Both gospel and blues are musical traditions rooted in the American South, both are based in tragedy, pain, and misery. But the difference between gospel and blues is that the gospel offers hope. The very nature of the blues is that there is no hope. Your heart is broke, you’re probably going to die from […]
MadMania
Faith, Books, and Stuff
Category: music
I remember the first time I heard of Jim Richey; knowing my weakness for the blues, my friend The Celt told me about him. “Imagine there’s this amazing blues guitarist, and he’s an older middle-aged white guy who lives out here in the sticks and works out at the Hab Center as a janitor.” I couldn’t […]
For the past two years Rahne has composed the theme music. For Law of the West, our wild west VBS, I was looking for music that would fit in with a John Ford / John Wayne / Roy Rogers good guy kind of western—not a spaghetti western. When she was working on it, we listened to a lot […]
So you know how you get a song stuck in your head? I’ve had the same one stuck in my head for like three weeks now and it won’t go away. The song is ‘Cuban Pete’ from 1994’s The Mask. It’s really getting on the kids’ nerves, too, because I walk around the house singing it […]
Every time I hear Elvis’s I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You it makes me think of Kaleb’s wife. Hold on–I know I have some ‘splainin’ to do–just give me a second. Music has a way of embedding memories. Trisha Yearwood and Clint Black, appropriately, used music to point this out, in The Song […]
The first cassette tape I ever bought was the soundtrack to Phantom of the Opera (I already had a pirated version, but wanted the real thing). Sarah Brightman played Christine, and I loved her voice. Shortly after I bought this I started hanging around with Noodles. She did not think very much of Ms. Brightman’s […]
2006’s Casino Royale, the James Bond flick that introduced Daniel Craig as a new kind of Bond, was the Gandalf the White of 007 movies, if I may mix my metaphors. It was brilliant and new and unusual and better than any of its predecessors. One of its more unusual features was having a title […]
Nostalgia You know how you have fond memories of a TV show or movie from when you were young, and when you finally get to see it again as an adult (or in this case, older adult), it isn’t quite how you remembered it? Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s amazing, but some other times, well, […]
Mine is that one where Johnny Depp plays that weird pasty guy, and all that creepy stuff happens and Danny Elfman’s music is all ‘oompa OOMPA oompa OOMPA.’ I’m just kidding. Really my favorite Tim Burton movie is Big Fish, probably the least Burtonesque movie he’s done. Second favorite? Probably Ed Wood, though I don’t […]
I haven’t read The Hunger Games, and haven’t really paid attention to the book series. I had the barest concept of the story from The Baby, who liked the first book, was cool to the second, and hated the third. So I had pretty much no expectations going in. I only went because the girls […]