A quiet practice
Sunday Practice
Originals, covers, and traditionals.
begin
Originals, covers, and traditionals.
Cowboy church most Sundays with my dad. Crestview Baptist with my mom on the holidays. My sister’s family’s church as often as I can, not as often as I’d like.
These songs are not a replacement for any of that. They are what I sing in the truck on the way, on the porch when I get back, and in the room where nobody is listening.
Most of the week is the quiet between hymns.
These songs are what I make of it.
his was the first one. A pine-forest morning, sun cutting through, a small white church across the field. The kind of Sunday that finds you whether you went looking or not. I wrote it for the hour I keep showing up to, before I knew I was making a record of any kind.
heard this in church with my mom on Mother’s Day. We sang it together. By the second verse the tears were already coming. I built this version trying to remember what it felt like to mean every word.
he female counterpart. Same prayer, different mouth. The shift from I to we changes the gravity of the line. The room gets bigger. Nobody was ever in it alone.
simple uplift. The kind of song one sings because the alternative is silence, and silence is worse. The chorus is built around a single phrase that kept repeating in my head all week.
lain and direct. The male version. No clever arrangement, no irony, no winking. The prayer my grandfather would have said with his hat in his hand. Some sentences only sound right when there’s nowhere else to put them.
salm 118:24 set to a tune most of us learned before we could read. I’m working on a version that keeps the joy without the church-camp polish. Slower than you remember it. Same words.
ne of the first songs I ever knew. My version is in arrangement. The challenge with traditional songs is not adding too much. The song already works; the trick is staying out of its way. More soon.
od, grant me the serenity. The most direct prayer I’ve written. About loving someone through the long night and the language you find when begging stops working. The rooms I sit in on Sundays and the rooms I sit in on Wednesdays are the same room.
had wrote it. I covered it because the line keeps finding me. A practice that only includes the easy songs isn’t a practice. Closing here on purpose. Even chaos and cruelty are part of the morning, and the morning still comes.
Thank you for sitting through it.
If a song helps, take it with you.