This was the era of Mike Bowling and Nicole Watts, when the Perrys were still with Eddie Crook, and Crook’s fingerprints are all over the project stylistically: the driving country rhythms and often overbearing steel guitar; the unimaginative but satisfying endings that recycle variations on the same two or three basic patterns of resolution; and the uneven arrangements that strive for a sense of grandiosity but go strangely flaccid at key moments, as when the bridge of “God Sent Angels” borrows part of the chorus of “Angel Band” … the effect is clearly intended to be dramatic, the voices backing way off the dynamic level as if to listen for the rustle of angel wings, but the sotto voce rendering of the lines knocks a big sink hole in the emotional center of the song.

I mention this stuff primarily to note how mightily the album succeeds despite its somewhat primitive tendencies, and to mark the growth in the Perrys’ music over time. The Perrys’ sound has evolved so gradually during the past 15 years that one doesn’t think of them as has having changed as dramatically as they so noticeably have when one goes back and listens to an album like Center Stage.

And the evolution isn’t just musical: signing with Daywind has polished off a lot of the group’s rougher edges aesthetically, Tracy Stuffle’s continued use of the chainsaw schtick notwithstanding (and though I will admit that the memorial image of the Stuffles’ stillborn child printed on the cd’s inside cover brought me up short, I’m actually thinking mainly here about a certain lack of self-possession in the stage manner that is apparent even on a live album absent visauls: for instance, Tracy Stuffle’s emcee work is somewhat frenetic (as when he gets so busy trying to keep a barely funny bit of banter going during the piano player’s introduction, he forgets to actually tell us the pianist’s name), or Mike Bowling’s manic, machine-gun laughing at the ends of big tunes, which even Daywind’s unobtrusive A&R people would no doubt counsel Bowling to dial back (though in his defense, in at least one case – “God Sent Angels” – the laughter could be a nervous response to the screeching woman in the audience having herself a prolonged and disturbing spiritual fit at the first ending of the song and throughout the encore).

As for the changes to the music itself, I can’t really say I find one sound superior to another. They’re just differently good.

But listening to the album made me really wish that a mixed foursome of the Perrys’ style and quality today would adopt the female-male-female-male harmonic voicing that the Perrys had in the mid-nineties. One reason the formulaic endings don’t really hurt the album all that much is because when the parts are revoiced and Watts takes the highest harmonic position in the stack, the resonance created with Libbi Perry Stuffle’s alto against Bowling’s baritone-lead is transfixing. This happens, for instance, in the middle and at the end of the chorus on “Gonna Be Someday,” which – with just a handful of notes - Watts single-voicedly transforms from a ho-hum also-ran tune into a mid-tempo charmer.

Watts actually doesn’t prove herself much of a lyric soprano in her solo moments. She often experiences what one commenter in another context recently (and brilliantly) christened “pitch disorientation” (resulting in many cringe-inducing moments during “Marriage Supper of the Lamb”). And she rushes the front of her phrases when she’s got a tricky interval or a big note coming up (see “Marriage Supper” again).

But put her back in the ensemble and … dear Gawd. It’s positively incantatory. She quite literally brings down the angel choir to mingle among us on the ending of “God Sent Angels,” when the chorus modulates up a half step and she launches off on that ascendant final note, a fifth – a fifth – above the tonic. I admit that nine-tenths of the effect here may just be the sheer novelty; you simply don’t hear this much, at least not done well anyway.

Not the Hoppers (they’ve got all the upper-register power and range of Watts and then some in Kim Hopper, but Connie has none of Libbi Perry Stuffle’s vocal gravitas), not Karen Peck and her back-up singers, not Lauren Talley and her back-up singers, and not the Crabb Family, which I continue to insist was always actually two or three different trios recombined from among the various Crabbs on stage at any given time.

In fact, since the mid-nineties – not only the period from which the Perrys’ Center Stage configuration dates, but also Charlotte Penhollow Ritchie’s years with the Nelons - southern gospel has been without a mixed group presided over vocally by a commanding soprano, supported by a well-balanced ensemble beneath her.*

Except for the Lesters, which are (as is so sadly often the case) the overlooked exception. Indeed, they have all the right ingredients, assuming Brian’s son continues to get good vocal instruction, receives the right material for his voice, and doesn’t try to sing above his pay grade (and assuming in general the Lesters could somehow shake the perception that they’re a regional group that happens to tour nationally, a stigma that I suspect is part of the reason they are serially short shrifted). So, barring the Perrys sending Troy Peach back to the bus and hiring his wife to sing with them instead (sorry, Troy!), more Lesters please.

*An earlier rendering of this sentence didn’t really capture the point I was trying to make about the rarity of an evenly yoked ensemble sound built around a soprano, as reader JB notes in this complaint. My point isn’t that the Hoppers aren’t led by a strong soprano (Kim Hopper is, of course, one of the two strongest in the bidness, Taranda Greene being the other), as I point out in the paragraph above. Rather, it’s that the Hoppers aren’t as well matched throughout the rest of the ensemble as, say, Watts was in her days with the Perrys, or Ritchie (or Janet Paschal or Karen Peck) was with the Nelons. In the Hoppers’ case, it’s basically the Kim and Dean show, with Connie and Claude performing mostly non-musical roles that involve holding a mike through most tunes (though Connie does do often marvelous, subtle things harmonically within her range and abilities). Which is to say, these days, without backing stacks, the Hoppers couldn’t pull off the kind of live performance the Perrys deliver in Center Stage.

