Thursday, October 05, 2006

Danielson!

Baboon Palace makes its triumphant return to the blogosphere with a post linking to a music video for Danielson's Did I Step On Your Trumpet? I defy you to watch that video and not be put into a better mood.

It was a BP post from a while back (right after I converted, I think) that introduced me to the wonderful world of Danielson in the first place. Immer schon Excelsior!

Danielson's music is generally distinctively Christian (though Did I Step On Your Trumpet? is not obviously Christian). Of course, it's easy to miss that aspect of the music on a casual listening. This is mostly because it isn't awful.

Danielson remains pretty much the only Christian music I can stomach, excepting stuff written by people who are long dead. The essence of most of the other Christian music I've encountered has been nicely captured by the Wittenburg Door: Evangelical Mad Libs. See some concrete examples of this sort of depth and artistry here. One of those songs shows up fairly frequently at the church I go to--it's a weekly spiritual exercise for me to set aside my moderately snobbish sense of musical aesthetics for the duration of the service (though I had a brief respite the time we did Be Thou My Vision).

Here are five other examples of great Danielson songs (and great Danielson lyrics).

What to Wear
Goin' to a dance party with God!
Goin' dancin' with God!!
What to wear to the funeral!
Be Your Wildman
My loins say just one thing to me...
But my brain...
My brain says another thing to me!
But my loins...


I deserve to be dropkicked!
I deserve to be backdropkicked!
Dropkicked by my God, but he won't...
I deserve to be dropkicked!
Fathom The Nine Fruits Pie
Our Lord of the Dance will come!
Time to eat, time to eat! Come and get it, time to eat!
Love, and joy, and peace, and patience!
Kindness! Goodness! Faithfulness!
Gentleness and self-control!

Time to eat, time to eat! Come and get it, time to eat!
the lords rest
A certain day has been set!
And it's called "Today"!
Today with a capital "T"!!

Fire will test the realness of each man's fire will test the realness of each man's fire ...
(His banner over me is love...)
Can We Camp At Your Feet
I get down ...
from my sky ... high ... chair ...
to camp ... at ... your ... feet ...

With what can I get away?
Your love will have your way!
With us...
Your love will have your way!
I'm not sure if these are my favourite all-time Danielson songs, but there are listed roughly in order of increasingly preference. The first two are just hilarious, and make me grin. Fathom The Nine Fruits Pie is like a shot of pure, unadulterated joy, and makes me want to dance. And I wish songs like the lords rest and Can We Camp At Your Feet would show up in church, although the arrangement and Danielson's falsettos make that idea somewhat less than practical.

(The internets tell me Danielson will be coming to Chicago next May. Woo!)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Haha awesome. Can We Camp At Your Feet is one of my favorites also.

My favorite album at the moment is Brother Danielson "Brother:Son". Definitely check that one out if you haven't already.

Also seriously digging "Deeper Than The Government" off the otherwise kind of inconsistent Tri-Danielson Omega.

Let me know if you can't find either of those and I'll put them on my webserver for ya.

Toby said...

I think I've got pretty much the whole corpus. Brother is to Son does have some great songs on it.

"There's two kinds of fun! There's things and there's stuff, and they just cannot get along. Which side are you on?"

Tough call, that one. I think I'm partial to stuff.

Vile Blasphemer said...

I didn't watch the video, but I do wonder if Mr. Miyagi makes a cameo appearance.