On the Craft of Songwriting and Authentic Pop (with Aryn Michelle)

This is episode 77 of the Renew the Arts Podcast, On the Craft of Songwriting and Authentic Pop, with Aryn Michelle. Welcome to the Renew the Arts Podcast, where we discuss the role of art and creativity in the church and in the world. I’m your host, Michael Menkoff.

Our motto at Renew the Arts is liberate Christian creativity. Our mission is to cultivate Christian communities by inspiring art partnership and supporting artists. If you’d like to join our community of monthly donors and contribute to this podcast, please visit renewthearts.org/donate.

If you want to join the Porchlight Network and begin your journey as a partner in the arts, go to app.porchlight.art and sign up as a host or a tender. I’m here today with Aryn Michelle Calhoun, aka Aryn Michelle, a songwriter, recording artist, music professor, worship leader, and mother of four from Dallas, Texas. She recently published a songwriting textbook called Play Shape Create, and in July, I think, or June, I can’t tell because there’s two different things in your Spotify.

But anyway, in one of those months, she’s going very soon, she’s going to release, I think her ninth studio album, Bloodline, which is a thematic concept album written from the creatively imagined viewpoints of different women in the genealogy of Jesus. So we have a lot to talk about, and it might be somewhat of a long interview. If you’re into it, I’m into it.

Aryn, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here. Yeah, June was our aggressive goal, and July, the end of July is when it’s coming out because that was the realized goal.

We ended up, actually, I was with Jonathan today who’s producing the project. We went back to the first song that we started with. We listened to all of them when they were done and said, oh, that first one, we hadn’t really caught the vision of what the whole album was going to be.

So we had to open the first one back up and pull it towards everything else. Oh yeah. So the first one ended up pulling a little too country Americana, and the rest of the project just went somewhere else.

So we are both very committed to an album being a holistic work of art.

Yeah.

And so we’re like, well, we got to finish where we started and go back and rein that one in. So end of July, that’ll be coming out.

So exciting. And the singles that you’ve released so far, is that the album or are there singles or songs that are not released yet, that are going to be released with the album?

There’s one left. The Ruth song will come out with the album, and then this new version of Inside Out will come out with the album.

All right. Awesome. I am very excited about that.

I’ve been listening through those singles, and I’m actually not, full disclosure, a huge fan of pop music. That’s okay. And maybe we can talk, we are going to talk about this.

I plan on it. But my wife and kids have slowly drawn me over to it, and my wife’s also a fantastic dancer, and I’m a drummer, but I’m a terrible dancer. Like I feel so awkward.

I’m like I can move my limbs in rhythm, but I just end up feeling weary within a couple of like, do I do anything else? Am I just supposed to do this forever? Like this feels like torture.

Why do people do this to themselves? And my wife, on the other hand, just loves, loves, loves dancing. And I realized that you mentioned dancing a few times in your songwriting textbook that we’re about to talk about.

And I actually do think that somewhat of the enjoyment of pop and the enjoyment of dancing is related and in embodiment. I think that that I’m not a, I have not been an embodied individual to a large extent. At various points of my life, I’ve been kind of a brain on a stick.

So I think that this is one of the areas of growth that pop music, dancing and general incarnational things that have more to do centered with that are gonna be helpful to me. But we’re gonna get into all of that here in a minute. So may I just begin to talk about your book?

I loved your book. I thought it was fantastic. I’m only a metal in songwriting, but I felt really, really inspired by it.

And also I know that it’s just gonna be a fantastic resource for so many of the songwriters. I know I talked to dozens and dozens of songwriters every year. I’m in the process of talking with and working with tons of different artists and almost everything you said.

I was like, man, this is such a comprehensive and so useful theoretical basis for all of these various different elements of songwriting. But then also to be filled with so many creative experiments and prompts and exercises that they could run through, I was just thoroughly, deeply impressed. So thank you.

I just wanted to say that first off, but thank you so much.

No, I appreciate all the kind words and encouragement. I think it makes it feel worth it. It took me about 18 months to write and years of experience teaching classes.

And the, I just foolishness that was like, I can write a book, no problem. But yeah, it makes it feel worth it to know that people are getting something out of it. So I really appreciate you recommending it to other people.

Yeah, definitely. I’m going to be, I am currently on the podcast recommending it to any songwriters and even non-songwriters if you’re just interested. I think we’ve talked about this a little bit before, but I think learning a little bit about the craft of songwriting is useful for anybody who listens to music.

It helps to deepen your appreciation. Even if you wouldn’t be able to do it exactly like the greats that you think are the greats, you might actually be able to. You don’t actually know unless you try.

So that’s one reason to try, but I also think it helps to improve the depth of your appreciation. So I want to talk a little bit. I have a few questions about the book itself.

Throughout the book, you have a very practical and holistic emphasis. You talked about all the exercises and prompts that are there. I would say that they’re more than half the book in many ways.

Like most of the chapters, you have a short theoretical basis, and then you have a bunch of exercises, prompts, and other kinds of creative experiments. And I was wondering, where did that committed emphasis to the practical over the theoretical come from? Do you think most students learn better practically, or is this your preference, or is this your most gifted mode of teaching?

Are you implying something more general with this? Did it just happen that way? I’m mostly curious about your take on the relationship or the dynamic between the practical and the theoretical.

Yeah, so when I took over the songwriting division, I’m the head of the songwriting division at Visible Music College, and I teach online, and I live in Dallas. The school’s in Memphis, Tennessee. But when I got to take over the songwriting program, I got to reimagine the curriculum.

And a lot of the books that they had were quality. Several of them were very outdated. One of the first ones that I inherited was a book called Six Steps to Songwriting Success.

I think that’s what it was. And I was like, I don’t know.

It was like, get the attention of a label.

Exactly. Yeah. And so I found that a lot of the songwriting books that I encountered were either that quick tips and hacks to try to make a lot of money on Music Row, and that’s not what I wanted, or books that lean more into the theoretical that are really autobiographies by hugely successful songwriters, and they’re not really giving practical steps.

They make the process seem like magical, mystical, only the muse, and I just met this guy one time, and then I wrote a song that went around the world. And that’s inspirational maybe, but not necessarily helpful for a beginner or someone who’s trying to take the jump from hobby songwriter to a craft songwriter. And then there’s music theory textbooks, which, let’s be honest, are mostly pretty boring and dry.

Hard to get into for me. Very hard to get into. I thought your chapter is on music theory, and again, hard to get into for me, but I thought that they were really well explained.

And they were very playful, so it was more organized, again, toward that more get on a keyboard, don’t read this chapter unless you’re in front of a keyboard, and mess around, and you call it a finger painting. I just thought that that was really, again, really inviting, really welcoming. Helpful for me.

So I was looking for books for my level one class, and I just couldn’t find anything that covered the 10 to 15 concepts. I always come back to really in songwriting lessons when I’m working with a songwriter on a song they’re currently writing. I keep coming back to these things, and I couldn’t find one book that was conversational and accessible, but also practical and paced in a way that made sense to me.

So yeah, I think there is later on in the book, there are definitely some theoretical principles that gets into emotional connection and balance and some of that stuff is pretty abstract. But there’s a lot of nitty gritty stuff, rhyme scheme and point of view and how to construct a basic melody and manipulate it that really just, there’s always magic and inspiration in music. But when it’s combined with diligent intentional craft, I think that’s where the greatness occurs is both halves of it.

So I wanted to put that all down knowing that I don’t believe there is six steps to songwriting success. I think it is a craft with no rules, but definitely a lot of guidelines and best practices that work well most of the time. And most people just, most hobby songwriters, or people are trying to make the jump to the next level, don’t realize what those little fundamental craft things are.

But I too, I just want people to have fun. I think when I inherit students into my program, they are thinking they have to write about these big, heavy things, which I want to get them to that place. But I also want them to begin the process by just playing around, you know?

Sit down on the piano and play around. Let’s find some words that rhyme and see what happens. So yeah, just try to give people the freedom to take that step into it without that big, scary, I must have this muse or I can’t write anything.

It is really discouraging sometimes, especially if you’re an aspiring songwriter and you have what you think are heroes of song who have written these great songs that you really love and you come back to, and then you go to figure out how they made them and they’re like, it just came to me. It’s like, well, that’s not very helpful because I’m trying to get from where I’m at to where you’re at, and it just came to me isn’t working for me right now. So I thought, and we’ll talk about this a little bit later, unless you want to right now.

But the issue of artistic identity and the specificity of your experience and what you like and all of those things really contributing to your art. And in that way, you don’t necessarily have the capacity to write a song like one of the people you think are really, really great because you’re not them. They already wrote those songs.

They’re them. So be yourself. What does that mean?

How does it mean to figure out who you are? Without exploration and playfulness, you’ll never get there. You’re always going to be trying to conform yourself to some external standard, and you’re never going to really find your own voice.

So that was really, really great. All right. You have a very controversial to me.

At first, I will say when I first read this, I was like, absolutely not. You are wrong.

As a poet, yes.

Yeah. As a poet, I must disagree. At one point in your book, you make what you yourself call a bold statement that, quote, melody is more important than lyrics.

And I will say, I disagreed with you when I first read it. I was like, that can’t possibly be true. We’re all word-centered.

We’re Christians. What are you talking about? But then after you made your case, you convinced me, like I am convinced that this is true now.

And actually what’s interesting is I think it’s true because I think the lyrics are more important. I think what you’re saying is true because the lyrics are important. If the lyrics are important, I think the melody…

Yeah, so you explain it. I’m not going to steal your time.

Well, yeah, if you want your lyrics to have power and to connect with people, they’ve got to be writing on a melody that will do that. You talk about being embodied, embodied human thing where we are just affected by rhythm and tunes that we can hum and whistle. My friend Jonathan always says that melodies don’t require a passport, right?

We have fallen in love with songs even when we don’t understand the language because we can just feel them and understand them through the melody. I think often people who are very lyrics forward, which there’s nothing wrong with that, I think it’s great to be super passionate and talented about lyrics, but they sometimes do it to the detriment of caring for the construction of their melodies, the intentionality of their melodies, and then their lyrics can’t pierce through like they want them to. So it was really just a call for people to care more about your melody writing.

But also it’s sort of like if the melody is the vessel for the lyrics that people are actually going to be able to hold the lyrics in themselves with, because it is. I mean, if you go to like, for instance, the old school Scottish Presbyterian churches, most of those people know the Psalms like we don’t. And the reason they know it is because they had a Scottish Psalter.

