Watch this if you need help understanding the new Tim Hortons cup sizes…

It was just a simple little question, really: What book has most influenced your life and thinking? 28 comments later, here is the result:

Desiring God, Revised Edition John Piper

Mere Christianity C. S. Lewis

Here We Stand!: A Call from Confessing Evangelicals for a Modern Reformation James Montgomery Boice and Benjamin E. Sasse

The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells

The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien

INSTITUTES OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION… John Calvin

Lectures to My Students Charles Haddon Spurgeon

‎The Hero With a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell

The Perks of Being a Wallflower Stephen Chbosky

The Pursuit of God A. W. Tozer

Chronicles of Narnia Box Set C S Lewis

Dynamics Of Spiritual Life Richard F. Lovelace

The Problem Of Pain C S Lewis

Pagan Christianity? Frank Viola, George Barna

The Naked Gospel Andrew Farley

One Thousand Gifts Ann Voskamp

The Gifts of Imperfection Brene Brown Ph.D.

Abba’s Child Brennan Manning

Let the Nations Be Glad! John Piper

Radical Reformission Mark Driscoll

Don’t Waste Your Sorrows Paul E. Billheimer

The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

Irresistible Revolution Shane Claiborne

Radical David Platt

A Tale of Three Kings Gene Edwards

The Screwtape Letters C S Lewis

Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond

The Holiness of God R. C. Sproul

Beyond Good and Evil Friedrich Nietzsche

Reason within the Bounds of Religion… Nicholas Wolterstoff

The Crucified God Jurgen Moltmann

The Doors of the Sea David Bentley Hart

Another B.S. Night In Suck City Nick Flynn

My sister lost a dear friend on the weekend. Eva Peters, her husband Bill, and their daughter Lilly were almost finished the long drive from Ontario to Alberta, where they were moving to work and live on a horse farm/resort.  This was a dream they’d had for some time but the opportunity had come as a surprise. So on fairly short notice,  they packed their stuff and left for a new life in another province.

The picture you see was taken last Friday night. That’s Eva on the left, my sister Tammy on the right. Bill and Eva and Lilly said their goodbyes and left on the long journey. On Sunday night, on a snowy road – just 20 or so kilometers from their new home – Eva lost control of the vehicle she was driving and went off the road and was killed.

She was just 31-years-old…

Many in our church community are grieving. Eva was dear to us, Bill was one of our elders. The funeral is Saturday – the day before Christmas, so as you can imagine there are a lot of mixed emotions here.

Here is a song I came across yesterday that’s fits the occasion, sung by one of my favorite singers and writers, Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls.

There’s Still My Joy

I took my tree down to the shore
The garland, and the silver star
To find my peace, and grieve no more
To heal this place inside my heart

On every branch I laid some bread
And hungry birds filled up the sky
They rang like bells around my head
They sang my spirit back to life

One tiny child can change the world
One shining light can show the way
Through all my tears, for what I’ve lost
There’s still my joy
There’s still my joy
For Christmas day

The snow comes down on empty sand
There’s tinsel moonlight on the waves
My soul was lost, but here I am
So this must be amazing grace

One tiny child can change the world
One shining light can show the way
Beyond these tears for what I’ve lost
There’s still my joy
There’s still my joy
For Christmas day
There’s still my joy for Christmas day

John Piper’s newest book, Bloodlines: Race, Cross, and the Christian, is now available. Earlier this year his publisher traveled with him to his hometown of Greenville, SC to revisit the world in which he grew up. This 18-minute documentary takes us through his experience of racism in the 1960′s American South.

This is a really touching documentary and even if you don’t agree with his Christian perspective on the world, it is still worth watching:

Bloodlines Documentary with John Piper from Crossway on Vimeo.

Order the book online, or call 888.346.4700 between 9:00 and 5:00 (CDT), Monday to Friday.

Get a free download of the Introduction [PDF].

Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight…
August 29 is the release date! The album will be available online and on CD for you to buy. I’m really proud of the work Deni Gauthier and I have done on this album and I know you’re going to like it too.

Download a pre-mastered track from the album here

This is a picture I took during a visit to Chicago earlier this year. This is a dubious distinction but this is the very corner on which the finale of the latest Transformers movie takes place. I KNOW – you are impressed.

Live performances…
If you’re interested in booking a show, contact me here. Full band show to solo acoustic set – the rates are reasonable and the show will be good!   We’ll play in back yards, parking lots, living rooms, churches and anywhere else there’s a few people willing to listen. Here’s a little bit of what you can expect in concert… watch Michael Krahn & Band – “The Love Song (live)”

The Weight of Glory…
It’s been a decade already since I released “The Weight of Glory” and I still think it sounds pretty good. You can listen to samples buy it on iTunes by clicking here.

