Favorite Albums of 2008 (1 through 5)

5. Andrew Peterson - Resurrection Letters Volume II

Five Star Songs:

Invisible God

I like Andrew Peterson because he writes good folk music about faith that is deep and epic at the same time. When I listen to Resurrection Letters it makes me feel like I am outside in the woods, in a cave, or out in a field experiencing something very ancient and spiritual. I don't know if that really makes sense. Maybe you just have to listen to AP to know. The theme of resurrection in the songs on this record really came at a good time in my life. I needed to be reminded that nothing truly dies. Every end is just a new beginning, and we see it all over - from a seed being planted in the ground to the sun coming up each day to a man finding grace and renewal in Jesus. Resurrection Letters tells this over and over again in a very beautiful way.


4. Thrice - The Alchemy Index Volumes III & IV (Earth and Air)

Five Star Songs:

Come All You Weary
Broken Lungs

If I made of special award for "Album worth digging into the most," The Alchemy Index would definitely get that award. With most albums I don't get out the liner notes and follow along with the music. I would but I don't have the time. For Thrice's new album I read the lyrics along with the songs and I even looked up words I didn't understand. It seemed that within the words of each song was hidden some sort of mysterious, divine truth. This was very rewarding because I am terrible with literature and poetry, I rarely ever see the deeper meaning in anything. When I took a closer look at the music and lyrics of The Alchemy Index, I found more than music that just happened to be cool because the earth CD sounded earthy and the air CD sounded like wind.

The Alchemy Index is deep, which is important because Dustin Kensrue writes songs about faith that are poetic and meaningful and not shallow. He makes the song "I Am a Friend of God" look like the alphabet song. It just isn't fair how good Thrice is.


3. Counting Crows - Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings

Five Star Songs:

1492
Cowboys
When I Dream of Michelangelo

Counting Crows is a good band to listen to when you are sad or feel like being pessimistic. I got on a big Counting Crows kick last fall, and it carried over into spring of this year. They were my favorite band for a really long time, not because I really felt like being sad or anything. Adam Duritz is just a really honest and open -not to mention talented- songwriter. His singing voice is incredible and CC's folk rock sound is exactly what I like to spend my time listening to. Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings packs more of a punch than other CC recordings. It starts out fast and hard but mellows out after about song 6. A very solid record, I listened to it probably too much.


2. Ben Shive - The Ill-tempered Klavier

Five Star Songs:

She Is The Rising Sun
4th of July
New Year

Faith and doubt have sort of been a recurring theme in my life for the last couple of years. I have been doing a lot of questioning. Ben Shive's album sort of represents how I believe God communicates to people through art and beauty. Nowadays, everybody puts so much emphasis on reason and rationality when really the human brain is designed so that we make decisions holistically. People seem to think that something is only true if it is measurable and tangible. I took a sociology class this semester with a professor who had a PhD and was really a pretty darn intelligent guy. From what I gathered, the guy's personal religious beliefs were agnostic. He said once that he goes to church, but only because his family does. I liked listening to his teaching, we had discussions about all the really touchy subjects in his class - issues like politics, race, and religion. I remember sometimes I would leave his class after a really deep discussion wondering if God really existed at all. It was good because it forced me to think about my faith, and I think that I've come out stronger for it. But some days I would really be perplexed.

After one particular class I walked out and put my iPod earphones in. I was thinking and wondering about some things, feeling some particular doubts that haunt me every once in a while. The song that came on my iPod at that moment was a song by Ben Shive called "Rise Up" and these are the lyrics I heard in this particular moment:

Every stone that makes you stumble
And cuts you when you fall
Every serpent here that strikes your heel
To curse you when you crawl
The King of Love one day will crush them all

And every sad seduction
And every clever lie
Every word that woos and wounds
The pilgrim children of the sky
The King of Love will break them by and by

And you will rise up in the end

It was just a cool moment for me because at that very moment I probably couldn't have heard something better than that. Looking back it was a key moment for me because now I'm coming to the point where I feel pretty safe in my belief again, and it has been a gradual process with moments and happenings such as this over a long period of time.

The Ill-tempered Klavier is a beautiful and unique album. Ben Shive's songwriting is brilliant, and his lyrics are both captivating and thoughtful at the same time. It is a really great CD.