And so they sung the Psalms. So if you’re quoting from a psalm, they’re like, oh yeah, that’s Psalm 110. How do you know that?

Oh, because we sang it. We used to sing it all the time. I’ve memorized it.

I memorized all those because I sung it. And if the melody makes that memorable so that it not only makes that initial emotional connection that keeps you coming back to it, but also I think it makes it so you remember it, and then you remember the lyrics. I mean, I remember lyrics that are really dumb, like that are not good lyrics.

Simply because the melody is so singable, it gets stuck in your head, and you’re just like, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Brain. These words are not that interesting, but this melody is great. If the words were interesting, even better, then the melody would be, exactly.

So, you know, the melody would be able to hold that. So, I do actually agree with you, and it inspired me to, I loved your talks about melodic phrasing and shapes, the shapes of the melodies. It seems so simple, but I think some people are bewildered by sheet music.

But when you think about it like you did, with just like the structure of the shape of the melody and ways in which you can give it sparkle and all that kind of stuff, I just thought for me, who’s totally beginning melody writer, that a lot of the things that you said, I was like, I’m going to use those immediately and try and experiment and play around with it. Thank you so much. That was really good.

Yeah. It’s a space where you don’t get a lot of practical simple content about melody writing, because it’s really difficult to talk about. 90 percent of songwriting books are about lyrics and maybe chord progressions.

Then they’re just like, and whatever melody you want on top of it. But I’m like, no, that’s the most important part.

Right. And like you said, but it is hard to talk about. Yeah.

And in one more defense, right, you can think of all these songs that you know of that have pretty subpar lyrics, but they’re super popular because the melodies are incredible. And there’s not a lot on the flip side. Oh, I think of that song that has incredible lyrics, but the melody is forgettable.

Well, they just don’t cut through. They don’t survive.

Exactly.

Oh, my gosh. I hate to out myself as being someone that gets on TikTok occasionally. Please forgive me, Michael.

I do forgive you.

But there’s this song that’s been stuck in my head for days that’s on TikTok. And the, Like the whole, the lyrics are nonsense, but the melody is incredible, and it’s going around the world. You know, it’s going viral and it’s so funny.

But yeah, so if people could learn one thing from my book, is manipulating melodies is important. You can do it. Doesn’t have to be rocket science.

You can draw pictures. You don’t have to read sheet music. You can just study the rhythm of how they sound and the shapes that they make.

That’s what I’ll be doing for the most part. And so that was, that was good. That’s a way in on that.

Another question. So in the chapter on balance, and this is connected to that emotional connection that we’re talking about with the melody, you said, a powerful song is one that creates an emotional connection with the listener through a grounded, specific content that leads to a universal emotional experience. And I totally agree with you, and that’s actually not just about songs.

This is an art in general that I would, I would say that you begin with the specific, and if the specific is accurate enough, it will actually create that universal. That’s what I usually say. But I’m wondering if you think that it always needs to go in that direction from specific to universal, because it seems like a lot of pop music especially seems to start with a sort of vague, generic content, that then you can just fill in with your own specific feelings or experience.

Do you think there’s any problem with making art in that sort of general vessel to be filled with the audience’s feelings kind of direction? Or would you say, no, it should absolutely begin with the specific, and that is what’s going to create that universal connection?

That’s a good question. I think some specificity is always helpful. I don’t think every song needs to be a story song with all the names and places, but I think just a few specific grounded-

Like metaphor?

Well, sensory details even. I often reference this Charlie Puth song that it’s very tell, like just emotional tell in the whole song, but there’s a line in the verse that said, that dress is karma, perfume, regret. And it’s just enough sensory grounding that then you can see the club and hear the music.

And I was also thinking about Losing My Religion by REM, and it’s got one part- That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight. I thought that I heard you laughing.

And it’s still very generic. People find their own stories in that song all the time. Nobody really knows what that song is actually about.

It’s apparently about losing your religion.

I got it. But they’re still in of that specific sensory language that people find authentic. I think that’s what is the authenticity.

You need to feel like the singer is an embodied person who had a real experience, and you want them to come alongside you and spill the tea, right? Give the context. You can’t be angry or sad or happy with them if they don’t seem like a real person, if you don’t give them some window into their world.

Yeah. No, I remember there’s actually a hilarious poem by Billy Collins, that’s called Introduction to a Poem, I think. Not Introduction to Poetry, that’s another Billy Collins poem that’s wonderful.

But he has one that is, the whole entire poem is an introduction to the poem that would be spoken by the poet who’s about to read the poem. And it is so obnoxiously hilarious because it’s just Billy making fun of the way that poets will introduce a poem with all these details that are not in the poem, that you need to know in order to make sense of the poem. And my professor, my poetry professor, always disallowed that in workshops.

He’s like, if you are going to read the poem and it’s not on the page, I don’t know it. I don’t, I can’t know it. Like I’m going to be a reader, I’m going to be out there.

If you need to tell me something now so that I can make sense of the poem, that needs to be in the poem. Yeah. So yeah, so I thought that was good.

Oh, we say that a lot. Just say no to disclaimers. And if you have to explain something for the song to make sense, you need to go back and edit it.

You’re not done. Yeah, for sure. So you also talk about this in the same chapter on balance, which is a great chapter.

Thank you. They’re all great. So anyway.

But why do you think modern worship music, this is a special topic for me.

You’re going to ask me the hard one.

I am. And you’re really nice throughout the book. Our listeners may be able to handle you being a little more on the Frank side.

I don’t know. I’ll give you your choice. You can continue.

But anyway, why do you think modern worship music has fallen into a problem of balance, where it overemphasizes unity over diversity, sameness and repetition over variety and universality over specificity? Why do you think that happened? And how do you think we might address it, both as artists and as audiences within the church?

I think there’s several different reasons, some with more altruistic intentions and others with more exploited art intentions, if we call it that. On the front half, I think worship songwriters do have this care for the congregation and they want to make everyone feel seen, everyone to be able to relate to the songs and to make it highly accessible and highly singable. So I think that’s the altruistic motive.

My response to that is, I think we’re not giving people enough credit for their willingness to learn beautiful things. They will. I mean, the first time I heard that Matt Redmond song, I was like, wow, a real melody.

I haven’t heard one of these in a while. People learned it. That song went around the world into a lot of places.

So I would push back on worship songwriters that, if we write something that everyone can know completely understand melodically by the end of the first chorus, that’s great the first time we do the song, but the 10th time we do it, we’re gonna get bored. It’s the same effect. It’s why preschool song, this is gonna be, I’m gonna get hate mail.

It’s why preschool songs work for preschoolers because they’re learning patterns. And so it lights up their brain and they wanna hear it over and over and over and over again. But for adults, we get bored of that stuff really simply.

And I just think if someone can learn a journey song and go sing it a karaoke night, we can give people melodies that are incredible and interesting, fun music half. And then lyrically, I talk about this song in the book. I never understood Raise a Hallelujah until I learned all that backstory that was the preamble.

And they gave no indication of what that was, that this was a song written for a child who is really sick in the hospital and they’re like singing over them. And then all of a sudden I’m like, oh, I understand the song now. I like it a whole lot more.

But before I had that context, I’m like, who are my enemies were singing over? Barb from accounting? Like, I don’t understand what’s going on.

And so I need this.

My daughter, I got to say, my daughter Selah actually says Barb or Ned from accounting all the time. Anyway.

Yeah. So I think for the worship writer, like take a little bit of a risk to see the people in your congregation as people who are willing to learn beautiful things. And it might take a little time, more time, before that song.

They have it in their hearts, but I think it’s worth it. And then the other half of that equation is as media, creation and consumption has changed. It’s just singles, singles, singles, singles, new songs, new songs, new songs, new songs, big church houses just pumping these things out.

And so we, it becomes lowest common denominator of what’s hitting at the time, what’s trendy, package that together, pump it out, move on, make another one. So I think as a Christian music industry, we’re not caring a whole lot about beauty. I hate to say it.

We’re caring about what will stream well, what will sell well, what will the big evangelical churches pick up and run with for six months. Then we get tired of the song, but it’s okay, cause we got a new one coming around.

You got a new one, sounds just like the old one.

But not as much depth.

We have a problem in that, I mean, I’m not gonna push back, but do you remember the whole thing with Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill where it was a little bit of a gray area and looking back at it, a lot of people are like, it’s not really a gray area. But when he used the church’s funds to put his book on the bestseller list, do you remember this? And his argument at the time was, I’m trying to, it’s a book about the gospel.

And if being on the bestseller list means that more people are going to read this book and get this good content, then, you know, like, it’s important. You know what I mean? It’s like, I haven’t really sold out because my goal is get this to as many different people, like you said, the altruistic motive.

But it’s so, it’s pretty obvious in that story how easily that is twisted, like how easy the whole situation becomes twisted and how easy it is for Satan to come in and pervert. What I’m not gonna argue may have been initially a like good motivation that I just wanna get the gospel out to as many people as possible. But I think one of the things that I think you point out in the book, and I think that is important, is that’s not really the goal.

Like that’s not our job. Like, you know what I mean? Like, the goal is not, I wanna make something that is going to sell a billion copies.

Like, if that is actually the goal that you have, and you’re not actually focused on making a good work, well, what if you do sell a billion copies or whatever, but that intention has altered the work to such an extent that those people are not served, you know what I mean? Et cetera, we can’t use the methods of the kingdoms of this world in order to forward the goals of the kingdom of heaven. It’s not the same kind of kingdom.

And so, I do think that’s kind of infected the church with this sort of market mentality, business mentality, and as much as it can be justified by people to say, I just want to get this out to as many people as possible, or make it as accessible to as many people as possible, I still think it’s so easy for that to become perverted. And not only that, if you’re saying, if you actually do believe that the audience doesn’t have enough taste to be able to discern between whatever, and maybe you’re right, and I do feel like there’s like an implicit kind of condescension and patronization that’s occurring there, like you said, to not really trust that the audience is going to be able to step up to the challenge. My children can sing hymns, you know what I mean?

You can learn complicated or more complex melodies, and I know that they should be singable over time, et cetera, et cetera. But people are smarter than you think, they have more perseverance than you think, and I’ve dealt with this a lot over the years, people saying, why do you talk to your kids like that? They can’t understand what you’re saying.