There is no single formula for success in southern gospel when it comes to new music, but in general, most new material that succeeds does so on the basis of how well it makes the listener think or feel. It’s the difference between the head and the heart.

Of course most good music is a mix of both. It’s a matter of emphasis, but that emphasis can make quite a difference. Compare the Hoppers (prior to their current “poor man’s Vegas show” era) and a song like “Anchor to the Power of the Cross” to the subject of this review, the Perrys, and “Calvary Answers for Me.” Each song’s (and group’s) unique appeal, you might say, is the difference between “wow” and “amen,” respectively.

Listening to Almost Morning involved the odd experience of frequently being brought to the height of some great feeling, only to struggle and often fail to locate the basis for that feeling in the song itself. The album is full of soaring orchestrations, impeccable arrangements, and for the most part exquisitely sung songs that provide regular inducements for us to feel very deeply, but without clearly tethering that feeling to lyrical ideas or images that will support it. Take the first verse of “If You Knew Him”:

I walked by the tomb of Buddha
Looked inside and saw his bones
Traveled on to see Muhammad
Still wrapped up in his grave clothes
Then I journeyed to a garden
Where old Joseph left Him lay
The precious lamb God’s own begotten
Was no longer in that grave

On this basis of this verse’s first-person “report from the field of world religion” form, we might naturally expect a chorus whose payoff describes the Christian’s belief in the everlasting salvation of a resurrected Christ, right? Instead we get this:

If you knew him, like I know him
You would know that he’s alive
If you felt him, like I feel him
Resurrection, deep inside
You’d know he’s living and death has died.

The rest of the song is a mix of modes, switching back and forth between the second person direct-address to the listener and first-person testimony established in the first verse, with a borrowed hymn dolloped in toward the end. The song can’t decide if it’s testimonial or evangelistic. Is it declaring the visible wonders of the risen Savior to a world filled with alternative spiritual paths (Buddha and Muhammad), or speaking directly to someone uncertain of what religious living means in felt terms of individual experience?

The Perrys sing all this marvelously, of course, but conceptually confused and confusing lyrics prevent the song from adding up to much. Indeed, that’s a pretty fair description of the album as a whole: lots of rich and yummy – but mostly empty – calories.

The most likely rebuttal to this view will be “Did I Mention,” which is making a big splash live, but it’s actually the best example of the phenomenon I’m talking about here. Not unlike “If You Knew Him,” “Did I Mention” suffers from some conceptual confusion: the first verse explicitly states that the rest of the song will be an occasion for the singer to “humbly testify.” But instead of testimony, we get variations on the already famous chorus: “Did I mention that I love him …,” which is not so much a testimony as a profession.

If you’re inclined to say it’s a distinction without a difference, that you still want to shout hallelujah no matter what the lyric’s formal classification, well, that’s my point. These songs go over so well with audiences not because of the way lyrics merge with the music to make possible spiritual insights reinforced with religious feeling, or the way the music brings out special inflections or textures to the ideas in the lyrics. Rather they work because when the Perrys sing this stuff, “it makes you feel,” as one reader so aptly put it a while back, but “it doesn’t do much else.” (Which reminds me of Bob Dylan’s comment about effective performances being ones that make you think and feel at the same time.)

Think back again to “Calvary Answers For Me,” a song with an original hook whose central idea was consistently and thoughtfully developed in the verses and given emphasis and depth of feeling by the musical score and arrangement (“Wish I Coulda Been There” would work too, if we were doing upbeat tunes). By comparison, the phrase on which this hook is built, “did I mention,” is at its most basic level a throwaway piece of ironic furniture from ordinary conversation – “uhm, did I mention I love love LOVE the new iPhone” – fused to a statement of religious piety so that the result is a lyrical novelty act, equivalent to music built around the idea of “OMG Salvation” or “It’s So God.”

The fact that only ONE of those examples is fake illustrates the issue I’m trying to get at, an issue that goes way beyond the Perrys. In fact, the Perrys might be said to succeed because they are among the best in the industry at transfiguring just about any lyric they decide to take up and making their audiences (I count myself among the crowd here) feel something that simply wouldn’t be there in the hands and voices of lesser talents.

This is a rare ability. So much of the new music being written and recorded in southern gospel today is often all heart and no head, or the religious-music equivalent of cheap grace. While faith without feeling is pretty purposeless, and piety sheared of any emotional belief risks drifting off into empty religious gestures, the near total absence of all but the most conceptually simplistic lyrics in popular southern gospel raises the possibility that the Praise & Worship phenomenon is creeping into all corners of evangelical pop culture. Horrors! Really.

The point is not to turn musical concerts into theological disquisitions, but it doesn’t seem like too much to ask that new music at least attempt to do more than open the floodgates of pious tears.

Of course, that’s not all Almost Morning is about. For one, it’s about Kyla Rowland. At least, there are a lot of Kyla Rowland tunes. A. Lot.

There’s also a mid-tempo Zydeco number featuring Troy Peach early on. It’s a paint-by-numbers tune that relies almost totally on instrumental hanky-panky to get by, but the song does fit Peach’s voice well, giving him short phrases that don’t require sophisticated phrasing or precise tone placement, and then allow him to slip back into the supporting role he is so well suited to with the Perrys.

