Worship Musician Magazine September 2020 | Page 41

toward the promises of God that don’t get as much attention. I think they should be a bigger part of our musical dialog, but to take on that challenge is itself difficult. You’re trying to harness concepts and utilize words you have less of a roadmap for. It’s uncharted territory, with fewer comfortable clichés to rest on. So I’m writing this song. It’s ultimately about the faithfulness of God even when we’re faithless, and it comes from a passage we almost never hear put to music. And I have this lyric in mind, specifically for the chorus. The line says, “All space and time will echo faithfully.” It’s cosmic in scale. It brings the laws of physics in to the promises I’m exploring. It’s a grand idea, and I love it. The only problem is that it just doesn’t work. As I write the verse sections and the early chorus, I see there’s simply no way I’m motivating such a big statement in so intimate and personal a space. Even though I am now pulling from more scripture, and it’s all working together fluidly, something is wrong with that one lyric. Every time I sing the verse and chorus through, I get to that line—my favorite line— and it feels like it’s coming out of nowhere. It’s disrupting the whole song and keeping it from saying anything cohesive. Discouraged, I put the song away for a couple days. I come back to it later, thinking I’ll be able to tweak other lyrics and motivate that line capping off the chorus, but it doesn’t work. This process goes on for a couple weeks. I keep setting the song aside as though something is magically going to change, but nothing does. I know deep down that I’m trying to avoid the inevitable, but it takes me awhile before I’m ready accept inevitability. Goodbye, my darling. I let it go. Finally, I start fresh and write out what I have: Two verses, most of the chorus except for the removed original lyric I began with, and most of the bridge. And almost instantly, it hits me: Not only is there a simpler lyric to end the chorus with that actually serves both verses, but my lyric I didn’t want to get rid of? It can legitimately work in the bridge. The bridge has broader concepts going on that support it, and the removed lyric can now provide a climactic statement for a song that was not ready to go there earlier on. The chorus now ends less evocatively, but more in line with encapsulating what the verses had to say. The new chorus line has become “A love divine, enduring faithfully,” while the original line has been resurrected— reborn to provide the bridge with something bigger. It usually doesn’t end this positively when I have to sacrifice one of my darlings, but this month was a good win. And I would still maintain that losing that line in the chorus was the right thing to do even if it hadn’t found a place somewhere else. We don’t necessarily need to “kill” all of our darlings. Sometimes we do. Other times, we just need to be willing to, and we’ll find there’s a better place for them. Kevin MacDougall Worship leader, published and recorded songwriter, musician and podcast producer. [email protected] September 2020 Subscribe for Free... 41