Condemned No More - how it began

Some songs are born unexpectedly, and such was Condemned No More.

I became a Christian later in life, so I wasn't raised with the hymns. But after studying the Bible a few years, I started to appreciate the old hymns. They were like preaching set to music, very different from a lot of contemporary Christian music which sounded like secular pop music with watered-down Christian lyrics. But many hymns were written hundreds of years ago and come from the European classical music tradition, making them sound strange to the modern ear. Sometimes the melodies are difficult to follow and clumsy; sometimes they are downright boring. And sometimes the old English words seem out of place. I mean, who uses thou or thee in 2017? It's a shame that the timeless truths contained in these hymns should be shackled with antiquated constructs.

But what do hymns have to do with Condemned No More? One day I was singing a hymn, and as I thought about the lyrics I began to feel a deep sense of joy. I began to improvise spontaneously and came up with a chant for it. I liked the chant so much that I figured it was worth making it a brand new song. And it became the chorus for Condemned No More.

The hymns influenced me in other ways, too. I'll save that for another post.

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