“How to Write a Worship Song”

11 Responses to “How to Write a Worship Song”

1. Dean Westerman says:

   June 1, 2013 at 10:47 pm

   Spot on! I can’t begin to count the times, usually during the 6th or 7th chorus repeat, I have told my wife that I could easily write praise & worship songs.
2. Charles McLean says:

   June 2, 2013 at 8:02 pm

   Okay, this is kinda funny. We do tend to get formulaic about music. My current formula is about 15 years older than this kid’s, so HIS formula is funny. Humor is like that.

   But prior to that, I cut my four-part solfege teeth on songs like “Walking in the Light”, a cracker-jack opening number which was clearly one of several re-purposed college fight songs given new life in the old Sacred Selections. Follow that with one of those Depression-era standards like “Farther Along”– which for five verses lamented how hard we had it and promised that our current sufferings would be more comprehensible when we were dead, whatever comfort that was supposed to be. Then, we would downshift even further into the main prayer with “My Savior Dear”, a paean pirating the tune “Danny Boy” with new lyrics.

   The set-up tune before communion would be a classic like “Night With Ebon Pinion”, which nobody understood but which we assumed was reverent because it was gloomy and full of minor chords. A few minutes later, the leader would bring us out of the “separate and apart” laying by in store with one of a stirring list of Sousa-esque marches which gave us all that quasi-military feeling so essential to sitting through the subsequent 45-minute lecture about something in Acts. Then, in a tribute to Pentecostal tradition by backing one portion of the service with a musical bed, we segued into one of several familiar “invitation songs” (grouped in your song book for convenience). We had a good selection of these, ranging from the plaintive “Just As I Am” to the vaguely-threatening “Are You Ready (For The Judgment Day)?” Finally, we wrapped the Sunday morning set with a “leader’s choice” number for the closing song (never a benediction, for that sounded Catholic), said selection being the best picture of the leader’s inclinations, whether a brief and functional “Blest Be The Tie” or — for the more energetic arm-swinger — one of those peppier, riskier numbers with a non-soprano lead which he would roll out here because even if it fell flat, it couldn’t really hurt anything but the closing prayer.

   “Do-mi-SOOOOOOOL!”

   With smiling regards from both ends of the octave from a top-notch songleader turned worship leader-hyphen-guitar picker, I remain,

   Sincerely,
   Charles
3. Jay Guin says:

   June 2, 2013 at 8:38 pm

   Charles,

   I’m glad you enjoyed it — even though I had to look up “solfege” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge (I thought SURE it was a spelling error — but that would be most atypical of you.)

   You forgot the greatest invitation song of all time: “There’s An Eye Watching You (Watching You!)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOT5fcagZ2Y. (This is a better version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K83WhPPwRY Gotta love the lilt and syncopation. Which is NOT how we sang it back home.)
4. mark says:

   June 2, 2013 at 9:18 pm

   I had the benefit of two women in the congregation who basically took care of all the singing except they could not stand up in front of the audience. So long as they knew song I was fine. If they did not know it, you were on your own. that limited the total number of songs to about two dozen.
5. Larry Cheek says:

   June 2, 2013 at 11:54 pm

   Jay,
   A little off the subject but I have often wondered about the reading activity on the blog, while Chrome was not finding the blog I attempted to connect through IE by searching your name. On one of the sites I visited I believe that it stated sometime in 2010 there was activity of over 1200 visitors per day. Besides our own learning, I have been of the opinion that many that don’t comment could be learning from our comments. Is that possible?
6. Charles McLean says:

   June 3, 2013 at 9:23 am

   Jay, how did I miss that one? The decision to capitalize “Eye” in our song books was the most notable feature in that memorable “song of surveillance”. As the “Eye” was a reference to deity, it of course had to be capitalized. My kids all agree that this little grammatical choice “creeped them out” more than any campfire ghost story.
7. Mark says:

   June 3, 2013 at 9:35 am

   Of course many people may read and choose not to comment. If one did not read a lot of these blogs, one would think the cofC did not have any problems and was growing at a good pace.
8. Jay Guin says:

   June 3, 2013 at 7:21 pm

   Charles,

   When I first heard “There’s an Eye” as a 12-year old or so, I found it incredibly creepy — and I LOVED it! I asked for it every Wednesday night singing –because I enjoyed seeing my friends get creeped out. It was kind of a double-dog dare thing. You had to have real guts to ask for THAT song to be led! (And it made my older sisters mad at me, which made it all the more fun.)

   Of course, the YouTube clips totally miss the mood of the song. They’re upbeat with a strong drum tempo. We sang it S-L-O-W with a funereal tone. Very, very scary stuff. Very portentous, very threatening. (And that’s probably true to the original intent.)
9. Jay Guin says:

   June 3, 2013 at 7:30 pm

   Larry asked,

   Besides our own learning, I have been of the opinion that many that don’t comment could be learning from our comments. Is that possible?

   It’s certain, I’d say.

   OneInJesus gets about 1,200 pageviews per day, but you have to add to that views via email and RSS, which aren’t countable. I have over 800 email subscribers and maybe 200 RSS subscribers (really hard to know). Then are a few hundred Friends on Facebook and Twitter. Really, really hard to measure. I figure that puts daily readership at something like 2,000-ish.

   That means around 730,000 page views a year — with a significant margin of error.

   I cannot directly measure how many readers read the comments. If it’s only 1 in 10, that 70,000 comment-reads a year. I know that when comments occasionally go down, I get a LOT of complaints, early and often.

   I also know that when a post is well-commented, viewership of that post goes up by the hundreds, even if only 10 people are commenting. And so I think there’s a pretty strong multiplier effect of comments on readership — meaning lots of people are reading the comments even if they aren’t commenting.

   So thanks to everyone who comments. It’s fun for me, but for lots of other people, too.

10. Pingback: �How to Write a Worship Song� | One In Jesus | Worship Leaders

11. Charles McLean says:

    June 7, 2013 at 10:25 am

    “There’s An Eye Watching You”, from our new special-use church hymnal, entitled, “Scaring The Hell Out Of Them: Invitation Songs for the Unconvinced” 😉

Comments are closed.