29 Songs: A Preface.

I turned twenty-nine two days ago. Neither congratulations nor sympathetic awws are in order; I only mention it because it was a catalyst for what I’m going to be posting next, over the space of probably the entire year.

I’ve talked a lot about music on this blog, and shown myself (I hope) to at least have a grasp on the many different styles, histories, and cultures of popular music. One kind of music which I haven’t really mentioned is the kind I grew up listening to, and which still makes up a slight part of my listening habits: Christian pop. This can be defined as non-worship music sold in specialty Christian stores (or through specialty Christian catalogues), music which takes the form of current (or past) pop music, but whose lyrics tend to deal exclusively with spiritual concerns, usually in a very overt, unsubtle manner.

What I’m going to attempt to do over the next year is to present autobiographical essays stemming somehow off of particular Christian-pop songs, one for every year I’ve been alive. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m going to detail each year of my life — and it certainly won’t be in chronological order — but 29 is a nice random number, and enough of a challenge to keep things interesting.

These essays are going to be fairly long; the first one is five pages in Microsoft Word. (Oddly-formatted pages, but still.) They are also probably going to be fairly revealing; it’s the nature of the form, and while I said I wouldn’t talk about my personal life on the blog, they’re not really blog posts; they’re essays posted to the blog, and which I hope someday to collect in a more permanent form. To that end, they’re also going to be more properly-written and better-edited than anything I’ve posted so far. I hope.

Unlike with my 60s and 70s song projects, these won’t be the only things I’ll be posting to the blog. Blogger’s updated version allows for groupings of posts by label, and I’ll trust to that form of collation for anyone who wants to read only the essays — or, just as likely, anything but.

Finally, although the essays are about Christian songs, I’m not going to be watching my language or keeping unchristian ideas out of my prose; part of the point is to look at my past with the rather jaundiced eye of my present. And there’ll be lots of references to the wider world of music and culture; this is written for a non-Christian audience, though Christians (i.e. everyone I know in real life) are of course welcome to read it.

And I think that’s all I need to say about that.