KEYS
TIMELESS WORSHIP KEYS | David Pfaltzgraff photo by Ebuen Clemente on Unsplash
Each month as I prepare to write the column you ’ re reading now I take a quick look at a folder on my computer that holds all of the previous articles I ’ ve submitted over many years . The idea is to make sure whatever I ’ m thinking about writing on isn ’ t a topic I ’ ve already covered .
This month ’ s article was originally going to be inspired by a Thanksgiving road trip playlist , as my wife and I pulled up a now ‘ classic ’ Christmas album by NSync . It was released in 1998 and as I was listening , I was struck by its similarities to albums released as early as a decade prior , and in the other direction reaching to at least 2004 .
This pondering gave me the idea to write an article about ‘ sounds of the early 2000s ’ being relevant today . But dear reader , I ’ ll tell you I was shocked when scanning my folder of previous articles by the realization that as recently as July of this year I ’ d submitted an article on ‘ sounds of the 90s ’!
Clearly , in today ’ s context we can ’ t point to a single decade at a time as we consider what ’ s influencing us and thus my original article idea was thrown out the window .
This got me thinking , though , about what we can do as keys players , and as musicians in general , to impart a certain ‘ timeless ’ quality to our playing , even as we pay attention to new trends and yes , the sounds and ideas of past decades .
Thus , today ’ s article was born . Let ’ s get into it .
DEFINING TIMELESS When I think of a timeless song , I ’ m talking about a song that sounds like it could ’ ve been written yesterday , or fifty years ago . Think ‘ Dreams ’ by Fleetwood Mac , ‘ Here I Am to
Worship ’ by Tim Hughes , ’ She ’ s So Heavy ’ by the Beatles , or ‘ I Exalt Thee ’ by Pete Sanchez .
Of course , each of these songs emerged from the zeitgeist of their time , but each also traces a vein forward in time to where we are now .
One of the main things that jumped out to me as I was mulling over songs to include ( and believe me , it was hard to trim down to only four references ) was that nearly all the examples that came to mind had a certain essentialism and simplicity to them , in one or often more than one way .
From the basic two chord structure of ‘ Dreams ’ to the dead simple five-note melody that defines ‘ Here I Am to Worship ’ and from ‘ She ’ s So Heavy ’ s total word count of about ten words and its garage-y guitar-rock vibe to the pure , devoted simplicity of ‘ I Exalt Thee ’ s chorus refrain , these songs , I propose , are
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