#90 YOUR NAME IS HOLY - Hungry

The Queen of Christmas, Amy Grant, enchants us in the Andy's Extras tab above

As I mentioned in this post, One Desire by Hillsong, I believe that Hillsong is the Beatles of modern worship music. That is, they should probably be considered the greatest artists in modern worship history. Well, if someone has to be the Beatles of modern worship music, then one album has to be the Sgt. Pepper's of all modern worship albums.

When Rolling Stone Magazine put out their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, they ranked The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as the #1 album. A testament to how great and important this album was in rock history is that when Rolling Stone made the announcement, almost no one was surprised. It's as if most people said, "Yea, that sounds about right".

I could do about 50 paragraphs about the greatness of Sgt. Pepper's, but it's been done to death already (I'm sure I'd have more cat pictures, however). Modern worship music needs it's own Sgt. Pepper's, and I think of all the worship music released in the last 20+ years, Vineyard's Hungry HAS to be that album. Here's my take:

"Hungry is the most important worship album ever made, an unsurpassed adventure in concept, sound, songwriting, cover art and studio technology by one of the greatest worship music producing groups in history".

Actually, those aren't my words. That description was taken from the Rolling Stone's write-up of Sgt. Pepper. It goes to show how great and important Hungry is that it's description can be paraphrased from a description of Sgt. Pepper's.

RANDOM ANDY NOTE: A song just came on my iTunes that I really like. I immediately thought, "Oh, crap, I love this song - it should've have been on the list". Then I looked at my list, and found that it was already there. Crisis averted. 

Free cat pic - they're so cute when they're young.

Your Name is Holy is the first, but certainly not the last, Hungry song to make the top 100 list. It's a mind-numbingly simple song, which grammatically speaking contains but 6 sentences - and 4 of those sentences are just saying who God is followed by 'Your Name is Holy'. Kind of amazing, really - and they manage to get over 5 minutes of song out of those 6 sentences.

But it's this simplicity that makes the song so great. If you were making your first visit to a 'contemporary worship church' back in 1999, it would take you approximately 11 seconds to learn the song. It's a very easy going, pop-rocky song that's fun and easy to sing. It's the Call Me Maybe of worship songs, in a good way. Not in the other Call Me Maybe way that makes you want to go out in the back yard and torture squirrels. Uh, I've said too much.

Yea, I just LOVE the Call Me Maybe meme. And I can't do just one. Here are some other favorites:

All this talk of Hungry being the best worship album of all time gave me an idea - maybe after this list is finished, I'll continue my blog with the best worship albums of all time. But then I thought that I can't do that, because I simply don't own enough albums to make that decision. Maybe when I'm done with this list, my next list will be the best secular songs of all time. It would be fun, I would potentially have a bigger audience, and I could probably get away with swearing on that blog. Shit.

But, you know what I can do? I can list my top 5 at least. So, here's the top 5 worship albums of all time that everyone should own:

5. Blessed - Hillsong
4. Cutting Edge - Delirious
3. Sonicflood - Sonicflood
2. One Day Live - Passion
1. Hungry

Chris Tomlin probably belongs somewhere on that list as well, but I don't really have his music segregated by album, so I'm sure which songs are from which albums. I seem to remember See The Morning being pretty good, but I'm not sure and I'm too lazy to look it up.

I'm sure I missed a bunch of good albums, feel free to correct my mistake in the comments. For now, enjoy the original version ofYour Name is Holy:

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