From Theory to Reality

Paul Baloche discusses the transition of song from its testing phase towards its culmination. He dives into the "filtering process" where artists take the entirety of their songs/song ideas and begin narrowing it down. Just as a coach must cut, bench, and start players, the songwriter must choose which songs to discard, postpone, and focus on. Baloche encourages songwriters to find a group of like-minded worshipers who can evaluate songs and give meaningful feedback. This collaborative community enhances the songwriting experiences and refines the songs, themselves, so that they are of the highest quality. 



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Performance vs Worship Leading

Paul Baloche makes it clear that a worship centered environment begins from the "top down", in the episode "Performance vs Worship Leading". It is the worship leaders' responsibility to guide the congregation into a time of musical worship, but not to worship for them. This is dependent on where the leaders' heart is oriented toward. There will always be the temptation of worshipping for the sake of satisfying the ego, but it's clear that the whole purpose of worship is lost when that desire overshadows the heart to serve. Baloche also points out that in the pursuit of being fully oriented toward the Lord, there's no place for "fake humility", as he puts it. The Lord knows the inmost desires of the heart so there's no reason to put on a fake persona in an effort to follow him. The idea of fighting against the temptation of self glory ties in to what Jesus means when he calls us to "deny ourselves, and take up our own cross". T...
Read more

The Feeling of the Message

Paul Baloche talks about crafting music to fit the "feeling of the message" in this episode of his Youtube Songwriting series. He points out that the first step is deciding what type of atmosphere the song is intended to create. For example, his title "Above All" was meant to be an anthemic song, thus he chose a tune that fit its intended purpose accordingly. Baloche mentions Disney as the king of melodies, noting how many of their songs have beautifully constructed tunes that capture a breadth of pitches which earn a place in our memories. Hints of the styles of these well-written songs are prevalent in other genres of music, further highlighting their brilliance.  The idea of being memorable is an intriguing one. In the context of songwriting, the tunes that are generic and aren't creatively put together are the ones that fade with time. It's the ones that are different, seasoned with flair; those are the ones that are remembered. We must seek to find our ...
Read more

How to Write a Worship Song

In Phil Wickham's workshop titled "How to Write a Worship Song", he outlines the general process by which he writes worship songs. He highlights the importance of life experiences and how they shape themes of songs. Wickham uses the example of God's goodness. Even though it's a common theme among worship songs today, it's possible to experience a different and more personal facet of the the goodness of God to kickstart of worship song. The idea of finding intricacies within themes to write songs is stressed multiple times by Wickham in the workshop.  Wickham describes writing a song like formulating a sentence. A good sentence has a topic with grammatical tools that assist in emphasizing that subject. In the same way, a song also has a topic that's usually amplified in the chorus. The verses and bridge are similar to verbs and adjectives that highlight the importance and applicability of that topic. When we think of songs as sentences, it should demand us ...
Read more