I can’t stop looking at this painting by local artist Nik Harron called “A Field Remembers The Rain”. I contacted Nik and he’s going to allow me to use one of his paintings for a future album cover. Enjoy!

You can see more of Nik’s paintings here: http://nikharron.com/category/paintings/

Here’s a first… I’ve never posted a recipe before, but we’re having some new friends over for supper tonight and this is always the meal I make for people the first time they visit.

(Serves 4)

1 1/2 lbs. boneless chicken breasts cut into chunks

2 T oil

1/2 c chopped onion

1 clove minced garlic

2 c salsa
Herdez brand is my favorite. Hot if your guests can handle it, medium if not

1/2 c water

1/4 c currants or raisins
I prefer raisins and put at least 1/2 c in

2 T honey
Use a bit more to sweeten it up a bit

1 1/2 t cumin

1 t cinnamon

1/2 c toasted slivered almonds

Directions:
Brown chicken chunks in oil; place in baking dish.

Saute onion & garlic; spoon over chicken.

Combine salsa, water, currants/raisins, honey, & spices. Pour over chicken.

Cover & bake 1 hr at 325 F. Sprinkle with almonds.

Serve over rice (mixed with black beans)

Today’s bit of wisdom from Seth Godin:

If you engage with the heckler, if you qualify yourself, justify yourself or worst of all, rationalize yourself, the heckler will pounce, turning a small wedge into a giant hole. Like a standup comedian, it’s almost impossible to outwit or shut down a dedicated heckler.

But there is a strategy that works. Acknowledge and move on.

When the heckler announces that you’re incompetent, unqualified or hardly ready to step forward, think, “oh.” And then proceed.

You give it no purchase. No opportunity to escalate. Each jibe is met with “noted.”

Over time, the heckler gets quieter, because it just isn’t worth the effort.

Read more here.

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My new album “Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight” is almost done… info here: http://bit.ly/pimCw8 Get the previous album “The Weight of Glory” here: http://bit.ly/pFEhs1

Some of the best songs ever written have as their source an overwhelming sense of regret. Bill Mallonee writes these songs with the best of them. Here’s a new one he just wrote and recorded that’s available for purchase as part of a re-issue of the EP “Electromeo“. The entire EP is well worth the $5 asking price.

(RSS readers may need to click through to here.)

“Life I Never Lived” by Bill Mallonee

Look at al the goodwill i retracted
Look at that deck of cards and how i stacked it
Look at all that fear and how i masked it
look at the life i never lived
look at the life i never lived

Look at all once mistook for wealth
Look at all those gifts i put back on the shelf
Look at all the slack i cut myself
look at that life i never lived
look at that life i never lived

Playback all the harsh words i spoke
Take note on how i squashed some hope
look at all those tender hearts i broke
look at the life i never lived
look at the life i never lived

Look at all the houses i tore down
Look at all the smiles i turned to frowns
Look at all the roads that just went round & round
look at the life i never lived
look at the life i never lived

Look at all the good i failed to see
Look at all i failed to do for Thee
look at what i might one day have been
look at the life i never lived
look at the life i never lived
look at the life, look at the life
look at the life i never lived

Just booked another gig playing at the Sweetcorn Festival in Aylmer on August 20th. The Facebook page for the event is here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=207998552582131

If you travel much in folk/country-rock/americana circles, you should be familiar with this fantastic album by the Canadian band Blue Rodeo. It’s an album that’s been a seminal influence on my own songwriting.

There’s not a weak track on the album but the highlight moment for me is the guitar solo by Greg Keelor’s in the song “5 Days in May”. It’s simultaneously misplaced and well placed, as if it was transplanted from another song in which it sounded more appropriate, and yet… it fits here too. Have a listen… (RSS readers may need to click here).

The Ottawa Citizen recently did a feature story on the upcoming 20 year anniversary of the making of the album:

“The commune-like vibe and the trees and hills around them helped create a folk-rock record pitched and sold to the record company a mere detour from their electric, rockabilly-inspired, country rock repertoire.

‘The band was never the same after that record,’ Cuddy said. Many of their albums since boast harmonica, pedal steel guitar and layered harmonies reminiscent of the Five Days record.”

Read the rest here.

