Praises Heard Around the World (live recording 2020)

Happy Monday!  Merry Christmas!  Happy New Year!  What a crazy year it’s been.  Things are really bad right now in my area (Los Angeles County) so we are still in lock down mode, even tighter now.  Glad we have vaccines and better times on the way.  One cool thing from 2020 was doing a fundraiser concert for Better Haiti, with some of my popular church tunes they asked me to sing.  The audio turned out pretty well, so I decided to release it as a live album (now available on streaming platforms or for download).  Over the next several weeks I’ll post one video at a time from the concert.

This first song has become a favorite among International Churches of Christ, as it celebrates our family of churches “all around the world.”  The melody and lyrics for the chorus of this song were written by my friend Tony Martin for a small worship leader conference we both helped to put on around 15 years ago.  It was kind of a catchy “jingle” he came up with to celebrate the praises we were singing at this international gathering.  He asked me to help turn the tune into a congregational song that our churches could sing.  I worked on orchestrating a groove, harmony parts, and verses for the song.  The acoustic part was influenced by a Jack Johnson style of playing, who I was probably listening to at the time, and kind of an island type groove.  It really caught on right away — it’s fun and celebratory, inspiring, and motiving to think about the ways God is moving through all the nations of the earth.   It reminds us we are heading towards a future together with God along with a family of brothers and sisters of every nation, tongue, tribe, and language (Revelation 7).  (By the way, check out this video of disciples from around the world singing the song in their own native languages.)

 

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