One of my favorite tunes is an old Stamps-Baxter song, “I Love to Tell,” that the Perrys sing with magnificent ease and grace in straight-ahead style … an amply enjoyable quartet number. Joseph Habedank’s voice is special bonus feature of this song. For whatever reason, it’s much less covered and textured than it normally is (and the melody line when he has it is refreshingly unembellished). He backs off the vibrato and lowers his soft palate a bit, creating a brighter tone without nasalizing it (pay particular attention to his voice in the ensemble and his solo in the last chorus), the resultant sound more like Broadway than Stamps-Baxter, a neat stylistic intermixture.

Habedank applies this style to parts of “Almost Morning,” the title track, and a solo for him. The melodies are thoughtful and evocative, carefully crafted, and the vocal delivery and arrangement are by turns pleasant and powerful. It’s easy to imagine while listening to this song what a Joseph Habedank solo gig might sound like, which is just a way of describing the song, not career advice or anything; the last thing we need, mind you, is another sg soloist.

But alas and again, there’s no lyrical center to anchor the song. “It’s almost morning, joy will replace all your fears” etc. It’s not that any one of these phrases are intrinsically flawed or should be off limits by themselves, or that they don’t express some genuine belief or statement of faith, just as no one of these songs with worn-out phrases abounding would be bad in small dosages. It’s that, taken together, they begin to overwhelm in an underwhelming way, like eating too many rice cakes.

Good songwriting isn’t about inventing an entirely new lyrical idiom or creating a completely new imaginative landscape every time you sit down to write. The key is to lead your listeners down familiar pathways and then guide them into new and unexpected territory at some key point.

The lyrical conceit of “Almost Morning” is full of potential: light and dark, the misleading shadows of near night and the becalmed beauty of early dawn, the moon describing its arc in the vastness of space above, our lives cast in dim and shifting shadows of night below … so many possibilities for the writer of religious songs. But instead here we simply are told that “joy will replace your fears” and “it won’t be long till the dawn” and “tomorrow’s another day” and God’s love rhymes with home above, and at some point it becomes disappointingly clear that some varietal of the same flaccid-lyric syndrome is broke out all over this album.

That doesn’t mean these kinds of songs don’t sell well live and won’t, for instance, light us all up at NQC next week. The Perrys are among the industry’s finest artists on stage – simultaneously sincere in their piety and sophisticated in their understanding of performance art. And for this reason, the Perrys die-hard fans will be tempted, I imagine, to cite Almost Morning as proof of the group recapturing the spirit of This is the Day and Changed Forever, perhaps their best albums. It is true enough that like those earlier albums, Almost Morning packs a big emotional wallop across a set of stylistically various tunes. But the comparison only holds up if you don’t think too hard about it for very long.

On Thursday night, Tracy said they’d be making an announcement on Friday as to who their new piano player would be.

Troy Peach played on Thursday evening and did an admirable job. For those of you who don’t know, Troy has been driving the bus and helping Jared run the sound. In fact, it looked like an impromptu moment midway through the service when he was sort of put on the spot and really came through. Libbi sang The Potter Knows The Clay and was talking after the song and just kind of out of nowhere started into the second verse of that song again with no music. Troy quickly came in and played the song out (just piano and vocals), even taking it up at the end. There were looks around by the others on stage, making it seem as if it was something totally unrehearsed. They had me believing it wasn’t planned. Kudos Troy.

Katy Peach came up and sang a song they did on the Torch video (filmed two years ago at NQC). It was a Who Am I medley that she originally sang with Habedank and Waldroup, but on Thursday, she sang with Habedank and Troy Peach. She ripped it. She’s too good to not be singing with somebody.

Good night for the Peach family on Thursday.

Perrys were solid as always, nothing out of the ordinary, just solid.

Two points. One: as a student of live performance and the craft of showmanship, I’m particularly fascinated by this anecdote not just because it’s one of those departures from the nightly routine that can really break open a chamber of feeling and religious experience for an audience that makes gospel music unique, but also because of the “meta” aspect of it all.

The moment was special and unexpected and interesting because it used the official absence of a live musician to outflank the audience and achieve a series of special “live” moments. With Holt gone, the audience wasn’t expecting live piano (who does these days in sg?), and the Perrys smartly capitalized on gospel audiences’ lowered expectations. After all, what the Peaches added to the Perrys set was, in the end, nothing more or less than what a good musician and a great singer do. But we don’t get so much of that these days in sg, and the Perrys, realizing that ok music is the new normal, appear to have played off the poverty of genuinely live gospel music. The Perrys: Not Mediocre. Smart. Very smart. Really.

Which leads me to my second, more general, point: call me cynical, but I always assume everything is intentional until proven spontaneous (which is not always the correct assumption, mind you, and more on that, actually, in a post to come soon), but in this case, whether impromptu or rehearsed, this little interlude reinforces how essential live accompaniment is to the gospel experience. And more Katy Peach, please.

