themattscott are you listening yet

Lately I’ve been listening to some music that is a bit outside my normal spectrum. I usually go for the corporatized sound (I know some of the bands I listen to would argue against them being corporatized sounding, but they are), but I stretched out to a newer artist lately.

John Mark McMillan

I first heard his song “How He Loves” a week and a half ago and I can’t seem to get enough of him since then. Anyone who can use the phrase “sloppy wet kiss” in a song about God intelligently gets my vote. Like I said before, his sound is different, there’s something… unknown about it.

It’s like he’s not trying to become the number one listened to artist in the world by imitating everyone else, instead it sounds like he’s actually playing the music the way he envisioned it (not letting it be corporatized, over produced, or over ‘popped’). I genuinely feel like this guy cares about the music, not fame.

Here’s an excerpt from his biography on his website

You get the sense, when listening to an album by John Mark McMillan, that there is another America out there. It’s an America more real than the one you’re used to: the one of endless car dealerships, sprawled out suburbia, and shoeshine religion. This is not that America. This is the America that exists, breathing and living, outside the realm of blue state and red state allegiance. This is the America built on the backs of the bruised and the broken, the America of under-produced country music and fuzzed out rock and roll and old time gospel

And that last sentence basically describes it. A beautiful messy mixture that feels like nothing else to me.

The guys a poet, no if and or buts about it, heres a couple of lyrical excerpts

Come closer, closer to me.
Find me broken, find me bleedin’
cause I need more now than a fairy tale,
a god who lives in a book.
I need someone real.

Hope grows between cracks in the asphault
In the downtown ghetto streets that contour
The government housing intentions of my heart
No one notices the daisies don’t care
About gang related violence
As long as they get enough air and water and sun
They’re all just fine

We are His portion and He is our prize,
Drawn to redemption by the grace in His eyes,
If grace is an ocean, we’re all sinking.
So Heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss,
And the heart turns violently inside of my chest

Anyways, give him a listen, he’s on iTunes.