I was like, well, ask them. They are understanding what I’m saying. You know what I mean?

Because they’re expected to, and that’s not me being proud or holding something over them. That’s actually me inviting them to step up and to operate within their own dignity because they have it already. I don’t have to grant it to them.

They already have it. So I do think that there’s a lot of that in the church of just an implicit disrespect for what the audience is capable of receiving or appreciating. Anyway, I appreciated that whole section in your book.

I also appreciated that you were kind about it because you were really gracious. A lot more gracious than I’ve managed to be over the years, I’m trying to work on it. But part of me just says, if it’s true what you’re saying that not what you’re saying, but what the hypothetical person is saying, that the audience really can’t tell the difference, and you just got to make it really well.

No, because you’ve got songs like Amazing Grace or other things that have somewhat more sophisticated, and people know those and they sing those. And if you insert a little praise chorus into the middle of it, which I think they do have one of those, the praise chorus is not the same quality of music, melody, or lyrics as the original, but the audience will sing both with gusto. I’ve seen them.

I’ve seen audience, congregations with their arms up singing both of them with the same abandon. So it seems to me like it behooves the creators, like just because the audience isn’t holding you to the standard, maybe they aren’t. But don’t you, shouldn’t you?

Because if they couldn’t tell the difference, they would sing a great song just with the same gusto that they would sing a mediocre one, well, then it’s on you, it’s your responsibility to make a great song for them. If they can’t tell the difference between a Big Mac and filet mignon, you should still be making them filet mignon, because they’ll eat both with the same relish. You know what I mean?

So that’s on you.

Absolutely. I think it’s the job of the creator. And it’s so funny that you mentioned food, because I think about that, I often think about that, like these Christian music in general, like mainstream, radio-friendly Christian music or corporate worship music, it just feels like pie to me.

It’s very sweet. It’s very easy to go down. I’m like pie, pie, pie, pie.

I’m like, somebody give me a vegetable. That’s the balance that we’ve lost. But it is our job as creators who give out the healthy, kind of more difficult, fibrous stuff every once in a while.

Because the thing that’s going to sell more is the sugar, right? I mean, we know that. Yeah, that’s going to make money.

It’s easier to go down. So we have to be willing to hold that, push that line of, let’s dig a little deeper, yeah. I mean, that’s how you raise your kids, right?

Is showing care is to not always give the thing you know people will love and want. Because as part of our calling is to help be a witness to the way the world actually is. And yes, you meet people where there are, but hopefully calls us to grow together.

I know.

I would hope so.

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I was really intrigued by your commentary on writing within genres, and the idea how that connected to costumes and personas, which again, all of this is very fascinating to me. Would you explain how writing fictionally, outside of your own experience, within the costume of a genre or persona, can actually be authentic and true? Do you think it could at times maybe be inauthentic, and even appear the same on the outside, but actually be inauthentic?

And how would you distinguish between like an authentic expression and an inauthentic one, if both are playing dress up and pretending?

Yeah, okay, so I’ll have to get up to that. I think I want to start with, I think quality written songs have good bones, right? They have strong melodies and they have lyrics of interest that are working with that melodies.

And I believe that strongly crafted songs can jump. They should be able to jump from genre to genre to genre. So it’s difficult for me when people say, oh, I only like country, only like hip hop.

But if you can write a good song, it’s like a tree, right? That if it’s a resilient tree, it could probably weather a lot of different environments. So I start there in encouraging people, like you don’t have to pick the genre first and then try to squish yourself into it.

I would much rather you discover who you are as a writer, as an artist, and then pull from genre outfits and see which one works for this song. For better or for worse, like with Bloodline, it’s more genre diverse than a lot of projects you will hear, because I don’t really care about what’s the most streamable. So it’s not a good business practice to work from the song and then pick the genres that really do it justice.

Okay, so how you remain authentic while trying on these different outfits, I think is the willingness to play, the willingness to come at it from a place of, I loved your episode on exploited art, that just opened my mind in such a way I’d never thought about it before. And so I often talk about it with my students. So if you’re conceiving something, if you’re conceiving your art from a place of, will this make me famous?

Will this make me the most money? That’s the exploited place to start. Instead, we start this place of purity.

Am I humbly coming to the art from a place of love and I’m writing it with joy? And because it’s what I feel God’s put on my heart, then that can lead you to different places that feels authentic. I don’t know if I’ve quite answered your question correctly.

What I would say, so the thing that’s interesting to me is it would make sense if you have an experience and God has told you a certain truth and then you just express it from your experience. Like, here’s a story that actually happened to me and that’s valid and that’s the easiest way to be authentic. But then when you look at the various different ways that even Jesus told parables, when he didn’t have to cloak the truth in the story, he could, and a lot of those stories in the scriptures are made up.

They didn’t necessarily happen to Jesus. He didn’t even necessarily know a guy that was going down to Jericho and then got helped out by a Samaritan after he got mugged on the side of the road. Like he doesn’t actually have to know that story or have been part of it or something for that to convey the truth that he wanted to.

It’s still authentic. It’s authentically Jesus, but it’s like wearing this other garb. Like he does have straightforward statements.

But I wonder, like, how do you do it? Because it’s also the case that deceivers wear other clothes, where it’s like, I don’t want you to see who I really am, so I’m going to like cloak my lies in, you know, good sounding stories, like, you know, fables, like myths that I’m going to kind of cloak my lies in so that they’re not as obvious. And.

Your purpose in it, and if your purpose is actually to take advantage of the audience in one way, which a lot of people would say, oh, no, that’s not my purpose. It’s like, well, do you want to sell a lot of, is that what you’re wanting to do? Want to sell stuff or you want it to get lots of streams or whatever?

Well, then your purpose ultimately is to use your audience, not to serve them. Like, you want to figure out a way to get them to serve your personal selfish goals. Maybe that’s a way.

Yeah. Well, you had asked me earlier about emotional justice. And I think beyond genres, that process of authenticity, if you’re living in a musical space or even a lyric writing space, that’s not something you’ve personally experienced.

I think it’s the willingness to do the research, to sit next to the person whose story it is, to really understand them. And John shared a song with us that he wrote about divorce, and he has not gone through that, but he had a close friend who was, and he wrote that from a place of trying to meet his friend where he was at, and walk him through that process, give him a piece of art that would help him through that process. On the flip side, I was trying to think of a counter example earlier this week, and I was like, oh, I know, when I was at Berkeley, I won a songwriting contest that was about drug prevention.

And here’s a girly pop that knows, I’ve never done hard drugs, and yet I wrote a song about being addicted to cocaine. And I won this songwriting contest, maybe no one else put their name in that. But it wasn’t a badly crafted song from a melody perspective, but looking back on that 20 years later, that had a lot of inauthenticity to it, because I didn’t really do the research.

I didn’t know anyone who had gone through that. I was just trying to win a song contest. And I don’t like that anymore.

And so I think if you want to do emotional justice to a topic that you haven’t experienced, you gotta take the time to do the research and find where it connects to your own personal story. I mean, it’s kind of like metaphor making in a sense, right? I see that kind of pain and struggle.

How have I experienced that in my life so we can meet? It’s really why I started doing the Bloodline Project is I felt like people were seeing these biblical women as caricatures of their worst moment. And I wanted to see them as women with complicated lives and lived experiences.

So I, you know, really sat with the text and tried to put myself in their place and say, have I experienced being let down, being lied to, being used to give them emotional justice, even though I clearly have never lived in Bibles.

No, no, no, of course. And do you think by writing in that persona, is that a way of making the material more accessible to you, more palatable to the audience? Like, I’m curious, like what effect are we trying to get at with the persona writing?

Because I know there’s a purpose. I’m truly just actually, I’m curiously thinking about it, have been for a while. Just giving an example, like Tom Waits, I’m pretty sure is a persona.

But he’s been doing it for so long that it’s almost like that is Tom Waits. But you see him in the interviews, you know, and he sounds like he just smoked seven packs of cigarettes and drank five whiskeys. And he may have, but also he’s kind of just doing that because that’s like, that’s his thing.

The character. And I just wonder if he ever goes home and takes that off and, you know, just has a normal voice and talks like this. And you know what I mean?

Or if that’s just, if Tom Waits has played that part for so long that that just is Tom Waits. But the thing is, I don’t mind that for some reason. There’s something about it that’s so, it is obviously a costume.

It is obviously makeup. So it’s almost like I don’t, I can kind of feel that it is authentic in the sense that he’s coming up and being like, hey, here’s my costume. I’m in a costume.

Do you get that? But there are other people that obviously, like, I’ll give you an example. There’s a Weezer song.

My wife is gonna think this is hilarious. But I really like the blue album, in spite of the fact that Weezer, like self-consciously made it to make money so that they could go to college. Like that was the reason they made that record.

And they said, so now like, we’re gonna make a popular record and make money. And they ended up doing it. Like they, but there’s a song on there that kind of exposes that a little bit.

Most of the songs do, but this one really does. When they say, I’m waxing up my board, so I’m going real fast. As if you wax a surfboard in order for it to be able to go over the water more fast.

Like that’s not why you wax a surfboard, right? So it’s very clear in the line like that, where you’re like, I don’t know that you’ve ever surfed before. But you want to embody this surfer feel because you think that’s what’s cool and hip, kind of like the Hollister t-shirt thing or whatever.

It’s like Hollister is in California, but no one knows that, so it’s Hollister surf country. Sure, why not? That kind of stuff, it peeves me a little bit, but I’m wondering, is there really that much of a difference between them trying on this basement dwelling, Dungeons and Dragons, guitar nerd feel, where they’re kind of putting on that persona because they think that’s the audience that’s going to buy this music?

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? I don’t know.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that’s a good distinction right there because I’m continually discovering who I am as an artist when I try something out because I’m intrigued by it, and maybe it does eventually lead me to a character I’m becoming. You mentioned Tom Waits, it makes me think of Lana Del Rey.

It was like she became the character that she started with, but it’s who she is now, and that’s really a difference. It’s an investment in exploration and working out things over time as opposed to, well, I’m going to do a zoot suit thing now because that’s popular. Well, now I’m doing Billie Eilish vocals because that’s popular, and when you’re just continuing to cater to whatever’s popular, that feels very unauthentic to me.

I think that is a difference in your motivations.