Commenter Payton offered the rare argument with support rebutting my critique of “He Forgot.” And Daniel Mount made the flabbergasting assertion that Habedank is the Perrys best lead in the last 10 years, and then offered absolutely zero evidence or argument to back up the claim. But other than that, there’s a lot of touching tributes to Habedank the great friend, great Christian, great brother, and great grandson (all of which I assume to be absolutely true), some hysteria and indignation … and not much else. Does anyone want to make the case that the Perrys sound better with him in lead than with Loren Harris (and/or that lapses in judgment at several points may be the source of the problem) and do so in a way that doesn’t require that we trust you, Joe’s a really great guy? Really. Anyone?

While we wait, let me say a bit more about why I think any of this matters, since many of you seem to think I just don’t have anything better to do than throw darts at Brother Joe. There are a lot of reasons why I like the Perrys and want to see them succeed and thrive (and not just get by). But mainly it comes down to this: if the Perrys played their cards right in the next 3-5 years, they could be the next super group. Here’s why. They’ve already proven from the Changed Forever through Life of Love era that with the right talent in place and with the right material, they can capture the attention of pretty much the entire range of gospel music fans – young, old, traditional, progressive, quartet people and everybody else.

More than that, they’ve caught Bill Gaither’s attention. He had them on his Nashville taping and has them scheduled later this month in Greenville, SC. I don’t think this is just coincidence. Gaither needs a new super group that resonates with the Howard and Vestal crowd. And think about it. The Perrys are perfect for this role, with the added bonus that they sing better than the Goodmans (in fact, they arguably sing the Goodmans better than the Goodmans, from a purely technical perspective anyway). Can you imagine what will happen at a Gaither concert (with a live audience) when Libbi Stuffle rises from her seat and opens the first lines of “Gawd Wawlks the Dark Heeels”?

Look at the Nashville taping: The Perrys sang “Wish I Could’ve Been There” and, as I understand it, it went over very well (and no one seemed to care that a certain lead vocalist who shall remain nameless sang nowhere near the beat). And then Libbi Stuffle sang with a pickup-group of vocalists by herself and that seemed to have went well too. This is exactly what Gaither did with Vestal and Howard. Used them together to evoke that family harmony and faith tradition passed down from generation to generation in the old time toe-tapping way, and then used Vestal’s charisma and vocal abilities by herself and in recombination with others to create the kind of sparks of spontaneity and magical moments that people kept buying videos and tickets in hopes of seeing.

The thing is, for this to happen, the Perrys have to be rock solid. And right now, they are not. But imagine what would happen – what could happen – if Habedank went back to baritone, where he was (as I have said before, often brilliant and always competent) and the Stuffles hired a lead who could give them that great wall of sound they had three years ago and who could really carry solos on his own. My own pick from the current crop of leads out there is Josh Feemster from Mercy’s Mark (I’m curious, though, to hear other suggestions; it’s not as easy as I thought it’d be).

But whatever. The smartest thing the Stuffles could do right now is go to Gaither for help finding a lead. It would give him a sense of ownership and if anyone has their finger on the pulse of who’s great out there, it’s Bill Gaither. And once the Perrys and Gaither have a sense of shared investment in the sound, the partnership has a basis to build from.

It’s an interesting moment for them as a group. Even though it’s a bit soon to be picking the greatest albums of the aughts (three years too soon to be exact), it’s already pretty clear that with time and retrospection, Life of Love and This is the Day, while not perfect, really do and always will stand out as the kind of instant classics that both define a group and consolidate on a single album or two some of the best that’s being thought and written and arranged in an entire genre.

And yet what has followed these landmarks has often felt unworthy of the Perrys’ own standard of achievement. What the Goodmans tribute album gained the group in the near term – endearing themselves to legions of old-timer fans eager to find an object for their Howard and Vestal nostalgia – it has cost them in focus over the longer term. Come Thirsty, the last major release from the Ps and the first project of new songs since the Goodmans album, went wobbly on the basis of uneven material, and that wobbliness was only exacerbated for the group when Loren Harris left.

Shortly after Habedank was promoted to fill Harris’s spot and Nick Trammel hired to replace Habedank on baritone, a friend of mine saw the Perrys in concert and caught a glimpse of Habedank, Trammel, and the Stuffles’ son JK together. Describing the situation in email, my friend wondered wryly if Tracy and Libbi Stuffle had a license to operate a day care.

A huge Perrys fan, my friend was being facetious. But I think I understand her point: the same youthfulness that has invigorated the Perrys’ style and energized their sound has in the last year or so seemed to scatter their force to a certain extent. In promoting Habedank to lead and replacing Habedank with Trammel, the Stuffles seem to have become somewhat captive to, rather than primarily role models for, the young talent in their group.

What makes me say that? It’s not, actually, the shakiness of Trammel’s start with them (whether he ultimately proves himself vocally is a matter for which there’s not yet quite enough evidence to decide). Rather more urgently, there’s the problem of Habedank’s metastasizing ego, which by all outward appearances has gone virtually unchecked. Instead of impressing upon the young Habedank how much he had to learn, his promotion to lead seems instead to have been an occasion for him to slip the chain and harass the neighbors. The spottiness of his vocal work in the lead position wouldn’t normally be cause for much concern – everybody needs time to adjust and grown into new roles. Neither are any one of his hammy, manicured stage habits worth much notice in isolation – the white hanky peaking out of the clenched fist, the little glory hops at strategic moments, the over-practiced expression during particularly powerful moments of teetering between heaven and hysteria, the IAG singing.

