Fiiiinaly we’ve got a resource for updated song-sheets we can share with the world that isn’t, like, eight years old. If when you click on the link a dialog box opens asking for a password, go ahead and click on “cancel”. This part of the site should be completely excessible without the need to enter a password. If anyone has a problem, please add a comment to this blog. 

Matt Johnson is a Native Seattleite. Born in the early seventies to music teacher parents, he spent most of his pre-teen years ceremoniously pilfering his older brother’s classic rock records and scanning the radio airwaves until 1985 when he discovered punk.

Matt started playing drums in grade school after a near-religious experience listening to the band Rush but didn’t really learn to play his instrument until he joined the high school jazz band.

 Throughout the nineties and the early ought years, Matt took The Vow of Poverty for the sake of touring the North American Continent in unknown bands including Roadside Monument, Blenderhead and Ninety Pound Wuss. He has also served as a for-hire drummer and has performed on roughly twenty nationally distributed compact disc recordings.

Matt wed the love of his life, Roseanne, six years ago and they played together in Team Strike Force, at Mars Hill Church, for nearly ten years. Their new project, titled Sons of Thunder, is tentatively slated to debut in the fall of ‘07. Matt also occasionally writes music criticism fueled with the fetching conviction that leisurely listening is best spent on Black Sabbath over the Beatles nine times out of ten.

Beach House - “Beach House”

A few months back a friend burned me discs of about 6 different records which then sat in my car for months before I finally ran out of things to listen to and threw them on. The other 5 didn’t really impress me, but something about this resonated right out of the gate. It is a very low-fi and unassuming record. The elements are fairly simple…shimmering 60’s sounding organs with corresponding drum machines (imagine finding an old wood paneled organ-esque machine in your grandmother’s basement with far too many knobs…the sound that comes out of that is pretty much what you will hear on this record), minimal but tasteful guitar, and a relatively low female voice. There are wonderful pop hooks throughout (in particular on “Master of None”), but done in an understated way that is quite refreshing to hear.

This record has a nostalgic sound that hangs out in that wonderfully ambiguous space between beautiful, sad, and longing. I think they chose the name Beach House not because it sounded like some summer party, but more like hanging out in a mostly empty beach house in October when the town is quiet, the air is cool, and the sand untouched. Perfect listening for grey autumn days, of which there will be plenty in coming months.

“CHICAGO-Music, a mode of creative expression consisting of sound and silence expressed through time, was given a 6.8 out of 10 rating in an review published Monday on Pitchfork Media, a well-known music-criticism website.”

 I heart The Onion.

Joel Brown was born to missionary parents in Jerusalem, Israel 1979. The Browns moved back to California and settled in Bakersfield, where Joel began playing drums in local punk bands.

After high school, Joel left B-town behind and he and his two band mate-best friends arrived in Seattle.

They quickly realized the Seattle music scene belonged to the twenty-one or older crowd which is bummer news to eighteen year old music fans.  Simultaneously, Joel had to stop living off of his parents’ faith and figure out what Jesus was all about.

He began attending Mars Hill church and in time, came to faith in Christ. As 2000 began, he started work at The Paradox, the small all-ages music venue Mars Hill launched.

In 2001 he married his long time sweetheart, Emily, and spent the next two years recording bands, running sound at shows, and touring with his band, The Prom.

In 2003, Mars Hill opened in Ballard and Joel took a position managing the ever-growing sound needs and currently leads a Mars Hill-based worship band called Red Letter. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Emily, and twin girls, Blythe and Naomi.

Make sure to register for the Continuous Worship conference!  

Last week Jentry (my wife) and I saw Spoon play to a sold-out crowd at the Showbox in downtown Seattle. Though I am a fan, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

Granted, I’m a sucker for this band. And though I discovered them late (in the last year), Spoon have been a significant discovery for me. Their most recent release Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a strong album. It opens with a classic Spoon-ish chord progression on Don’t Make Me A Target, the type of 2-string, rhythmic strumming found on Pedro the Lion records, but with a bluesy twist. And from the beginning singer Brit Daniels had me hooked. The guitar tone, the understated instrumentation, his oddball take on soul, all come together right off the bat. After that, it took a few spins for the rest of the album to grow on me. The obvious highlights are the reverby Cherry Bomb, and The Underdog with it’s super-catchy horn melodies.

