And Then The Virus

Origins

Common Hymnal started with a blank slate. The goal was to aggregate creatives and creativity from the fringes of Christianity with a view to building a well-stocked library of songs, stories and ideas for an as-yet-uncoalesced movement.

We intuited that the first step should be to host co-writing camps for songwriters who had not been invited into the mainstream. It worked, and we soon found ourselves in contact with a network of talented writers, the custodians of a growing catalog of songs, and the curators of a new music genre - spiritual music with a social conscience. In September 2018, we gathered a group of these writers to record some of the songs in the catalog that were gaining traction, and we have now fully released this debut body of work.

We have a long way to go, but it has been rewarding seeing the library grow, especially when we have been able to draw songs from the catalog to frame current events. For example, when Sandra Bland’s iPhone video was publicized, we were able to post Rose Petals. When a well known Christian leader committed suicide as a result of a struggle with mental illness, we were able to post Peace My Mind.

First Fumbling Steps

In order to promote our initial release, we have hosted soirees in a few cities around the US, and put together pop-up bands for third party events.

2020

Hosting soirees and assembling pop-up bands for third party events was our ongoing plan for 2020 - not only for promoting our debut collection, but also for capturing new content. We did our first soiree in LA in January. We intended to record and video as many of these events as possible, producing out singles and EPs whenever songs captured well to tape, then following up with multiple studio recordings of the songs that started gaining traction - as we are primarily a song publisher.

Because our HQ is in Tennessee, we decided to base this plan in an alternating series of events in the state: a mini content creation camp in Chattanooga followed by a soiree in Will Reagan’s recording studio in Knoxville 6 weeks later, followed by another mini content creation camp in Chattanooga 6 weeks later, and so on. This just seemed the easiest way for us to document new content in this season. In addition, we started scheduling more soirees (Milwaukee, Chicago, etc) and we accepted an invite to send a pop-up band to Soul Fest in New Hampshire.

We did our first mini content creation camp camp in Chattanooga in early March - and it was extremely fruitful.

And then the coronavirus!!!

Now we are left figuring out how to adapt in this unsettling and uncertain time in world history. (See Common Hymnal And ‘The Virus’ below).

Just as many others are doing, we have started doing regular live streams and are working to revamp our podcast - with Brittney Spencer and Brandi Miller co-hosting a new format. We are exploring a fairly ambitious ‘streaming’ idea that will be a lot of fun if we can pull it off. No guarantees.

We are also re-recording a studio version of The Kingdom Is Yours in 12 languages: English, Mandarin, Bahasa-Indo, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, French, Swahili, Zulu and Creole. Soul Fest has made The Kingdom Is Yours their theme song. They have asked us for a video to play three times a day during prime time, plus our pop-up band will be playing it all three nights on main stage. Therefore we thought we would produce a multi-lingual version of the song for the event - with English sub-titles.

International

Brittney Spencer and Gilbert Nanlohy wrote a beautiful song with Langa Mbonambi from South Africa last year - in English and Zulu. There is no way we can capture this ‘live’ as we cannot afford to fly our communities trans-continental. However, we can record and video this song on location in both countries and edit it into something special.

Actually, we have plans to record several of the bilingual songs our writers have written these past few months. English and Spanish. English and Brazilian Portuguese. English and Swahili. These are not translations. These are songs that were written and meant to be sung in more than one language.

Common Hymnal, The Label

In the process we launched Common Hymnal as a label, not only releasing ‘movement music’, but also helping individual creatives in our orbit release their personal artistry. First out the gate - Andrew Blooms’ Never A Waste and Kevin Daley’s Boone River. Next up - Brittney Spencer, Dee Wilson, JonCarlos and Gabby Velez, Connor Wheaton, To Infinity (Connor and Tehillah), etc.

Common Hymnal And ‘The Virus’

In the very near future, we hope to release a few songs written out of our experience with Covid-19. The first one is probably going to be a song about the domino effect of white Christianity’s comfortability with right-wing propaganda about the virus - that it is is a left-wing hoax, and how this misinformation has put all of our lives in jeopardy. By comfortability, I mean ‘silence’. Right-wing lobbying for small government resulted in the shutting down of a vital government agency that was set up to manage a worldwide pandemic like we are currently experiencing. The connection between our faith and our politics is becoming a matter of survival.

We are not a news outfit, nor a political operation. We curate art. But we are the curator of art that is in touch with the spiritual and idealogical realities of our world. Spiritual music with a social conscience. Normally we would stick with poetry about justice themes and not make out-and-out political statements, but the recent round of right-wing propaganda has just been too close to the bone.

Prepping For ‘Post Virus’

If you are a community builder in your area, and have access to a venue, gear, accommodation, food, a recording engineer, a video director and a video crew, and would like to host a soiree, please feel free to reach out to us. We will explore putting together a pop-up band to do something together in your area - when the virus. is over and the coast is clear.