Music Day - Desert Rose

I really only have two criteria for Music Day posts: 1. It must be legally available for purchase; and 2. It should be a song that means a lot to me at the time of writing.

This is a song that I always glossed over. White Heart has so many loud, interesting complex songs that I was very confused by this ballad's immense popularity. If you mention the name 'White Heart' (to anybody who even knows who White Heart is), this is, nine times out of ten, the first song they mention. And that boggled my mind -- what about Let The Kingdom Come? What about Raging Of The Moon? What about Heaven Of My Heart? I do primarily listen for the lyrics more than the music, but in ten years of listening, I never 'got' the lyrics to this particular song.

Until now.

I am currently living in a VERY remote 'small town' that is literally an hour and a half drive from any other civilisation. There are no arts, no theatre, no dance classes, not even a freakin Staples. We've talked of moving but small tourist towns like this have a way of hiking grocery and gas prices so high that it is literally impossible to put together any kind of savings in order to actually do it (gas prices have been $1.43 a litre here since July; meanwhile my parents three hours north are zipping around on $1.17 gas. In the same province).

I don't have dance and I don't have money. I'm just watching my dream wither and die without practice. And I've been crying out to God, asking why He gave me this dream only to take it away again; terrified that I'm going to die in this literal hole in the ground, completely forgotten. I'm terrified of proving my program director right when he said I would never amount to anything.

Is this one of those desert experiences that so many people in the Bible went through -- Moses, the Israelites, Elijah, Jesus...? Is there still some important thing I'm supposed to do forty years from now and I just have to go through the motions until then?

I still feel angry and ignored sometimes when I think about how Brittney and M and my cousin died and I'm still here. It's not survivor's guilt so much as it is jealousy. They already live in a place where mercy is unreceipted, but I'm not lucky enough to get that chance. Given the choice between life and death, I would absolutely pick death. I'm not suicidal, per se, but I wouldn't fight death if it came for me. This world is not my home, and I want to go home. I don't even really know what 'home' is, but I know this world isn't it. I'm just so weary of life here.

And it's hard not to despair completely when all you see is the desert rising up on all sides -- literally.

(Forgot I was supposed to be doing a Music Day post. Pretending those last five paragraphs never happened.)

The song opens with a mellow but very classic '80s keyboard intro that hints at some of the haunting woodwind flavours that the band would explore in more depth on their next album Tales Of Wonder. And the tender, clear, angelic voice of Rick Florian (who I still maintain in the greatest singer to walk the face of the earth, even after five years of listening to music of all eras and genres while acquiring a BA in Music) comes in, painting a picture of an ocean of featureless sand and the tiny beauty drowning in it.

And you wonder

You wonder

Can you last much longer

This cloud you live under

Will it cover you?

The chorus features White Heart at their band-harmony peak. Harmony was something that White Heart always excelled at (their best-known line-ups featured a minimum of four competent vocalists), and it shimmers here, floating along on that bed of gentle keyboard that Mark Gersmehl weaves throughout the song.

Sometimes holiness

Can seem like emptiness

When you feel the whole world's laughing eyes

This is the part that resonates with me. I feel abandoned, alone, empty, tossed to the side, unwanted, unneeded, and useless. I feel like I and my life have been wasted and I'm just a shell of all my old dreams and potential just shuffling around waiting to die.

After the second chorus, the heretofore muted harmonies go from backdrop to centre stage, filling the song with layers and that beautiful '80s 'big' production. Chris McHugh's fantastic drums go a long way here too, and the effect is so lush and rich that it was several years of listening to this album non-stop (because of the title track and Storyline) before I realised that there isn't actually a verse here, only vocalising and a bit of vamping from Florian. (They pull off the same stunt in their song Let The Kingdom Come from their previous album, but that time they did it by distracting the listener with truly epic guitars, giant drums, and energetic rock vocals.)

Title: Desert Rose

Artist: White Heart

Album: Powerhouse

Year: 1990

Label: Sparrow Records

iTunes here; YouTube here.

Heaven knows

Heaven knows

He will hold your tender heart

Oh desert rose...

Covers That Need To Happen #1

Can we just take a moment to talk about a cover that really needs to happen?

Okay. Russ Taff's song Higher. Seriously. Go listen. You have full permission to groove. (I should probably throw an '80s-music warning on this song though. Then again, this entire blog should have an '80s-music warning on it.)

And now, picture Freedom-era White Heart covering this. Tommy Sims on that bass, Gersh on the keys... and I can't even properly handle the thought of Rick Florian's voice over that.

A Few YouTube Gems

I've spent the last two weeks or so on YouTube. Amazing how as soon as you click one White Heart song, there appear twenty other White Heart songs in the sidebar. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. What I will complain about is the fact that EMI blocks 65% of the White Heart from Canadian viewers on 'copyright grounds.' Do you people want to sell your product or not...? It's worth noting that nobody -- nobody -- else blocks their content from Canada on 'copyright grounds.' White Heart is the only artist I have ever been blocked from seeing on YouTube.

Anyway, here are some gems I've found in my YouTube travels... they're not all White Heart, I promise... (and also, most of them are not on the Canadian iTunes Store, or I would have featured them on Music Day. Methinks iTunes needs a little competition... they've got too much of a corner on the market).

