On melody and life.

There is power in a melody. A song that could be entirely uninteresting suddenly comes alive, imbued with sparks of life through a series of notes that, when strung together in some mystical way, makes it unforgettable.

As I said previously, the power of a melody to take a simple structure of chords to where it becomes potent cannot be overemphasized. Think about some of your favorite songs. I'll step out on a limb here and venture that melody has a lot to do with why those songs have that much power for you. For example, John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change": for the majority of the song, the chords are exactly the same, repeated over and over. It's that melody that the chimes play that pulls the whole thing together, giving it that vintage groove. Love it.

Or, to put on my worship leader hat, a lot of worship songs can be pretty flat-out boring. This is a whole different playing field, because worship is much more about connecting with God than about a show, but the music itself plays an integral part of worship. It's hard to worship when the songs are just blah, with each one sounding no different than the one before.

One of the worship bands I have a great deal of respect for is Hillsong United. The amount of worship that Hillsong Church has put out, particularly the last 5-6 years, is staggering. Granted, some of their songs can start to sound formulaic (the "Hillsong United sound") but their guitarists and vocalists have this great ability to come up with melodies that are distinct enough where you can immediately tell what song they're playing. The problem with these songs is that they're performed with a massive band - think 3 electrics, 4 acoustics, countless vocalists - and some worship bands don't have the horses for the job. When the melodies get lost, it can be hard to distinguish between songs, or even a verse and a chorus of a song.

Melodies can be the hardest thing in the world to come up with. There are plenty of musicians out there who are incredibly talented at their instrument, but will always flounder at the bottom until they find their melodies. I know this far more than I would like, as it's left me feeling completely paralyzed in my music. But, like any type of writing, if you keep at it often enough and long enough, things will start to form themselves. There may be hundreds of songs that need to be played in order to find just a piece of a beautiful melody, but it's worth it. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that playing it safe all the time will eventually kill your soul.

As a musician, I've experienced my share of ordinary, generic, safe music; I've listened to it, and I've made a lot of it. I've had enough of it to last a lifetime, and like an energy drink binge on an empty stomach, it's left a gnawing hunger for something more substantial. That's not a defense of what some may see as pretentious taste. Great music can appear in the most unlikely of places.

When I was hanging out at a friend's cabin one fall weekend in sophomore year of high school, bored from all the free time to do whatever we wanted, we decided to look through the VHS tapes in the cupboard below the 13" color TV, and found a copy of Runaway Bride, with Julia Roberts. 99% of the movie was entirely forgettable, but the first 2 minutes blew me out of the water.

"I have climbed highest mountains,

I have run through the fields,

Only to be with you,

Only to be with you.

But I still haven't found what I'm looking for..." When I heard that song, and that rhythmic guitar sound as Julia Roberts rode across the field on that horse, I knew I had to watch through the end of the credits to the soundtrack, a practice I now associate with really good movies. It was a band called U2, and I'd never heard the name before. Now, of course, anybody who knows me at all is aware how I feel - "I'm in love, I'm in love, and I don't care who knows it!!!", to quote Will Ferrell in Elf.

Everyone has a song, a melody, that inexplicably does 'it' for them every single time they hear it. For me, it's always been "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Or "Where the Streets Have No Name." No, actually, pretty much all of The Joshua Tree album. Or their whole catalog. You get the idea. The reason why U2 is the longest-lasting band on the planet is because of each member's innate grasp of melody. And when a band knows those melodies, really feels them, sometimes you can feel it too, and join in.