The show was good. Not amazing, but solid. The band has a very interesting presence. They are very complimentary in the sense that Brit holds everybody captive with his voice and frantic moves, while the band just do what they do. And they’re really good at it. At one point during the show Brit pauses asking the fan in the front row where they got “that shirt?” He follows with, “That’s my favorite Prince record!” A favorite Prince record! Wow!

But then, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve known there had to be something beyond the simple, easily identifiable layers of Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger I’ve heard in his voice. I had wondered if it was Bob Dylan….maybe. But then he mentioned Prince, and it came together. Brit’s got soul. He sings the heck out of every track and does it in his own unique way. I bet he also has a favorite Michael Jackson record!

But the greatest thing about Spoon is how much they do with so little. Overall, their instrumentation is sparse, the kind of stuff a 3-piece could bang out in a garage. But somehow they make it sound big and full. Part of it may be Brit’s guitar tone, which is the combination of a vintage Gibson 335 and a Vox AC-30. It’s just dirty. But the songs themselves allow that tone to work beautifully. Though they tend toward similar tempos and beats, any guitarist who watches his hands will notice he rarely deviates from the use of the same simple chord structures song after song.

In the end, Spoon are simply good. I should’ve known. And that’s what Jentry and I talked about as we walked away from the Showbox, up the street to our car.

“Love is not static; it cannot but pour itself outward.”

There is plenty in Harold Best’s Unceasing Worship that makes me scratch my chin and think, or put a place holder in the book and stare off into space, and the quote above is worth some pondering.

The idea that love is an active thing can be found throughout scripture.”For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son.” (John 3:16), or when Jesus reminds his followers that if they truly love him they should do what he says. Love does not sit by on the sidelines, just as Jesus did not sit by on the sidelines. He stepped boldly into human history and paid a great price. Biblical love is not theoretical, but tried, tested, and true.

But, as Best points out throughout his book, this can go two ways. We become more like what we love.if Christ, than more like Christ, if the world than more like the world, but not both. Love compels us to be more than what we are, but the love described in the Bible is so much different than the “love” the world offers which seems to be more about feelings than action.

Reading Unceasing Worship was a good checkup to see where and what I pour myself in to, and thus to see what I love. A lot of what I saw, and continue to see, is disheartening, but I hope it is God’s purpose to put those kinds of reality checks in my life so that I see my fault and come to love Him more. It also makes me realize, once again, how far I am from being a perfect worshipper, and how much I need to cling to Jesus who was (and is) exactly that. And that’s just on page 22.

With the Continuous Worship conference fast approaching, we thought we’d give it a little extra nudge by quoting some of our fav Harold Best quotes. To be honest, we folks in the worship dept at MH have kind of become Best-ians if there is such a thing. So much so that we’ve actually adopted some of the terms he uses in Unceasing Worship into our regular vernacular. Anyhoo, here’s Deacon Joel’s thoughts on his favorite quote to kick things off. Enjoy.

It’s incredibly hard to pin down my “favorite’ quote from Harold Best’s book “Unceasing Worship’, but this is one that really makes me think (watch out it’s a long one! From chapter 11): (more…)

One of our weekly features for September is blogger bios. We figured it’d be a good way to get readers acquainted with Doxologist contributors and communicate a “who’s-who” for the leadership of the worship department at Mars Hill. (And assigning the blogs was fun too cause the subjects had to write “em in third person themselves!) First up to bat is our good pal, Joe Day. Enjoy.

Back in 1977, a few months before Elvis died, a young couple of ski instructors, Mike & Tracy Day, birthed their first born son, Joseph.
Joe wasted no time getting on the slopes and by fourteen was competing in the Junior Olympics.  By sixteen he’d traded his skis for drums and guitar and cut his teeth in his first death-metal band.

Between the busy years of “97 to ‘03 Joe had moved to the Seattle area, started and dissolved bands Static and Mindhead, toured regionally and released two albums and an EP, respectively. Joe also served as worship pastor in the Acts 29 church, The Gathering and released a CD of worship songs creatively titled, “Worship.” He wrote Surrender, For Your Goodness, The Glory of God, and Psalm 25, all of which are sung at Mars Hill Church today. 
 
In 2004 Joe married his home-town sweetheart, Jentry Major. They enjoy sailing, hiking, cooking food for friends and making smores in the back yard.

In 2005, Joe transitioned from The Gathering to Mars Hill and by January 2006 was leading worship at the inauguration of the Shoreline campus.  Today, he leads the band The Northern Conspiracy and continues to write songs.