Review Detail
Saintsong - Sarah Hart
Spiritandsong.com Records
WL Quick Tip: A sublime melding of modern music with timeless words that provides a profound and unique worship experience. Worship songwriters have all experienced times of frustration with their art, and often justifiably complain that language is incapable of expressing the deeply profound love that is evident in worship. This shortcoming has been a blessing in disguise, as people have been trying for thousands of years to capture our understanding of the Lord in words and given us countless works that reflect small facets of what God has revealed of Himself to us. On her new album
Saintsongs, Sarah Hart has taken the daring step of adapting religious prose from writers like Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), St. Ambrose (c.340-397), St. Augustine (354-430), and other equally "vintage" Christian writers into contemporary musical settings. The result is a sublime CD.
The lyrical art benefits from the filter of time, so the texts are succinct but beautiful-not a wasted word. The musical art is also well done and compelling to listen to. One of the challenges in setting text from different eras in contemporary musical styles is that the accents don't always fall in a way that sounds natural to our ears. All of the songs maintain the integrity of the original text while sounding natural in their musical settings, which is a tremendous credit to Sarah Hart and the various writers that she collaborated with. The album has a variety of styles, venturing from a "Newgrass"/Alison Krauss sound on some songs to a ethereal Sarah McLachlan-like sound on others. As an added bonus, the CD also has a devotion for each song in PDF format. The devotions, in
lectio divina form (reading, reflecting, responding, resting), add dimension that leads the listener to delve deeper into the words of each song.
The album has value on three levels-as a personal listening and study experience, as a resource for worship songs with material to focus and guide a congregation culled from the devotions, and possibly even in a small group that has a particular appetite for music and might enjoy the experience of listening, reading, and then sharing with each other.
Play List: "O Sacred Breath," "Restless," "Today"
sarahhartmusic.com- Daryl Bean