1. Relient K - The Bird and the Bee Sides/The Tennis EP

Five Star Songs:

The Lining is Silver
Up and Up (acoustic)
Who I Am Hates Who I've Been (acoustic)

When I was thinking about making this list, I decided what would be the #1 album before I ranked any others. Relient K's new release was basically a clear choice. It has (I think) 26 songs total, and not just songs that are alright but songs that are REALLY GOOD. I could listen to this CD all the way through and not get tired of it because truly it is good all the way through, even though it is more than an hour long in its entirety. And it's more than just a bunch of good punk songs. There are some acoustic versions of songs, some new songs that are acoustic or piano-driven. "Curl Up and Die" is definitely not your typical Relient K song, but it is one of my favorites on the whole album. Over the months that I have actually owned the CD, it has been one of those go-to albums that I could listen to no matter what I was doing or what kind of mood I was in. It's good for singing along to, listening to, playing with friends, etc. It is truly a great all-around release and I've had a lot of fun listening to it.

Favorite Albums of 2008 (6 through 10)

Not that you care, but for the few people out there who might (and in the interest of keeping with tradition), I've made my list of my favorite albums for 2008. While I am no elitist when it comes to musical taste, I did go through a friend's iPod today and was horrified at poor musical choices he has apparently made in his life. Whether you consider it good or bad, I love the music I listen to. I won't force it on you, but I highly recommend it.

This year I included the songs that I gave a five star rating on my iPod. iTunes allows you the opportunity to rate your songs, which is one of my favorite features. 5 stars is the best and 1 star is the worst. I included the 5 star songs to show my favorite songs of 2008.

So that being said, on to the list:

10. Sandra McCracken - Red Balloon

Sandra actually had two albums released this year. One was the Ampersand EP which she co-produced with her husband Derek Webb. It released on Valentine's Day, which was appropriate since it was a CD full of love songs. If not for having only 6 songs, it probably would have made the list as well. Red Balloon, however, is much more experimental and original than her other releases. Just like all her albums, it took me a while to actually start enjoying the songs. But every now and then I would find that one of her songs was stuck in my head and I didn't realize it. While Red Balloon has some good songs on it, there isn't that one song that I have to listen to over and over - that "Portadown Station," that song that floors me every time I hear it. Still, the album is very strong and Sandra has proven again that she is one great songwriter.

9. Norma Jean - The Anti-mother

The Anti-mother is the first Norma Jean release since Bless The Martyr, Kiss The Child that is both brutal but at the same time equally appealing to listen to. This album has a raw, chaotic sound that I haven't heard anywhere else or from any other band, though my days of listening to hardcore music are mostly behind me. I have had a lot of fun listening to this CD, though. Some days I just pop it in to my CD player in my truck and turn it up way too loud. Of course, I can only take that for about 4 or 5 songs. I'm getting old I guess, but it still is a lot of fun.

I really like where Norma Jean is going with their sound. It seems like the songwriting is just plain better. It's not so focused on being too technical or too heavy. It's just good, and I like it, and that's all that matters.

8. Matthew Perryman Jones - Swallow the Sea

Five Star Songs:

Save You

I have never found anybody who could write songs that were simple and catchy, yet sounded original and deep at the same time. MP Jones writes choruses that are so easy to get into that I find myself singing along sometimes without even knowing it.

7. Andrew Osenga - Letters to the Editor: Volume 2

Five Star Songs:

Good Things Always Are
Let Us Know You

An EP inspired by ideas from fans, Letters 2 is simply vocals and electric guitar, except for one track where Andy O let fans record themselves singing and/or playing a part in the song and then send it to him to add. This album is a great tribute to just how talented Andy O is and how he can write good songs as well as execute them with only guitar and vocals. When I posted my iPod Top 25 Most Listened To Songs, tracks from this CD were all over it. Letters 2 would probably be the soundtrack to my fall semester of college. I listened to it at school more than anything else, and in a year or two when I stumble upon it again, I know that the songs are going to remind me of the last few months.

6. Copeland - You Are My Sunshine

Five Star Songs:

The Grey Man

I really like listening to Copeland's "You Are My Sunshine." I don't think I can even explain why, I just like it. The Grey Man is one of my favorite songs to listen to, and has been for a while. Copeland's sound is just so original and unique, it has been a breath of fresh air in a year when not a lot of good original music has come out.

"I don't know" is such a bad thing to say these days

Life is such a great mystery. I think I’m figuring that out the hard way. The other night I got home pretty late and when I got out of my truck I looked up at the stars and was amazed at how bright and clear they were in the night sky. I was so caught up in the sight that I walked around to the other side of my house where there are no lights to get a better view. It was incredible. I live out in the country, but even where I live there is a lot of light. In spite of all the lights, a remarkable amount of stars were visible. I could see the big dipper and Orion, two of the three constellations I can correctly identify (the other being the little dipper).

Even from what little bit I know about stars, I was still filled with a strong sense of awe at their sight. Stars are huge, bright, burning balls of gas just like our sun. The stars we see are part of our galaxy, the Milky Way. They are so far away from us that it takes like millions of years for their light to reach our humble planet. I tried to put it in perspective from what the ancients knew. They believed the earth was flat, that it was in the center of the universe, and that the sun revolved around it. From their perspective this was the right way of looking at things. Even though they were wrong, it is clearly easy to see how they made that mistake.

