When we're writing it seems like it's the questions or self-criticisms or things that might be troubling that come to the surface and sort of have an urgency to be expressed, but then God is always the answer to all of these questions, and so there's a hope that we feel in any situation."
(Karen Peris, of The Innocence Mission)
Late Fall afternoons, particularly Sunday afternoons, are ripe with melancholy. Outside my window the last Fall leaves, already brown, cling to trees. The backyard, with all the leaves scattered about and branches down from storms, has a settled disarray about it. The air is still, the birds silent, the neighbors settled in and turned inward.
It's a good time for the music of The Innocence Mission, the featured artists on this edition of Wide Angle Radio. Looking at the date on the recording master (July 2000), I realize that its been almost a decade since this recording was made by partner Kevin Auman and myself, and that too fills me with a warm sadness that so many years have passed since these voices spoke, so many days since these songs were recorded. And yet the title of one of the Innocence Missions' early albums, Glow, really describes the joy that underlies these mellow, hushed songs. They are completely at rest in a world full of noise, and listening further you realize that the sense of peace that permeates the music is rooted in Christian faith, in a belief that "God is always the answer to all of the questions." It gives audible reminders of the truth of the season, that God is with us, that Emmanuel has come.
In this edition the narrator, writer and Christian music veteran John Fischer, explores doubt, questions, and ambiguity in the context of faith. In the last ten years it's become fashionable for Christians to write books and songs about such things, but it was not always so. In fact, writing about such things might mean you were not welcome in the contemporary Christian music industry. That's why most of the artists featured on this edition of Wide Angle Radio were outsiders, people of faith who were offered no place in the Christian music subculture. I gravitated to them because their music seemed genuine and authentic. We called it "the best music you've never heard," and the honest truth is that much of it is still just that: good music left unheard. Listen to the latest EP by The Innocence Mission, Street Map, and you'll chuckle just imagining this delicate music being played on Christian radio or any radio these days. It is from somewhere else, from somewhere too good for the airwaves, like sonic poetry full of as much space as sound.
Slowly, oh so slowly, I am posting the audio files of these radio shows, some 35 of them that extended over a period of three years nearly ten years ago. All of the artists you hear on this recording are still making music, still telling the truth, after all these years. Listen well. Tell me it isn't the best music you've never heard.
To hear Episode Nine of Wide Angle Radio (as well as the previous eight episodes, click here and navigate down the page to Episode Nine. Enjoy!
