“The Red Letters Project” — Lyrics by Matthew, an apostle of Jesus of Nazareth

Tyndale House publishing — not your usual source for rock and roll music — has just released “The Red Letters Project,” a 3 CD set of rock music including all of Jesus’ words recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. That’s right: the lyrics are all of Jesus’ words recorded in Matthew.

There are 40 songs, in varying styles, most written or co-written by Mario Canido. And they are surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly” because even U2 or Bruce Springsteen would struggle to put out 3 CDs of uniformly excellent material. And Christian musicians often struggle in the rock genre. Most Christian singers are more into pop, ballads, praise hymns, singer-songwriter, emo … that sort of thing. Add to that the constraints of singing around prose rather than poetry, well, rocking out through Matthew is just hard to do.

It turns out that the CD was made and produced by first-rate musicians. It takes incredible talent to fit such familiar prose into music. The words don’t rhyme and the prose often lacks regular meter. This is a clearly a project of passion for the musicians and producers.

Christianity Today offers this review. This is a review from IndieVisionMusic. Several consumers have reviewed it at Amazon. The closest analogy I can think of is Green Day. Some songs have a rap element. Some are more Southern Rock. All have strong bass and drum play — making it genuine rock, not pop.

Of course, the lyrics are beyond impeccable. They’re holy. But even divine lyrics won’t rescue bad music. And the music is good. The styles vary. You likely won’t like every song, but if you’re a true rock fan, you’ll love many of them. I suspect most listeners will choose to skip some songs that don’t suit their tastes (but I do that no matter who I’m listening to). My tastes run more toward classic rock, and so I like the strong rhythm tracks. This is not Jars of Clay or Chris Tomlin. If your tastes run toward easy listening, don’t buy this.

Music is a highly subjective thing. You really can’t just take someone else’s word for it. So let me just urge you to give this project a fair shot at winning your approval. I suspect that for most this will be something of an acquired taste, like coffee.

Fortunately, it’s reasonably priced. You can download the entire 40-song set for $9.99, although it costs $29.99 to buy the music in CD form (does anyone do that any more?)

Here’s the only video I can find on the internet —

[veoh]http://www.veoh.com/browse/videos/category/music/watch/v303164eKgJBjKH[/veoh]

I prefer “The Light of the World“, which is a free download available from the official website along with samples of several other songs. I’d love to post a couple of other songs, just so you could make more of an informed decision, but there are these copyright laws …

Now, for such an ambitious project, the marketing is a bit of a mess. The official website only lists 7 songs as being for sale, for $7.99, on the main page, whereas the Store tab takes you to a site where you can buy all 40 songs for $9.99. The site doesn’t include the video, and no videos appear on YouTube. It looks like the website may be in the process of being redesigned. There’s some chatter about upcoming performances, but nothing is scheduled presently. Amazon has the collection for sale, but it’s not properly set up with samples and such.

Frankly, the idea of setting Jesus’ words in Matthew to rock music is a little crazy. I mean, the thing about rock music is that no one listens to the words. And it’s surely just unbelievably difficult to fit the words to rock music, where rhythm is such an important part of the music. And yet there’s something very appealing about being so explicitly Christian in a genre that is almost entirely secular. I mean, rock and roll music is not noted for its Christian value system.

We’ve been talking in the “To Change the World” series about Christians being a faithful presence in intellectual and artistic centers. Here’s an example of exactly that.

DISCLOSURE: I got the CDs for free for agreeing to post a review but with no obligation to write a favorable review.