You’ll see any number of talented but young and inexperienced artists over-indulge one of these behaviors now and then when they get their first big break. But converging in a single artist, which they have, and establishing themselves, which they are, as serial patterns of misbehavior in Habedank, these habits look a lot like symptoms of a more general lack of focus and proper instruction – the kind of acting out that kids will do to get attention.

There a couple of mp3 clips making the email rounds in sg right now. They’re both, I gather, from a gospel cruise back from the first part of the year. I’ve heard one of them and had the other described to me by a few people. The more widely circulated of the two involves a bunch of artists getting together one night and singing Amazing Grace intentionally out of tune. Several phony shouts go up among the general carrying on. This little dramedy’s high point involves one Joseph Habedank stepping into the “pulpit” and launching into a lengthy parody of an old-fashioned fire-and-brimstone preacher discoursing extravagantly on the carnality of the flesh. It goes on for some while.

I know people who grow up evangelical and/or fundamentalist and think this kind of stuff is funny. And I can’t say I’ve never joked privately about the pietistic fervor of the stem-winding evangelist. But there’s an outlandishness to all this that’s unnerving and off-putting, the kind of thing that when you hear it you’re embarrassed to listen, and embarrassed for the people involved largely because they have no better sense than not to be embarrassed themselves (see, for example, here). Habedank’s full-throated embrace of his “preacherly” satire gives off a certain tawdriness that spoils the fun, leaves one with the feeling that such cheap limelighting comes a bit too naturally for him, is not that far off from the glory hops and the white hanky of the main stage, the “real” thing.

Why hasn’t someone told him: A)that it’s probably not a good idea to publicly mock the religious traditions of so many of your fans, especially when it could be (and obviously was) recorded for posterity and circulation (I’m assuming here that Habedank himself isn’t emailing these things around to people, which would be incomprehensibly gauche); and B)that his focus needs to be on learning how to lay down his lead lines with polished expertise instead of fixating on matters of choreography and stagecraft and cheapseat showboating? Where, that is, are the Stuffles in all this?

Where were they when “He Forgot,” a song from Come Thirsty written by Habendank and Perrys pianist Mathew Holt, was chosen as a single, passing over any one of the far superior tunes on the project – “Until the Last One is Home,” “They Sang a Hymn,” and “Day that Never Ends” come most immediately to mind? Instead of singling middlin’-to-fair Habeholt music, why aren’t they sitting the two young aspiring writers down for a talk: Look guys, you’ve got a great deal of promise as writers, but your song doesn’t quite cut it. In fact (and now I’m quoting myself here), “it doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the verses, which talk about all the transgressions that have required God’s forgiveness. I get the “sea of forgetfulness” allusion here, but what does it matter that God has forgotten more than I’ll ever know when what the song really seems to want to say is that he forget all that I ever did when I asked forgiveness?”

The song and the songwriters have a great deal of promise that with the right support and honest feedback could be cultivated into something special. But for a group of the Perrys’ status, an early cut from the songbook of two fairly inexperienced writers simply won’t do as a single. At least it shouldn’t have.

This can’t be news to the Stuffles. The hits they scored off Life of Love and This is the Day – among them, “I Will Find You Again” or “Calvary Answers for Me,” or “Wish I Could’ve Been There” – possess a lyrical and melodic coherence that are conspicuously absent from “He Forgot.” So what gives?

Perhaps they’re afraid of losing Habedank and so are willing to single a musically inferior song of his and Holt’s – just as they’re willing to indulge and let go unchecked Habedank’s indiscipline on and off the stage – in passive kind of appeasement. Or maybe they see other groups cutting Habeholt songs – for instance, Mark Trammell Trio, which just recorded “Weary at the Well,” a rhythmically savvy and melodically catchy tune, but lyrically, full of beginning writers’ mistakes – and think, “well, they must be good.” The irony, of course, is that other groups are probably cutting Habeholt songs because they’ve been recorded on a Perrys album. A perfect little echo chamber of abdicated responsibilities and bad judgment.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s something else altogether. But in any case, it’s natural to wonder (or fear) if whatever is leading the Stuffles to cede their creative and professional authority to their less experienced and skilled employees means we should expect their next album to be weighted in favor of musically substandard Habeholt songs.

Supporting young artists in the industry the way the Perrys have is deeply admirable. They’ve made a long-term commitment to investing in their own people that speaks clearly of their fundamental goodness and professional integrity. But to make this investment an effective one, you’ve got to have a solid grasp of your own needs first and then decide how much you can give the artists you surround yourself with. It’s not just a matter of inadvertently creating another Andrew Ishee or the next generation’s Jonathan Wilburn, troubling as that is. It’s a matter of unintended self-sabotage, of surrendering so much control over the direction of your music that the artistic vision languishes in the hands of those who are still in their professional adolescence.

I see Hope’s Cal signed with Daywind. Good for them, I guess. The few times I’ve seen them they’ve had their act together mostly, and they clearly know how to sing (even if the vocal histrionics are still a bit too often in play). But I would thought they’d signed with Wayne Haun and Kevin Ward’s new label, especially since Hope’s Call has had such a longstanding relationship with Ward – which is to say, Ward’s engineering and producing work was essential in Hope’s Call early years, helping to keep their sound first-rate while they built a fan base and enough professional credibility to launch into the tier above the middling-to-fair category in which they began. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Hee Haw lately but I keep hearing the lyric from that old skit … “you met another and … [thuhhhhht] you were gone.”

