Music for the Morning after, Thanksgiving
Paul Cauthen, Better Than Ezra, Jason Isbell, and pirates and pastors
Turkeys and pigskins ruled the day yesterday. T-Day gatherings huddled diverse family and friends together for glorious, nostalgic, or awkward mealtimes (some shared all three experiences at once).
Today is ruled by shopping deals and leftovers. As you retrieve Christmas trees and decorations from your basement or attic, enjoy this diverse and nostalgic playlist - featuring a “Pirate and a Pastor” Bonus Track where a Jimmy Buffett song trains pastoral interns.
Happy shopping, be careful out there.
P.S. Ben wants to know if anyone caught the Peter Yorn reference in the subject line.
Country Coming Down by Paul Cauthen (Ben)
You might do a double take on your listening device of choice when you hear the echoes of this Johnny Cash vocal-doppelgänger (or is the term “sound-alike”). This simple song longs for a place out in the quiet, where you can hear the “crackle of a campfire and the country coming down.”
Also available on Apple Music.
King of New Orleans by Better Than Ezra (Jonathan)
This week we are home for Thanksgiving back in my home state of Mississippi. While here, my wife and I took the opportunity to take our kids to one of our favorite cities, New Orleans. They were enamored with the street performers, the music, and somewhat with the food (I know, they are a work in progress). Being back home brings with it a large dose of nostalgia, which usually involves music. While driving home from New Orleans, I put on some music from my high school years with one of the songs being King of New Orleans by Better Than Ezra, which I thought was fitting. If you’re back home this weekend for Thanksgiving (and even if you’re not), what are some of the tracks that take you back?
Also available on Apple Music.
King of Oklahoma by Jason Isbell (Kody)
I was hesitant to choose this song because my friend Matt (who wrote this PJ Harvey Bonus Track) gives me a hard time for highlighting too many of the same artists, but once Jonathan told me he was going with King of New Orleans I felt emboldened to go with the King of Oklahoma.
Our family had a blast singing this song on Tuesday as we crossed the Kansas-Oklahoma state line en route to see our families in OK for Turkey Day. The song is up for a Grammy (if that counts for anything). It tells the sad story of a man who once felt like the King of Oklahoma but is now devastated by a bad back and opioid dependency - something all too familiar in many of our communities.
Also available on Apple Music.
Bonus Track: A Pirate and a Pastor by Ben Bowden
One of the first things I do with our pastoral interns at First Baptist Church Enterprise is not unpack a theology book, but Jimmy Buffett.
Here’s the assignment: Listen to Buffett’s “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” and tell me what’s really going on from a Christian worldview.
The project is usually met with surprise since the song is littered with drunkenness, womanizing, and drug-smuggling. Buffett croons about a man who sensed a calling that was never met, and replaced it with things that never satisfied. He gets to the end only to discover, “After all the years I've found; My occupational hazard being my occupation's just not around. I feel like I've drowned, gonna head uptown.” It’s a poetic way of describing a longing for something that is just out of one’s reach and feeling the weight of a wasted life.
When Paul spoke to the men of Athens in Acts 17, he quoted one of their poets to make the point that God has revealed Himself to all mankind through creation. He basically said, “You say you don’t know this God, but you know something about Him. I’ve listened to your songs, you know that there is only One God. You don’t know Him in a personal way, but you know He is there.”
Listening to music is one of the ways we can recognize idols in our culture. Music is often brutally honest about things we don’t want to talk about - despair, loneliness, heartache, betrayal, and sowing what one reaps. Music tells us that we know deep down something is missing; that we’re made for something greater than this world can give. CS Lewis famously said it this way: “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” As Augustine said, “We’re made for God, so we’ll be restless until we find our rest in Him.”
In the end, I just want to teach our interns the value of using common messages already in our culture and connecting the dots to the storyline of redemption. Besides, I’m simply taking a page out of Jimmy’s own playbook, who read dozens of books about heroes and crooks and…learned much from both of their styles.
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Ben Bowden is a pastor in Enterprise, Alabama (War Eagle if you were wondering). His favorite band is Elvis Presley and the Jordanaires. For his most recent live show, he saw Drew Holcomb in Atlanta, GA.
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Thank you for reading this edition of the Swap. Reply or post with some of the music you’re listening to this post-Thanksgiving weekend.