Update: Hilary reminded me of Susan Ashton’s In Amazing Grace Land. See comments below.
Update 2: Dagum it. Neil Diamond has even got in on the act. See the video for Pretty Amazing Grace. (I’m not making this up.)
Update 3: Jars of Clay. But they get it right.
Warning: The following post is a work of highly hyperbolic satirical ranting. No offense is intended against any of the songwriters mentioned in this post. They are all friends of mine. Or they might have been had things turned out differently.
Warning: Stop reading now if you like any song with the words “amazing” or “grace” in it besides the John Newton original.
May the ghost of John Newton haunt your dreams.
If you do not immediately desist from writing songs that piggyback on Newton’s classic hymn, may wrath fall on your head, not like rain, but like an Acme safe from a tenth-story window. Fellow musicians of mine, I appeal to you as one who has stared at a blank sheet of paper and willed fresh lyrics to appear: Stop ripping off “Amazing Grace.” It’s no longer amazing. It was a great song in its day. But jacking it up with distorted guitars or a funky bridge is really lame. God’s faithfulness is new every morning. But nuking that song in the musical microwave is a recipe for holy heartburn.
Think of something else.
How about “marvelous mercy.” That’s kinda catchy.
Marvelous mercy it makes me merry.
Jesus is cooler than the ol’ tooth fairy.
See. I can write original lyrics. I do not need to resort to rehashing some slave trader’s Victorian poem.
Who is guilty?
1. Louie Giglio, David Bell and Rod Padgett: Grace Flows Down (2000)
“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound; amazing love, now flowing down…”
What’s so amazing about this song is that it took three guys to twist the original lyrics into something that could be sung with four guitar chords in the key of D.
2. Matt Redman: Amazing (2002)
“That’s what’s so amazing about Your grace.” (repeat over and over)
No, Matt. That’s not amazing. What’s amazing is that the Big Guy in the Sky hasn’t struck you with male pattern baldness for these lame-o lyrics.
3. Todd Agnew: Grace Like Rain (2004) W
“Hallelujah, grace like rain falling down on me. Hallelujah, all my shame washed away, washed away.”
Grace… falling… like rain. Hmmmm, let me get out my Heresy Detector™ … Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! Hey guys, this one refuses to recant. Somebody pass me the thumb screws.
4. Chris Tomlin: Amazing Grace (My Chains Are Gone) (2007) W
Well, there’s no great violence done to Newton’s lyrics. In fact, they’ve been lifted word-for-word with an Emergent-style bridge thrown in the middle. This is a treacly pop song cranked out by elaborate electronic machines powered by the sparkle of Chris Tomlin’s teeth. K-Love made this song number one. Any questions?
5. Susan Ashton: In Amazing Grace Land (1992)
“I once was lost. But you found me and brought me here. Now there’s a halo over me. In Amazing Grace land.”
This song is sweet. Kind of a country slide-guitar ballad with a nice groove. But a halo?!? Oh man, I’m speechless. Shouldn’t Lisa Presley sue? I mean, we’re talking about Graceland here! You can even download a ringtone of this song. Life is good!
6. Jars of Clay: Amazing Grace (2005) W L
“Amazing grace I feel it coming up slowly now like the sun is risin’, heat on my face.”
I love Jars of Clay. God Will Lift Up Your Head is the best recycling job of a hymn I’ve ever heard. But, hold on a minute. I thought grace was falling like rain? Now it’s rising like the sun. Can somebody please tell me exactly what this grace thing is?
Our primped and pampered pop stars of the Christian circus need to spend more time with the living God and less time mining treasures from Granny’s hymnal. We do not need to ride on the shirt tails of our ancestors’ spirituality. I’ve got an idea. Let’s tie all these swooning, crooning falling-on-my-knees, I-can-feel-you-touch-me Julio-Iglesias-of-the-TBN wannabes… where was I? Oh, sorry. Let’s tie them all to the mast of a sinking ship. As the waves toss that boat around like a bar of soap at baby’s bath time, maybe our songwriters will see a light. Or hear a voice. Or in their wretchedness, grace will fall like a sea storm shrieking and the voice of God will boom from the aquatic depths, and perhaps they will get an idea. It won’t be a mamby-pamby Jesus-Is-My-Boyfriend kind of idea. More like “Life is sucking me into the abyss and yet God is going down with me.” And when they get home and write that song, I might once again be interested in listening to the lyrically-challenged theologically-vacuous thing that has become Christian Contemporary Music.