White Heart -- Powerhouse live
Rick's coat. Dude. That is an awesome coat. It looks kind of odd at first (or maybe it was just me because I'd spent the previous hour watching videos of him in blue jeans with the knees blown out), but it's seriously an amazing coat. He must be absolutely dying of heat stroke in that thing though -- it looks heavy.

White Heart -- Powerhouse live (again)
THERE IT IS! Did you see it? Did you see it? Don't blink or you'll miss it -- right at the beginning of the video (15-second mark), you see the legendary back handspring. I had heard SO MUCH about this and thought I would never get to see it... but there it is!
Also, his dancing is amazing. Not that I'm biased or anything. (Man, what I wouldn't give to see that in concert for myself...)

Crumbächer -- Track You Down live at Cornerstone 1985
This song is catchy as heck. And... not on iTunes. Literally every other Crumbächer album is on iTunes -- not this one. Sigh. But this performance is pretty great (as is the song itself... two, count them, two keyboards!) The vocal blend on this song is so, so pretty. Also, am I the only one reminded of Mark Gersmehl circa 1986? (Who in turn, now that I think about it, reminds me of Steve Green. I think it's the hair.)

White Heart -- My Eyes Have Seen (1994)
Beautiful. Just... gorgeous. This takes everything that was great about the Highlands album (from 1993), sonically speaking, and compressed it all into four minutes.

White Heart -- A Love Calling live
Actually, this appears to be just Gersh and Rick -- I looked and looked, but didn't see any evidence of any of the others. But holy smokes, this is beautiful. There's such joy on both their faces.

Isaac Air Freight -- Final Minutes
How familiar does this sound (churchgoers)? Perhaps a little too familiar... Is this my home? Is it yours? And doesn't it sound eerily like the Pharisees as we imagine them -- the ones Jesus condemned at nearly every turn?
We wonder why people look sideways at anyone who identifies themselves as a Christian. I think this pretty much sums up the answer to that question.
(For those listening and going 'What's the deal with the logs in their eyes?' it's a reference to the book of Matthew chapter seven in the Bible.)

Lifesavers Underground -- Shaded Pain (1987)
Straight to the soul. Just trust me on this one. It's not rock, but to make it rock would be to kill such lyrical perfection. Simply beautiful.
We put on all the masks
And then we play the game...
Cut by the Body
Forced to run and hide...

Daniel Amos Concert (probably 1981 or '82)
Exactly what it says... a full DA concert. I wasn't too sure how much I'd like this, since it predates Doppelgänger and if I've got it right this was just coming out of their transition period from country to awesomeness, but this is a good concert. They rocked up some up the songs rather more than on the records from which said songs came. You can pick out some of what was to come with Doppelgänger (and, on a side note, if anyone has footage from the Doppelgänger shows, I will seriously love you forever for posting it).
Anyway, this is a good show. That story he shares about playing at this high school and then an older man comes up to them and says... well, you'll have to watch the video to find out what the man says, but that story really hit me, in pretty much the same way it sounds like it hit the band. Many times I've passed the same judgement about older people in our church, but as he told that story I found the finger I've been pointing was suddenly pointing back at me.

Crumbächer -- Jamie (official video) (Trigger warning on the video: relatively explicit allusions to suicide attempts and some reference to prostitution.)
This is SO moving. In fact, it is so powerful that I actually didn't hear the song beyond the first verse -- I got so wrapped up in the story that I tuned out the song. It might be because I'm a dancer... the story is that Jamie is a ballerina, and, with dreams of stardom and dancing in her head, she auditions for something, but is turned down. Deeply hurt and in need of money, she turns to the dark side of dance -- prostitution. Deeper and deeper into this dark world she gets until finally she hits bottom, in some nameless back alley, with a gun in her hand. And then she sees a Bible in the gutter. The part that hit me the hardest (spoiler alert... as far as those go in a music video) is at the very end, when she goes up to... it's Stephen Crumbächer, and I'm not sure if he's playing the part of a pastor or a Christian friend of Jamie's. She has a Bible in her hand. The pastor/friend figure gives her a pair of ballet slippers. They embrace, and the camera focuses on the man's back, Jamie's arms around him -- the Bible in one hand, the ballet slippers in the other.
And she lets go of the slippers... just lets them fall to the ground.
As a dancer myself, that was gut-wrenching. Once a dancer, always a dancer... to give up dance is akin to, say, severing a major limb. On one hand, I literally gasped in pain as the slippers fell, but on the other hand, it convicted me -- given the choice between a Bible and dancing shoes, what would I honestly pick? The message was so clear -- Christ is so lovely, so wonderful, so worth-it, that even dancing shoes are counted as loss against the glory of the risen Christ.
And watching this now, as I stand at a crossroads, where one way I stay here, guaranteed to get a few more years of ballet, and the other way I go where it seems God is leading me... but it may be the end of ballet for at least two years (an eternity in dance-time), that was... that hit home. Hard. Jamie stood at the crossroads and made her choice. And now I stand at the same crossroad. What decision will I make?