Bonus… found this cover version of the song that actually does it justice:

From Billboard.com editor Jem Aswad,

Today, the media is exploding with stories about her sales “spike,” “surge,” “skyrocket,” “soar.” This week’s SoundScan totals of 55,000 albums — up by 3,400% from the previous week — and 111,000 digital tracks (up 2,120%) are based on the first 36 hours after news of her death broke. They may be bigger next week, by which point the story will have cooled off — watch for it to last for the rest of this week and flare up again with next week’s SoundScan results.

What gets lost in all this is perspective: For all the talk about her legacy, she leaves behind a sadly thin catalog of two strong albums, two digital-only B-sides collections and a smattering of stray tracks. She was a marvelous singer and a precocious interpreter who left behind precious little evidence of her talent, since her spiral began almost as soon as she became famous; not much she recorded after the age of 23 has been released.

Read the rest here.

Here is the first of many #FREEBIE_FRIDAY songs that you can download for any price (including nothing).

This is one I wrote about some great songwriters I know… The songwriters I’m singing about may or may not include Bill Mallonee, Ron Sexsmith, and Mark Heard

(RSS reader may need to click through to here)

This via Bob Lefsetz:

1. Listen to a lot of records.
A knowledge of music is the best education. Spend more time listening than posting on Facebook. The musicians of yore could play every lick on their favorite blues records, can you?

2. Learn how to play.
Start with lessons. Only give them up when you surpass your teacher. Know how to play what you don’t like. It’ll come in handy, just like studying algebra.

3. Write.
We’re interested in what you have to say. You can wring emotion with a note, but begin composing lyrics too. Music blew up in the sixties because we were interested in more than the surface, we wanted to know who these acts were, we wanted to know what they had to say.

4. Rehearse.
If you’re not frustrated, if you’re not chomping at the bit, you’re not doing it right. Sure, post the results to the Net, but don’t expect anybody to pay attention. And promotion is passe. Don’t tell people to listen, go back and cut more until you create something so good it spreads by itself.

5. Use what’s come before as a stepping off point, not as a blueprint.
Although you should know how to play the classics, your music should not sound just like the Beatles or Zeppelin, but different. If you haven’t got people scratching their heads, telling you to turn it down, you’re playing it too safe.

6. No one has the magic keys.
Top forty radio is a formula fed by a conveyor belt no different from the one at GM, but with a lot less innovation. If you’re interested in making a Cruze or a Camry, sign up. But it’s the aforementioned Prius which is sold out and unavailable, it’s what people want, what they’re willing to overpay for, even though GM killed its electric car. It takes a while for the public to catch up. The Prius was not an overnight success. Hipsters and the green signed up first, Toyota improved the product, gas prices went through the roof and voila, a mania! Manias are not manufactured, not ones that last, they’re all about being in the right place at the right time, anticipating the market, not playing it safe, but being dangerous.

7. If practice isn’t hard, you’re not doing it right.
No matter how much success you’ve had, if it’s become easy, if you’re repeating yourself, you’re on the road to failure.

8. Listen to no one but yourself.
Recruit information, but preferably from someone without a financial interest in your success. Musical artists are the last loners, they’re visionaries, they’re not part of the group, but outside it. If you’re showing up at the club or the Met Costume Ball you’re doing it all wrong. No one should be inviting you, they should be afraid of you, and if they do call you won’t go, because you know they’re trading on your success for their own benefit.

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My new album “Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight” is almost done! Info here: http://bit.ly/pimCw8 Get the previous album “The Weight of Glory” here: http://bit.ly/pFEhs1

Keith Green was influential in my early life as one of the few bright lights in the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) scene. Green was preachy, but passionately so – which somehow made it seem more legit than the many faux-preachy “Jesus singers” of the day.

Endowed with enormous talent in addition to his passion, he released five excellent albums before his untimely death at the age of 29. He, along with two of his young children were killed in a small plane crash, leaving behind another daughter and a pregnant wife. His page at Wikipedia is a good read.

Here is a section from that page that caught my eye:

“His first solo project, For Him Who Has Ears to Hear, was released in 1977 and his second solo release, No Compromise, followed in 1978. In 1979, after negotiating a release from his contract with Sparrow, Green initiated a new policy of refusing to charge money for concerts or albums. Keith and Melody mortgaged their home to privately finance Green’s next album, So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt. The album, which featured a guest appearance by Bob Dylan, was offered through mail-order and at concerts for a price determined by the purchaser. By May 1982, Green had shipped out more than 200,000 units of his album – 61,000 for free.”

So the math goes like this: he offered the album for free and shipped 200,000 units, 139,000 of which people paid for. Of course I’m sure it helped that Zimmy made a guest appearance, but this was an idea ahead of its time.

