Ultimately, when attempting to assign characteristics an undefinable God, we realize that the word “good”, though pedestrian as it may seem, is probably one of the most accurate descriptors we can conjure up. Simple and clear, yet wide enough to contain a bit of mystery. Sometimes we don’t understand God’s actions but we trust that behind them all is an indwelling of goodness. Good may not fully define God, but certainly, God defines good.

If the purpose of prayer is to let God change our hearts as individuals, then in corporate worship, we should be seeking to have our will and heart and soul and mind and bodies changed together as we pray, “Lord, make your will my will.”

As we reflect on the beauty and goodness that dwells in all of creation, we experience together the creative spark of goodness that started the universe. That observation should take us to that simple place — God you are good. I trust you. Make my will like yours. Give me your mind. Allow me to rest in your Spirit and overwhelm me with this goodness. I don’t fully understand, and I never will, but I ask that you would allow this divine good to seep into my consciousness today, infusing my thoughts and actions with that which is You.

Thanks to the excellent GOOD Magazine for use of their image at the top of this post. Visit their beauty-seeking website and support them here.

1991: The year I transitioned from cassettes to CDs

2000: The year CD burning became the norm.

2002: The year I got high-speed internet, and thus discoved the illegal bliss of file-sharing, and

2005: The year I finally ditched my CD wallet for the combo of iTunes and iPods.

2011 was the year of music subscription.

It’s not that the concept of music subscription is brand new. Some of these services have existed for years, but it wasn’t until very recently, with the ubiquity of smartphone apps and decent wireless data speeds, that these services became a legitimate alternative to “owning” your music files for high-consumption music addicts like myself. This was the year that the major drawbacks of these services started vanishing for me.

The benefits of these subscription services are obvious: unlimited streaming of enormous music catalogs (including most new releases on the day of release), the ability to save music directly to your device (in case you are in an area where streaming is unavailable, such as on an airplane), and social networking features that allow you to share music with your friends. For these reasons and more, combined with the aforementioned exploding smartphone market, 2011 saw the rise and growth of the next generation of services like Rdio, MOG and Spotify.

Though Spotify’s well-funded and highly publicized US launch was responsible for bringing the spotlight onto music subscription services this year, it was Rdio that became the app to replace the stock “music” app in the bottom right-hand corner of my iPhone’s screen this summer. There’s something I like about the way the mobile Rdio app keeps the focus on albums, similar to the way that native music app does, rather than the way Spotify insists on promoting the “playlist agenda”. In addition, I love Rdio’s ability to browse through current new releases. It’s a tradition of mine to start every Tuesday morning by browsing through the new releases of the week on iTunes, and now I get to continue that tradition within this new streaming model. These are subtle, but, I think, powerful differentiators that make Rdio stand out.

So, how has this new model changed the way I consume music?

1 – I am no longer tethered to physical files. In the same way that the switch from CD to mp3 files liberated us from the necessity of having to carry around cumbersome plastic discs, I am now free of having to remember which music I am going to sync onto my phone to bring with me.In addition to Rdio, as an iTunes Match user (which probably deserves another whole post), I have constant access to even the most obscure music in my collection.

2 – I spent far less money on music in 2011 than in the years preceding it.

3 – I consumed far more music in 2011 than any other year so far.

Sounds great, right?  Like crack for music addicts.  Well, just like crack, I think music subscription services carry a few hidden dangers.   Those dangers are rooted in the second two of those aforementioned changes in consumption, and are dangers both for me as an individual and for the music community as a whole.

As an artist, I have some mixed feelings about subscription music services. On one hand they represent an opportunity of distributing my music to a far broader audience than ever, due to the fact that I don’t have to convince subscribers to part with any hard-earned cash before they listen to the music I’ve created. On the other hand, they also represent a giant step in a trend that has been making recorded music far less valuable in most people’s minds. At one point, I felt that I was getting a deal if I found an album on sale for under $13. More recently that number has dropped to about $8. As it stands with the new economics of music subscription, paying for music outside of the subscription at all will be a rare occurrence.

