In honor of the Matthew Smith/Indelible Grace concert this September, here is a post Philip did for his blog in 2012:
Twelve years ago the loose confederation of Nashville musicians known as Indelible Grace were an anomaly in Christian music. They weren’t out to become famous for sounding like kosher editions of secular bands and they weren’t out to create music for churches that furthered the trend of tunefully sentimentalizing faith. They were out to make music the way jazz musicians once did: by taking a particular canon of songs (in their case, seventeenth and eighteenth century hymns) and making it their own. These days, when everything old is new again, and even the most conventional of suburban housewives find themselves busy growing backyard tomatoes and making homemade penicillin in petri dishes above the kitchen sink, a coterie of reformed Presbyterians setting old hymns to riffs on a pedal-steel guitar might not seem terribly strange, but believe me, when they started out, it was.
A couple of weeks back I had the opportunity to sit down after a show with Matthew Smith, a founding member of Indelible Grace and solo artist in his own right. We talked between mouthfuls of Brunswick stew about the role of music in churches, the creative force that is Nashville, and what the centuries-old hymn texts he adapts for his own music mean to him. It was a scattered kind of interview, with frequent trips to the kitchen for more beer and occasional parenthetical asides with Kenny Hutson, the guitarist, pedal-steel player, and compendium of country music history currently touring with him. Matthew Smith speaks in thoughtful, measured sentences. Kenny Hutson once held Otis Redding’s dentures. It’s good to have both sorts in a band.
Christians make for awkward rock stars. They’re humble, unassuming, hang out after shows to talk to you even if you aren’t all that pretty, and usually don’t smell like cigarettes. In this tradition, Matthew Smith schedules his shows early in the evening so kids can come, but upends it by slapping their precious little souls with ninety minutes of seventeenth century hymns set to country-tinged folk-rock. Its not unusual for a musician to cast an occasional line into their mother’s hymn book to get themselves through a spell of writer’s block, but those hooks usually bring up pretty small fish: “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Amazing Grace,” “Blessed Assurance.” Not exactly the stuff to make a sinner squirm in his pew. But when Matthew Smith casts in his line, he pulls up the big stuff: songs of sin, sickness, blood, death, hell, heaven, suffering, pain, crucifixion, forgiveness, propitiation, redemption. Material that not even Johnny Cash dared to touch.
There is more to this, though, than Indelible Grace simply having discovered a way of distinguishing themselves in a crowded musical marketplace or a more-historical-than-thou posture to shove in people’s faces. These texts are rich poetry and continue to speak. Matthew Smith isn’t necessarily motivated by a conviction that what people need to hear is knotty theological doctrines set to rhyming couplets (though this writer might have such a conviction). He puts it like this: “I just want to sing songs about the gospel that help me.”
In our conversation, Matthew expressed concern that the lyrics to one of the most popular songs on his new album is written in the past tense. It’s not that he doesn’t like his song “Redeemed, Restored, Forgiven” (he did, after all, compose the melody and arrangement for it), it’s just that he’s troubled with the possibility that its popularity with churches stems from some latent prejudice these congregations have in favor of past, rather than present, suffering. Singing about the Israelites in the desert doesn’t take a lot out of you, emotionally, and doesn’t help develop a great deal of empathy for your neighbor. He wants to make suffering acceptable in churches and feels that too many years of singing “and now I’m happy all the day” has truncated our emotional repertoire.
Hymns—like certain kinds of primitive blues or country music—both attract and repel modern listeners. In the music’s sorrow and spitting-out of pain and suffering, we feel our common humanity and, beyond that, our souls somehow essentialized. But we also feel our historical isolation and our material privilege. We are cut off from the particulars of the world that those songs embody. We do not fear the boll weevil. Jealous husbands rarely resort to poison anymore. Rousing death-bed speeches are discouraged by hospital orderlies. We are orphans of history, cut adrift from our ancestors on reefs of technology and affluence. We want to own the pain that traditional music expresses, but feel disingenuous about it. We are not, after all, sharecroppers. Not even the sons of sharecroppers. But we go on listening to Son House and Uncle Dave Macon, and singing the hymns of Isaac Watts because we intuitively sense that, external optics aside, the rich material life we live is not really so different from a sharecropper’s once we get down to the bones. Our hearts are the same, we think, and so, too, our fears, our depression, anxiety, heartbreak. In the end, Son House didn’t sing the way he did because he suffered more than anyone else, but because he expressed it better.
In the show that prefaced our conversation and during our late-dinner talk, Matthew seemed attuned to both the kind of suffering we experience first-hand (our own sickness, our own financial ruination), and the suffering we experience from a distance, when we read the newspaper or listen to the news. He sees the biblical story of Lazarus as illuminating both kinds. Sometimes, in our suffering, we are Lazarus: suffering, sick, dying, dead. But more often, we stand beside the sick bed, outside the tomb. In the Lazarus story, we stand where Christ does. But—and this is what Matthew Smith latches hold of—even in our position as observers of brokenness, cruelty, and injustice, we, like Jesus, still suffer. Jesus still weeps. We suffer actually and we suffer sympathetically. There is a place for both. Any man’s death diminishes me. Laid alongside his CDs on the merchandise tables in the lobby are child-sponsorship brochures that appropriately underline his belief that we both deserve to own the pain of a universal brokenness, yet are privileged materially enough to feel a holy pressure to give sacrificially to diminish it in some small way.
Those are the heavy moments of the night. We do some laughing, too, trade barbs about The Louvin Brothers, joke about Kenny’s days backing the enigmatic Bill Mallonee in his band Vigilantes Of Love, and return to identifying what truly makes Nashville a unique place to make music.
He calls it “song city,” not just “music city,” much less “country music city.” It’s a place, Matthew says, where the song is king. You can be anybody from anywhere, and if you can write a song, the city will make room for you. Hymn texts are a good fit in a place like that, and not just because of Tennessee’s gospel music past. They come to us both as strange and foreign, ready to be re-imagined and reused for new audiences, new worshipers; yet they come to those new audiences bearing the seal of history’s approval. They survived. And if they survived, they deserve to be used again. When originally written, those texts assumed a Christian’s familiarity with suffering; this time around, they teach a Christian how to suffer in the first place.
Philip
(Matthew’s music can be enjoyed here)
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