So yeah, so it would still go back to, what are your central motivations in this? Are they for the service of the audience in order to express what is true to you? Something that you believe is true or that resonated with you somehow?

Or are you just doing it for, again, some exploited reason to exploit the audience or whatever? I think that might be something there. We’ll talk a little bit more about this as you talk about artistic identity.

I really did have a little heart cry when I read your section on artistic identity, centered on finding out what you want, because over the past year, what God’s been pressing on me is to be more specific about what it is that I want. This is probably not for this podcast, but I could tell you a whole long story about that whole journey. But one of the things that it has produced is that I have a 10-minute exercise that I’ve been doing for a little while where I just write what I want, free journaling style.

It just, you know, 10 minutes, timer. It’s annoying, I don’t like it. I don’t like expressing what I want.

I really don’t, it’s weird. But when you were talking about this, that the idea of desire is connected to identity, or the idea of what you want for the song, what you like is actually how you’re gonna find your artistic identity. Can you explain that a little bit more?

I started thinking a lot about want after I read Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way, and worked through that. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked through that.

I haven’t.

It’s good. It’s a little hippie-dippie, but she may commit to a 30-minute-a-day journaling habit for 12 weeks. And this is my testimony.

I’m not a journaler. I hate. I’ve never.

I always thought journaling was for girls who needed to talk about what they ate for breakfast in their high school crushes and stuff. And so when I started reading this book, I was like, I’ll do it. I’ll show her.

I’m going to prove that journaling is stupid and a waste of time. And three days in, I was like, oh my gosh, this is therapy, and I’ve neglected decades of songwriting ideas. So, but encountering that, looking inward and pulling out of what have I witnessed in the world, I haven’t made space to process it, caused me to consider want.

And I’m a very type A personality, and so I have lists upon lists of this needs to get done. And then here’s item number two, item number ten, and sticking to doing things in the right order. And the problem with that, if you are also an artist, is that spontaneity, just wandering around, playing in the Play-Doh, is never gonna be on the priority list.

“Never. The things that you want to do that bring you delight and joy are always on the back burner. And if you are an artist, and this is important to you, those have to be priority things, like taking a walk and looking at clouds.

Like that has to be on the to-do list. So I even considered, like, man, I have been neglecting the role of the Holy Spirit in my life to prompt me, like what I really want to work on right now is this song that I don’t know when I would record it, I don’t know when I would release it, I’ve got 10 other things to do and five loads of laundry, but what I want to do right now is work on this song and the humility to get over myself and my grown up responsibilities and be like, no, that want is a prompting of what I really should be giving my energy to in this moment, if I can. I mean, it’s not an excuse to never do laundry, but it’s also a realization that listening to that want in your life and putting your creative energy toward it in that moment ultimately is going to produce more quality art.

And I tell my students all the time, if I give them a homework assignment and then they come back to me and say, hey, I started with that, but it turned into this, I’m like, I’ll take it, great. Or I started with that and then I started like drawing and I just couldn’t stop. Could I have an extension on that project?

I’m like, absolutely. I would much rather have you listening to your artistic wants and where the creative energy is than like following the assignment and the to do list, because that’s how you’re going to grow if you’re willing to be flexible.

As long as it’s just sincere and not just procrastinating, and everybody knows that you can just tell Aryn you’re drawing or something, and she’s going to give you an extension.

I got to see the drawing. Show me. No, I had a student once, it was like I wrote a poem instead.

I’m like, produce the poems.

And he did.

It was fantastic.

My dog ate it. I’m sorry.

Yeah. And I, you know, you get overwhelmed. I tell my students too, like, it’s just going to get harder.

You’re going to get married and you’re going to have kids, and you’re going to have a day job. And so you’ve got to learn now that rhythm of taking moments for joy and prioritizing that and keep carrying that with you because I think a lot of artists stop making their art when they’re no longer students and just the worries and the burdens and the real responsibilities of life start pushing down on them. And it’s hard to carry it forward.

And you’ve got to decide that your art is worth it. And it’s important. It’s something you’ve been gifted to do.

I have to preach that to myself.

Yeah. Well, yeah, me too.

As I’ve been putting off my journaling for a solid week.

It’s okay. I also feel about the same as journaling, but I appreciate doing things that I don’t necessarily want to do. And I love what you did even with the trying to prove the person wrong.

I’ve always told my kids, if you’re not trying really hard to prove me right, you can’t prove me wrong. So you got to give your best effort to prove me right. And if in the process of doing that, it doesn’t work, then you’ve proved me wrong.

But if you’re not trying your best to prove me right, you can’t really be sure you’ve actually proven me wrong. So anyway, I think that’s a really good practice. And I’ve gotten better at journaling.

When I was journaling a lot more, I did produce more poetry. Like I actually did. And they weren’t terrible, mechanical, lifeless poems either.

Like they, it was still quality work. I, you know, you probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish that those poems from the poems that just like, you know, came out of the blue lightning bolt kind of ones.

I truly believe that writer’s block is not a thing. If you will open yourself up to daily processing, the things you’ve experienced in the world, the memories you’ve had. And honestly, it’s a reason why I don’t journal every day as much right now anymore, because I’m worried that if I do journal every day, I’m going to have so many new song ideas.

And I don’t have the budget to record the songs. But yeah, one of the chapters in the book is on rock collection. My collection of potential ideas is so big at this point, because of that just little chippin it away, journaling every day.

Yeah, and maybe it’s not a short-term one, but it’s a long-term one of a wealth of creative stuff to pull from.

And you touched on it in the book as well, but I also, I think it was really fascinating, the connection between what you want as an artist and what you like as an artist and how that actually is where your artistic identity is produced. But it also, it connects to what you were saying too, like if you allow your identity to be shaped by things pressing in and kind of telling you who you are, telling you what you have to do today. And you’re right, like sometimes that’s what you got to do.

But even then, you can learn the skill, it is a skill, of being able to choose the things you have to do. But then still making space for what are the things that I want, what are the things that I care about? Because in many ways, that’s my contribution to the world.

Not just my service to other people’s will, but also my contribution of will and agency in the world. And for an artist, I would say the contribution of their agency into the overall conversation of the arts, if they don’t have one, why are you making art? You know what I’m saying?

If all you’re gonna do is just something that somebody else has already made in the way they’ve made it, then we already have that. We don’t need that. What we need is to hear what you have to produce and how are you gonna figure that out if you’re not willing to say, this is what I like.

I like this. And maybe you’ll like it too. You know what I mean?

Now, I had a brief period of time where I had a manager and we were trying to just see if I could make The Leap to be a Christian music industry, more national level, radio friendly artist. And the project I was working on at the time had an Americana, one-toe-and-country kind of feel. People, audiences in general respond to that better for me, because I’m from Texas, I’ve got a little bit of a scoop in my voice.

I can play that character very well. And so we tried it and I just, I don’t like that kind of music the most. And I don’t want to be that for the rest of my life as an artist.

I know it would sell better. I know I could have probably made that jump, but it’s not the art that I wanted to make. And I wanted to make stuff with more lyrical depth and quirkiness.

And I wanted to be more on the fringe, musically and lyrically. But I can be proud of the things that I’ve made, because I think I’m exactly what you’re saying, speaking into a space that not a lot of other people are speaking into musically and lyrically. In the Christian space, especially in the pop Christian space.

Oh, yeah. And so I’m content there with fewer streams, but doing, I think, what I know I’m supposed to be doing. But it can be hard when one of your future questions was about like, should people write songs even if they don’t think they’re going to be a professional songwriter?

And I’m sad that we live in a culture that’s like, if you can’t be successful by being able to book a national tour, get a record deal or get X amount of streams, then you shouldn’t do it at all. Like art has become a mandatory hustle only if you’re good enough at doing it as a full-time professional. And that’s just not what it’s for.

If it leads to those things, that I think it can be good. But yeah, I think when I get a room of people in a room, they’ve never done even, not just songwriting, just object writing before. I put a pair of scissors in front of them and I say, just journal about it.

It’s amazing what will dump out of people because they haven’t processed their feelings.

I know. It’s like you’re writing about scissors, but I feel like you’re talking about your pending divorce. No, you know, like that kind of stuff.

Yeah. And I think that songwriting is for everyone. It’s a gift of joy and grief, a love of understanding who you are and then building community with the world to it.

So I would encourage anyone. That was, again, my hope with the book, too, is make it super conversational. I did not want to be boring so that people could be like, I’m not a professional songwriter, but I could learn how to play with rhymes.

I could learn what a big idea is and how to hone in on that.

Well, and because of your emphasis on starting with melody, you don’t even need to know an instrument because you have one. It’s built in to your face. And all you have to do is know how to sing.

And you can play with melody that way. And it actually is a beautiful, creative thing to just hum a melody and shape it over time until you have something that’s like, that’s memorable and it resonates with me and I like it. And even if you forget it later, like that process of creating something is, it is one of the ways I think that we express our unique individual identity as human beings.

And I don’t mean as human beings in general. I’m saying the way in which I am a human being different than anyone else has been a human being, which is, I think, maybe the center of the idea of holiness. Because holiness means to be set apart, to be distinct.

And so if God says, be holy as I am holy, what he’s really saying is imitate my uniqueness, imitate the sense in which there’s none like me, and I want there to be none like you either. Like I want you to express yourself in a way. And sure, there are lots of common ways, there are lots of common things, there are lots of common words, there’s a lot of things we have in common.

But it’s actually those things you don’t have in common with the person next to you that in some ways contributes to your unique holiness before God. In that way, I think everybody should create that from wherever they’re at, because that in some ways is an expression of holiness.

That’s so good. No one would say it like you exactly would. No one’s got the exact melodic inclinations that you do.

It’s why I didn’t co-write for maybe my first 10 years of songwriting, and when I finally did, oh my gosh, it’s such an exercise in humility and trusting someone else’s unique holiness. I love that unique inclinations, because something would come out of their mouth, I’d be like, I would never have said it that way, or I never would have sung it that way, but I love it. So we’re building something together that stretches me and you as an artist, because we’re different in our inclinations and who we are.

I love that.

This book is written for beginners, which is sad, which is funny because it was still over my head in a couple of places, but that’s okay.

Was it the modes? Was it the modes chapter?

No, the modes actually was interesting, but yes, it was the finger painting too, I think because you had finger painting one and I was like, well, I hope we don’t have to do much more music theory. And then you’re like finger painting two modes. And I was like, oh, why?

