Christian music continues to steal into the secular world in the guise of elegant folk-pop, led by Sufjan Stevens' definitive document, the masterful Illinois. It doesn't diminish Stevens' accomplishment to say that it took me a long time to warm up to it. It was so utterly poised that it came off with a certain sterility-- the seamless contours of its surface held the listener at a remove. Page France's warm and inviting Hello, Dear Wind has the same striking imagery and deft arrangements with none of the remoteness. Michael Nau's earnest voice sweeps achingly over subtle folk-pop crescendos. Simple acoustic chord progressions accumulate deft touches of glockenspiel and burbling organs, swooning harmonies and majestic percussion, lurching gracefully toward the sublime.
Nau is a true prodigy-- at age 21, he's writing songs with uncommon theological complexity. Let's spell it out in no uncertain terms-- in 21st century America, Christianity has been hijacked by some evil men. Jesus said that it's easier to fit a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven. But in an age of mega-churches that lavish money on high-end AV equipment and contributions to PACs that would undo every social program designed to counteract uneven wealth distribution, Jesus' central teachings of compassion, forgiveness, and charity have been forsaken. His national face has become that of a cruel tyrant, peering down upon humankind with the miser's disdainful grimace.
Hello, Dear Wind accentuates the common traits of Christian music that is able to penetrate the secular world, with an unfettered joy that would scan to conservative Christians as almost pagan. It deploys Christian tropes poetically and not pedantically, brimming with reiterative Biblical imagery -- angels and burning bushes and trumpets, but also circuses, kings and crowns, wind, trees, and fruit. Here's an excerpt from "Chariot", Nau's take on the Rapture, locating all of its poetry in hallucinatory animation, not dread: "Dance like elephants as he comes to us through a fiery golden rain / With a violin and a song to sing as he brings for us our wings/ Now he's one of us, plays the tambourine, breaks the bread for us and sings."
Nau's Jesus would rather sing and dance than condemn. He "will come up through the ground so dirty/ With worms in his hair and a hand so sturdy"; he "will dance while we drink his wine/ With soldiers and thieves and a sword in his side." Nau also prefers celebration to judgment, and he eschews Christianity's frustrating certainty along with its guilt. On "Dogs", he sings, "I'm not sure what happens when everything here ends/ But I hope it's like they said, and I hope it never ends." It's a statement of inward belief, not of outward censure. Nau understands what so many conservative Christians can't or won't: That to hate God's human creations, whatever their lifestyles or religious beliefs, is an affront on God; that to distort Jesus' teachings for personal and political gain is the gravest sin of all. "Praise to you, praise to me," Nau sings on "Glue", restoring a measure of spiritual generosity to a faith that's losing its confidence in humans.
