Finally!!!
You can download the new EP right now AND help me launch it into the world at the same time! This kickstarter campaign will run for only 60 days from April 15th to June 14th. It’s all or nothing which means either I raise the total funds needed by the end of the campaign or we’re back to 0. You can do it!
Go HERE to get involved- and if you want to get some Weight of Glory swag, or to book a show, just up your reward tier.
Your support is essential. Thanks for believing in me!
-Josh
I’m so excited to share that six new songs are coming your way very soon. Mindy and I just returned to Florida from a week of tracking new music in Nashville with Artist/Producer Jeremy Casella and a team of fantastic musicians.
We recorded six songs. Five are brand new, written in the past couple of years. One is a song I wrote a ten years ago that just hasn’t fit on any other projects until now. I can’t describe how fun it is to be releasing these new pieces into the world!
The last time I recorded completely original material was 2013. In between I have released two Hymn projects. So, this new EP is really exciting for me. A lot has happened since the “Count The Stars EP” was funded by you via Kickstarter and released: I was ordained an Episcopal Priest, I became an LMHC, I celebrated the birth of two daughters, I grieved the death of both my parents, and I played more away dates around the United States than ever before. What is life?!
So, this new EP is about responsibility, growth, home, doubt, reconciling with our past, and the centrally of the Christian Faith in the midst of life’s chaos.
The producer, Jeremy Casella- a compelling artist in his own right- helped me make these songs a reality. He booked the musicians and caught my vision for the songs from the beginning. This project marked the beginning of a new, sweet, friendship for me with Jeremy!
One of the fun discoveries in the making of this project was just how many unrecorded songs I have. Choosing the songs for this EP made me realize that I have a lot of work ahead of me in the coming years, if I want to get all of my music on tape for others to hear. It’s a fun and challenging dream that I plan to make come true!
Hope is a hard thing. It’s hard because we all need it but we all lose it.
So, when did you first lose it?
“Yeah, I used to hope,” you might say, “back when I was a child. But that was before the abuse.” Or, “I used to hope before corporate used me for 20 years, chewed me up and spit me out...before the divorce...before the cancer...before...”
And so most of us hate hope. It makes us angry. It feels like a farce, like a lie. Without realizing it, we’ve inherited the worldview of philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche or Albert Camus for whom hope is absurd. Nietzsche wrote in Human, All Too Human that hope is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of humanity. And Camus saw religious hope as no different than Sisyphus pushing his boulder up that hill every day.
Not many years after Nietzsche died, one of his fans, Adolph Hitler, put this same hopeless worldview into practice, killing millions in the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel, a
holocaust survivor, wrote about his experience in the concentration camp in his book, Night:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky. Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Literary students would have us note the way Wiesel uses a rhetorical device, called an anaphora, a sequence of words repeated again and again, “Never shall I forget! Never shall I forget.” What is it Wiesel won’t forget? Night. Hitler’s Night. Evil’s Night.
In the Easter Vigil, the opening liturgy of Easter, Christians also encounter an anaphora in the text of the Exsultet. Again and again, we proclaim “This is the night!” But it’s a very different night.
This is the night! When God rescued Israel from bondage to Egypt through the Red Sea.
This is the night! “When all who believe in Christ are delivered form the gloom of sin, and are restored to grace and holiness of life.”
This is the night! “When Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave...how holy is this night...how blessed is this night.”
To be clear, none of us have experienced a night like the holocaust. But in our own profound ways we each know something of Wiesel’s night in our own sufferings.
Easter is when Christ’s Night conquers Evil’s Night. In his death and resurrection Jesus reaches into our nights and pulls us out of our hells. Jesus kills our hopelessness. He takes the worst nights of our lives (even the night of our death) and redeems them.
THIS IS THE NIGHT! When our Lord is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
I love praying the Stations Of The Cross, especially during the Season of Lent . Growing up, I was not familiar with this ancient devotion and have come to value its focus (Christ’s Passion), its rhythm, its images, and its prayers.
I recorded this version of the Stations devotion for Holy Week, 2020, at my church in Orlando.
One of my favorite hymns of this season… Helping us prepare to not only relive the first coming of Jesus Christ, but live- in advance- his second coming. We do this weird kind of “remembering the future” thing in the Eucharistic Liturgy of the Church when we “remember” that “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” It’s a strange juxtaposition of our past, present, and future, but it’s all captured in this hymn.
-JB
