Another Thing Chesterton Would Like…

…is the phenomenon of Indie Music.  Sure, he wouldn’t like most of the music itself (he wasn’t even keen on early jazz and, in fact, didn’t care much for J.S. Bach, which I find inexplicable).  But the idea of musicians making their own music and marketing it on the web directly rather than going through some giant corporation would have thrilled him to the marrow.  In that spirit, may I present Peter Hollens and Co.:

and, while we’re at it, here’s another one:

I’ve never quite figured out why this tune works. C.S. Lewis once remarked of myth that it is a form of story that is somehow independent of the storyteller. Dickens’ stories work because Dickens is the one telling the story. Most fiction is like that. But with myth, says Lewis, what satifies is not not the prose style of the writer, but the *shape* of the story itself, like a tulip or a vase. Even a bare-bones summary of a great myth somehow retains the power to send chills up the spine, whereas a bare-bones summary of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield does not.

“Hallelujah” is one of those rare songs where, somehow, the shape of the music manages to have that effect on me every time. It breaks my heart, and I couldn’t tell you why. Nor, I doubt, could Leonard Cohen. He just seems to have struck lightning somehow with that tune. Very mysterious to me. I think it is the longing of every artist to be able to hit that nerve and I think it is given to precious few artists to do it. I sure wish I could do it. But then I wish was an artist, which I’m not.