Every year the promise of preparation beckons, that if I get the things I’m responsible for done early enough, the stress and anxiety of Christmas Eve and Christmas and the Sunday after Christmas will be diminished, and every year that promise turns out to be an illusion. Everything I’m responsible for over the next three days is accounted for here on the morning of Christmas Eve, and yet, here I am, on the morning of Christmas Eve, certain I’m forgetting something.
Last year was even worse. With everything prerecorded and nothing happening in person, I still spent Christmas Eve an anxious mess.
People seeking financial help very often tell a story to justify the request.
I’m trying to get home on the bus. My car broke down. My paycheck is late.
Scrutinizing the veracity of these stories is cruel. Assume they’re false if you must, or assume they’re truthful. The real question is not “Am I being lied to?” The real question is “Can I help this person?”
If you help and the story is true, that’s a good outcome. If you help and the story is made up, that’s not necessarily a bad outcome.
We are succeeding and messing up at the same time all the time. We are focused on these things and distracted from those things simultaneously. We are every second making choices about what’s important and what gets our attention, and so we are inevitably overlooking things that matter.
Ministry under Covid mitigation conditions requires us to focus on things we never had to before, and even after several months it’s a challenge. Getting better about this is a choice, and not simply one of the will, like “I promise to pay better attention.” Attention is limited, and attention diverted to policing masks and distance is attention taken from facilitating your exercise.
The choice is probably one about systems and processes; we can choose to designate someone else to watch out. We can address these matters on their own with the group and ask them to pay attention to one another. We can work on a culture of compliance with mitigation strategies for the benefit of all, particularly those most at-risk and vulnerable.
Attention is a matter of choices made before attention needs paid.
I got an email from someone who saw my name listed as the person to call if you’re interested in a particular church ministry. I replied, “Nice to know you. Maybe you’d like to volunteer.”
They answered, “Not so fast. I simply wanted to introduce myself.”
Sometimes an introduction is just an introduction.
I posted the other day about Wrapped, the Spotify product that shows you every year what you spent the most time listening to since January. I love it.
Music wants to be collected and categorized as well as played, and in the era of streaming music that means making your own lists of songs and albums, which I do every year. Actually, no. I don’t make annual song lists anymore. I let Wrapped do that for me. But I do collect albums that I like best in a given year, even ones that I don’t seem to have listened to all that much.
Here, then, are the 12 albums released in 2021 that I’m keeping.
The Cream of The Crop
Fatal Mistakes by Del Amitri and On Account of Exile, Vol. 1 by Trevor Sensor
Del Amitri last released an album in 2001, and it pretty promptly spelled the end of their two decade run. I’d been on board for the last seven years of that run, and hard; if you knew between 1994 and 2001, you knew that I was obsessed with an obscure folk rock band from Glasgow. 20 years on, now, in an utterly reshaped music industry, the same lineup that last recorded under the Bush administration signed a deal with a small label and released 13 brand new songs into the world. I was ready to be disappointed. I was not. It’s really good, and I’m still a little obsessed.
Trevor Sensor is crazy young and sings like he’s gargling gasoline, but, man does it work for me. The songs on On Account of Exile, Vol. 1 are the perfect combination of memorable melodies, lush arrangements, vivid lyricism, and vocals that scratch an itch deep inside my ear. I can put this on and play it straight through without skipping a single track, then start it over again.
Twangy Stuff
The Horses and The Hounds by James McMurtry, Ten Thousand Roses by Dori Freeman, You Get It All by Hayes Carll
James McMurtry’s dad wrote Lonesome Dove, a fact I didn’t know while I was listening to “Carlisle’s Haul” on repeat in 2015. I hooked onto his latest album pretty quick for lines like “Cashing in on a 30 year crush/you can’t be young and do that.” These are character sketches and declarations of conviction that will hold up for a long time.
Dori Freeman was an Appalachian minimalist when I first heard her in 2015. Her first two albums contain completely acapella tracks (you have to hear “Ern & Zorry’s Sneakin’ Bitin’ Dog”). Ten Thousand Roses is all moderned up, which adds muscle without sacrificing the storytelling. “I Am” is worth repeat plays.
Hayes Carll’s 2011 debut album has one of my favorite all time songs on it, and on the strength of that one song I’ll give every one of his albums a try forever and ever amen. You Get It All is my favorite so far.
Rockers
Open Door Policy by The Hold Steady, Enjoy The View by We Were Promised Jetpacks, Huffy by We Are Scientists
I missed the boat on The Hold Steady while they were rocking the bar scene during the aughts, so I didn’t greet their first album with any kind of nostalgia, but rather as a chance to experience something new. The songs on Open Door Policy do what I understand this band to have always done–tell stories about down-and-out salt of the earth drinkers and druggers (“I sell software made for offices/it increases their efficiency/hospitals and local governments/it’s a pretty heavy covenant”), which is fine, but my money is on the backing band, horns and all.
