Bring Back the Soul of the World

 

Bring Back the Soul of the World

Yeah, let'see if I can make this explanation not too long winded. In this Year of my Writer's Block, I was tossing around ideas for concept albums, which might potentially get the creative juices flowing. One o' the things I've been aspiring to do for a while is to record songs that sound like a bunch of people in a church, singing church songs so exuberantly that they sound drunk. I think the closest I've come to that sound has been "Over an Hour Away From Home" and "Happy Birthday, Bro" (although I wasn't consciously trying to get the drunk-church sound on those songs - it just sorta happened). Anyway, yesterday morning, I was thinking it might be fun to focus for a while on recording fake drunk-church hymns.

But then I thought to myself, what would the hymns be about? I ain't been to church in many, many years. What're hymns usually about?

Well, there was something deeply disturbing that happened to me the other day. I saw this picture on Facebook of a statue that had been burnt up in the Hiroshima bombing, and something about it freaked the fuck out of me. I realized after thinking about it for a while, that it felt to me like the soul had been burnt out of the statue. The statue now has no soul. That was freaky, because I tend to think of everything as having a soul.

There've been times I've walked through places and felt a creepy emptiness about those places. I've wondered for a while if those're places that don't have souls. (I think of places as having souls). For a while I've hypothesized that these places don't have souls because some atrocity happened in said places, and either the soul of the place died or it flew away.

That led me to my idea of what the fake, made-up hymns could be about. See, I've wondered for a while if music can bring a soul back to life or if music can call a lost soul back to where it belongs. I realized yesterday, hey, that's what my fake hymns can be - they can be songs that cal the lost souls of places back home again, and those songs'll be sung by drunk church people.

Phew, that was a long description.

Anyway, this song ain't as churchy sounding as I'm planning the rest to sound like. I guess you can think of this one as a general introduction. Yay.

The lyrics are:

There are holes where the world has lost her soul
And the emptiness leaves us feeling cold
When you see the no-soul, it will make you sad
Because you now know that something real bad (has happened there)

We want to repair all those holes
Bring back the world's ever loving soul
Can this song bring back the soul of the
World? We don't know, but we hope so

This is my new collection of songs
And I hope to God that it does not sound long
And boring; I'll tell you what it's about
I feel so strong about this, I could shout

When atrocities happen in a certain
Area the soul of that place disappears
You might notice that it feels empty and
Cold, and that is because it don't have a soul

We want to repair all those holes
Bring back the world's ever loving soul
Can this song bring back the soul of the
World? We don't know, but we hope so

I want to write an album about some people in
A church, who want to make the world better by singing
And they sing so exuberantly that they sound drunk
Trying to heal the world with music cuz it's in a funk
See, I've walked around some places that feel empty – I'm aware
That the likelihood is that something really bad happened there
To the indigenous people who were living on the land
And the soul of that land left – it was something she could not stand
See, I believe that music can heal a lot of things
Can it bring back the soul of the world when people sing?
We'll see if the drunken church music people can bring
Back the soul of the world when everyone starts to sing

We want to repair all those holes
Bring back the world's ever loving soul
Can this song bring back the soul of the
World? We don't know, but we hope so

Bring back her soul let's bring the world back her soul