Food for the Soul

Bruce Benedict of Cardiphonia is at it again, this time with a flash mob of 30 songwriters gathering around the theme of the Lord’s Supper. The album is called “Songs for the Supper,” and it includes my new song, “O Lamb of God.”

I had planned to write a half dozen short communions songs in a Taizé-meets-praise-band style, but with a due date for a Psalm CD looming overhead, it just wasn’t possible. So I focused on finishing just this one song for Bruce’s project. This song is a setting of the traditional liturgical text, Agnus Dei. It is almost entirely call-and-response, which makes it easy to learn as the people can simply repeat the leader line by rote. In the case of this recording, I sing the leader’s role and Laura de Jong sang the people’s role. Thank you , Laura! It was nice to spend mixing time on someone else’s voice, because frankly, I’m sick of my own voice.

Though the song could go any number of directions stylistically, this version is pretty trippy, with lots of phasing and guitar noodling. Add a bit of backward piano and you simply can’t go wrong. Can you?

Both the MP3 and the PDF leadsheet are at the album’s Cardiphonia Bandcamp site. I’ll make a piano version available soon. The whole album is a free download, but you can donate a little something to stophungernow as your way of thanking all the people who took part. It’s liturgically appropriate to connect the Table with feeding the hungry (that’s how the New Testament church rolled), and it’s also a nice gesture at a time of the year when most of us sit down to overeat.