goosebumps on your arms, your feet or hands may start moving, or heck — if you’re alone — you may just start belting out a chorus so incredibly off pitch, you’d have to be out of your mind drunk to ever do it in front of other people.
It’s a physical response to the music.
And it is in this ability to move us that I attribute a big part of my love for music; however, a big problem with this is that the music doesn’t have to be about Jesus to effect Christians in this way. It could be a song that is anti-God and anti-Kingdom, but in reality, it is still really good music and catchy as hell.
It is because of this that, in recent days, I have grown a little more weary about what I am listening to and how I am letting my body respond to different types of music.
My problem has always been that I don’t make much of an effort to find out what a song is about, and it has always been that way. Just like I mentioned with the Green Day CD: I had no idea what those lyrics were saying, but my body was so connected with that music, that it was physically acting in complete agreement to it.
Now this is definitely not to say that Christians can’t appreciate talented secular music (we would unfortunately have a very limited selection of decent music to listen to if that was the case), but because our bodies are so naturally moved by music, there needs to be a sure sense of what exactly we are listening to. A lot of popular music out there is very blatantly anti-Trinity, and if we are letting our body and mind become carried away and connected with those songs –regardless of how ignorant we are of the artistic message being presented — we are putting the Spirit inside of us in a pretty tough position.
Paul speaks on this in his letter to the church in Corinth.
“Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.” 1 Corinthians 3:16-17
So in light of this, we may not necessarily be “destroying” our bodies, but it just doesn’t make sense for the temple of God — our physical bodies — to physically act in agreement with a work of art that speaks out against the creator and master of that very temple. He can’t be pleased with that.
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For anyone who is interested, over the next few weeks, I am going to be posting different bands and artists on here that are, in my opinion, very talented. Some will be Christian, some won’t, but none of them will have a message tied to them that would cause the Spirit inside of us to struggle against how our bodies respond to the music. I think this is an important habit to get into when deciding what albums to have on our mp3 players, so hopefully this process will help to better preserve a Spirit inside of us that longs for the things of God and His Kingdom coming.
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Also, I would LOVE to hear about artists that you listen to that meet this same criteria. I am always on the hunt for great music. If you have any bands that you’d like to share, just post it in a comment.
And surely feel free to post a comment if you have any disagreements with what I’ve said or if you have anything you want to add. Just keep it civil.
Yeah that’s right. New post.
In most cases, amateur blogs that go on a thirty-six day hiatus normally fizzle out into oblivion (which could be best described as being the exact opposite effect of going out in a blaze of glory). It is then that the blogger is forever doomed to a feeble existence where he will never be free to start up a blog again without his friends and loved ones raining doubt upon him.
“Let’s hope it turns out better than the last one,” they’ll likely say.
“What, are you going to blog about your baby now?”
Well I’m sorry, but I will not accept that fate.
Actually I may write about my baby some...
assuming he does come out...
but this blog still has a little life in it!
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Here is the album art for the new The Appleseed Cast record, “Sagarmatha”. It will be released February 17th, and thanks to these guys, I have heard the whole record in its entirety.
My take: creative and very addicting to listen to
There is so much fresh and well done songwriting packed into each track, that I have no problem listening to this album over and over. If The Appleseed Cast is not on your radar, their new record can best be compared to the more popular instrumental band “explosions in the sky” — only with vocals.
and good ones, at that.
Anyways, this is less about me reviewing a record — because I’m not at all good at that, and a lot of dopes that are too wordy for their own good do that already anyways – and instead it is more about me suggesting that you go and take a listen, because you are my friends, and I want you to be happy.
Hopefully it will be something that in the end you will really enjoy, and if not, well then there’s no use blaming me for your adolescent taste in art.
A 2003 consensus reported that 1 out of every 5 people in Houston, TX live in poverty.
roughly 500,000 people.
In that same year, Houston’s very own Lakewood Church spent 95 million dollars on buying and fixing up the Compaq center to be used as their new home.
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Don’t tell me that America is God’s country anymore.
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Unto what far away shelter must I swiftly flee
If this omen of misfortune was meant for me?
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This happens about once every 15 years around here
Well everyone, Thanksgiving is officially over. The tryptophan has worn off, the left over turkey and sweet potatoes are rotting away somewhere at the nearest dump, and Al Roker is once again counting down the days until he gets to see the Big Bird float again. This can only mean one thing, Christmas season is upon us, and what better way to start off the holiday season than a little Christmas music…
FREE Christmas music!
For the last month, Clairmont has been recording four of some of our favorite holiday tunes, and now that they are complete, we are giving them to you for FREE. Just click here and it will take you to our website where you can start your download.
Along with the songs, we are also helping raise money for the brand new Texas A&M chapter of International Justice Missions (IJM).
International Justice Mission is a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression. IJM lawyers, investigators and aftercare professionals work with local officials to ensure immediate victim rescue and aftercare, to prosecute perpetrators and to promote functioning public justice systems. (taken from www.ijm.org)
You can find out all you need to know about this organization by visiting their site, and I also have embedded a short video that shows a lot of what IJM is accomplishing right now.
As Christians, it is very important, during the Christmas season, to spend our money on more than just presents for our families. Not that that is a bad thing by any means, but we are very specifically called to love on and care for the poor in spirit and for those who are tired and weary. That also doesn’t mean you have to give to IJM, but it is certainly a viable option. They are performing miracles for teenage girls and other abused women who have experienced absolute hell in their lives, and this is all they know.
So if you are interested in contributing some money for this organization’s mission, you can either click on this link or follow the links on our website while you download your free Christmas songs.
We hope you enjoy the music, and have a merry Christmas!