And then Loren Harris left the Perrys. No great sound lasts forever, it just remains embalmed in a thousand chat rooms and discussion-board threads about how superior were the “real” Gold City (Tim, Ivan, Mike, Brian) and the “real” Kingsmen (Hammil, Reese, and whoever was your favorite baritone for Hammel to pick on and your favorite tenor who ruined his voice in all-night screech-a-thons) and the “real” Cathedrals (G, G, Danny, Mark) to everything that came before or after. [Interesting tangent: The Hoppers. The same personnel is intact from their heyday back in the mid to late 90s but they’ve managed to lose Shannon Childress their mojo all the same]. Perhaps it’s a mark of excellence or greatness or at least a sign that you’ve passed some magical point in your career as a group when you find that too-perfect sound that depends on something irreplaceable in each person’s voice and creates a cultlike identification among fans. If so, the Perrys found – and with Harris’s departure, lost – that sound.

I’m not sure what Libbi Perry Stuffle was thinking when she claimed that promoting baritone Joseph Habedank to lead and hiring someone else to fill the baritone spot “will keep our sound basically the same as before.” There’s a world of difference in that “basically” — the sound will be basically the same, much the way the Supremes would have sounded basically the same if Diana Ross had gone off to spend more time with her family. David Bruce Murray has described the Perrys late sound that developed with Habedank and Harris alongside the Stuffles as a “hard singing” style – by which I think he means to describe the considerable strength (not just volume, but control, pitch, blend) equally distributed at each vocal position.

I don’t know for sure why Harris left, but the usual cabal of whisperers in my ear who are usually right about these kinds of things certainly weren’t using phrases like “wants to spend more time family.” And Habedanks promotion to lead – coming as it does on the heels of the Perrys putting two songs written or co-written by Habedank on their latest project, despite the fact that the songs were B-list beginners work at best and despite the other fact that the Perrys are, or ought to be, at a place in their career when only the best songs (and not just the ones written by people you really like) get cut – well, these are the kinds of decisions that presage a decline. Let’s hope I’m wrong.

Finally, David Bruce Murray has made sghistory.com a wiki. Go read about why that could be a really BFD.

The Perrys
Come Thirsty
Daywind 2006
ALI: 63%

Comparing the Perrys to the Goodmans is such a commonplace in gospel music that it has become less of a compliment and more of a critical crutch, a way to sound perceptive and historically literate without really having to say anything terribly insightful, indeed without having to listen much at all. Of course the Perrys eagerly cultivate this comparison.

For all its reverence and seriousness, the Perrys’ Remembering the Goodmans album from 2005 was, after all, the ultimate extension of what started long ago as Libbi Perry-Stuffle’s better-than-the-real-thing imitation of Vestal Goodman’s “God Walks the Dark Hills.” But something happened on the way to life imitating the Goodman’s larger-than-life art in this case. As Perry-Stuffle’s out-Vestalling Vestal suggests, the Perrys have gone well beyond imitation of the Goodmans’ style and, with Come Thirsty, have pretty clearly managed to surpass it.

The first three songs of the album - “Until the Last One is Home,” “Still Thrilled,” and “Day that Never Ends” - are a better tribute to the Goodmans than anything on the Perry’s slavish Goodmans album. “Day that Never Ends” is reticulated with delightful little Goodman moves: the way dotted quarter-notes are used to punch up certain words such as “together” and “never” rather than singing them in straight time (this is one way the Goodmans were able to keep simple I-IV-V music from sounding monotonous), the piano trilling and running all around the vocals, and the shuffling gait.

“Still Thrilled” feels a little too much like a warmed over “Still Blessed” reimagined in the style of Vestal, but “Until the Last One is Home” opens the album pitch perfectly and is perhaps the most pleasing and well sung bass-lead I’ve heard in years (Tracy Stuffle and the song’s arranger(s) deserve an extra gold star for pulling off the most enjoyable bass-note ending since Greater Vision’s remake of “I Didn’t Know” on the live recording of the Quartets project, and this depsite the fact that you can’t really understand what in the heck Stuffle is saying in his bass lead lines on the chorus).

It’s as if the Perrys use the first three songs of Come Thirsty to work out the emotional residue from their work on the Goodmans’ project because the remainder of the album goes in several different directions. The cinematic ballad “He Will Hide Me,” sung mainly by Loren Harris, anchors the album emotionally. A self-possessed edge has crept into Harris’s voice with age, giving him Herculean reach (listen to the second verse). And the song’s intricately shaded orchestration has the expansiveness of a Broadway show stopper or an operatic overture. In fact, the song demands the kind of investment of emotion and extension of empathy usually associated with musical drama.

“He Will Hide Me” seems to aspire to the kind of power-ballad position that “Calvary Answers For Me” occupied on the This is the Day* album (one title even vaguely echoes the other), but I’m not sure “Hide” is lyrically up to that level, and certainly it’s not up to the level of its own melody and arrangement here. Words, though, hardly seem to matter in moments when Harris and Joseph Habedank share a splendid few bars of harmony, or when Perry-Stuffle’s voice comes out of nowhere to take the lead and then recedes back into the ensemble with the stealthy confidence that often comes to vocalists only after their voice itself has peaked, or when the orchestra’s trumpets sound a transition that seem almost to presage a more apocalyptic trumpet blast.

