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Album Of The Day: Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan

Album Art of Bob Dylan's Nashville Skyline album - A photo of a young white man with a short beard and mustache in a black coat wearing a black hat, and he's holding his hand just below the hat like he's about to tip his hat. He has a noticeable smile and is photographed from below, looking down at the camera while holding his guitar in his left hand in front of him. Behind him can only be seen the blue sky, bluer towards the top and more white near the bottom. In the top right, by the neck of the guitar, the bare branches of a tall tree can be seen.

Released 56 years ago yesterday, Nashville Skyline is Bob Dylan's 9th studio album. Recorded less than 4 years after he shocked the attendees of the Newport Folk Festival with his rock music, he recorded this album in Nashville with a much more subdued, country-influenced sound. For a few years around this time, Bob Dylan stopped smoking and on this album his voice has a much more smooth, crooner feel to it. The most well-known and best songs on this album are a re-recording of Dylan's hit "Girl From The North Country" with Johnny Cash and "Lay, Lady, Lay". And the "Nashville Skyline Rag" is a rollickin' instrumental song too. It's a short album, but it's a fun set of songs from the songwriter featuring great musicians mixing country, bluegrass and even a bit of rock.

Release Year: 1969
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Album Of The Day: Home by Josh Garrels

Album Art of Josh Garrels's Home album - On a white background, there are four drawings set into light brown squares. The top left has a crude drawing of a structure's corners with of various sizes, a garden growing inside of it in just black pencil. The top right is a picture of a house of a white color with many small lines that are windows on the closest side, that is surrounded by tall, thin trees on three sides. The bottom left is a very similar-looking white house with a roof and many windows on two sides, but this one is for some reason floating in a drawing of a bathtub with the tap running. The bottom right is a large, white building with no visible windows that has a rooftop garden on one half of the roof, and a more traditional angled roof on the other half. Over this last white house is written the artist's name in black, hand-written small print and underneath that in much bigger print the album title.

Released on this day 10 years ago, this is the 7th album from independent folk/pop/rock artist Josh Garrels. I remember I was a bit disappointed when it first came out, as it was less epic and exciting as his preceding album, Love & War & The Sea In Between, still my favorite album of his. But after giving Home a few more good listens, I appreciate it much more for the shorter and more succinct masterpiece it is. The musicians create beautiful soundscapes and Garrels's treble vocals mostly float above the instruments. I think my favorite song is the rock-heavy "The Arrow", but all the songs are a great lyrical exploration of the place we live and family, on life shared with others. Another beautiful song is "Heaven's Knife", which doesn't sound like a love song to his wife by the title, but that what it is. It's a beautiful album that reminds us of the most important things to us: home.

Release Year: 2015
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Album Of The Day: Cutting Edge by delirious?

Album Art of delirious?'s Cutting Edge album - The top and bottom and most of the background is white. Interlaced into the background are pictures of a scissors and a shaver in verital lines, somewhat blended into the white at the top. In the top middle, there's also a small photo of a scissors. There's print that says the album title in black, and then white slightly below and over it. In the top right of the middle section, there's an orange oval with the band name in them, except the 's' is replaced with a '5'. In the middle is a blue rectangle with the letters 'd:' cut out. And a small photo of 5 white men lit by light bulbs in front and behind, with a mirror behind them.

In the early 1990s, a worship band started leading youth-oriented prayer meetings on the small cities of England's southern coast. They were known as "Cutting Edge" and they wrote, recorded and released four EPs on cassette, creatively titled 1, 2, 3 and Fore. When I heard these songs in 1998, they were packaged into this two-CD, 25-song compilation of all four EPs. By that time, the band was known as delirious? and the compilation album was called Cutting Edge. Throughout this album, lead vocalist Martin Smith wrote and passionately sang about a relationship with God in a way to that was much more personal and compelling than most of the old hymns and hippie folk songs that their parents were singing in church. Over the last 30 years as the English-speaking world came to know this album, songs like "I Could Sing Of Your Love Forever" and "Shout To The North" became songs commonly sung in churches with modern worship music. And songs like "Did You Feel The Mountains Tremble?" and "Obsession" showed that while they were definitely a worship band, they also had a rock band creativity and drive to go beyond what a church worship band might normally do. The band delirious? went on to create 7 more studio albums combining pop, rock and worship genres, get played the UK Top 40 pop radio, and tour around the world before saying farewell to their fans in 2009. And I've been enjoying these songs for nearly 27 years now.

