New Song
When I was in elementary school, I remember my mother singing along with the radio as she took me to school. It didn’t happen that often. We were not the most musical family, and I almost never heard her sing. But every now and then, on old country song she knew would come on the radio, and she would be transported back to whatever age she had been when it was released.
“The songs of your youth stay with you,” she told me. “When you’ve forgotten everything else, you’ll remember the words to old songs. You’ll see.”
She’s right. I would wager that almost no one from my high school algebra class remembers the quadratic formula. But pull up “Can’t Touch This” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and we can wail out those lyrics at volumes that may cause our children to melt into puddles. It’s glorious.
These songs stay with us because they are more than just music. They are markers on our life’s adventure. All those new experiences of the world that come with being a teen or young adult—growing up, moving away, taking road trips, making friends, falling in love, breaking up—get tied to songs. We don’t just sing them. We feel them.
I’m almost sure some of this is developmental. If I dug deeply enough—or at least deeper than I have time to do as of this writing—I suspect I’d find research on the brain’s ability to process and retain music at an early age. I also think there’s a value calculation made by our younger selves that views learning a song as a perfectly good use of one’s time. But when you’re pushing 50 and have bills to pay? There’s just no room for such frivolities.
I think our younger selves had it right.
One of the things music does for us is allow us to express things that could never be said in conversation—mysteries of love and loss and sex and fear and hope. Maybe we learn to talk about these things better as we get older, and a wider understanding of mental health has made it more acceptable to bring them up. Still, the raw honesty and vulnerability allowed by song is far beyond what most of us can reach with mere dialogue.
Then there’s God.
I’ve seen my faith go through a fairly radical transformation in my forties—a letting go of much I thought I knew, along with a settling into commitments that once seemed uncertain. I’ve begun countless prayers, only to realize I had no words for them. In then end, I either give up or fall asleep.
But songs open windows to prayer that I have not thus far been able to access in other ways. They allow expression of things that seem silly or downright nuts if spoken aloud. Consider the bridge from a song we sang last night at our Student Ministry Council gathering:
Oh, what’s impossible for this love I’ve found in you
I’ll sing your praise ‘til it’s all I’ve got, and my heart belongs to you.
Such intimacy doesn’t belong in declarative statements. It belongs in melody. These days, I don’t know how to get there any other way.
This is also why I think it’s so important to learn new songs at every stage of our lives. A good song expands our emotional vocabulary and maybe even our faith.
I spent a good chunk of my weekend learning a new song for Fusion, the church where I attend on Sunday mornings—”All This Future” by Hillsong United. It’s an outlier in contemporary worship, with driving, multi-layered music and complex lyrics drawn from the Biblical book of Joel (probably as referenced in Acts). It expresses a vision for a world I can’t see, a hope I can’t feel, at least not right now.
Turn the music up/watch the mountains fall
Let the streets ring the sound of a brand new world
Better let the night know
Our hope doesn’t set with the sun
Read aloud, those lyrics seem merely rhetorical, or at best pollyanna. The world as I experience it throughout the week leaves precious little room for such confidence that the good will triumph. Set to music and sung with friends, however, these words have a way of lifting me up to a place I could never have reached by climbing alone.
Good songs do that. They get inside us. They remind us of what it’s like to discover new feelings and share those with the people around us. They open up the desires of our hearts.
We need new songs, if we want to remain hopeful and alive amid our daily struggles. They are the vehicles by which we are transported back to our deep humanity.