Well, you were really nice about that too. I mean, you didn’t, I didn’t feel overwhelmed. And I am going to go back through those and a lot of the exercises because I couldn’t run through all the exercises in the read through.

That’s too much. And so, but I am going to go back and work through those things. And they, it was all presented really, really well.

But anyway, so you’ve written this book for beginners. You are not a beginner, obviously. You’ve been a professor for how long of songwriting?

I’ve been teaching at the music college for six years. And then I do have a degree in classical voice because why? The Lord works in mysterious ways.

And then I went to Berkeley for a couple of years to study songwriting. But so yeah, I’ve been writing for a really long time.

Do you find yourself, seasoned as you are, ever returning back to like the basic disciplines in the book to kind of like refresh yourself? And when does that happen? And why do you think it happened?

I absolutely do because there’s so many variables that it’s difficult to hold all of them in your mind at the same time. I think I have an intuition about a lot of them just lives in the background about point of view and rhyme scheme and big idea and melodic motif construction. But yeah, I miss stuff all the time.

My favorite is, I have an editor, my friend. I would encourage anyone who is songwriting and trying to take it to the next level, find a peer who you trust, their judgment. And I don’t record anything without Graham listening to it.

And I love it when he catches me. He’s like, you know, your point of view is inconsistent in this song. I’m like, no.

Caught me. So, you know, so one, I think, yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of variables and factors.

So I have to come back to the basics myself. But also because songwriting is a discipline, a craft that has no rules and just guidelines. I love coming back to the guidelines to see if I can break them on purpose for the sake of the art, because it seems like the right thing to do.

Even though I know the song would be cleaner this way. This way feels more true and right for some reason. And so I’m almost gonna desanitize it, but I’m choosing this thing because it’s weird and I like it.

I mean, you like it.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to the Renew the Arts Podcast. This time of year, lots of families begin to plan their road trips for the summer and fall. So we want to let you know about two festivals that are sure to have lots of folks from the Renew the Arts community, both of which are connected to our art and hospitality network we call Porchlight.

The first festival takes place on the 4th of July weekend in Urbana, Illinois. It’s called Audio Feed Festival. Porchlight is returning for a second year with its own line up including Kevin Schlereth, Ballet 58, Traylon Eltsroth, Virtuous, and Zane Vickery.

You’ll also get to catch a few other Porchlight artists that weekend on different stages, including BoHa Tribe, John Hayes, Matthew Clark, and Rusty Vining. You can get your ticket at audiofeedfestival.com/tickets.

The second festival we’d love to invite you to is brand new, and it’s our own. On October 23rd and 24th of this year, Renew the Arts will present Porchlight Festival, a gathering around art and music in Dayton, Tennessee, which is just north of Chattanooga. We can’t wait to share more about it with you.

But in the meantime, please save the date October 23rd and 24th, and keep an eye on our landing page at porchlight.art forward slash festival. We will share this in our show notes along with the audio feed link. We hope to see you in person at both audio feed in July and porchlight festival in October.

There is an element where people will talk about transgressiveness in art, as if that’s like the heart and soul of art. In fact, I remember, I think I took the GRE, and one of the essay prompts was like, is art intrinsically rebellious? Like that was actually one of the, and you’re like, oh, weird, why are you asking me this?

Anyway, but the, and I think that that kind of comes from that, the idea that like, you know, art’s all about breaking the rules, punk rock and all this kind of stuff. But if you don’t know the rules, then you can’t break them in interesting ways. So like, if you think about Picasso’s stuff is way more interesting because he didn’t have to do it that way.

He knew all the conventions. And so it’s much more interesting knowing this was a choice that he made. Whereas opposed to, you know, there are a lot of people who might do abstract work who don’t have the same capacity to do anything else.

And so it’s like, well, this is not as interesting because there’s no intelligence in the breaking of these rules. Like, you know, if you look at Stravinsky’s, the original ballet for Stravinsky’s Rise of Spring, where because he knew all the rules of formal ballet, he was inverting and twisting them in various different ways on purpose. And that’s what makes it interesting.

If you don’t know the rules, if you don’t have great dancers, that’s not an interesting ballet anymore.

Now, I think it’s so interesting that you brought up Picasso because there is a Picasso at the Dallas Museum of Art that I saw once, and it’s guitar player. But he’s like, weird. Yeah, I love that one.

And we had just looked at some Picasso’s earlier. I felt like in that moment, I was like, oh, that feels like me, someone who’s a classically trained vocalist, who could have gone the route. Like opera was what I set myself up for.

Really? Yeah.

I could do it. I had the skill, I had the instrument to do it. But I was like, I chose this weird thing instead because that’s what I wanted to do.

And I felt very seen when I saw that painting.

No, yeah, for sure. That’s really cool. Well, that was one of the things, and we’re gonna talk about Bloodline here in a second, but when I was listening through, it did have, they all felt like they could be great songs in a musical theater.

You know what I’m saying? Like they all felt like they could be in musical theater and be like those kind of anthemic.

I can’t believe you said that. Like when I started the project, that’s what I wanted. I wanted it to be a musical, and I could never find a scriptwriter to come alongside me, so I kind of gave up on that wild fishing.

Oh, that’s really sad. But they feel like that.

Maybe one day we’ll come back to it.

Maybe so. But going along with the personas and the costumes, it really did feel theatrical in those terms. My girls are both, I have 18-year-old twin girls, and they are both into musical theater.

And so they have gotten me into, they’ll listen to the albums. It’s not even that they don’t even just go to the theater or whatever. They’ll listen to these albums.

So they’ve shown me a few of the things that they’re really interested in. So I’ve gotten more familiar. That is why I’m more familiar.

So when I heard your stuff, I was like, this feels like these are the kind of musical theater type songs that my girls would really love. Anyway. Well, thank you.

No, for sure. My eldest daughter, they’re twins. So they’re identical twins.

So they’ve been trying to shape their own unique identities in the face of a person who looks and is exactly like them, which means that they are on the polar opposite spectrum of every possible thing that they could be. It’s a really weird thing that happens. I think with some identical twins, they go one way or the other.

They’re either all dressed in the same outfits and they’re just like, we are the same, or they are completely different spectral. Well, mine are the spectral difference. So I’ve got a huge Elliott Smith fan and a K-pop fan.

That’s pretty much it.

That’s great.

Yeah. So, enough of that. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about your new record that’s coming out in July.

You’ve already released a lot of the singles, so if people want to listen to it, you can. Or you can just wait till July to get the additional song that’s going to be added to it. I don’t know.

Do whatever you want. But… Do both!

You can do both. You could listen to it before, you can listen to it after. You’re free.

It’s a free country. Can you tell me a little bit about the concept of the album and how did it come to you? Was it like an A song and then others came along, or what happened?

Oh man, I’m going to have to confess for a second time that I spent time on TikTok. I started writing. Being a creator, content, I don’t consider myself a content creator.

Being an artist on these social media platforms is so complicated.

I know.

So I’m trying to find ways to do things that I think are interesting, that will engage people, but still remain in the center of being authentically me. And so I was like, I’m going to start writing these little mini songs, 30 to 45 second songs about scandalous women from the by not. So I think I started with Jael, just going for broke.

And so I released several of them. And then I wrote one about Rahab. That was just the chorus.

It wasn’t anything. I didn’t have any plans to write the rest of the song. And for whatever reason, that one caught people.

And I didn’t tend to have a ton of engagement on TikTok, but like thousands of comments on that song was like, okay, maybe there’s something there.

I will say when I listen to that song, especially in the chorus, like the first time I heard it, like I immediately, with the I believe part of it, like that part particularly. And the way you extended at the end and kind of alter it very slightly moved me again, but it moved me both times. Like I got the, you know, my skin was affected by it and I started to tear up a little bit.

And I was like, and I couldn’t even put my finger on exactly why, but it makes sense to me that it would, you know what I’m saying? Like I wouldn’t be able to articulate exactly why that particular song in that particular section of the song had that particular effect, but it definitely did.

So anyway, I think it’s something about the breaking off into the I believe, and then there’s a chord change underneath. That’s a major chord that you’re not expecting just to be a music-y nerd about it. But anyway.

No, no, I think that is probably that it almost feels like the bottom’s been taken out from under you, but you’re still holding.

Yeah. Anyway, so I, that song got a lot of engagement and I said, okay, I’ll maybe I’ll make a whole concept album about scandalous women in the Bible. But I’m like, just to write about scandal, to be scandalous, that doesn’t feel me.

And so I started thinking about women who are mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus, that their names are there on purpose because we don’t get all the women, but these particular women, Rahab and Tamar and Ruth.

The wife of Uriah.

Yeah, Bathsheba.

She’s like not even named, it’s just the wife of Uriah. You know who I’m talking about.

Yeah, and they have such messy stories.

Oh, big time.

I feel like that’s part of the reason they’re there. And so I said, well, maybe I’ll start writing songs about these women in the genealogy. And there’s only five of them listed.

And I was like, that’s not quite long enough. So I picked a few other ones that I thought were interesting to me.

I noticed is like Yadida or Jadida.

You’ve got the good pronunciation. I call her Jedida, which I’m sure is the Texas corruption of how that name should be pronounced.

You can do whatever you want.

No, tell me.

I feel no, really, like I feel like it doesn’t actually matter all that much. You know, it’s like people will be like, well, it’s technically I mean, like, for instance, Jeremiah is Yeram Yahu. Yeram Yahu.

Okay.

So it’s like Yeram Yahu. No one’s going to say Yeram Yahu instead of Jeremiah. I’m sorry.

It’s not going to happen, you know, but like out of the Hebrew, I didn’t even look it up in Hebrew, but I’m sure that it probably is Yedida or something like that.

So with her, I picked her to kind of represent a lot of the women who are not named, who are still in that genealogy that we don’t know anything about. And the only thing we know about her is that she was the wife of Eamon and the mother of Josiah. And I’m like, there’s some interesting going on there.

So I had to take a lot of artistic license with that song. But to me, I’m like, if there was some person who could represent that hope of coming through something really terrible and yet encouraging the next generation forward towards hope. So I picked her and a few others to kind of round out the project.