As an artist, I recognize that I only end up seeing a small fraction of a PENNY each time someone streams one of my songs, as opposed to the 80-ish cents I get if they buy it on iTunes or the $8 I get if they purchase a full album. Really, as the growth of music subscription continues, it makes it even more important to rely on other sources to support my music making habits: playing shows, selling physical merch at those shows, and offering new and creative methods of distribution that provide a richer experience for music fans than a simple song download. Yes, it’s uncomfortable and new and different that what I’m used to – such is change.

Because I am aware of this economic shift, I am also making an effort to increase the amount of money I am spending on concerts and projects for other artists I love and believe in. If you are part of a community with a local music scene (which you probably are, even if you don’t know it), do your best to support artists in your community by frequenting their shows, wearing their t-shirts, buying their limited edition vinyl releases, etc. I know it may sometimes feel painful to part with a $10 cover charge to see your younger brother’s goofy friend from college play bass in his new band next Friday night, but please realize – this is the primary method in which the music community sustains itself in the coming years.

The other, and perhaps more dangerous result of this trend has to do with the vast amount of music I consumed this year. As I reflected on the music released these past 12 months I realized something quite frightening. Though there were some absolutely STELLAR releases this year, I’m not sure if as many of these albums will stand the test of time the way music of previous years has. This is not a commentary on the quality of music produced this year at all. This is a commentary on my own life and the way I consume new music. Due to the vast amount of music i am intaking on a daily and weekly basis, I recognize that the sheer number of albums encourages me not to simply sit with the music the way I have done so for years. It’s much easier to skip past an album that did not just make my wallet $10 thinner. My theory is that if this trend is happening to me (a self-admitted early-adopter), it will be happening to the music community en masse over the next several years.

So, as 2012 begins rolling a new slew of music our way, I‘m realizing it’s important for me to stop and reflect on the year past, whose calendar might be sitting atop a pile of trash in the garage from the holidays. The temptation would be to treat the music created during these months the same way I treat these paper calendars: like disposable commodities — good for a time, but not worth investing in long-term. Here’s my list of favorite music of 2011. Maybe there’s something in the mix you’ve overlooked. I encourage you to take the time to compose your own list, share it with some friends, and sit in the music for awhile.

(FWIW – if you’re an Rdio user follow me at www.rdio.com/#/people/Ben_Thomas)

Continue reading here for my Favorite Music of 2011.

2011 was quite a year… so much fantastic music (for a more detailed look at that, be sure to see my post called “Crack for Music Addicts: The Joys and Dangers of Music Subscription“).  In order to not overwhelm you, I’ve kept my list to my top 15 albums of the year, plus of handful of contenders.  So…. [drum roll]… here it is:

1.  Helplessness Blues – Fleet Foxes

2.  The Harrow & The Harvest – Gillian Welch

3.  The Whole Love – Wilco

4.  The Rip Tide – Beirut

5.  Within and Without – Washed Out

6.  The Long Surrender – Over the Rhine

7.  Bon Iver – Bon Iver

8.  Kiss Each Other Clean – Iron & Wine

9.  No Doubt of Sunshine – Waterdeep

10.  Anar – Marketa Irglova

11.  Ghosts Upon the Earth – Gungor

12.  Whokill – tUnE-yArDs

13.  Cults – Cults

14.  Circuital – My Morning Jacket

15.  Never Trust a Happy Song – Grouplove

Contenders (alphabetical by artist name)

Burst Apart – The Antlers

The People’s Key – Bright Eyes

Strange Negotiations – David Bazan

Nothing Is Wrong – Dawes

The King Is Dead – The Decemberists

Metals – Feist

Ceremonials – Florence + The Machine

Torches – Foster the People

Father, Son, Holy Ghost – Girls

The Waking Sleep – Katie Herzig

Passenger – Lisa Hannigan

Ritual Union – Little Dragon

Mountaintops – Mates of State

Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will – Mogwai

The King of Limbs – Radiohead

Our Blood – Richard Buckner

Ashes & Fire – Ryan Adams

Strange Mercy – St. Vincent

No Color – The Dodos

Civilian – Wye Oak

Sometime in mid-2005, shortly after the release of The Recovery, I recall saying something to my wife that compared being a singer-songwriter in the suburbs to some sort of sadomasochistic extreme-sport wilderness survival challenge.  The kind where someone abandons you in near-arctic Northern Canada with nothing but a pair of galoshes and a carving knife.   After a few weeks of solitude you start to forget what it’s like to speak out loud, and after a season or two, you realize you’ve completely forgotten what its like to have a conversation with another human.

