This is a guest post from my friend Brad Crisler. Song-writer extraordinaire, budding archaeologist . . . I value Brad’s friendship and voice in my life. I know he will bless you too.

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I remember the exact moment I knew I wanted to write songs.

It was the summer before I turned 10. I can still hear the drone of my Dad’s cub cadet mower outside and the crackle of that single speaker radio shack radio. I was lying on the carpet playing with Star War’s figures when the country band Alabama’s “My Home’s In Alabama” came on. I was mesmerized. I distinctly remember feeling the urge to cry. Maybe I did. The thing is, I didn’t know why. Sure, the lyrics resonate with anthemic southern pride but to a 9 year old who had never ventured much outside of Lawrence county, I’m not sure the lyrics even mattered. It was the melody that moved me. The raw emotion of those notes sung over that 5 minor chord…’no matter where I lay my head’…Something deep within me connected with that great melody. It was almost like I was hearing a language I knew I understood but didn’t quite know how to speak.

Even though at that point I couldn’t play an instrument and had no clue how to go about it, I wanted to help people feel like that song made me feel.

I wanted to write songs.

Fast forward 27 years. I was toast. Burnt out. After having had dozens of songs recorded (including one by the aforementioned Alabama), several big radio hits, multiple gold and platinum records and awards on my studio walls I had run out of musical fuel.

One of the casualties of the seismic shifts in the music business, Nashville had become an assembly-line manufacturing center for lifeless, uninteresting and in most respects, melody-less songs. I was part of the problem. My low point: riding in my car one day and hearing one of my latest songs on the radio and punching the preset to NPR.

That ‘thing’ that I connected so deeply with had largely disappeared within my own format of work and it was killing me. Musically, I was a dead man walking.

I had obviously heard of Coldplay. Their massive worldwide hits “Yellow” and “Clocks” were passively on my radar but ever being the non-conformist, (I held off reading “Blue Like Jazz” for 5 years) I hadn’t really explored their music seriously.

But in 2007, after hearing my wife listening to the “A Rush of Blood to the Head” album, I decided to dive in. Within days I had bought almost all of Coldplay’s music. I was listening day and night. I was learning to play the songs. I was feeling that urge to cry. It was there again: great melody. I wasn’t even sure of the meaning of some of the songs but the melodies were speaking to my soul. Most importantly, after rediscovering the source of why I love music, I was inspired to write great melodies again. By 2008’s “Viva La Vida” release, I was a hardcore Coldplay fan and waking up every morning with a new lease on my musical life. Seeing the band live in Nashville in 2009 is still one of the transcendent experiences of my life.

In “Simply Christian”, NT Wright talks about ‘Thin Spaces’, the places where the reality of God and the reality of people come close to meeting. The times when the ‘echo of the voice’ of The Creator resonates deeply within the created. These spaces are found in nature, beauty, art, community and ultimately, some of the thinnest spaces are found in love, mercy, and sacrifice. I believe great melodies are a thin space…and at the heart of true worship. Ephesians 5:19 says, “Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make melody from your heart”. I come from a faith tradition that has, in the past, used this verse as some kind of clandestine proof text for accapella worship preference. This interpretation not only offends me as a musician, it offends me as a believer. I think what the writer is saying is that our worship, our songs, our melodies, should come from that place where words aren’t sufficient. That’s what melody does. It’s a conduit for expressing the inexpressible. The loss of a child. The collapse of a relationship. The joy of a beautiful sky. The mystery of a benevolent God. We don’t just need words for these things. We need great melodies.

There’s a fantastic scene at the end of C.S. Lewis’ “The Great Divorce” (The best book ever on heaven and hell, sorry Rob Bell). As a famous painter is being guided into heaven, he asks his guide, “When do I get to paint this place?” He argues that if he isn’t allowed to paint, he had rather go back to purgatory. The guide explains “When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came…”

Great melodies do that. They give us glimpses. They point to something in us that we can’t exactly articulate with words.

It’s why we’re moved to tears when we don’t even know the words.

It’s what called me to be a songwriter.

And even though it’s melodramatic (I’m an artist after all) It’s what saved my musical life.

Coldplay is not a Christian band. I’m not even sure they are Christians.

But when I think about the Romans 8:26 Holy Spirit “interceding for us with groanings too deep for words”, at least part of me thinks it sounds an awful lot like a Coldplay song.

Amen. and Viva La Vida.

http://www.coldplay.com/

@bradcrisler (twitter)