Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, reviewed some of his favorite Christian and religious albums for emusic, on the occasion of the release of his new album, on which every song is inspired in some part by a scripture verse. Here, he recommends “The World as Best I Remember It, Vol. 1″ as the album to check out from Rich Mullins:
It’s hard not to go with Songs, the first greatest hits collection — it’s more solid end-to-end. But the title of this one comes from “Jacob & Two Women”, which is one of the best Christian songs of the past thirty or forty years by anybody and an incredible song by any measure. (My favorite version of it is Carolyn Arends’s graceful reading on Awesome God: A Tribute to Rich Mullins.) It’s a song that shows Mullins at his best: witty; clever; open; doubting; playful; faithful; wistful; in touch with the sorrow & the loss & the hope & the wonder that lies underneath all spiritual seeking, and all housed in one flesh-and-blood, wholly unpretentious person. There’s also “Step by Step” and “Calling Out Your Name” here — both clear evidence of how truly great a songwriter Mullins was and how much the music world lost when he died.
Amen. Amen. See the full list here.
Over on Tiny Mix Tapes, Darnielle is given the full interview treatment, and this question is illuminating, heartbreaking, and worth swallowing any immediate reaction you have to consider what he says for awhile.
Let’s turn to the album. Religion always seemed hinted at in your music, but it’s never been so blatant as it is on The Life of the World to Come, even without the song titles. Is there any reason for this explicitness? Religion is treated here in a similar way as subjects like love or family on past albums.
For sure: religion’s explicitly personal for me, for a bunch of reasons. My early school experiences were in Catholic school, and some of the early Sisters who taught me were real heroes to me: they nurtured me, treated me with love and respect; they meant so much to me. Experiences like those, at a parochial school, can really cement one’s ideas about God and bind them with one’s ideas about self-worth and feeling welcomed and at-home.
And then my parents divorced, and church became something we only did when we (my sister and I) would go to stay with my dad, and he wasn’t Catholic any more at that point, so I’d get exposed to the weird world of protestant services, which had their own warmth for me. And then I renounced God and raged against religion for years, as I still will, often, given all the damage that Christians (not fake Christians, that’s a cop out: real ones do all kinds of harm) will do. But down in my gut, I want to believe so badly. I can’t stand the idea that Christian virtues are mainly humans celebrating their indwelling natural goodness; it’s probably true, but I want transcendence. That’s personal. And some of my friends are dead, but I feel that what they left in this world persists: and that’s spiritual. So, yes. Spiritual stuff, way personal for me.