Music/Discography
Buy Agape’s CD “Many Rooms” produced by Ant from Atmosphere and Fader. This enhanced CD
Features Lost and Found and Thomas Mclaurin and curriculum for youthworkers. Also features ELCA theme song
“All Are Welcome”
| Previous Releases |
Get Your Learn On
|
Bridge the Gap
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Keepin' it Tight
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Agape' featuring
Jump Worship
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WHY I MADE MANY ROOMS
- We’re more concerned with the label of music
than the lyrics of the music. God can use whoever God wants to
to touch people. If God wanted to use DMX to bring somebody closer
to God than God could do that. Take Bach for example. Bach wasn’t
a Christian composer. He was a composer. He understood that because
he was a person of faith his faith was intrinsically woven into
every note of music he made. So now we have to have our own little
section of the music store to feel safe about life again. Our
God is bigger than one section of the store. You’d be surprised
where our God is. My father’s music store has many sections
in it.
- We’re more worried about creating heavenly
robots for Christ than thinking Christians that can function in
the world. Paul Tillich said Faith without doubt and questioning
is not faith. Somehow we’ve gone from inquisitive journeyers
and God dancers to stagnant self righteous wall-flowers. How did
that happen. We’ve decided who God was before God was even
able to dance with us. But my God is a dancer. My mother’s
disco has many questioners in it. So dance on.
- We’ve created a God who’s house is
only big enough for the right people. It couldn’t possibly
be big enough for people who think differently than I do? It couldn’t
possibly be big enough for conservative and liberal it’s
one or the other. It couldn’t possibly be big enough for
straight and gay, rich and poor. Black and white. Let me ask you
a question…Would you really be disappointed if everyone made
it to heaven? I think some of yall would actually. Then that wage
you were working for would be cheapened somehow. But I wanna let
you know. My father’s house has many rooms in it. My father’s
house has many rooms in it.
SONGS DEFINED
| ART IMITATE LIFE |
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I was privileged to work with Lowell Michelson
(Echelon) and Micah Taylor (Trace) on this song. I always wanted
to be in Def Leperd, and I think this song might be as close as
I come to that dream. The bummer with this song is that it is missing
a huge heavy metal Usher “you got it bad” cheesy guitar
solo. It is hard to truly rock out without this element. It does,
however, have some of my favorite lyrics on the album and hopefully
a concept that will get people to no longer bulldoze their Dave
Matthews CDs.
| SPIRITFLOW |
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This beat just shows you how good Luke Harper is
as a producer. This song is like Enya sittin’ on 20s. These
were the easiest lyrics I have ever written because they just came
to me from, you guessed it, the spirit. I have felt God’s spirit
in so many different ways that weren’t the typical five clichés
that we usually use. I think we all have felt some kind of strong
emotion and didn’t quite know what it is was. John tells us
that the wind blows wherever it chooses. Hopefully folks dig it.
Kira gets nasty with that Destiny’s Child finish.
| BEST I CAN |
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This song was funny because my producer Ant had this
amazing beat that I didn’t know what to do with. It was darker
than I was used to and I had no idea what to write about. I was
supposed to be going into the studio the next day and didn’t
have anything.
The night before I went in, my producer Ant
told me “Just go down into your soul and find out what song
it is singing.” Apparently the song it was singing was “Best
I can.” I hammered out the lyrics very quickly and read it
from paper. I normally have my lyrics memorized by the time I go
into the studio. Because this song was so new to me, I feel like
there was a little more rawness to it than when I have it down pat.
Somebody told me this was a “realistic love song”.
| ALL ARE WELCOME |
|
This song is going to be used as one of the theme
songs for the ELCA national youth gathering. I recorded it with
my good friend Thomas Mclaurin. As we came up with the hook and
heard the beat, it just started to evoke strong emotions in everyone
that was present at the recording. Pretty soon there was this unspoken
language between us where we knew the truth in the song. There were
a few times during the chorus where I became choked up. Having grown
up with the question, “Where do I fit in to the church?”
This was my attempt to show my support for others who felt the same
way I did growing up. I hope it blesses someone the way it blessed
us that night.
| GOD’S THERE |
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This was written after
9-11 from a place of total anger and sadness. It made me so sad
to think of how our world would change after that day. Within writing
the song in my anger, I kept feeling the steadying presence of God.