We Were Promised Jetpacks have added lots of electronica to their production since the bare bones brogue-driven 2009 album that made me love them. But those elements bring out what’s great about their music, which is driving, straightforward melodies with hooky little lines like, “I thought I had a fat chance/maybe one in a million.”
I can’t hardly keep up with all the music We Are Scientists release. It’s a constant stream of singles and albums and reworked versions of those albums and podcasts about those albums. A lot of what they do gets lost for me. It’s just so much. But Huffy is a focused collection of pop rock songs that reward their fans in abundance and might also be an alluring point of entry for new listeners.
Grooves
I Told You So by Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, Obviously by Lake Street Drive
I can’t tell you much about Delvon Lamarr and his two organ-accompanying friends, but I can tell you I play this lyric-less album all the time. It’s fun and contains multitudes.
Lake Street Dive gonna Lake Street Dive, you know? Rachel Price’s vocals punch you in the chest, and the songs reach for social comment and relationship witticisms i equal measure without it feeling awkward. This album has a new band member on it, the keyboard player they’ve toured with (and who I saw three years ago). He even has a vocal on here. It’s so good.
Straight Pop
Screen Violence by Chvrches, Sob Rock by John Mayer
I have a thing for Scots, clearly. Chvrches, though, aren’t another collection of self-loathing rocker blokes. Lauren Mayberry’s voice is GORGEOUS, and all the synthesizers and drums machines just work, with force. “He Said She Said” is that perfect combination of powerfully percussive rhythm with layers of melody that are downright enchanting.
I’ve spent a lot of time making fun of John Mayer. Reviewers hated Sob Rock for reasons I would have probably have been mad about five years ago (it’s kind of a shameless 80’s nostalgia product. I wouldn’t be surprised if Toto were the studio band). But real talk: it works on me. I listened to “Last Train Home” almost more than any other song this year, and it didn’t even come out until, like, May. I guess I just feel like Sob Rock is good at what it is, and that is for my 80’s-formed tastes.
Invitation is a skill, and it’s less about persuasion (how can I convince you to join me?) than it is about courage (am I actually trying this?). Whether it’s an ambitious project or a coffee, someone has to make an invitation. Nothing happens until then.
Beyond practicality, though, skilled invitations grow good will. People like to be invited. It feels good when someone asks you to join them; it means they think you have something to contribute, or could. They think you’re interesting. A community that knows how to invite is filled with people who have been invited. There are bonds.
We often hold back an invitation for fear it will be received as an imposition or a demand, an obligation. That fear is almost always made up. People like to be invited, and if the thing you’re inviting them to isn’t for them, they can say no. That’s the other mark of a community that knows how to invite: people are free to decline if the invitation doesn’t speak to them or doesn’t work for them. It’s opt in. That means you can’t get your feelings hurt when your invitation is turned down.
The invitation can’t be about you. It has to be about the thing you care about and suspect others also care about.
Matt and I care about the Bible. We invite you to listen to the latest two episodes of our podcast about it.
I am a sucker for Spotify’s “wrapped” feature, the personal playlist and accompanying animation it makes for users every December filled with data about their listening habits over the previous 11 months. Every year I know it’s coming, and still I’m delighted by it. I listen to music in February and September conscious of how that listening will be represented in “wrapped.” There are always surprises–some pleasant, some cringy.
Did I expect four of my 10 most listened to songs of the year to come from the same album, the glorious return of my adolescent musical obsession, Del Amitri? Absolutely. Did I expect my second most played song of 2021 to be a kitschy Toto impression by John Mayer? Nope.
Permission is not the same thing as responsibility. If it’s not your job to fix the leak or to improve the agenda, it could be. You probably have permission to do it from your peers already, but check with them if you’re stressed about it. Then take the permission to make something better.
We need to take responsibility when something we own doesn’t work. We also need to take permission to own things nobody presently is, things that need doing.
“Or else?” feels like a really critical question when we’re trying to enlist people in the thing we care about. And, critically, it feels like the more the answer to “or else?” is something punitive the less effective it will be.
“Or else I’m taking your phone away” doesn’t move a teenager toward taking responsibility.
“Or else you’ll be charged more” might turn your consequence for bad behavior into a fee people willingly pay for the freedom to misbehave.
“Or else we will shame you” (nobody actually puts it like this) only reinforces the resentment preventing people from doing what you’re asking them to do in the first place.
What happens what the answer to “Or else” is that you’ll miss out on something positive and constructive and beneficial? Here, words don’t work as well as actions, and those actions probably have to me multiplied by lots of people to have an effect. We can be conscripted by the positive examples of peers.
“Or else?” must give people a clear choice, and the choice we want them to make has to speak to something they value, rather than something they fear.
YoRocko! 