Things get complicated

As is the case for many churches, our little church schismed and our beautiful little community was fractured and torn apart. Some of us left. Some stayed. It was devastating and tragic. A lot more could be said. Story for another day.

Over the previous few years I had become good friends with Tim Smith, the worship pastor at Mars Hill. Our churches were connected because The Gathering was planted from Mars Hill. Since Tim & I were the worship leaders at these two churches, we’d get together from time to time to catch up and share songs. I’d intro some of his songs at The Gathering and over time he introduced my songs one by one at Mars Hill. They stuck. By the time Jentry & I started attending in 2005, more than a few were in heavy rotation. I’d meet people and they’d say “Oh, you’re THAT Joe Day!” It was wild.

I Look At The Cross came during this transition period. We were no longer part of The Gathering and not yet part of Mars Hill. I’d fallen in love with Emmy Lou Harris’ album Wrecking Ball and wanted something that felt like the opening track Where Will I Be? By this time, I was into the idea of combining theologically rich themes in emotive, singable melodies. In retrospect, I see this as a different direction than simple and heart-felt, but at the time I was pretty sure I could hold all these ideas together. I remember sharing this song with Luke Abrams (from the Mars Hill band Team Strike Force) on his back deck. Right after I finished playing it he looked at me and smiled, That’s like...architectural. It was a high compliment coming from him.

At Mars Hill I was known as a songwriter before I got there. The attention complicated things for me. It was really weird to be in a church environment where people knew my songs without knowing me. I’d love to say I was able to keep writing impervious to what people might think, but I had no idea how to do that. At all. I became self-conscious. There was nobody in my life at to talk to who had been through the same thing and could help me navigate it. Most of what I wrote for the next few years was a mess of conflicting thoughts and motivations. I would think so much during the writing process about how the song might be received, and you simply can’t write anything meaningful with that on your mind. I did not have the tools or know-how to deal with it. Gone were the days of simple anonymity.

Yet, not all was lost. It was just more of a fight to tap into the meaningful stuff. Reflecting on it today, a pattern emerged: the songs that barged into my consciousness at inconvenient moments are the ones that endured. The ones I intentionally wrote did not. For instance, one day in our first year at Mars Hill, Jentry & I decided to join up with the outdoor ministry for a day of snowshoeing in the Snoqualmie Wilderness. It was a beautiful, sunny, Winter day. A couple hours into meandering our way toward Chair Peak all of a sudden the melody and words come to me:

Oh the blood shed 
Then the last breath
Resurrection
Salvation
Chist is Risen!
Christ is Risen!
And my soul knows sweet salvation!

Thank God it was catchy, because this was before iPhones and the Voice Memos app and I had no way of capturing it on the mountainside. I just sang it in my head until we were home where I was able to finally work it out. It was interesting, but it wasn’t a full song yet. And I couldn’t figure out what else to do with it.

One beautiful thing about this part of the song is the connection to Tim Tackles. At the time, we were estranged due to the schism at The Gathering. But, estrangement doesn’t erase the impact a person has on you. Prior to the schism, I sat with Tim in many prayer meetings over the years where he often concluded his prayers with “Thank you Jesus for sweet salvation". Tim’s words broke through the estrangement into the song. Thankfully, Tim & I would reconcile in time. I’m so grateful for his impact on my life.

Easter was looming. I wanted to finish the song. It needed verses. And maybe a chorus. But the muse eluded me. The song remained just a fragment. One night, the week before Holy Week, Seth and his wife Lauren were at our house for dinner and I showed them what I had. The one idea I had was based on 1 Corinthians 15:22 where Paul ties the resurrection to salvation: For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. As the lyrics unfolded, they were concise and direct, threading a through line from the Creation story in Genesis to the Resurrection of Christ. We workshopped the verses in a short period of time. Christ is Risen began in the beauty of the Cascades, and was completed in a seventies rambler in Lynnwood. So Seattle.