Note: This post was inspired by listening to 20 The Countdown Magazine on a TransWorld Radio transmission out of Malawi.
“Life is sucking me into the abyss and yet God is going down with me”
I’m waiting for that song to be written, too
.
It made me think a bit of your Psalm 93 song. And wish you’d write one based on Psalm 107.
And by the way, isn’t one of the perks of living in Africa supposed to be that you don’t have to listen to things like 20 The Countdown Magazine?
Mere “satirical ranting”? I think not. That last paragraph certainly packed a punch.
But back to the mindset of satire and hyperbole… Do you call down more or less wrath on lyrics that take an alternate message from words like Newton’s? For example, As Cities Burn’s “I once was blind, but now I just look away,” or Thrice’s “we are lost and we are found.”
My latest Cyber-Psalm kyped “Motherless Child” so I also should be tied to the mast while the Sirens sing.
Phil, whoa. I like that As Cities Burn quote. We’re like that living in Africa quite often. We see the truth but we wish we couldn’t (Like Cipher on Matrix…)
This is why I adore you.
At a church I used to attend many moons ago, they used to sing Amazing Grace as it is found in this “liturgy.”
[...] Contact « May the ghost of John Newton haunt your dreams [...]
I’ve got an idea. Let’s tie all these swooning, crooning falling-on-my-knees, I-can-feel-you-touch-me Julio-Iglesias-of-the-TBN wannabes… where was I? Oh, sorry. Let’s tie them all to the mast of a sinking ship.
Dude, seriously – why so subtle?
Tell us what you really think!
Emerging “Grace”? How sour the sound
That stirred a wretch like me.
I once knew one, but now I’ve found
A hundred songs there be.
When I’ve sung them ten thousand times,
10.30 every Sun.,
I’ve no less times to sing these lines
Than when I first begun.
(Yes, “times” and “lines” is a bad rhyme, but the original rhymes are worse.)
Have I earned myself a free trip to the bottom of the sea?
PS John Newton (1725-1807) was not a Victorian anything. The art of writing hymns as good as “Amazing Grace” was lost by the time Victoria (reigned 1837-1901) came to the throne.
My previous comment was not inspired by this description of worship from Dave Walker, but it could have been. Actually three quarters of an hour of worship sounds like a taste of heaven to me, if it’s done well (e.g. by Matt Redman) and preferably without the dancers and flag wavers. But I can understand the reaction of people who don’t understand what’s going on, similar to 1 Corinthians 14:23.
This is of course the same Spring Harvest and the same Steve Chalke that caused such a stir on my blog, and on Dave’s other one, nearly a year ago.
Peter, your hymn is brill’. Or is that expression as outdated as a Graham Kendrick song? (I’m a Graham groupie) Far be it from me to stereotype anyone based on race, but the English really are terrific at making up poems on the spot. Why is that? Please promote your comment to a post on your blog.
Regarding dancing and flag waving, Hilary would be the one to respond to that (of course, she has better things to do). Living in Africa we see plenty of dancing. In fact, I quite often imagine Africans attending a “worship service” in the West and not realizing that people are worshiping because they’re all standing so still.
I can’t write poetry! Only slightly humorous doggerel like this. But your wish is my command on promoting this to a post, watch my blog.
I don’t mind the congregation dancing. In fact I can even sometimes be found joining in. I love the way Africans do it. What I struggle with is people dancing on stage, apparently performing, and distracting worshippers.
[...] His post was a rant about modern rip-offs of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, which he associated in passing with the emergent church, concerning which I had just written in a comment elsewhere: I think “emergent” has become the latest way for Reformed types to dismiss anyone they don’t like, to be added to “liberal”, “post-modern” etc. They make no real attempt to understand or engage with the people who actually use these labels. They just find one or two things they don’t like in any new movement and then add the whole thing to their implicit index of errors. [...]
If you prefer biblical lyrics to raining or rising grace, try this “worship song”!
[...] Ker has already written about all the riffs on Amazing Grace, and the possibility that such imitation is the highest form of flattery. But, there’s also [...]