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There is a school of thought in mainstream culture which calls for the recovery of true 'masculinity'. Men who are real men. Who like drinking beer, taking unnecessary risks, and fighting. (These are probably the kinds of men who beat you up in high school.)

Thankfully, these ideas only very occasionally infiltrate our church thinking. It's not hard to see that such a conception of masculinity has precisely nothing to do with a gospel community. Jesus, after all, embodied a strength which was counter cultural: he willingly suffered, and died at the hands of wicked men, instructing his followers to likewise 'turn the other cheek'. Vindication of such suffering will come when Jesus returns to put the world to rights. In the mean time, humanity, both male and female, are called to be more like Christ in his suffering - and that rules out using strength to assert our rights. 'Standing up for yourself' is not a Christian project.

Very occasionally, however, unbiblical assumptions about masculinity surface in discussions about music in church. The comment 'why are our songs so feminine?' betrays some sloppy thinking about music, and gender, which I'd like to address.

My obvious question is: What on earth is 'feminine' music?

Perhaps the ranges of the songs you sing are difficult for you to sing? If so, this is not an issue of gender but of range. We all have different comfortable ranges, and it's not as simplistic as 'boy' keys and 'girl' keys. One key will work for baritones and altos, another fits better for tenors and sopranos.

Perhaps the songleaders in your church are all women? Fair enough, it would be nice to have variety. I struggle to find men who are happy to sing up front in my church.

Perhaps, though, what you really mean is that you just don't like the style of music that you hear in most churches. That's fine, of course. But I'm bemused by the suggestion that it's a neatly gendered issue. Two things make it not so neat:

First, it's worth noting that this is not reflected in who is writing and recording the songs we currently sing in Australian churches. Of the CCLI top 10 for Australia in the last reporting period, only one of the songs was written by a woman (Shout to the Lord). The rest were written by blokes. So if anything I'd expect the ladies to be complaining about a lopsided repertoire.

But, second, and most fundamentally, I want to question where you're getting you sense of what's 'feminine' and 'masculine' in music. There is a model of masculinity being assumed here which I suspect has little solid beneath it. Is it more masculine to like rock than jazz? Even if a survey of 100 men showed that 70 of them preferred Midnight Oil to Keith Urban what would that prove? Are the other 30 somehow wrong? Unmanly? Effeminate?

The German theologian Karl Barth talks about these assumed models of masculinity and gender in Church Dogmatics (III.4). He observes that these systems (e.g. boys like blue and girls like pink) can only ever be "suppositions and assertions which rest upon impressions and personal experiences and are necessarily problematic" (III.4, p150-151). He asks "On what authority are we told that these traits are masculine and these feminine?"

Most importantly, he asks, how do we possibly make commands out of these "rather contingent, schematic, conventional, literary and half-true indicatives...? Real man and real woman would then have to let themsevels be told: Thou shalt be concerned with things.... This is quite impossible." (CD III.4, p153.)

I play piano as a man. I write songs as a man. I can't do otherwise. But it is entirely possible that there will be overlap with how a woman might play piano and write songs. That's because, while different, men and women aren't strictly speaking opposites. An opposite is totally different in every way. Gender is a variation on a theme. After all, I have more in common with a woman than with a rock. And dividing the world up into 'boy songs' and 'girl songs' seems like a very silly way of saying 'I'd like it if we played more rock and less ballads in church'. (Who knows, you might find a number of girls agreeing with you.)

AJ

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It's been a while since the last blog on making our latest album, 'Unity'. But now that many of you have heard the album, hopefully unpacking how we made it will make even more sense. We are keen to share some of our experiences so that the challenge of writing and recording church songs can perhaps be made a little bit easier for you. Of course there's no manual for making an album, but we've found the processes we're sharing here to be hugely beneficial over the last couple of albums we've made.  

So, what on earth is pre-production? It can seem like jargon that makes sense only to those in the know (like 'key grip' in the credits of a film!). Each band probably has its own definition of pre-production. But for us, it is the time we spend working on the songs after writing them and before hitting record.

We bunkered down for two weeks in January 2011 with a list of 13 songs that we thought would make the album. In the first week, we rehearsed the songs intensely. We developed the parts for each instrument. We chopped the songs up into sections, workshopped them, and put them back together...the result often sounding very different from where we began!

In song writing, we want to help people let the word of Christ dwell richly within them (Colossians 3:16). So we scrutinised lyrics - a lot. Importantly, we also sent the songs to church music directors around Australia to gain objective feedback. The need to do something similar to this in pre-production cannot be overstated - songs that are intended to be sung (or at least listened to) by thousands of people need to be carefully critiqued by more than the small number of people in a band before being released.

We selected music directors who would approach the songs from a range of angles, and wouldn't simply tell us what we wanted to hear. The challenge for us, as songwriters, is to have the humility to be open to hearing and embracing feedback. (See the blog post 'Pride and Scratching' below for more thoughts on humility). That often means re-writing sections of songs, or ditching a song altogether - painful but always worth it.

In the second week, our producer David Nicholas joined us. David had been developing thoughts on the songs well before he joined us. David brought an essential external perspective to the process. He was able to dissect the songs in ways we couldn't because we were too close to them. His musical insights into arrangements, sounds, and parts were absolutely invaluable.  And with his vast experience, he helped identify the unique element in each song that would contribute to making a balanced and exciting album (and live show in the recording process!).

All of the 13 songs made it onto the album - except one. It was a song we really liked, but just couldn't seem to get right in pre-production. Sometimes that happens, and we hope the song will turn up somewhere else down the track. (eg, 'May the Words' off this album was written for our last album, but we couldn't quite nail it then...it resurfaced two years later!). So letting songs breathe over a period of time serves a crucial role.

From February to May we spent one night a week rehearsing and fine-tuning the songs. Many of you joined us on those wonderful nights in May when the record button was finally pressed...in the next blog we'll talk about the recording and mixing processes. Stay tuned!
GC

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