“Walk Away Free,” an airy, medium tempo number with a reliable hook, balances the heftiness of “Hide Me” and sounds like a shoo-in for an early single. “He Forgot” moves along ably enough that it’s easy to … well, forget that the chorus’ hook - “He forgot more than I’ll ever know” - doesn’t really make a lot of sense in the context of the verses, which talk about all the transgressions that have required God’s forgiveness. I get the “sea of forgetfulness” allusion here, but what does it matter that God has forgotten more than I’ll ever know when what the song really seems to want to say is that he forget all that I ever did when I asked forgiveness? But no matter. Tap your toe hard enough and you’ll be sufficiently distracted to enjoy the song.

This cannot, alas, be said of others. “When Jesus Prays” is a melodically meandering tune that sounds like a good idea (”hey, wouldn’t ‘When Jesus Prays’ be a great title?“) in search of a song that’s never really found. Ditto “Why Trouble the Master.” Though it’s catchier than “When Jesus Prays,” “Why Trouble” pivots on the ghoulish line, “I know he makes dead things rise.” Entire pet cemeteries and miles of sludgy road kill levitate before my eyes every time I hear this song in the car. Dead things? Ick. And finally, the title track manages to be both turgid and singsongy, though given that the Life of Love title track also fizzled and sputtered, maybe there’s a logic here that finer minds than mine appreciate.

As I’ve noted before, in the mix of material on a given album, the Perrys can end up sounding like everyone and no one. That’s fortunately not the case here. They are wholly themselves and for the most part (63% of the time to be exact), Come Thirsty sates the thirst it solicits. The Goodmans never had the stylistic or creative range showcased here; at their best, they bent every song to their will. The Perrys, on the other hand, rise (or try) to meet their material, which in this case means they end up sounding as good - but also as bad - as the songwriting. June 23, 2006 12:07 PM [comments]

*Originally I had said Life of Love here, incorrectly so. Thanks to DM for pointing that out.

The answer, I suspect, has to do with a faulty song-selection process common among groups - namely, the “I want a [fill in the blank of top-tier songwriter such as Lindsey, Griffin, Rowland, Sue Smith etc] song on our next project.” Which is to say, many hit songs have been written by Lindsey, Griffin, Rowland, Smith etc., but not all songs by Lindsey, Griffin, Rowland, Smith etc are hits. This may seem self-evident, but then if it that’s the case, then it bears repeating in an industry that’s so often obsessed with the trappings of success rather than success itself. For many artists, having Joel Lindsey’s or Rodney Griffin’s or Sue Smith’s name on their liner notes is more important than what the song sounds like. The value comes in being able to say to other artists or industry types “yeah we were in the studio this week working on that new Sue Smith song we’re recording.” But honestly (and all due respect to songwriters, whose work I deeply respect), big flipping deal. The real deal is in the writing: What does the song sound like? How well is it written? How about the hook? Cause even the most talented people lose their way occasionally. Remember Kelly Nelon Thompson and Legacy?

The better way to pick tunes would be to demand a blind submission process and song-review: listen to and make song selections for projects without knowing who wrote the song. I’ve only heard of one CCM group doing this, though I’m sure (or at least I hope) there were others in other genres. The advantage of this method should, I think, be obvious. And I want to be clear that I’m not bemoaning the fact that good or successful songwriters get frequent cuts. In fact, a blind-review method would probably end up landing established writers at least as many (and maybe more) cuts than they already get. This is not only because good writers are good because they write consistently good songs (to be somewhat tautological) but also because blind-reviewing would eliminate the need for writers to work on volume basis, which inevitably means writing a higher percentage of throw-aways and duds. Volume-writing is a fact of life in sg song-selection as it is practiced now … both for new writers, who have to blanket the earth with submissions hoping someone will take a shot on a no-name with so many big names in the mix, as well as for established writers, whose success means lots of people want more songs from them than they can possibly produce without sacrificing something. But there’s a better. Don’t believe me? Don’t think you’ll ever lose by betting on a name? Just ask Kelly Nelon Thompson and Legacy.

Except not this time. Instead of classic sg, there’s a little grace note dropped in, a few intentionally slurred notes in the harmony, the rhythm becomes just barely syncopated, and it all combines ot have a loosening effect on the style. There’s a hint of R&B here, some echoes of the blues and black gospel. Just like that, we’re no longer in the stuffy heat of the tent revival. For just a few beats, we’ve been transported to the Brooklyn Tabernacle choir, or a James Cleveland concert. I laugh out loud at this point. The woman next to me shuffles her stale and crumply newspaper, moves away, feigning a cell phone call. Who cares. Let her be skeeved out. This is one of those instances when I get to be right: for all my harping on the inevitable hybridity of southern gospel (in the face of howling protest from the classicists), here’s proof of what I’ve been saying all along, smuggled in under the guise of a noveau-classic quartet number from Kyla Rowland. It’s not like Whitmire or Webb or whoever it may be sits down and says, “I think I’ll throw in a dash of Mahalia Jackson here.” This kind of thing just what happens when studied and careful, attentive and interested musicians listen widely and generously to what’s going on around them, what’s gone on before them, and then return to southern gospel informed by the stylistic contexts of adjacent genres. Instead, they play what seems right, feels natural, sounds appropriate or effective for the moment. And thus can the introduction of a commonplace quartet number morph effortlessly into a wonderful stylistic merger of complementary traditions … and then … in a flash, fall back into line, never (literally) missing a beat. These spots of time are the kind of thing that endears gospel music me (whether I endear myself to gospel music is another thing entirely). And it’s these spots of time that make me come back here, to talk to myself in hopes that someone else will be interested enough to eavesdrop on my publicly private discussion of something that exerts such a shaping force on so many.

