The Culture Beat

USA Today has an interesting article that explores the inspiration of one of the songs on Neil Young’s new album.

One of the album’s most poignant songs is its closing number, When God Made Me, sung from the perspective of a man searching for his place in the divine plan. “Did he create just me in his image,” Young wonders in the song, “or every living thing?”

“I’m not a preacher, and I’m certainly not a good example, but I have my own feelings about God. I’m kind of a nature guy. My cathedral is forests, or the prairies, or the beach.”
…
The song’s specifically spiritual focus is a rarity in Young’s catalog. “I couldn’t figure out how I was writing it,” he says. Then engineer Chad Hailey showed him some of the recording studio’s history.

“Chad showed me, with a flashlight, up through a hole in the ceiling,” he says. “There were these gothic windows and church lights and everything. He said, ‘This has been a church since the 1700s. It was a Confederate morgue. It’s been a hospital.’

“Then it all started adding up, where the music was coming from and where everything was.”

Sufjan’s success
Have you been catching all the buzz surrounding Sufjan Stevens? His eclectic shows are selling out all over the place. One of my colleagues went to a recent show. I found her description of the concert to be quite informative. Well, kind of. “Amazing. I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t enjoy it,” she said. “It was weird. I have never seen anything like it. It was cheesy — but it made it all the more enjoyable.”

Jon Ward leads his story on Stevens in The Washington Times by stating:

One of indie rock’s fastest-rising stars is following a trail blazed by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis. His name is Sufjan Stevens (pronounced Soof-yawn). He writes songs about a God with precise features; God is big, and a little scary, and man is, pardon the blasphemy, evil.

Music about the God worshipped by John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards and Martin Luther is not exactly standard fare for indie rock fans. But Mr. Stevens’ latest record, “Come On and Feel the Illinoise,” his fifth album since 2000, is one of the best received indie rock albums of the year.

He’s right. Rolling Stone described the album as “part Schoolhouse Rock history lesson, part hippie Bible study. It has songs about UFO sightings, prairie fires, the Civil War, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the poet Carl Sandburg and the Cubs. It also has a song called ‘Come On! Feel the Illinoise!’”

The snarky rock elites at Spin even gave a nod to Stevens’s album: “At one point, a character asks, ‘What have we become, America?’ Timely question, and one that Illinoise offers more convincing answers to than a presidential town hall meeting.”

Reporting for The Washington Post, J. Freedom du Lac writes:

But don’t be fooled by Stevens’s idiosyncrasies, of which there are plenty. Beneath all the quirkiness, there’s a literary singer whose songs are deeply spiritual, though not always in a blind-faith kind of way.

Stevens is the artist who might have been birthed by Flannery O’Connor and Nick Drake, had they ever hooked up.

Actually, to play that fantasy out, O’Connor and Drake probably would’ve had twins, and the brother of Sufjan (SOOF-yawn) would’ve gotten the much easier to pronounce name of Samuel Beam. Beam makes music under the moniker Iron and Wine. Together, Stevens and Iron and Wine are the favored artists among the bearded elite, aka Critics and Indie Hipsters Who Love the Soft, Sensitive Folk-Rock Stuff and Songs That Ask Interesting Questions About Faith.

“I’m sure if I were to sit down with Jerry Falwell or anyone like that it would be very uncomfortable,” Stevens told the Los Angeles Times. “Yet in theological terms, we worship the same God, and that’s a very awkward kind of thing to reconcile with. The religious environment is a big problem, but I don’t really know how to start talking about it.”

Dylan’s rock of ages
There seems to be no end to the fascination with America’s arguably most significant and mysterious troubadour. Fans snatched up his autobiographical Chronicles, Vol. 1. And on September 25-26, PBS aired No Direction Home, Martin Scorcese’s four-hour documentary on Dylan’s life between 1961 and 1966. The twin-DVD of the show, as well as the two-CD soundtrack set of unreleased material from the period, had already been made released.

As helpful as these portrayals are in helping unwrap the Dylan mystique, there still remains the intriguing question regarding his theological disposition. Some fans would rather that he remain elusive on the question of religion, while others would love to see him clearly and articulately map out his beliefs. Here is a piece I wrote on Dylan for BreakPoint.

Lost’s little Lilly
Lastly, I suppose if you follow “Lost” you were sure to catch uber-babe Evangeline Lilly on the cover of the new Rolling Stone.

She grew up in small towns in western Canada; her only previous acting experience was a handful of commercials and a few jobs as an extra in projects shooting in Vancouver, like Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital and White Chicks. Her father was a grocery-store produce manager, and her mom ran a day-care center out of the house. Raised Baptist and Mennonite, Lilly taught Sunday school for eight years, and one of her first jobs out of high school was as a flight attendant for a “really sh**ty airline.” Not exactly typical network-TV-star material.

Among the interesting tidbits is this description of Lilly from cast mate Dominic Monaghan: “She’s a Christian, but she’s a pottymouth.” (Apparently, the two are rumored to be dating but they won’t confirm the news.)

“Over and over again,” Lilly explains, “I’ve been called a walking oxymoron. I do things that you wouldn’t associate with a good little Christian girl. The story begins with Lilly accepting a silly dare for $20 (“I don’t have a lot of inhibition,” she says.)

Rolling Stone’s Gavin Edwards asks: “And the challenge for Evangeline Lilly? After a year that took her from Vancouver to Hawaii, from Sunday school to an international object of obsession, it’s figuring out just who she is while the whole world is watching.”

As wonderful as being cast on such a top-rated TV show can be, she was not prepared for how overwhelming it would be.

She managed to put off the Big Meltdown until near the end of Season One. Worn down by her workload, she called her parents in full hysterics. They told her, “Screw Hollywood — you come home and we’ll feed you some chicken-noodle soup.”

Instead, Lilly went to Rwanda, where a friend was doing missionary work. “I holed up and read and wrote and prayed,” she says. “I just disappeared off the face of the earth.” Ironically, the consequence of playing the character of a forgotten person stranded on one of the most remote corners of the planet is that she has to travel great distances to end up someplace where nobody will recognize her.