AG: I'll tell you about Angel Band. Hymns are very important to me and the development of my relationship with God. They really were one of the first introductions I had to God, even though I grew up in the church and heard lots of sermons. I don't remember many of [those sermons], but I do remember the lyrics of the hymns. 

 

The hymns were really foundational in presenting to me who God was and how God loved us through Jesus. They were good reminders because they were types of these beautiful melodies that you find yourself humming later. Music has always had a huge impact on me, personally, since I was a kid.
 

Hymns have always had this special place, not only in my musical life, but also in my spiritual life, and I wanted to collect and compile some of my favorite hymns and do them in a style that I loved, which is kind of an Americana/Folk combination. I wanted to use every good instrument there is, such as fiddles and pedal steels and acoustic guitars—everything I don't play. I also wanted to ask some musical friends to join me—Ginny being one of those—because, if we grow up with hymns, we grow up singing them with a community. 

 

Very rarely did we sing them alone. They weren't necessarily solo pieces. So I wanted to have those contributions from people whose musical work I respect and who I also respected from a level of friendship too. There was a kind of relationship there that was akin to community.

 

 

AG: Yay! We've got another potential hymn lover. Thank you. That means a lot.
 

 

 

GO: For me it was a lot of the same thing [as Andrew experienced]. I grew up on hymns, and those were not only my introduction to getting saved, but also to music and just being in the church. For me, there were a lot of personal things going on at the time when Say Amen was created. My mom had cancer, and I had been walking with her through that, and she is now cancer free, which is awesome. But one of the things that she said to me at the time was, "I really wish you would make a hymns project."

 

Over the course of my being at home with mom for about seven or eight months, both my grandmothers each also said, "It's really time for you to make a hymns project." When all the important people in your life are telling you to make a hymns project, then you listen, and you do what they say because they're the bosses.

 

My selection process was partly taking some old, interesting songs from different places in hymn history and also from different denominations. For example, a couple of songs that ended up on the project are old Shaker hymns that I thought were really cool and really haunting. And then, being from Jackson, Mississippi, I grew up obviously loving Gospel music, so there's a lot of Gospel influence on it as well.

 

The album is called Say Amen, and it's all about the different ways we as a culture, in the history of our country, have said, "Amen." That, in a nutshell, is where my hymns project came from.

 

 

GO: As a recording artist who was making songs for radio at the time when worship came on and Christian radio evolved to be much more about worship music, I thought it was interesting, if not maybe a confusing thing because it's sort of a different kind of music to hear on the radio.
 

When people started saying, "Don't write songs about your personal journey. Write more corporate songs," well, for a lot of us that had been doing music in a different way for a long time, we thought that was interesting because we didn't quite know how to do that or what to do with it.
 

It was such a movement, and it came on so strong. I love a lot of modern worship but, for quite a while, I would wrestle with, "We're creating music that is really easy to sing but maybe doesn't have a lot to say, but it works in church, so we're creating it and selling lots of it and making lots of money...but is that a noble thing to do?"

 

I've always led worship in concerts, and I think Andrew does that as well. And at churches we're doing our concerts or leading Sunday morning worship. But a funny thing has happened in the last year or so, in that I have begun leading worship at a large church just south of Nashville, part time. I'm one of the four worship leaders on rotation there.

 

I have become immersed in modern worship in a way that I have never been in my life, but what's awesome is that our church still very much responds to hymns, so we do a really fun mix of modern worship songs and hymns. We do one hymn in a Sunday, sometimes two, and then several modern worship songs as well. What's really interesting is that, being a female, it's hard to find worship songs that are easy for me to sing because so many of them are sung by males and written for the range of males. As a result of going through that selection process, I fell in love with some worship songs and then thought, "Wow. There's really a hole here. We need some songs that are maybe more about God and not so much about us, and maybe we need some songs that are easier for us ladies to sing as well," because we make up quite a bit of the church population.

 

What I love about hymns is the depth of the lyrics. In any genre of music, it's very difficult to write a simple enough melody that'll be catchy enough for everybody to remember but that will also have a depth of lyrics. So I struggle all the time with how to incorporate that depth into the new music that we sing in church today. It's been kind of humorous because for the first time ever in my life I thought, "Maybe I really need to write worship songs and make a worship CD," and that's just something you would have never heard me say ever. It's been a journey though because I still think there's something very beautiful and poetic and incredibly deep about the lyrics of the hymns from the past.
 

 

GO: Absolutely. 

 

AG: Sure. I don't have quite the history that Ginny has, as far as I was not an artist when the modern worship movement made its splash. I was more of an observer rather than a participant in the industry at that point, and I was able to observe it for whatever my purpose was. 

 

I do not specifically try to write my worship. I've never really been asked or had to do that. There are so many great hymns that are just as much worship songs as the modern ones. They're just as worshipful, and they're easy to include. Part of the reason I did a hymns record was to give me a catalog of songs that I could use in a worship context. 

 

You have modern day hymn writers of sorts. You have Keith and Kristyn Getty. You have Stuart Townend. You have folks who write in the hymns tradition, but they're widely accepted in modern worship circles. Only time will tell from the modern worship culture if a song is being written for modern church culture today. Only time will tell what will last and I think what lasts will be deemed, once again, as hymns and be incorporated into the hymn books.

 

I think, for me, there always has to be a litmus test to decide whether I use a song or whether I write a song when I'm leading worship. For me, music is a natural expression of what I do somewhat well or what I try to do well as a craft and as a profession. It's also a natural expression of who I am.

 

Worship is a lifestyle. We've heard this a thousand times in modern church culture, and it's almost a cliché now. So if worship is a part of my everyday life, or what I'm trying to allow God to do through me to glorify Himself, then hopefully whatever I write will be true to my story—-true to the art that I enjoy making and creating and that I also enjoy sharing with others.

 

Chris Tomlin writes really singable songs that are easily incorporated into church services. If that's true to the best art that he has to offer, or how God is using him at this craft, that's fantastic.

 

Getting back to the Gettys and Stuart Townend, the reason I would say they're writing modern day hymns is because they write in the tradition of the hymns--the way that the melodies are structured and the chords are structured. And lyrically, there's a lot of meat in hymns. You find a lot of similar theological meat in their songs. Modern worship often doesn't have that theological meat.
 

Hymns introduced me to God, so I have a bit of an ache or a bit of a hope that there are still songs being created and used in churches for that other seven, eight, nine, or ten year old that, as he or she sings, is experiencing some kind of sound doctrine and theology that expresses to them the love of God through Jesus Christ. There is a lot of poetry in hymns, and poetry gives you a lot to think about.