All in all, this is pretty disappointingly derivative stuff. Like mimeograph copies taken from an original that has been recycled too many times, both the copy and its master suffer in the reproduction. And you gotta wonder what we’re doing here in the first place. Because the truth is, a studio project is an odd way to pay tribute to the Goodmans. They did their best work on stage, where they could slip the chain and head for the woods in a full gallop. Their work always felt slightly misplaced and stunted when forced into the constraints and narrowing demands of the recording booth, the animating zest in the Goodman voices that made them great somehow depleted in the isolation and carefulness of a studio. The best Goodmans albums are the live ones, which is why I don’t know anyone who talks of this or that Goodmans’ studio project being life-changing or even that memorable.

Unfortunately, the same thing might now be said of the Perrys nobly flawed imitation of Goodmania. Take, for instance, the money song, “God Walks the Dark Hills.” It’s nice, but Libbi had already outdone herself at NQC’s Remebering the Greats concert last year, when she sang the song with her husband, Tracey, Gerald Wolfe, and Mark Trammel. It’s not just happenstance; the difference between a live setting and a recorded one for the Goodmans could not have been vaster, starker, or more insuperable. And I’m half surprised (but only half) that the Perrys let their nostalgia get the better of them long enough to pretend this wasn’t true (the other half of me knows perfectly well that, in addition to being the product of the Perrys’ genuine affection for the Goodmans and their desire to honor them, the project will also sell and perform quite well). Maybe the best thing to say about the project is that it gives the Perrys an excuse to create more Goodman memorials on stage like the RTG performance. Beyond that, let’s hope this gets the Goodman bug outta the Perrys’ system. The best way for the Perrys to honor the memory of the Goodman legacy is to unleash their own music, sung in their own way, upon the gospel world. Discovering what that means and sound like is, as I’ve noted before, what stands between the Perrys and the proverbial next level

There’s a covenant sweet
It was written for me
It’s a promise that I could be healed
From all my sin and my shame
Even heartache and pain
It was signed and confirmed on a hill.

But you really must hear these lyrics as sung by the Perrys if you’re to begin to understand the power and force of this song (for a clip of part of this verse, click here). A while back I suggested that the next step for the Perrys was to acquire a definitive sound of their own and sustain it. This song is precisely what I’m talking about. The harmonics and intonation are so tight, the contours of their voice, the texture of the ensemble possess a richness that deepens and authenticates the lyrical idea. Listening to this song, I know why people bankrupt themselves, bust up relationships and ruin family ties to get on a bus and sing for a pittance … all for the sake of just the chance to recreate for yourself the feeling that this song stirs up inside you.

It doesn’t hurt of course that the song is about as well produced as any you could ask for (for this, we have Wayne Haun to thank). There’s nothing here that, by itself, will knock the top of your head off. But the restraint, the creative discipline and the careful attention to subtle accessories are enough to make me giggle like flirtatious schoolboy. Two examples. First, the little flute accompaniment after the word “shame” in that first verse. It floats in, as if form an open window somewhere, softening the confession of failure in the lyric, humanizing it … and just as quickly it drifts away. It’s thievably good.

And second, the trio lines in the next verse:

Don’t feel sorry for me
When you see I’m in need
There’s a judge who grants mercy and love
All my burdens he lifts
All my sin he forgives
Every trial is won through the blood

For a split second, the vocals almost sound like Gold City in their finer moments of years past, but this is mellower, more considered sound - not least of all because the arrangements use Tracey Stuffle’s bass voice in creative harmonics. By avoiding the easy applause lines of pot-bellied low notes, the arrangement is freed up to bring Stuffle’s lines into more of a baritone’s range, generating a beautiful, mellifluous sound (this happens in a few key places on the Life of Love project as well). The harmonic repositioning of Stuffle’s voice gives just the right amount of intimacy to the trio lines and produces just the right emotional pitch to the lyrical idea of struggle turned to strength through unmerited favor.

The Perrys are not art-house singers. No producer who throws flat thirteens and sharp nines at them is going to get back the kind of sound he or she had in mind. Leave that to First Call, or the Ruppes. The Perrys are the combined effect of their unadorned voices, and they rise and fall not on the complexity of the music but the indelible imprint of genius stamped on the lyrics and arrangements they sing. “I Rest My Case” works - like all the Perrys’ best music - because the music (the arrangements, the accompaniment, even to some extent the lyrics themselves) get out of the way of the vocals. Once the Perrys are allowed to inhabit their songs, the instrumentation can return and build in layers of aura and intensity behind and around the voices. The result is that you rarely ever say, “Wow, that was a great arrangement,” even if it was; or “The Perrys really sang that bridge well,” even if they did. Instead, you may - if you’re like me - find yourself slightly stunned, left dumbstruck with little else to do but pull off to the side of the road or sit down or stand up, hit the play button again, and mutter silently to yourself: “My God, what a song.”