Still, now that we know that we aren’t in the center of the universe and all that, it doesn’t take away the mystic and awe-inspiring quality from looking at the stars. They are a mystery to us, and even though we have a better understanding of what’s out there, we still are grasping onto crumbs of the actual truth of what it is.

I think that in approaching life people have to embrace that mysterious quality of it - that “we don’t know” factor. It’s great that so many people are out there researching, thinking, and trying to unlock some of the mysteries that the universe holds. In the last century people have made tremendous gains from an increased amount of knowledge and understanding. We know more about the world we live in, and greater technology has provided us with things like better medical treatment and automobiles.

But we are becoming a people who only accept the concrete, the explainable, and the provable. The mystical understanding of the world that the ancients had is starting to fade out because we think we really know the world we live in. We know what stars are and how they got there. We have an idea of how our world got to be the way it is. And because of what we do know, sometimes we use that to keep us from believing that life may be something more than atoms held together by gravity.

In high school and college I have learned a lot about old scientists, philosophers, and thinkers who formulated certain theories about all sorts of things. And what they do in these theories is try to offer an explanation of how the world works. Lots of times these theories deal with ideas that can’t actually be proven, but are generally accepted based on the evidence that we have. That’s how their theories end up in our textbooks. I noticed that when approaching a subject, a text won’t just give you one guy’s theory and say “this is the way it is.” No, they usually give you multiple different theories that all sort of explain things but not quite. It’s like these brilliant thinkers were able to offer an explanation that sheds some light on a problem, but doesn’t exactly nail it.

I don’t think that people, no matter how brilliant, can use what we know to offer some universal theory that encompasses all of life and the universe. We just don’t know enough, and we don’t have all the information. With what information we have, we have to break it down into formulas, rules, and laws that make it simpler so we can understand it. We are only a small group of organisms who understand only what we can observe and try to apply it to the whole of existence. We are trying to make something way too small encompass something that is way too big.

It would be kind of like being a person who lives in a primitive African village. You never wander more than 15 miles from your home. Your people hunt, fish, and grow food. Your clothes are made from animal skins. You don’t have TV, the internet, transportation, or any other convenience of modern life. Now imagine being dropped in the middle of New York City. Upon returning to your small, primitive tribe, how do you think you would be able to describe New York City to your villagers? You would have been exposed to new sights, people, and ways of life that you have never experienced before and probably didn’t have a word in your vocabulary to identify. How would you be able to understand New York City, much less communicate it to your fellow villagers?

Chances are you would probably use metaphors. That skyscraper was like a mountain, or that plane was like a bird. You might even invent other ideas by reasoning that because the people wore extravagant clothing they were gods. Either way, the fact remains that with your primitive, tribal understanding you wouldn’t be able to come up with anything that sufficiently explains New York City. In fact, you may have to just tell other tribes people “You have to experience it for yourself.”

This is why science can be a flawed way of looking at the world. We have to see things more holistically. It is useful and it does teach us important things, but science can’t encompass all of it. Any person who reduces life experience to what some scientists discovered in a laboratory is throwing away a lot of important information.

With religion, I think people also make the same mistake of trying to offer too much explanation on things that we really don’t understand. We have a really hard time even using the Bible to explain the intricacies of God, but we still try to. How does an all-loving God send people to hell? Why does the God of the Old Testament seem different from Jesus? What is required of a person to be saved? How can Jesus be a man and God at the same time? I could go on all day long. Do we ever get any crystal clear answers to these questions? Aren’t churches and denominations divided over some of these very issues?

We are using our own human logic and language to try to understand God, and it’s not working. In fact, it seems counterproductive. The Bible does more pointing to God than it does explaining Him. That’s why it includes so many metaphors, stories, and poems. Jesus told parables, his miracles were called signs. They were pointing to something bigger, something Jesus liked to call a “kingdom.” But they weren’t the kingdom themselves. They were just there to show the way.

I’m a person who is hardly ever sure of anything. I have found that when I try to act like I know a lot and throw my opinions in other people’s faces I sometimes look like a complete idiot. Sometimes I would be better off saying I don’t know. I think a lot of people should come to this point. The jury is not in on a lot of things, and I think that rather than trying to explain away everybody’s questions when sometimes it can be futile, I would rather let my life point to what I believe in. And I use that word believe because I don’t know. I simply believe. And what I believe in will never fit inside my head, and I can’t write it down on paper. So all I’m going to do is simply live and point.