But I just want, I think I said this earlier, that I would like for myself and for others to see these women as whole people and not just a caricature of their worst experiences and moments. Because this is kind of an aside, but for my album release concert at the end of July, instead of me, again, with the musical theater thing, instead of me singing all the songs, I’ve got seven of my friends and each one of us is going to embody one of the women and deliver the lead vocal on that song.

And which one did you pick?

I’m Bathsheba. I wanted the angry one. But no, just by default, because my co-writer on that song couldn’t do it.

I like all of them, but all the songs. But it’s also going to be a multi-arts experience. So we have original poetry and we also have visual art, a visual artist who’s going to present a painting.

And I wanted a slideshow of visual art to go along with all these women and their stories. And Michael, I was devastated. Like when you go looking for art about biblical women, like fine art, it’s all terrible.

Like the most famous sculpture of Eve is by Rodin, and it’s called like the Shame of Eve.

Oh, yeah, you’re right.

There’s like these classical painting of Ruth where she is like a bare-chested working in the field. I’m like, what’s happening, guys? I couldn’t find a lot of fine classical art depicting these women as anything else but like Tamar as the Temptress, and she’s half dressed, you know.

I’m like, let’s not talk about everything she went through to get to that point. So anyway.

Well, not only that, like, let’s not forget that Judah says to her, you are more righteous than I.

Yeah.

So like whatever you may think, like she was clever. I mean, all of them were clever. They were functioning in what I would consider to be an extremely shrewd way in order to figure out how to navigate all the pressures and the violence of the world that was around them.

And I think a lot of people forget that too, or it’s like, well, if I were there, I wouldn’t have done that. It’s like, dude, we have so few pressures and so few difficulties comparatively, and the environment that we’re in is so less evil. It’s just so less painful to live now.

And I sympathize with those stories, and I am curious about more of those stories. Like, one of the things I’m going to be doing a lot of in heaven is going to the history archives, you know what I mean, where you get to relive every moment of all of human history from all the perspectives of the people who experienced it. Like, that’s got to be a thing, right?

Yeah, I don’t know. I think they’ll all just be mad at us that we live like kings.

Right, and yet complain so much about our little troubles. Like, yeah, but if I were there and like the completely oppressive and soul crushing environments they were in, I would have been better.

You know, I was like, no, I don’t.

Well, anyway, all those stories are really interesting to me as well, just thinking about the story behind the bare bones of the narrative that we’re given. And I know that God put a lot of that stuff in the scriptures in that way so that we could have creative imagination to think behind the scenes and figure like, well, what were they going through? What were they feeling?

What were they thinking? What was their life like? And give us some freedom to discover that.

So I’m glad that you did a lot of that work from your own perspective and from your own, and connected it to things that make it relevant to contemporary experience as well. So it’s really good. It’s a great concept and I think you executed it well.

The only thing that’s wrong with it is that a lot of it is pop.

That’s so funny.

Anyway, we’ll talk about this a little bit if you’re willing to. Absolutely. Okay.

So like I said earlier, I’m not a huge lover of pop music. In fact, I’ll give you an example. I’ll give you a little story, tiny, tiny, tiny one.

I can successfully predict the hit single off pretty much any record. I have been like pretty much 100 percent. I’ll choose my least favorite song on the record.

Yeah. In fact, I don’t tell. So I produce, I produce for artists.

And when we’re trying to figure out what single they’re going to release, my secret method is to pick the song I like the least. And it works 100 percent of the time. In fact, in fact, Aryn, I will tell you a story.

Do you know the band Alt J?

No, mm-mm, Alt J.

Well, they’re kind of like an indie band. Their first record was really cool. My wife and I liked it a lot.

We enjoy music together. It’s one of the things that’s like a couple thing that we, that is awesome for us. So anyway, so we really like this band.

And their second record came out, Inside Unseen, this is back in the days of like iTunes, buying things on iTunes music or whatever at the time. I know that you can kind of do that now, but this was, I just was like, okay, I’m buying it, you know, and then, and I got it. And I listened through it, and I was like, this is great, this is great.

And I got to this one song, and I was like, do not like that song. And then got past it, and I was like, okay, this is good, this is good, this is good. Wow, this is a great record, except for that one song.

That one song is absolutely atrocious. I hate that song so much. And then I listened through it, I was like, let me just give it another chance.

I’ll listen through the album again, listen through, got to that song, ugh, hate it. By the third time I listened to the record, so this is the record, this is all yours. I just removed the song.

Like I unchecked it on my iTunes list, so that I wouldn’t have to listen to it when that album played. And I was like, oh, this is beautiful. This album works so well without that song.

And so I just listened to it like that for the first, and that was the first single, that was the lead single on the record. Secondly, I found out a story later, again, that was so weird to me, because I found out that the band had presented the album as I was listening to it, as the original album. And the record executives told them, you don’t have a single.

And so because they were angry with the record executives, they went back into the studio and they actually said they made the most obnoxious song they possibly could think to do. The drummer was like, I did all my parts lifelessly and with no spirit whatsoever. They intentionally made the most in your face insipid, like almost it’s also like it’s I don’t even want to say what the song is about.

Like it’s not the song is about something that’s also kind of low and gross and whatever. They brought it back to the record executives. And of course, they were like, perfect, love it.

Lead single. But I, not knowing any of that, actually figured out their original album just by removing the what was the single. And I knew it was the single before I even knew it was the single, because I was like, that’s definitely a single, because I do not like that song.

So anyway, this is how bad things are for me.

Hey, so I just need you to listen to this album of mine and tell me which one to take out. So I can have a lead single.

No, I know.

It’s terrible.

I never tell the artists we produce that I’m doing this, but it is my secret method. Now they know.

You need to read. Have you read this book? Oh, I got to find it.

I’ll send it to you. I can’t remember. It was written by a, she was like produced a lot of Prince’s albums, but then also became like a neuroscientist.

But she goes through this whole process of why people like what they like, and it’s things like spontaneity and structure and nostalgia. And anyways, I think you would think it was interesting. Maybe you can discover why you dislike pop music so much.

I think I know why I don’t like pop music, but I will maybe that will elucidate or fill out the picture. But I will say, I think your approach to pop is like legitimate.

Well, thank you.

And there are artists that I do like their approach to pop. I know that you can make good pop music. It’s just that as a genre, I feel like it tends to attract a lot of people who are in there for exploited reasons, to get famous, or to get money, or to whatever.

And I think that generally produces bad art. And the flavors of that have become so associated with that kind of inauthenticity for me that even when I hear those sounds now, there’s a little part of me that’s just like, I want to get away from that. But given the fact that, I mean, from reading the book and from talking to you and listening to your music, I can tell that you are an authentic person who cares about sincerity and authenticity in art and in your personal life.

So why, how did pop music like draw you in? You know what I mean? Like, did you choose pop music or did it choose you?

I think, I’ll answer this question in a roundabout way. I can’t remember which podcast episode this was. I think you were actually talking to Chase and you were talking about live music and produced music.

And correct me if I’m wrong, but I felt like you were kind of more arguing on the side of the authenticity of live music and that if you can’t reproduce that in the studio, it’s not cheating is the right word. But to me, the difference between music that’s done live and studio production is like the difference between watching a play in a theater and watching a film. To me, they’re very different mediums.

And the music that I love plays in that playground production that gives me access to strings or horns or weird sounds or drums and beats and it’s not something I could necessarily reproduce live. And that’s always the type of musical expression I’ve been attracted to is seeing my songs in that environment. So I love the creative process of working with a producer in a studio over a long period of time to craft a piece of art that it’s difficult.

It is difficult to reproduce it live, but we’re creating this soundscape that feels like it’s doing the song justice. So we figured out this morning, Jonathan and I have been working on Bloodline for three years exactly on these eight songs, because we care so much about that detail. So maybe it’s that.

I love the production environment. I’m not saying that I think that’s the only way to work or the best way to work. I actually, about six months ago, just started an in-person rock band.

This is my midlife crisis. I have pulled together a rock band. And so in the future, I would like to do it the other way around. 

Like we’re going to meet together, write songs together, then perform them, then maybe record them. So like working completely backwards from the way I’ve always worked, because I feel like pushing on myself as an artist is a way I continue to grow. And then I grew up listening to, you know, I was a teenager when Weezer and No Doubt, and Death Cab, where we were on.

I think we were born the same year.

But I grew up listening to the singer songwriters of the 60s and 70s, because my parents would only let me listen to the Christian radio or oldies. So I grew up with Stevie Wonder and Elton John and James Taylor. And so I think that melodic thing in my writing comes through with the context of like pop rock of, you know, that era.

I don’t know, I’ve just never been a folk Americana girlie. And I feel like there’s a lot of respect for that in indie Christian music spaces, but it’s just not my favorite. Yeah.

And I love to dance. Maybe that’s what it is.

Well, I think that is some of it. I mean, it probably is some of that. Because I don’t know what Chase and I were saying exactly, but I do agree with you entirely that the recorded music is an art in itself and that live performance is an art and that they’re distinct in many ways.

Even the same song can operate differently. I mean, one of my favorite bands growing up was Radiohead. And they have a song like Like Spinning Plates, where they recorded all the parts, and then they actually reversed the entire song.

And Thom Yorke had learned how to sing the vocals backwards so that when they reversed the song, they sound forwards. There is actually no way to reproduce that live. But they still played that song live one time when I saw them, and it was wonderful.

But it was a totally different expression of that song. So there is stuff like that where obviously there are things you can do, like you said, with film, special effects, things like this, that you can, you would not be able to do the same thing or create the same spectacle in a live setting. So I do get that.

I think there’s still an issue of authenticity, and maybe there’s a little bit of push and pull on this. Like for instance, I don’t like brick facades because it’s actually what’s actually holding up the structure of the building is concrete. But reinforced concrete is fine.

It’s a thing. If it’s reinforced concrete, let it be reinforced concrete. I mean, you look at Falling Water House that Frank Lloyd Wright built, that’s reinforced concrete.

You can make beautiful things out of reinforced concrete. Let it be what it is. And to me, it’s like the only way I would use, for instance, like I like Mellotron strings.

But one of the reasons I like Mellotron strings, but I don’t really like a lot of the fake string patches that they use, is because Mellotron strings sound fake. So when you’re hearing them, you’re not thinking those are real strings. You’re thinking that’s a recording that’s badly recorded from a Mellotron.

And that to me is fine. You know what I mean? It doesn’t work for everything.

If you need an orchestra, you need an orchestra. That’s kind of more the point that I’m talking about. That’s not obviously economically feasible for most people.

