TheChoir.Radio.Blog

Well, it's taken me 15 days to come up with a theme for the return of radio.blog--thanks for all the input oh ye who say you appreciate it :P

Playing around in iTunes today I found myself listening to a lot of The Choir, et voila! A theme! Only problem with something like this is that I had to trim the playlist down to something manageable--which was really hard. If I had the space and you had the time, it'd have been something like 50 tracks. Instead I give you 11. You're welcome.

In the summer of '91 I was doing some temp data entry stuff for the Fish & Game dept, and one of the other ladies on the temp crew and I started talking music one night--she was into Point of Grace and the like, I was more Petra/Bloodgood type stuff at the time. So, no real common ground :) She asked if I'd heard of The Choir. The name alone was enough to get me snoring. Her brother in law was their drummer, or her brother-in-law's sister was married to the drummer...something like that. It wasn't her kind of music, but she said it was good, and I'd probably like it. I had this aversion at the time to keeping money in my wallet, and was in the mood for something new to listen to, so the next day I went out and picked up their latest album, Circle Slide.

And fell in love. WOW. This wasn't CCM as I knew it. This wasn't anything as I knew it. Since then I've grabbed everything I can by them--even paying $40 for an out of print CD from some stranger on an Internet discussion board back before the WWW made internet purchasing ubiquitous. (I should add I had $60 in my bank at the time) A few years later, that same CD was reprinted and I could've picked it up for $10, but I still don't regret the $40.

Okay, enough of that autobiography. On to the music. A few standouts:

• No father of a beautiful little girl can help but identify with "Wide-Eyed Wonder" and "When She Sees Me"--I swear these songs started playing in the back of my head when I first held my princess.
• "A Sentimental Song" has to be one of the greatest love songs of all time.
• "Restore My Soul"--you don't get closer to an extra-canonical penitential psalm than this

oh yeah, sampled the songs at a lower quality this time--that should help my bandwidth. Sorry 'bout the quality.