A Pre-New Year's Ramble

I'm really glad that it's one of my favorite times of the year. Today I just finished putting lights up on my house and my thighs are very, very sore from climbing on the roof. My goal is to make the Christmas season as "Christmas-y" as possible. I'm trying to go the extra mile this year by putting up lights, getting people gifts, and trying as hard as I can to be kind and cheerful to people.

But to be honest, what I have been waiting a really long time for is not Christmas. I love Christmas and I'm going to enjoy every minute of the season for the next few weeks, but for at least 2 months now I've been thinking about New Year's.

I like the end of the year because it is a good time for a person to reflect on the year, what they did and didn't do, what they were or were not able to accomplish. I really like songs about new year's such as Death Cab's "New Year" and Five Iron Frenzy's "New Year's Eve" because they are reflective. My favorite episode of the old Nickelodeon show "Pete and Pete" was the episode about new year's. It's good for me because I have this habit of getting way too caught up in the moment. While that's good in some ways, it has been bad for me because I tend to lose sight of long-term goals and directions. I'm that guy who puts the short-term goal of taking a nap over the long-term goal of studying to get an A on a test. New Year's is a chance for me to step back and try to remember what kind of person I'm trying to be and where I'm trying to go with my life.

Last year my only new year's resolution was to not be a douche bag. Did I achieve that goal? You tell me. I think that has always been kind of an unsaid goal of mine - don't be a douche bag. Sometimes I can be. I try not to. It's very hard.

This year instead of having one resolution that is basically a given at any time in my life, I have come up with a laundry list of things I would like to do better. And that list goes from things like "play music more and videogames less" to "be more optimistic" to "stop sleeping so much." I really am going to have a lot to live up to in 2009. Changing is so hard sometimes.

But there is one specific thing that I am really going to have to key in on next year. One of my biggest struggles and hardest things for me to do in life is to care about anybody other than myself. If there is one thing I really hate about me, it's that. I can be so selfish and self-centered sometimes, completely unaware of the people around me without even realizing it. I'm sure I've hurt a lot of people at one time or another by acting like this, and just know that I hate it.

But I'm going to try to do better. This past year I put a lot of emphasis on trying to learn and understand life a little better, and if I've learned anything it's that I truly don't understand anything. The mistake I think that I made is one that I think a lot of people, and a lot of Christians, make at times. It's like I tried so hard to be right that I forgot that I'm supposed to be good. I don't think Jesus came to earth and died so that he could make us all right. I think he died so we could know him, and that along the way he taught us how to be good people.

I'm going to still try to learn and do well, but more than that I'm going to try to do good. I may misunderstand God, life, culture, politics, and religion sometimes, but hopefully I will learn how to be kind to my neighbor. Maybe I can learn how to forgive my enemies, give to the poor, and take up my cross. Maybe I can learn how to lose my life instead of spending every single day trying to find it.

iTunes 25 Most Played

So today I just discovered that there is a playlist in iTunes that records the Top 25 Most Played Songs on my iPod. Since I have owned my iPod for almost a year, it has been pretty interesting to see what songs got the most playtime. Just for fun, I thought I would post my list. I was really surprised by some of the stuff that's on here. Some of you probably will be too.

1. Andrew Osenga - Good Things Always Are - 19 plays
2. Andrew Osenga - Let Us Know You - 17 plays
3. Thrice - Broken Lungs - 17 plays
4. Counting Crows - Monkey - 15 plays
5. Andrew Osenga - Staring Out A Window - 14 plays
6. Andrew Osenga - House of Mirrors - 14 plays
7. Counting Crows - A Long December - 14 plays
8. U2 - Sunday Bloody Sunday - 14 plays
9. Andrew Osenga - Four Horses - 13 plays
10. Andy Gullahorn - Original Cliche - 13 plays
11. Brand New - Not The Sun - 13 plays
12. Five Iron Frenzy - Give Me Back My Sandwich - 13 plays
13. Brand New - Jesus - 12 plays
14. Jimmy Eat World - Just Tonight - 12 plays
15. Caedmon's Call - Expectations - 11 plays
16. The Killers - Mr. Brightside - 11 plays
17. Secret Country - Andrew Osenga - 10 plays
18. Andrew Osenga - Marilyn - 10 plays
19. Andy Gullahorn - Desperate Man - 10 plays
20. Andy Gullahorn - That Guy - 10 plays
21. Brand New - Degausser - 10 plays
22. Caedmon's Call - Sacred - 10 plays
23. Caedmon's Call - There is a Reason - 10 plays
24. Counting Crows - 1492 - 10 plays
25. David Crowder Band - (Repeat/Return) - 10 plays

I already knew I listened to Andy O a whole lot, but I was a little surprised to see FIF's "Give Me Back My Sandwich" at number 12. I honestly did not see that one coming.

Anyways, that's what I listen to the most. Anybody else want to share their iTunes Top 25 Most Played?