My Own Little World

This review has taken me a long time to be able to write. Looking back I can find only one reason for this. This is the only time I have ever guessed about an album and been dead wrong. I'm glad I was wrong, too. As you can see from my past two posts, I don't have the most welcoming view of Hillsong Live (now Hillsong Worship). To me, it felt like they made re-recordings of the same album every year, slightly changing the instrumentation in the process. Lyrically, this album does not differ greatly from previous Hillsong albums. For the most part, the album's lyrics focus on Christ and His sacrifice and how His Name is the Name above all other names. This is essential for a worship album, as the focus needs to be on God and not those worshiping Him. "Broken Vessels (Amazing Grace)" is a prime example of this. Besides the fact that it uses the lyrics to the hymn's first verse in an extremely clever way, it references the fact that we are broken people t...

In my last post, I covered all the reasons why I did not like Hillsong for the longest time. Those of you that are Hillsong fans may be wanting to ask me a lot of questions, but I am confident that many of them will be answered in the following words. Leading worship over the past few years has shown me one of the coolest things about Hillsong: it is an incredible resource for churches around the world. No other worship band that I know of could write at least ten new songs each year and not have them all be awful. If a church were to use Hillsong exclusively as their song catalog for worship, they would have an extremely robust selection of songs to sing. My perception of United has begun to change over the past couple years. Specifically, their 2013 studio album Zion is what changed my view of Hillsong in general. On Zion was a collection of songs that were God-focused and wildly original in their music. It was almost unrecognizable as a Hillsong album due to their house...