Since we started our tour of old-school Jesus music last week with Larry Norman, it seems appropriate to follow up this week with his protege and sometime-collaborator Randy Stonehill. (Or, actually, maybe it’s incredibly inappropriate.)
The first Stonehill album I ever got — 1982’s Equator — made me a fan, sending me back to pick up his older stuff, like Welcome to Paradise and The Sky Is Falling. Over time I came to think of Randy Stonehill’s musical career as something like Michael Caine’s movie career. He’s prolific and always a solid craftsman, but there are some less impressive choices along the way mixed in with the good stuff.
The guy has churned out 24 albums in 30 years, writing and recording hundreds of songs along the way, and his batting average is pretty respectable. He produced more than a few clunkers — particularly those songs that sound like he was trying to write a Christian-radio hit. But toss all those aside and you’re still left with a large body of good work.
Picking just 10 of those songs as favorites isn’t easy, but I think these 10 serve as a good introduction for those unfamiliar with Randy Stonehill:
10. “Starlings”
Like many CCM artists in the 1980s and ’90s, Randy Stonehill wrote his Compassion International song to tug on the heartstrings before making his pitch for audiences to sponsor a child through that agency. Compassion is on the up and up — they’re a responsible charity that provides tangible help and makes a real difference for the better in the lives of desperately poor children. Sponsoring a child through Compassion is a Good Thing and, in theory, writing a song urging others to sponsor a child through Compassion ought to be a Good Thing too. But those songs tended to be awful. So don’t listen to Randy Stonehill’s “Who Will Save the Children?” Listen to this song instead.
9. “Sunday’s Child”
In addition to his two dozen solo albums, Randy Stonehill has been a frequent musical collaborator, so I needed to get one of those songs into this list. On this track, he and Phil Keaggy did their best to write an early Beatles song. They came pretty close.
8. “Light of the World”
Did I include this song because it’s the first Stonehill track I ever heard? Or did I include it here because it’s a good example of his knack for deceptively simple, catchy refrains? Yes.
7. “Shut De Do”
The lyrics here are pure CCM, but the catchy calypso lilt and the good humor and musical playfulness life the song to another level. That playfulness also suggests that this “devil” Stonehill is singing of is more like the Old Scratch of folklore than the archenemy of Peretti-esque spiritual warfare. It reminds me of my favorite story about the Devil, one told by Tony Campolo: An old preacher wakes in the night and hears a noise. He turns on the light as sees Satan, the devil himself, standing at the foot of his bed. “Oh,” says the preacher, “it’s just you.” And he turns off the light and goes back to sleep.
6. “Hymn”
“In the end we are not forgotten / and our journey is not in vain.” That seems like such a modest expression of hope, particularly compared to the triumphalism of much of the other CCM music I was listening to when this song came out in 1985. But I found I believed this modest claim, whereas those other songs were just telling me what it was I was supposed to say I believed while somehow making it harder to really believe it. This song could be sung at a funeral, where I imagine it would provide a measure of comfort. Singing anything by, say, Carman at a funeral would be obscene.
5. “Turning 30”
When I first heard this song, in 1982, “turning 30” seemed unthinkably old. Now, almost 30 years later, it seems unbearably young. The remarkable thing is that the song still works. Stonehill could sing this next year, when he’s turning 60, and it would seem more true, not less.
4. “Rachel Delevoryas”
A snapshot memory from childhood. It’s the true story of that odd kid in school who didn’t fit in and was subject to a steady stream of juvenile cruelties. You remember that kid. Maybe you took part in that cruelty. Maybe you just watched it happen without saying anything. Years later you hear how she’s doing now. That’s the whole song. (The beautiful thing about it: Rachel wins.)
3. “Cosmetic Fixation“/”Big Ideas”
The best Randy Stonehill albums always had at least one song like these (both from Equator). They’re not quite novelty songs, but they’re funny, a bit goofy — though usually built around a kernel of genuine anger. “Cosmetic Fixation” throws spitballs at the shallow aesthetics overtaking the na-na-a-tion, while “Big Ideas” responds to various ecological crises with something like whimsical despair. These songs all tend to have an easy target, but always a nonsectarian one, be it smoking (“Lung Cancer”), “American Fast Food,” junk TV (“The Great American Cure”) or junk science (“Great Big Stupid World“). In another life, Randy Stonehill could’ve been Weird Al. (And I mean that as a compliment.)
2. “Venezuela”
Many musicians eventually have to give up music to focus on their day job so they can pay the bills. I sometimes suspect that Randy Stonehill did that, although in his case his day job was being a CCM recording artist for Christian labels. “Venezuela” is an example of the kind of music I suspect he’d have been writing and recording had it not been for the pressure to meet the expectations of that day job. Is this really my No. 2 all-time Randy Stonehill song? Probably not, but it’s a really good song — a simple little laid-back tune about seeing an old friend he hasn’t seen in too long. If Jack Johnson were a tenor, he’d sound like this.
1. “The Hope of Glory”
Some songs don’t seem like they were written so much as discovered. Randy Stonehill wrote this song in 1986, but if you told me that actually he’d unearthed it from some dusty, out-of-print old hymnal, or that he had scribbled it down hastily as Maybelle Carter sang it on her deathbed, I’d believe that too.
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