As a lover of music, and increasingly over my years, a lover of lyrics, there are few artists who I respect completely for the art that they pour into their songs.
I enjoy many different forms of music for various reasons. The bravado and confidence of rappers is to be envied. Folk singers often express a down-to-earth perspective that is honestly refreshing in today’s cultural atmosphere. Christian musicians can express the glories of the divine in ways that enrapture congregants during worship services. All good music has something worthwhile to contribute to the human experience, all in different ways.
Most serious lyricists of any genre can communicate something significant and fairly obvious to their listeners, who in turn can take away fragments from the songs and internalize them and make them their own. Lyrics can change us. Lyrics stick with us. Each musician affects us differently; some more, some less, some profoundly.
What impresses me most when it comes to lyrics is when a writer can imbue her songs with amazing depths of meaning and a subtlety that invites the listener in closer. It is one thing to say something clearly. It is another thing to say it in such a way that your audience feels like an active participant in discovering the meaning of the words. The best novels are written to disguise the road down which the author leads you, and the best songs only reveal their meaning in the winding paths of careful, subtle expression. The writer ought not plop the meaning right in front of you. He shouldn’t just say what he means. Instead, he should slowly reveal what he means.
D. Doug Mains of Doug Mains & the City Folk is the type of lyricist who we should all respect for his artistic ability to impregnate his words with more than we notice on first or even second blush. Christian artists especially often seem to lack the kind of grace of expression that whispers incredible significance in Mains’ unassuming songs. The world needs more Christian lyricists like Mains.
Today I would like to consider two songs from The City Folk’s album, These Broken Members, available for download by following the hyperlink. I strongly suggest you buy yourself this album, as well as The Mountain’s King, both of which I have listened to countless times over the past year.
The two songs we will discuss are ‘I Was A Gardener’ and ‘Stones Awakening’, treated in order below.
‘I Was A Gardener’, like the other songs and cover of the album, has a certain gritty quality. This should come as no surprise to us; any song about a gardener should have some aspect of that earthly occupation.
The song begins with the speaker telling us that he is digging a hole, trying to unearth something, but he doesn’t really know what. We come to find throughout the song that the hard work of gardening is contrasted against the hapless luck of stumbling over grace. The speaker, though he is actively working in his garden, hopes to find and grow things far grander than he can reasonably expect to create himself. If he should find such a thing, he’d be happy to share its glories with the world, shouting it from the mountaintops. But how can a simple gardener presume to gain such blessing, especially through his own efforts? Our gardener knows he’s being silly, but his hope is indomitable. He’s rooted in the ground but dreams of ascending heavenly heights.
Further, this man’s occupation as a gardener reveals something about him. Though he wishes to sustain life through his own efforts, his restless hands betray his inability to fend for himself. His fear and pride hold him back from admitting that he keeps whispering prayers for provision through the deep, panting exhaustion of his self-reliant labors. He expects that he will be able to take care of himself and hopes for far more, but he finds that he ultimately has little control. The gardener’s work, his life, are only disappointment.
This dreamer has a vision of his person that is noble, but unrealistic. He sees himself as a provider, relient on no one else. But the truth is that he is afraid of his inability and the darkness around him. He shivers at his shortcomings and the dirt that gets under his skin and stains his soul. This gardener is not at all what he thought he could and thinks he should be. He’d love to whitewash his earth-stained and incriminating hands.
He thinks of himself as this grand personality, but admits that his scope of influence is far narrower than anything praiseworthy; it’s petty, even. Given the chance to receive something truly glorious, maybe he would prefer his own lackluster pride. He’s too self-interested to allow something to come from outside of him and make him something more. Necessarily, he would have to share his success with that something else, which is a distasteful proposition. Ironically, his pride is what is holding him back from glory and honor.
Still, he does understand that he is broken. He doesn’t want to remain in his gringy, self-reliant poverty. He knows he isn’t brave enough to do what it takes to be great. He knows he isn’t righteous enough to earn real glory.
So instead, he holds onto this horribly slippery notion of faith, faith that somehow he can do what he knows he can’t and be transformed into the man he knows he isn’t.
He knows he’s failed, but still, there is more to the story, right? There is more behind the door through which he’s only peaked. He knows there has to be more. He knows that so long as he relies on himself, he only has access to something shoddy and hardly even good. He knows that so long as he limits himself to his little garden, he’ll flounder under his own grime and ineffective labor. He knows he’s dirty, and thus, he knows he is only dirty compared to something objectively clean.
Surely, there must be more. If this is it, we’ll never be more than gardeners wallowing in our own pitiful filth. So long as we keep trying on our own, refusing help from without, we will be bound to the dirt. This is our earthly reality. This is the plight of a gardener. This is an uncomfortably honest depiction of our imperfect faith in this imperfect world.
‘I Was A Gardener’ admits that we earthbound and dirt-covered mortals have only read one page of a great book, but we have been told that there is a far grander plot that we’ve been destined for. The dry soil and rough rock that compose our lives here below are just waiting to be cleaned and glorified to our true purpose. That’s the real story of our lives.
Bricks and stones and dirt root us in our earthly realities. Our very worth is rooted in the ground though we aspire toward and know we were meant for higher things. Somehow our brokenness is an indication that we have the possibility and hope of being mended. We are dry and cracked and broken, but a heavenly grace will fall like rain and revive our withered purpose. Our father is condescending to save us and pull us from the dirt and to proclaim to the world that we were his from the beginning.
Our world, our existence is dark, and in the darkness live our profoundest fears. But our vision of the dawn, a vision hardly more than a forlorn hope in the current depths of night, gives us assurance of a light and felicity that is coming to bless us and call us up out of the ground.
We are dead. We are dirt. We are in utter darkness. But we are being nurtured up out of our graves. The victory is already won and we are assured a revitalized life, but still the dirt of hell lingers in the depths of our souls which cannot escape the grave quite yet. We live in an enigma of existence. Our feet are held down in the grave and our hands reach up toward glory. We’ve been stripped of all else, and we stand in naked faith.
Like stones we have been dead and cold and lying in the dirt. But Mains invokes Micah 7:8 by reminding our enemy that he has little reason to relish over our earthly state. We will not remain as we are. Even now, we are awakening, and with the rocks we will cry out and rise to the glory for which we were created. A greater gardener has been growing hope, love, faith, and righteousness in us all along. Soon we will be washed of our dirt. Soon we ourselves will be those rocky mountainous heights from which we will all sing the greatest wisdom and glory reverberating in the skies.
For now, creation groans, but the groaning is already a sort of song. Mains, in his honest, earthy, homegrown voice echoes that imperfect song, joining the rest of creation in the highest reverence for our good King who has been preparing a mansion home for us from the beginning. By singing along, we can vitalize that living hope which will in time turn us into kings and queens of our own right.
With a little knowledge of scripture and an appreciation for the subtlety of expression found in the lyrics of Doug Mains & the City Folk, we begin to see what a gritty and honest faith looks like. Mains’ faith is far from perfect, but let’s be frank, so is ours. Isn’t it refreshing to sing along with a song that honestly cries out to God, praising and lamenting and glorifying and pleading and proclaiming and hurting and…