Sing Anyway

Track fourteen is the title track and the loudest song on the record - the whole band flat out, a big congregation at the top of its voice. Sing anyway, sing anyway. Wounded and glad, we sing anyway.

The verses sweep across the whole field and gather up everyone the album has met. There's a man out in the field with no church now, his hands are lifted high. There's a woman that the camp threw out. The grieving family from track eleven. The man still waiting on a prayer to turn. Every wounded figure from across the record, all in one frame, and every voice is raised. We came out wounded, every single one, and every one gives praise. That is the panorama the album was building toward - not a tidy church of the unhurt, but a scattered, bleeding, singing one.

And the bridge names the thesis of the whole album, straight from Paul. Sorrowful, and always rejoicing - that is what the apostle said. The two are not a contradiction and they never were. We do not wait to be made whole to lift the song instead. The reason a wounded man can sing at all is the next line - He gives a song in the darkest night, He hands it to the weak. Even the singing is a gift; He gives the song. And the album makes its boldest claim in the last line of the bridge - the wounded, scattered, singing church is the church He came to seek. Not in spite of the wounds. That church. So sing anyway.