One of the most hopeful and beautiful shifts that has happened to me as an artist, began just months later when I met Benjie Hughes.

Benjie is the owner and founder of Backthird Audio, a studio in Aurora, but more importantly he’s a music lover who lives by his studio’s motto… that “music is people”.  He has invested deeply into the arts culture of Aurora and, slowly but steadily, has been connecting artists with each other, one at a time.   The result, for moderatly-introverted songsmiths like myself, has been a gradual widening of a local network, and a kickstarted heartbeat (avoid thinking about these guys) to a local music scene.

There is something distinctly more human and alive about the music scene in Aurora today.  Its not Chicago, or even a mini-Chicago and I’m actually glad about that.  Its a bit unpredictable and even awkward at times, almost like your goofy 13-year old nephew, but it is growing and it is human.  For me, the past few years have been filed with small joys like Tiny Candle shows, City of Lights records, friends playing at each others gigs, on each others records and supporting each other’s projects.

This Fall, Made in Aurora Vol. 2 was recorded at Backthird, released, and is now for sale (Its a Christmas record, so buy it now before January blows in and makes it passé).  I had the privilege of playing a small part in it, and the 30+ names that grace the bottom of the album cover are the lifeblood of this heartbeat I’m describing.

Six years after that previously mentioned conversation with my wife, I can honestly say I don’t have that “sucking air from a vacuum cleaner hose” feeling about being a music creative in this area anymore, mostly due to Benjie and those 30+ names.

These are some of the most inspiring and full-of-life records I own.   They happen to be be centered around the themes of Christmas and Advent…

Songs For Christmas (Volume 1-5) – Sufjan Stevens

A Charlie Brown Christmas – Vince Guaraldi Trio

The Darkest Night of the Year – Over the Rhine

Snow Angels – Over the Rhine

A Very Rosie Christmas – Rosie Thomas

Christmas – Low

A Very She & Him Christmas – She & Him

Salvation Is Created – Bifrost Arts

A Christmas Album – Bright Eyes

Of course, because I’ve made a bit of Christmas music myself, I’m obligated to share that too.  I’m actually quite proud of this stuff.  Much of it was made with some of my closest friends and some really talented musicians…

The Bewildering Light – Ben Thomas

Five Candles (Tiny Candle Live Album) – Various Artists 

Made in Aurora Volume 2 – Various Artists

Peace, Here EP – Ben Thomas

We got together one morning, threw a bunch of ideas up on a whiteboard, decided to call it Perspective Shows, and run it as part of Aurora’s Art Walk, a multi-venue arts event that’s been helping build the burgeoning arts scene in Aurora the past few years.  This Art Walk was taking place on LaSalle Street, where Jimi’s space is, which was once a thriving auto district and retail corridor, then drug and prostitution corridor, and now simply a row of mostly vacant buildings.

Here’s the space as it looked a couple weeks ago:

Over the course of the following two weeks, dozens of people worked to transform the space… it was a really beautiful, collaborative effort that I feel privileged to have been a part of.

Last Friday, hundreds of people were treated to a Perspective Shows, which was just one of several shows on LaSalle Street. We watched as they were drawn in from the street through the old garage door, and welcomed by a variety of sights, sounds, art, community and inspiration.  Check out the pics:

Its called “The Gap“.

Every team gets gaps and every leader has to deal with them.

At The Orchard, right now, our gap is in our drummers (and our sound guys, but that’s another post).  Not that our drummers are incapable… its quite the opposite.  They are some of the best drummers I’ve ever played with.  We’re just in a season where our drummers are busy and scheduling can be quite a challenge.

This past weekend, instead of fighting our gap or pretending it wasn’t there, we embraced it.  We went full on acoustic — banjo, dobro, lap steel, piano… the whole works… with no drummer (I know, heresy, right?).  In many ways, it was more difficult: any out-of-tune strings or sloppy playing were quite a bit more evident without the wash of cymbals flooding the room.   The songs took some intentional reinventing and re-orchestrating with our decisively rural sound palate.  Our team rose to the challenge, though and killed it (the good kind of killing it). The results were simple, yet satisfying — our community’s collective voice was especially audible and beautiful, and at the end of the day, our team of musicians and technicians knew something special had just happened.

