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Daniel Amos - Kalhoun

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Daniel Amos - Kalhoun

Music You Might Want to Consider - K

Jeremy S. Zehr
Jul 25, 2022
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Daniel Amos - Kalhoun

zehr.substack.com

I make the rules, so I can break them, right?

Let’s face it, it’s hard to find an album for every letter of the alphabet, and I hit a wall when it came to the letter “K”. I had a few options, sure. I could have found something else for J instead of Jacob’s Trouble’s Knock, Breathe, Shine. I could have tried to wax poetic about Death Cab for Cutie’s Kintsugi, even though I don’t love that album as much as their other work. I could have tried to fake my way through Goldfinger’s The Knife, but that would be unfair.

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So here we are, with our first repeat recommendation - an album by Daniel Amos.

I already wrote about this record a bit, in my post about Mr. Buechner’s Dream.

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I don’t have a lot to add to what I wrote there, besides the fact that, after one of my well-meaning (but horribly wrong) friends told me, that DA couldn’t possibly be a Christian band because there was almost no blatant references to Jesus in the lyrics, I decided to butcher the cassette that I had, by dubbing it to another cassette, eliminating a few of the songs because they “weren’t Christian enough.”

I’m not sure why I was so driven to please my friends, but I was 15, so I need to have a bit of grace for myself. It wasn’t until years later that I actually got a copy of the full album, and was able to experience it in all of its glory. And glorious it was.

From the beautiful opener, “If You Want To”, to the conviction inspiring “Father Explains”, and finally to the closer “The Gate of the World”, Kalhoun is a timeless collection of solid rock and roll. Are the lyrics obviously Christian? Maybe. Maybe not. But I don’t think that really matters. It’s good music. Made by Christian’s just like me; trying to find meaning in a world where often there’s no meaning to be found

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You can find it here:

Working Class Hero
Daniel Amos - Mr. Buechner's Dream
To society in general, the term Christian music has a bad reputation. It’s cheesy, derivative, and devoid of the creativity you’ll find from secular artists. And if we are speaking solely in generalities, you’d be right. The first Christian rock band people think of, especially if you grew up in the eighties, would be Stryper. The yellow and black leathe…
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a year ago · Jeremy S. Zehr
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Daniel Amos - Kalhoun

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