Release Year: 1993-1995
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The original UK CD releases looked much like the original cassette covers:
Album Art of delirious?'s Cutting Edge 1 and 2 album - The left half is a bright yellow, with a very light scissors icon just a shade whiter in the background. There's a black circle in the top left that has the band name in it, and a black '1' in the bottom left corner. On the right half it's a somewhat pinkish-purple color, with a black '2' on the top right. Vertically in the middle it says 'cutting' from the top to bottom in white, with 'edge' just to the left of it bigger in gray. In smaller print, the song titles are printed on both the left and right side.
Album Art of delirious?'s Cutting Edge 3 and Fore album - The left half is an orange color, with some blocks of dark blue on the edges. There's a black circle in on the left that has the band name in it, and the words 'Three' written in white in a scripty font above that. Down the middle, in a dark blue box, it has 'Cutting Edge' in a font that looks like it's printed by a labeler machine. On the right, the color is mostly a light aqua blue with white spheres in it, plus a bunch more dark blue boxes. In the dark blue area there's a photo of a golf ball with a much smaller tee and flag photo towards the top. The golf ball has lines encircling it like it's a nucleus of an atom. At the bottom in a serif font in gray it says 'fore'.

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Album Of The Day: Hinterland by Held By Trees

Album Art of Held By Trees's Hinterland album - In the thick white border around the artwork, it has printed at the top in a small, black print the band's name and at the bottom the album name, both centered horizontally. In the middle is a square piece of artwork that is mostly off-white in the top and bottom. In the middle vertically, it's maybe some sort of abstract landscape, with largely gold colors on the right side especially in the lower vertical section, and bits of red, black and purple everywhere. Some thin, dark lines can be seen as well amidst the painted colors that look like they're on a textured canvas.

I'd not heard of "post-rock" as a genre before, but apparently bands I've enjoyed for years like Sigur Rós and Explosions In The Sky are post-rock bands. It seems to me like it's a genre that incorporates elements of rock, but also a lot of various other styles in mostly instrumental works. Held By Trees has been only been around for 4-5 years, but some of the musicians on their albums have done post-rock from nearly its inception working with the band Talk Talk and Mark Hollis. Released just yesterday, Hinterland is the latest release of this English band and provides 40 minutes of instrumental musical exploration. I've only started listening to their albums and EPs in the last few months, but I'm really enjoying the beautiful music they are making. Looks like it's not yet on streaming, but you can listen and buy on Bandcamp.

Release Year: 2025
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Album Of The Day: Cosmic Supreme by John Mark McMillan

About 15 years ago, I heard about a singer-songwriter from North Carolina named John Mark McMillan. He was then known for making his unique brand of "modern worship"—a more contemporary style of music designed for church instead of traditional hymns. But I never thought McMillan was doing that primarily; most of his songs were a lot more artistic and personal than most music written for congregations to sing together. Over the last 10+ years, John Mark McMillan still had religious themes in his lyrics, but the songs were not what would be called "worship". But with Cosmic Supreme, released today, John Mark McMillan is returning to make more worship-oriented music. It still sounds very similar musically to his recent albums—what I might call soft rock or I saw listed as "alternative folk" recently—but more of the lyrics are written directly in praise and worship to God. It's beautiful musical poetry about the creator of the universe, and I really like it. Time will tell if churches decide to sing some of these songs together, but this album has some impeccable production that your church service will probably not have and is a great listen.

Release Year: 2025
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Album Of The Day: Terraform: The People by Propaganda & DJ Mal-Ski

The People EP - A photo of about 50 Africans posing for a photo on a sandy bit of land with large rocks and the mostly cloudy sky with a golden brown hue added to it. In the midst of the sky, it has a Propaganda text with a pen and brush crossed behind it to be a sort of logo. Below that, it says 'The People' in large letters, then 'Terraform' in much smaller letters, and the 'Food For the Hungry' logo and word mark below that, all printed in white.

"We are the culture." Amen to that! Released 4 years ago yesterday, this is the first of his four Terraform EPs. Rapper Propaganda (with the help of DJ Mal-Ski) focuses on the world's people and how we have to work together and live together on this release. In "We Were Only 10", for example, he draws parallels between gang culture in his childhood growing up in the Los Angeles area and terrorists for kids growing up in the Middle East. Other songs on this celebrate the culture in more of a positive light, including a number of references to Propaganda's African heritage as well as his life in LA. This whole EP is quality rap celebrating that there is more that unites us as humans than divides us. It makes me think, and it's a good celebration of the many places we come from and what we can learn from each other.

Release Year: 2021
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Album Of The Day: The Brothers Martin by The Brothers Martin

Album Art of The Brothers Martin's self-titled album - On a dark grey background, a series of lines and circles are plotted in white lines. Vertically down the middle, there's a dotted line. About 30 degrees off vertical counter-clockwise is a solid white line. In the center is a circle, with a solid line bisecting it horizontally. In the center, the all these meet and approaching the solid diagonal line right at the center on each side are two circles and one quarter-circle arc. So it's just a bunch of lines and circles in a geometric design. Where the center circle meets the dotted line and diagonal line, there are arrows pointing to those intersections.

