�鶹��

Available for over a year

I wonder what your favourite song is, and where it takes you? I ask, because yesterday’s papers reported a study of more than 150,000 songs which found that “the sunny outlook of early pop has given way to a [more] forlorn landscape”. The study analysed the lyrics of the top 100 selling songs in the US for each year from 1965, as well as global ‘hits’, and noticed a consistent decline in the use of positive words such as “love” and “joy” and a consistent rise in words such as “hate” and “pain”. It’s an interesting observation, and reflects a number of things, I’m sure, from a shift in tactics by record companies who once thought happy songs sold more singles, to a more honest cultural expression of human experience. This doesn’t have to mean it’s all depressing, though. Personally, I’m grateful for Radiohead, a band who expressed so evocatively something of our culture’s heart in the 1990s: “a heart that’s full up like land-fill”, as one of their lyrics went. Some complained their music was depressing at the time, but as their singer Thom Yorke argued, music’s depressing when it’s poor quality, not when it plumbs our depths. I’m grateful, too, that the Bible contains songs of lament in the psalms, as well as uplifting praise. When a classmate's wife died tragically at the time we were all studying theology, it wasn’t to the more obvious passages we turned like Job’s comforters, but to Psalm 88: “My eyes are dim with grief,” writes the psalmist, whose lyrics met us there, within that moment. Songs meet us, and they move us. On the far side of human experience lies a second sense of innocence, and sometimes, only a song can take us there. I was listening to a top-10 of Oscar-winning music yesterday - and was reminded of how ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ has that indefinable capacity to transport us. And while our best-loved hymns and spiritual songs rarely top the charts like Judy Garland did, they can provide not just the soundtrack to services, but passage, somewhere, too. I held the hand of a dying friend, recently, and she was not a little unafraid. I asked her if I could play, from my phone, the hymn ‘O Love That Will Not Let Me Go’. Another song about a rainbow. She opened her eyes wide, smiled, and whispered, “My favourite hymn!” as she began to mouth quietly along with every single word. “I trace the rainbow through the rain,” she sang. “The promise is not vain/That morn shall tearless be.” In words of sorrow, in tune with hope, she made her way with my now favourite song.