We musicians are now smart enough to know (thanks in large part to guys like Bob Lefsetz) that a little free goes a long way, especially if the art is good.

You can get A LOT of good music free at Noisetrade. Like THIS, for example. ;-)

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My new album “Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight” is almost done! Info here: http://bit.ly/pimCw8 Get the previous album “The Weight of Glory” here: http://bit.ly/pFEhs1

Tim Challies recently recently made a statement that immediately set off a series of thoughts in my brain. He said: “I’ve become convinced that I can’t write a book until I first live a book.”

This is how the songwriting process works as well – for me at least. The last 8 months have been a period of darkness like I haven’t experienced in a long time; more than a few weeks in the last months have been more dark than light.

Songwriting has always accompanied these periods.

In the years of 1999-2003 I experienced seasonal depression every (roughly) October to February. During these years I would write 30-40 songs and I bet if I went back and checked the dates they were written, a majority of them would be from that stretch of months each year. It was the way I coped, the way I processed. (I have often borrowed a line from Bill Mallonee whenever I’m asked why I write songs: “Because it’s cheaper than therapy…” And with a bit of effort, not only is it cheaper but you can actually make a bit of money from it.)

As these years of regular seasonal depression made an exit, so did the torrential pace of my songwriting. At first I grieved this (the songwriting that is, not the depression), thinking that the gift had left me. I wondered where it had gone, not making the connection to the depression.

Fast forward to 2011. I’ve just come through an 8-month period of periodic but regular darkness. These are a little different than they used to be; I’m far more functional now during a time of depression. Where depression used to arrive for seemingly no reason at all, now it shows up when more life is happening than I have time to live. But that’s an exploration for another day…

In about a 12-week period from April to June of this year I found myself with about 15 new songs. They were coming regularly and I couldn’t figure out why. In the course of a conversation with a good friend I discovered the reason. I shared with him that I had recently re-found my songwriting groove while also expressing my frustration at having experienced a lot in recent months and not having adequate time to debrief. These seem like pretty obvious matching puzzle pieces in retrospect, but at the time I didn’t see the correlation.

“Maybe the songs ARE the debrief…” he said. Have you ever had the feeling that the cartoon lightbulb just lit up above your head? Yeah, I had that feeling.

Back to the quote that ignited these thoughts… I think in the last 8 months I’ve lived about 3 years worth of life. These have been both tremendously good experiences and excruciatingly bad ones, but they have been many.  And they have all been rich soil for new creative works.

I have nothing against the right kind of therapy, of course. If that’s what’s needed, find a good therapist and go – regularly. But if you have any kind of creative spark – and I believe that everyone does – try using all that darkness as fuel for art. By art I mean more than painting; I mean songwriting and journaling and dancing and singing and whatever else you might find interesting.

Whatever it is that you’re interested in, a period of depression is a good time to give it a try. There are things that can be done on the dark that will help you survive until the light returns.

My light has returned and I’ve got some new songs, a strengthened faith, and some new friends to show for it. And I don’t fear the next period of darkness; I used to, but I don’t anymore. I’ve come to accept the rhythms of life, to stop fighting the dark so much – because often it’s a gift that’s waiting to be opened.

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New album “Lovers on the Edges of the Twilight” is almost done! Info here: http://bit.ly/pimCw8

Get the previous album “The Weight of Glory” here: http://bit.ly/pFEhs1

Mystery quote time. Who said this?

“Preaching is not the totality of the church. And if all you have is preaching, you don’t have the church. A church is a body of people who minister to each other. One of the purposes of preaching is to equip us for that and inspire us to love each other better.”

Guesses?

This book looks interesting. Just read an interview with the authors in which they say the following:

“For some years now, the church in North America has been terribly confused on this issue of relevancy. We thought that relevancy meant being like the surrounding culture, having a style and an outreach that would be very familiar and comfortable to those outside the church. The pursuit of relevancy sought to reduce the barriers that would keep people from coming to church. In many ways, we have been successful in this, and ironically, this is part of what has plunged us into our current state of irrelevancy… We are in grave danger of being simply ignored.”

“Increased attendance, when it is a byproduct of an authentic work of God, is a wonderful thing to be desired and celebrated. But it is an unhelpful and inappropriate thing to have as a goal.” Faithfulness to the pursuit of developing an authentic expression of a transformed and redemptive community should be our goal.”

Order your copy here (Amazon.com|.ca)

This is how we like to end a concert… with a little bit of Johnny Cash. Enjoy!

Here we are performing one of the songs from my next album called “The Love Song”. Enjoy! Let me know what you think.