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Here is more reason to think that God has by passed the conventional Church to reach the world that from within the Church we have failed to touch. The Christian music industry can try all they like in the twelve months that are left of 2002 and they are never going to equal the artistic and spiritual depth and wonder of this record.

The project is simple but intellectual, researched like a thesis in song but profoundly spiritual in the most elementary sense. Basically, these two songwriters get involved with a project at the Institute On the Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard where they collect prayers and put them to music. Musically, the results are astounding but we can come to that in a moment. The first thing to say is that this is a fine piece of work on prayer. There is a depth to the prayers here that is powerfully touching. There is a sense that these words are actually making connection with the transcendent being. God is on this CD listening and indeed interacting people in the very real dilemmas of life. 

Perhaps the lines that best describe the work and impression of the piece are from aids patient Frankie Harris who refers to her virus as her “spiritual growth.” She writes: 

               Dear most merciful God 
               Humbly I approach your throne 
               Of grace and mercy
               Thank you 
               For putting your hand in the midst 
               Of our trials and tribulations
               Cause you bless me
               So many times in the hospital
               When I was afraid
               Hallelujah 

This is what the album is all about and should be what prayer is all about. A wrestling with the every day trials of living, not always seeing our answers in the problem disappearing but somehow God communing with us even in the midst; and to bring comfort of some mystical sort that we might cry "Hallelujah." Echoes here of U2’s use of the word in their live version of "Walk On."

As well as Harris, we are led in prayer by a Marine Scout Dog Handler in Vietnam, a victim of the violent oppression of southern Sudan, and we have a prayerful response to the September 11th tragedy in Suzzy Roche’s own composition New York. There are challenges for living in Anyway which tells us that the word will be hard, unresponsive, unforgiving, and unloving but we should love, forgive and attempt to live another way, anyway! Another song Sounds is a fascinating and provocative reflection on the murder of a gay man suggesting the sound of his beating and his screaming goes on forever; symbolic of the consequences of every choice we make.

The question had to be, could the Roche sisters come up with music as worthy as the subject matter. Building a very sparse but in every way interesting sound around their heavenly harmonies, this album is as beautiful musically as any Cathedral is architecturally. It is the perfect setting for prayer. 

DuPree, one of the collective, sings lead on the accapella "Teach Me O Lord," with the sisters in the sweetest support. Suzzy and Maggie leave the instruments off "The Gospel How Precious" too, but when instruments do get used it is sparingly but with perfect precision. Steuart Smith whose name on an inlay sleeve has been reason enough to buy albums by the likes of Shawn Colvin and Lucy Kaplansky plays guitar and Dave Mansfield most famous for being in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue contributes violin and dobro. So with lots of black Gospel, loads of protest folk turning rant to prayer and much in the territory of Suzanne Vega singer songwriter land, we have as spiritually and artistically fulfilling an album as will come out all year or indeed in many a long year. That his spiritual yearning comes out of a politically orientated institution linked to secular academia and not from the charismatic end of Third Millennium American Church revival may have something to do with the earthiness and dare I say humanity of the piece. As the song Anyway puts it “In the final analysis it is between you and God.” 

There is a sense of God on this album, listening and responding to an often aching, sometimes rejoicing and always hopeful world. 

Steve Stockman 2/16/2002