What Have We Done came during this time too. I had been thinking that Good Friday lacked specific songs that carry the weight of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. In a sense, every song we sing on Sundays about salvation, grace, redemption, etc... are Easter songs. The lack of true Good Friday songs left Good Friday services feeling abstract to me. I thought it might be interesting if a song put us in the scene. I had tried this before with a different song you’ll mercifully never hear called Hanging from a Filthy Roman Cross. I had recently read a book by Fredrick Buechner where he pointed out the good news starts as bad news. I was reflecting that maybe good news is good to the extent of how bad the bad news is, and here the bad news is really bad. Eternally bad. Christ, the son of God, had been crucified. This either meant Satan had defeated God, or Christ was not who he said he was. For three days the disciples and followers of Christ lived in this devastating, confusing reality. My thinking was maybe it would be good for us attempt to sit in the same uncomfortable reality for at least a few minutes one night a year. To let it be heavy so that it would amplify the good news to come.

Sometime in the weeks before Holy Week I was walking out of the church building between services on a Sunday when that first line hit me:

Oh my soul
Oh my Jesus
Judas sold you for thirty  
I’d have done it for less

I was able to write the rest fairly quickly. But that version bears no resemblance to the one you’ve heard. It was driving, and upbeat. I imagined a sort of double-time, REM kind of vibe, heavy on the snare beats. I brought it to my band The Northern Conspiracy (Seth & Lauren Fikkert, Audrey Stout, Craig & Jackie Marais, and Dennis DeMercer), and we we started working on it. We quickly realized the upbeat thing wasn’t working. Seth thought it might work if we did something like Wilco’s Radio Cure. Bingo. That’s it. What’s the old saying? Good artists copy. Great artists steal? I think we stole something there.

We debuted both What Have We Done and Christ is Risen on Good Friday and Easter respectfully, 2007. Those songs might be the defining songs of Grace. They might have also been the defining songs for Mars Hill for the next few years. Or, at least the next few Good Fridays and Easters. That includes the one a few years later at Qwest Field (now Lumen Field) where the Seahawks play. Tim Smith and Dustin Kensrue lead the music that day, and I was part of the congregation. I honestly felt a bit sick to my stomach about how awkward it was to be doing Easter in a massive stadium that was not even half-full. The issue wasn’t that it was half-full, but that there was something grotesque and performative about the entire thing. Like we were trying to prove something to the city of Seattle. Nevertheless, that day I heard 19,000 people singing Christ is Risen together. It was breathaking.

Death To Life was the last song to make the album. Nate Garvey & I wrote it together at a songwriting retreat with other Mars Hill worship leaders. He had the verse words and melody but didn’t have a chorus. By the end of our session, there it was. I’m not sure either of us had collaborated like that before. It felt weird. But it worked!

The one song on Grace I did not write was Passover. That was written by Team Strike Force. They were a band of Seattle indie musicians active and well respected outside the church: Luke Abrams, Andy Myers, Jeff Bettger (90lb Wuss, Suffering and the Hideous Thieves), Rose Johnson, Matt Johnson (Roadside Monument, Blenderhead, Starflyer 59 and many more), and Mike Garcia. My band The Northern Conspiracy had a version of Passover we really liked and we felt like the record needed one more song, so we put it on there. In retrospect I shouldn’t have called the subtext of Grace “Eleven songs by Joe Day” because it’s actually ten. The result is people think I wrote the song, something I never intended. It’s a great song, Luke, Andy, Jeff, Rose, Matt, and Mike deserve all the credit. I was just as big a fan of it as everyone else.

The songs were written and tested. The next thing to do was to make the record. I'll tell you that story next week.

Talk soon...

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P.s. Has Grace meant something special to you?

Would you want to share that with the rest of this community? I'm considering doing an entire email devoted to your stories about Grace. If you have something you'd like to share with this community (or privately) just reply to this message.

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The Story of Grace

Grace - An Introduction
Grace Part 1 - Mt. Vernon, WA
BONUS: The Songs that Inspired Grace
Listen to Grace