But that’s one thing. Pop music, I would say, and from reading your book, your genre descriptions were great, by the way. Those were really helpful.

Oh, man, I sweated over those. Like, trying to define what R&B is, I was like, I give up.

All of those. No, really, seriously, when I was reading them, I was like, these are really, these are solid descriptions of these genres. And it’s very hard sometimes to describe genre distinctions.

But I would say that your production style is more indie. It’s like indie pop, probably, in the sense that you do use a lot of those odd kind of sounds and textures and things like that. But I still say that your songwriting style is firmly grounded in what I would consider to be pop.

Yeah, like you could do full-on pop production things on those songs. Anyway, so that’s more what I’m talking about, is there does seem to be something about the song structure itself that is pop music.

Yeah, I don’t know, I blame Elton John. I think it’s just what I was raised on, like the songs that I loved when I was a kid and when I was a teenager. I don’t know.

I think maybe too it’s because I’m a type A person and that’s authentically me. So structure has always been song form, structure, understanding the structure has always been a really important part of the way I work and the way I create. I tell people I’m an alternative pop artist, two terms that mean essentially nothing for music.

I said, yeah, I do alternative pop, and what that means is I do the alternative to what is popular. So whatever you like, I don’t make that. I just make whatever I want.

Seriously though, because I think to be a true pop artist, you’ve got to be making whatever is making the money at the time, and I don’t necessarily chase that. So it’s a label I hold loosely.

Okay, okay. Well, I’m curious about this because you would still consider Michael Jackson to be pop. And the thing is that this is an interest, it’s interesting because you’re right that all the pop music trends have definitely moved in the sense that if you were to try to make a Michael Jackson sounding record right now, a lot of people would be like, that’s really retro, it’s really vintage.

You know what I mean? Like I like how weird this is. You’d be like, well, this is at a time that worldwide popular pop music.

But it’s kind of like indie music has the same thing, is that indie obviously came from being independent. But then as soon as you start saying, well, indie music is also a genre, those are kind of two different things. So like pop music has a long standing historical tradition that is kind of somewhat disconnected from whether or not it’s popular.

Like I don’t think a lot of, for instance, modern pop songs are gonna contribute anything to the pop music genre.

Like they don’t have a lot of staying power.

They don’t, yeah.

They want influence.

Like no one will care.

Yeah, I agree with that.

A lot of the, I mean, my kids, my kids, okay, they’re teens. They’re listening to stuff I listen to. And not because I’m showing them.

I’m serious. Like there’s a lot of stuff where they’ll be playing something and I’m going, oh, I remember that song. Like, why are you listening to Toad the Wet Sprocket?

Like what’s happening here? Like what happened?

My 15 year old’s the same. She has the most wildly diverse taste in music. I mean, she’s listening to The Police, she’s listening to ACDC, she’s listening to like old stuff from the 40s.

I’m like, go for it girl.

Just all over the place. But they’re not really listening to hardly anything that’s being currently made on the top, like what you would consider top 40 or anything like that.

Yeah. I think… The music’s becoming more throw away, like a lot of other things in our culture.

But that means that pop music may have reached a certain kind of stasis, where it’s like… Oh, no! No, no, I’m saying…

We’ve reached the summit of pop music.

Well, I’m just saying, in terms of what can be contributed to it, I think that it’s a pretty well-formed genre at this point. Like indie music as well, like in the sense of, this is sort of the shape of it. Like the shape of it’s largely been filled out by what’s been made so far.

And it doesn’t really seem like… It doesn’t really seem like pop music is much of an evolving genre at this point. Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it’s an interesting take. I think with streaming and then AI and then no one being able to afford concerts anymore, like I just think everything in the next 10 years is gonna just, it’s gonna be wild, wild west again about what survives and what people keep doing. And I hope that people will continue to lean into their own unique weirdness.

And that’s what’s gonna cut through. Cause like, yeah, just being popular for being popular’s sake is not really carrying artists anymore, which is I think ultimately a good thing.

I think it’s a good thing too. I’m excited about it. Well, and part of the reason I think I like your pop music is because you’re drawing from things that you like that are from all over the place.

And what are like your favorite other genres? Like what are your favorite other things to draw from?

Oh, man, I try to listen to as much different things as I can. I have a gigantic list called All My Friend’s Favorite Albums. And anytime someone gives me it, like I just added your Alt J album to the list, I will just try to listen to it and really consider it top to bottom all the way through.

If I get to song four and I just hate it, I will give myself an out. Like, I don’t really like 80s music, so I couldn’t make it through that George Michael album that won a ton of Grammys. I couldn’t do it.

I was like, not for me.

Hold on, hold on. But on Bloodline, though, I mean, isn’t Jedidah kind of sounds like…

It’s a little 80s. Okay. But our references for that one were Kate Bush.

Hounds of Love.

That makes sense. Yeah. I think I caught that.

Amity loves Kate Bush, though. Anyway, with one of my daughters.

Oh, yeah. So I try to pull from lots of different eras of things I love. I mean, 90s alternative is, that’s my teenage sweet spot.

But again, singer-songwriters from the 70s. And I mean, the first time I lift… I mean, not that there’s any influences of the song Bloodline, but the first time I ever listened to Discovery by Daft Punk from start to finish.

I was like, oh, I get it now. I understand why this was important. And so I just try to expose myself to a lot of different things and not get in a rut of listening to the same things that I listened to when I was a kid.

Because I think that’s why it’s hard to engage with the average listener right now. Because I was reading some article the other day that says most people don’t listen to any new music past the age of 24. They just use music as nostalgia and comfort.

So they just go back to that stuff that they listened to when they were a kid and when they were a teenager. And then they just don’t discover new stuff. And so I think one of the primary challenges as an artist, you think when you’re young, the challenges are going to be, I don’t have enough time, I don’t have enough money, or what’s my inspiration?

And I feel like I’ve got a lot of those things now. And my biggest challenge is getting people to care about something that’s new. So I don’t know how I got off on that.

No, no, it is really interesting. I’d love for you to send me the link to that article and I’ll put one in the show notes, because it does seem… Well, yeah, there was that…

I read an article one time that was talking about Fuller House. Do you remember when Fuller House got released? And the article was like, if you were ever wondering when nostalgia crosses the line into necrophilia, this is it.

But it does kind of feel like… I mean, movies are the same way. You have these big franchises that just make the same intellectual properties.

Like, oh, yeah, I know that. And so people go and watch the movie, I guess. But there’s franchise fatigue.

It’s so dead. It’s a dead horse so hard. And AI is going to make that worse.

It really will, because it’s going to synthesize. It’s going to make mud of it really fast. I’m serious.

Yeah, I know.

Race to the bottom.

Yeah, big time. Especially as I’m considering this concept of holiness. I’m going to have to write something about this at some point, because I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently.

But holy is set aside from common. Like holy is set aside, like sacred is set aside from profane, common, vulgar. Those things all mean like things that are interchangeable.

Like, what makes art art is that you’re distinguishing something from something else as an object of attention, right? You’re like putting this set of things together to be set apart to look at, like pay attention to this thing. I’m setting it apart as for special attention.

When you have AI and a lot of the other kinds of approaches that are happening, if you’re trying to drive up commonality, universality first or whatever, you end up kind of smearing over a lot of those distinctions and a lot of those changes, and you end up creating this sort of muddy, everything’s the same color, everything’s the same feel, everything’s the same same. And I think AI can’t help but do that because it’s ultimately just deriving from itself. It’s going to be a dead battery one day.

But anyway, how do you, how do you, Aryn, avoid what seemed like the inherent like just trajectory of pop or popular stuff to actually pursue creating your art in this genre? And like I would say a pretty tight area of this genre with integrity and authenticity and freshness. Like how do you keep doing that?

Do you ever just get tired of it? Or you ever just like, man, I just want to be out of it altogether?

No.

No. Okay. So that’s awesome.

A friend asked me that once like, do you ever just thought, oh, put the songwriting thing down? And I’m like, no, what would I do? I would just die.

I think I was made to create. And I think not getting stale, it’s like I was saying, not saying, oh, I like that Kate Bush album, I’m going to reproduce that. It’s drawing from a wealth of all the things that I’ve experienced in music and finding that little sliver of, I like the emotion of that, I like the sound of that bass line, I like the, and it’s never an intention to reproduce that thing.

It’s just like the atmosphere. And then channeling that, but no, I don’t get bored. But I will say, I’ve got another project past Bloodline in the pipeline for Aryn Michelle, and then I’m trying to turn a lot of my artistic energy towards the band.

I like that.

We are writing more like heavy rock stuff, because I have four guys in the room who are just slamming it up. So I think that’s how I will not get-

You could tap into your opera and you could do like rock opera stuff.

It’s not a bad idea. I’ll take that into consideration.

I want to hear that. When you said you’re maybe studying classical opera, I was like, I would love to hear your take on just infusing some of that stuff into the other work that you’re doing. That would be awesome.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe. Maybe I’ll come full circle.

But yeah, I think just continuing to lean into, I like it, I don’t like it, beyond musical spaces even. That’s something I meant to tell you this upfront that I’ve appreciated about your podcast so much is it’s like an oasis for me in a desert of true crime and political ranting podcasts. I just want someone who has taste to help me think about artistic mediums beyond my own.

That’s cool.

So I can discover what I like and what I don’t like. You talked about Flannery O’Connor a lot, and I was like, never read any of her work. So I got A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and I was like, I have never read anything like this ever.

I really like it. So then you also recommended David Foster Wallace, is that right?

Yeah.

I read one of his books and I hated it. I love that. I don’t know if I was the target audience or not, but I think to answer your question, to be a continuous artistic creator within a field moving forward, I got to keep being open to exposing myself to the things I like and I don’t like, to continue to refine my tastes.

If you have time, last question, this is a massive long one, obviously, because that’s what you do in interviews, is you talk. Sorry. The survival of your approach into the future, especially with the advent of AI, because we have to talk about something AI.

This season, I’m just joking, we don’t have to, but apparently, the season of AI seems, so especially with the advent of AI, the survival of your approach, and I would say, which would be in like a broadly pop music approach, it does seem to depend on the average listener having the taste and discernment necessary to detect a difference between well-crafted, excellent, life-giving, timeless work on one hand, and work that’s been deformed by, smeared with agendas and competence, ignorance and perversion. I think you would agree that that does seem to be a problem. There does seem to be an issue of discernment there.