I did not censor this song when I wrote it, I just tried to pour
my feelings onto the paper. As an artist, it is important to speak
your truth as much as possible. On September 11th that was my truth.
| ONE HAND CLAP |
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Talk about a strange song. When I was younger, my
step mom used to sing a song with the lyrics “oyaya.”
I started singing that same phrase one day over this boom bap track
and just laughing about it. I went into the studio and started recording
it, half jokingly. Fader and I both found it to be kind of fresh,
so we stayed with it. Despite its status as being the lone goofball
track on the disk, it is also my way of showing my one handed clapping
skills. Ant had the idea that we should just record ourselves talking
in the background like a party. Not shouting, “whoop whoop,”
just talking. It gives it energy and the mandatory goofiness it
possesses.
| REDEMPTION |
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People have said that this is the most controversial
song on my CD. The idea that a mass murderer is not beyond the redemption
of God is a radical thought to some. When I performed the song for
my friends Lost and Found, they thought it was great, but they helped
me tone it down a little so that people could hear it in a way that
wouldn’t be as alienating. I really like the beat that Ant
came up with. We originally had more of a reggae chorus but I think
this one works.
| STOP AND LISTEN |
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I got very excited the first time I heard this beat.
It reminded me of an old Nintendo game I used to play called “Castlevania”.
It was a late addition to the CD but a good one. The lyirics stem
from, surprise, more frustration with The Church. I feel the same
dichotomy Martin Luther did as a dedicated son to The Church and
a frustrated rebel at the same time. Luther once said, “The
church is a prostitute, but she’s my mother.” I couldn’t
have said it better. It feels to me like we have turned a deaf ear
to Micah’s pleas to “do justice” in the world. Problem
is, I can only yell so loud from my back porch. I pray daily that
God would help me do justice from a place of wholeness and compassion
rather than guilt.
| MANY ROOMS |
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This is the thesis of the album. The idea that God’s
grace extends to more people than we would like it to. The beat
is masterfully crafted by Ant. He has been manipulating old samples
long before this recent wave of Kanye West and Just Blaze emerged
in hip hop. I thought that in the singers voice, you could feel
the pain of those ostracized from faith communities. After a Bishop
I know gave a call to action to fight for the downtrodden, I felt
like this song was needed, especially in post 9-11 bigotry.
| EMBRACE |
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As I get older and older, I begin to open up more
and more to different types of music. This song stemmed from my
recent love affair with folk music. Setting aside those hip hop
purists that say mixing the two is a mortal sin, I decided to follow
the leads of The Fugees (“Vocab” in 1994) and De La Soul
(“Fallin” in 1993) and try it anyway. I am so grateful
to my mentors Lost and Found for blessing the track. We recorded
it once and then had to re-record it. They were troopers about the
whole thing. I have found this song to be a source of strength for
dealing with the death of my grandfather.
| BISCUITS |
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It’s based on a sermon of my dad’s. The
beat just sounds like an old Donnie Hathaway song or something.
It just reminds me of driving on a Saturday afternoon without a
care in the world. I knew I had to bring out the positive elements
of the beat. Thomas hit some notes on there that made Michael Jackson
mad. It is so nice to know that God is working through those around
us. I know a lot of “Kyles” that are really struggling
with stuff. I hope this song will get into their being.
| MUSICPRAISE |
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Remember when I said One Hand Clap was the only goofy
track on the album? I lied. This song has absolutely no theological
meaning to it whatsoever. Basically, I got out my Christian music
encyclopedia one day and thought it would be funny to play with
everyone’s name in CCM and see how many of them I could fit
into one song. The first verse I did were my friends from Churchnoise.com
and the rest were the heavy hitters. That guitar sample was pretty
cool that Ant found.
| QUESTIONS |
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I wrote this on a seminary campus. All of the questions
that the students were tackling inspired me to write this. The song
was written very quickly as the questions poured out. I wrote it
without the beat. We were really frustrated because it wasn’t
working with the beat we were trying it with. As we were about to
give up, my producer Fader (Luke Harper) said he had one more beat
tucked away that we should try. The minute I heard it, I knew it
was it. We turned off the lights in the studio, I took my shirt
off, went buck wild, and shortly thereafter had a song recorded.
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