The Brothers Martin are Jason Martin (Starflyer 59) and Ronnie Martin (Joy Electric). Yes, they are actual brothers and both major forces in the indie rock scene. So why not be a force together as well? This album is the only release under this name and it mixes Ronnie Martin's synths and other electronic sounds with Jason Martin's guitars. They take turns on writing and vocals on this 10-track album. I think I like this album more than Starflyer 59 or Joy Electric albums, but I'm not sure why. And I'm pretty sure most people prefer those other bands from the brothers more than this album. It's not a long album, but it's an energetic collection of music mixing fuzzy guitars and waves of synthesizers.

Release Year: 2007
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Album Of The Day: The Lone Bellow by The Lone Bellow

Album Art of The Lone Bellow's self-titled album - In a black-and-white photo, three white people are sitting on the front steps of a New York City brownstone, from the looks of it. On both the right and left are men wearing boots, the one on the left with lighter hair and a black shirt, and the one on the right with black hair and a grey shirt with vest and black pants. In the middle is a woman with probably brown hair coming down over her right shoulder. She's wearing a light-colored dress with no sleeves and beadwork on the chest area. They look really classy and somewhat timeless, though I think their clothing is modern. Above them, printed in white is the band name, with 'The' being smaller and built into a decorative line art above the rest of the name, with a similar line art right below the name.

It's not too often that I hear of a country artist and think, "I need to check that out." But at the time, I had a friend who lived in New York City and was a huge country fan, and they told me about a country band from NYC and said, "You've got to hear this band's album!" I also then noticed that this album was produced by Charlie Peacock and I was intrigued. Zach Williams (not the Christian artist, though they share the same name) is a great songwriter and this band is oh-so-talented. To call The Lone Bellow a "country" band is not accurate, though; their music blends country, alternative rock, indie folk, and even soul. There's so many good songs here, from the up-tempo "Bleeding Out" and "Green Eyes And A Heart Of Gold", to the slower "Looking For You" and "Two Sides Of Lonely" and every tempo in between. They have gone on to release 4 more albums since then, but this may still be my favorite album of theirs still. (I need to listen to their last few albums a bit more; I haven't listened to them as much as this for sure.)

Release Year: 2013
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Album Of The Day: Let There Be Wonder by Matt Redman

Album Art of Matt Redman's Let There Be Wonder album - On a dark blue background, an illustration of what looks like a fingerprint is in the middle. Upon closer inspection, it is a graphic where the top part looks somewhat like a fingerprint printed in gold, with mostly horizontal lines. We can see that a bit below the center these gold lines do circle, making it out to be a sky of gold with the sun just over the horizon. And below the sun, large ocean waves of blue and gold are crashing. At the top, in white handwritten-style font is the artist name, and in smaller sans-serif letters at the bottom is the album title.

Matt Redman is still one of the best songwriters of modern church music, and this is one of his most recent albums of his, released just over 5 years ago. I read an article recently which claimed that Matt Redman's earlier works were great for congregational praise and worship and that in the last 10 years or so he's lost some of that, making the more complex, less sing-able styles of the mega-church/arena pop/rock that is most popular in Christian Music today, and that might be a fair criticism. But I still think he is one of the best songwriters and that these songs can still be sung by congregations—I've heard songs from this album played by local worship bands and sung along with by congregations. Matt Redman does better than many other church groups on making sure that there's scripturally-based, theologically-sound lyrics and writes beautiful melodies to go with them. I think this is a good addition to his over 30 years of songwriting and recording. Some of my favorites here are "All Praise (Sing Praise)", "The Same Jesus", and "Jesus Your Name".

Release Year: 2020
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Album Of The Day: The Everglow by Mae

Album Art of Mae's The Everglow album - A drawing of a forest behind a metal fence with vines growing over it. In the middle, there's a path with a an open gate and a man with a suitcase is standing looking into the gate, and there is a bit of a glow from the forest behind him. The colors may be painted with watercolors or something, because the edges are not fully colored out of the grass, the path, the sky. The man in the middle also is black-and-white only, not in color. On the top of the gate, the metal spells out 'The Everglow' and there's a hanging piece of wood with 'by mae' written on it.

Released on this day 20 years ago, this is a concept album on relationships and love by the band Mae. The packaging and the recording does a really good job of reinforcing the fact that it's a concept album, as the booklet with the CD looks like a book and has an image associated with each song that shows a man on a journey to finding love. And on the first and last track, a narrator opens and closes the "audio portion" of the album and encourages the listener to "read along" with the booklet. Musically, it's an alternative/rock album that is not too innovative, but works really well as a cohesive whole thanks to their passionate musicianship and vocals, plus the emotional and easy-to-identify-with lyrics. This may still be Mae's most-revered album, and I get to see them play live tonight for the first time too, so I may come back as an ever bigger fan of this band.

Release Year: 2005
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