So if there is that, like what kinds of things would you recommend? And again, you could say to the artist or to the average listener, how do you fix an issue of discernment that’s as great as the one that we’re facing right now? So much so that, I mean, people may not even prefer real music over AI music, you know, like they might even prefer music made by human beings or they can’t tell the difference.

Yeah. How do we how do we fix that? Big question, I know. 

Tell us a little fix.

Start on the little things.

Our cultural taste crisis. I think that’s another good book. What’s it called?

Mood Machine. Have you read this book? It’s a book about the history of Spotify and why they do what they do and how they don’t think about artists as creators.

They think of artists as another customer base they can get money from. But first, considering this question, it made me think of Spotify and their ideal listener is what they call a lean back listener. They want people to just press play on a mood playlist and check out and leave Spotify streaming all day long.

So, the algorithm, the business model, it’s all set up to that, to capture a lean back listener with music that is generic enough lyrically, that matches the vibe, that people just won’t pay attention, right? That’s their ideal listener, is a lean back listener.

I mean, their ideal listener is a listener that does not pay attention.

Exactly. Someone who just presses play and lets it go. So, if you have a song that sounds too different, that lyrically, musically is just too different than everything else on that hit.

It kind of breaks people out of the lull.

Exactly. Yeah. And so, that was very comforting to me because I don’t make lean back music.

Like people don’t understand my music, especially lyrically, unless you like actually pay attention to it. What are you talking about? So, my first encouragement to people would be, try as best you can to not be okay with being a lean back listener.

Don’t just press play on the mood playlist. Like curate. Look to other people to help you curate and curate for yourself new music, different music.

It just made a lot of things make sense to me. For example, Billie Eilish came out with this album and I listened to the whole thing. The song that I thought was the most boring musically, lyrically, in all the ways, was the number one song from the project.

It was called Birds of a Feather. I’m not saying it’s terrible. It’s just so generic.

You could just play it forever and never notice that it stopped. And so I would just encourage people to pay attention. Pay attention to what you’re listening to.

Don’t let it just be something that’s provided as background texture, but it’s art that you care about.

I want to ask you a little bit more about that. So in terms of not being ill, is it okay to listen to music that’s just in the background and have it be a vibe setter?

I can’t do it. Maybe that’s one of my personality traits. So I will be abundantly distracted by any music in the background.

I had a choral director when I was in undergrad doing the classical music stuff, who he would go over to dinner parties and people would turn on classical music because they’re like, Oh, it’s classical music guy. He’d walk over and there’s classical music and then they try to have a conversation with him and he’s like, wait, are we listening to the music or are we talking? Because I can’t do both.

I care more about that. I hate to tell you. So I do know.

I think that’s true. That’s a point there that I know most people don’t care about music as much as I do and that’s okay. I don’t care about gardening as much as other people do.

I want to frame what you’re saying in maybe positive action item. It’s not necessarily don’t have music on in the background, but maybe you have to carve out an intentional amount of time where you do pay attention. So, you know what I mean?

Even if it’s like 30 minutes or one album once a week or once a month or something, just a time when you actually are saying, I’m setting my attention and intention aside to do this thing right now and this is all. I’m just going to focus on this and really pay attention to it. Maybe you can do it with Aryn’s record when it comes out.

It would be worthwhile to do it. Really to put on your headphones or put it on your best speaker system and just listen through from beginning to end with your full attention, not with your phone, not with anything else. If you want to do vibe music and background stuff for the rest of your time, that would be fine.

But I do think in order to develop taste, I guess the point you’re making, in order to develop taste, you have to develop specific intentional attention paying to works of art. Because it’s not just music. I mean, it’s really any works of art.

I found out recently that they’re changing the way they write dialogue. For the writers of Netflix shows, they are told you need to put exposition in audible dialogue so that people can hear what is happening because they won’t be looking at the screen because so many people are actually on their phones while they are watching Netflix shows, that they’re like, you have to make sure it’s in the dialogue. It’s stuff like that where it’s like, and they’re catering to that.

Netflix is catering to that in the way that Spotify is catering to the laid-back listener. It’s a vicious cycle, right?

Yeah.

You agree that it’s actually a vicious cycle?

Absolutely. We’re so thoroughly distracted.

But then it’s like, we’re accommodating it, so then it just gets worse. Then because it gets worse, you have to accommodate it further. And it’s just like, I feel like it’s just getting worse.

Yeah. Well, no, this is another good argument for why I should start doing operatic, just random sections in my song, because no one’s going to be able to just shuffle through that.

Can’t shut it out.

No, but OK, so I’ll give a practical, helpful… I’m not trying to do shameless self-promotion of this playlist. I get no money from this playlist.

But for the last five years, I have a Spotify playlist that’s called Doesn’t Sound Like Christian Music. And it’s all indie Christian artists making music genre-wise that does not sound like Christian music. So it’s not CCM, it’s not gospel, it’s not contemporary worship.

Is it a Spotify playlist?

It’s Spotify playlist, and I update it every Friday with usually five to ten new songs that just came out. So if someone’s looking to discover some new artists, that’s something proactively I’m doing to help.

Where do you discover new artists? How do you get, how do you find out about them?

Yeah, I just, this was my 2020, you know, everybody had their rabbit hole, they went down. I set out to discover as many indie Christian artists making this kind of independent, quirky, not mainstream Christian music as I could. And I would follow them and I would listen to them.

And then I would see, that is a helpful thing Spotify does. Sometimes it suggests other artists that sound like them. And then I would follow those five artists and listen to them and follow those five artists.

And not, I mean, in rap, in rock, in R&B, and just like, just digging and digging and digging. So I follow like, I don’t know, like 1500 artists on Spotify. That’s my one contribution to try to help get off a shuffle.

And I think, take a risk. That would be my other encouragement to people is take a risk. Make a make up list like I have.

It’s like somebody tells you they loved an album. Maybe that’s the time you carve out and consider it. You know, one of my students when I’m-

Well, because that’s service to them too, when you do that, to the friend who offered. Because I mean, I know I’ve been like, hey, you know, I really appreciate that you read David Foster Wallace and Flannery O’Connor because I recommended it. You know, that means something to me.

That’s like, well, you attended to me when you did that. You didn’t just attend to those works. So I agree.

Like if someone tells you, I have to check out and I’ve already put three things on it because of you during this thing. That’s why if I look like I’m typing-

No, that’s great. One other suggestion I’d say is the artists in your life, like if somebody is wanting to support artists, and I’m sure you’ve said this on many other episodes, is if they do a live show, please go, please go. That’s the hardest thing because we’re so thoroughly distracted, is getting people to show up in body and attention.

And I find when I go to a live show, even if it’s my kids have drugged me somewhere, to some artist I’ve never heard of, I end up falling in love so much more with the music if I see it in person.

Definitely.

So just prioritizing the embodied experiences, I think it means so much to as a listener, but then also to the artists who are trying to do this thing, who are making no money doing this thing. They’re just doing it because they love it and they love you, right? They love, they want to make connections with people.

So I love that that Renew the Arts does great, champions that with Porchlight and the things y’all do.

That’s right. All the tips and help that we can get, we’ll take it in terms of being an advocate for artists in this space is really challenging. Not because the artists, the artists are great, but it’s just really hard to get people to care.

I’m not trying to shame or judge anyone for not caring because I understand there’s a lot of busyness and distraction and everything else going on in life altogether. But I do think it is really valuable for that person. It’s one of those things that you’re not necessarily going to understand the blessing of it till you start to do it.

And I think you’ll understand the blessing more and more. Otherwise, Skynet’s going to take over and we’re all going to die. So, you know.

Anyway, thanks. Thank you, Aryn. So do you have anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn’t talk about?

I don’t think so. I just, I’m really appreciative of what you do and of the opportunity. And yeah, no, thank you so much for all your intentional questions.

And thank you for letting me see them ahead of time.

Oh, sure.

That minister to my type A heart.

Yes. No, that’s good.

Yeah.

All right. Well, Aryn, it was really great to talk to you. Thank you so much for spending so much time with me.

We’ve given Chase a lot to work through, which is great.

I’m sorry, Chase.

He’ll be fine. He’ll be fine. But yeah, I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for coming on. And for all of you out there, you should definitely check out the book, Play Shape Create. And if you’re a songwriter, you should definitely have a copy of this book.

If you are not a songwriter, you should probably have a copy of this book, but I’d still recommend it to you so that you can learn how to pay attention better. Because it really does help. It really does help, I think, to pay attention more closely.

And check out Aryn Michelle’s record that’s coming out, their ninth studio album that is going to be coming out here in July, called Bloodline. And you can listen to a bunch of those singles now, and I’ll have links and whatnot in the show notes. And we don’t always do this, but Aryn, would it be fine with you if we played one of your songs at the end of this podcast?

Absolutely.

Do you have one? We didn’t even talk. Like, what’s your favorite?

What’s the one you want me to play?

Okay, well, I’ll let you choose. My answer to what my favorite song on the project is, there’s, stop.

Before you say, am I allowed to tell you what mine is and then see if it’s the same?

Oh, upper hand?

No.

You can play whatever one you want. I like all of them.

Is that what you want? You want upper hand?

I like upper hand because it was the most difficult song to write. We probably spent the most time executing it in studio as well, because it’s the Tamar song and it’s like, how do you write a song about Tamar?

That was it. I didn’t know it was called upper hand. The Tamar song is my favorite song on the record.

Okay, great.

Yeah. We did it! I didn’t know it was called Upper Head.

When you said that, I was like, what? No, I like the Tamar song.

That’s what I like. That’s it, that’s it, that’s it.

The Renew the Arts Podcast is a production of Renew the Arts, a 501c3 dedicated to cultivating Christian communities by inspiring arts partnership and supporting artists. If you’d like to find out more about our work, please visit renewthearts.org. The Renew the Arts Podcast is directed, produced, and hosted by Michael Minkoff, with oversight by Renew the Arts President and CEO, Katie Martin.

Production support provided by Chase Tremaine and Abby Sitterle. Edited by Chase Tremaine. Theme music by Civilized Creature.

For the 2026 season, we’re using the instrumental version of the single Think I’m Ready, used with the generous permission of the artist, Ryan Lane of Civilized Creature. Thank you all for listening.