Here are a few songs, captured with a single mic at the back of the room.  Take a listen (thanks for the recordings, Todd)…

You Have Redeemed My Soul (written by Don Chaffer / Waterdeep)

All The Poor and Powerless (written by All Sons and Daughters)

Broken (written by Ben Thomas)

It was late October, 2010. Our team was gathered on a late Tuesday morning, just like the Tuesday morning before, and the Tuesday morning before that. Our weekly worship planning meetings took place immediately following an hour-plus long full staff meeting, and usually around 11:30 a.m. the caffeine and empty carbs from breakfast would vanish from our bodies, leaving us in a creative slump and dreaming about our imminent lunch plans. I’d served on the staff at Wheatland Salem Church for eleven years. I knew the routine.

This day was different. We’d tapped gold.

It was a concept brainstorm for a sermon series that would mark the beginning of the new year. The idea was simple: draw the masses on Christmas Eve with and invite them back to hear about something that was on everyone’s minds… the recession.

But it wasn’t just about global profit loss or corrupted bank heads. It was about you and me and the loss we all felt on a daily basis, knowing full well that we had placed our hope in something or someone that was failing us. The system was broken and every person in our wealthy suburb knew it. Every week we heard another story of a well-respected CEO who had to come home and explain to his kids about why his company’s restructure meant they had to sell their house, or a hard working sales person who was just told she was being put on a 100% commission plan to “increase her motivation”. In the middle of our conversation, I realized that the reason that all this talk of recession and housing market made my heart race and mouth get dry: this was my story too. I began to share with my colleagues.

We bought high, and at the peak of the market in 2005, so we could live within walking distance to the school my wife taught at.

Here’s our house:

It rocks. It has an in ground pool, 3 bedrooms 3 bathrooms, a fenced yard and and 2 gazebos. You read that right: two (2) freaking gazebos.

It made sense in 2005, but in 2007, when we decided for her to take the stay-at-home mom route, we realized we needed to move. Though the house was conveniently located near her workplace, it was a 30-45 minute drive from our friends and family, and in a highly car-dependant suburban neighborhood, far removed from the standard amenities of everyday life – public transit, grocery store, elementary schools. This might have been an okay setup for some families, but given the fact that we were a one-car, one-driver household, it made no sense for us. Add to all this the fact that I’m about as handy as that Bob Vila… after a a few beers… and a fifth of whisky. With one arm. I’m not exactly homeowner-material and our house was full a quirky, project-creating mess.

That was 2007. We were now in 2010, and after three years of hesitant, on-again-off-again, “don’t-settle-for-too-little”-mentality real estate sales techniques, we were tired and confused. Our entire adult lives we had received the preaching of the real estate investment gospel. The idea of making money off of your property had, at least in the back of our minds, become part of our life plan. It worked well for us when we sold our town home in 2005… certainly if the trend continued we would could continue our housing upgrades for years to come.

In 2008, the truth of that gospel came unraveled, and I don’t think we were the only ones reeling from the effects of the disappointment brought by the housing market crash.

The difference was, that, unlike most people struggling to make ends meet, we actually wanted to get rid of our house. Something deep within us recognized that our way of life — consuming more than we were creating — didn’t make sense in the grand scheme of things. We had grown weary of having to drive everywhere, collecting pre-garage sale knick-knacks and investing a large percent of our weekly scheduling into maintaining this plot of land, concrete and dry-wall structure we call “home”. We were suddenly awakened to the longing for something simpler and more time to dedicate to things that mattered – our young children, our friends and family, experiencing art, music, nature and allowing our attention to rest on the beautiful things that we already had instead of being fixated on what we lacked.

As I shared my story with my worship planning comrades, and listened as they shared their own stories and the stories of others in our community, there was a single word that bubbled to the surface of mind, poking through my subconscious and nagging my attention. A word that described what we all sensed our upside-down mortgage riddled community longed for… and the type of new start I wanted for my family:

Reset.

Little did I know, while sitting in that Fall planning meeting, that coming months would bring far more resting into my life than a simple sermon series. More on that later…

O hushed October morning mild,