A quote from my friend Jesse Norell on Facebook just now…
“Good music is the kind you can choose when you are in a particular mood and it can provide a soundtrack of sorts. It can give life, words, feeling and validation to an emotion like an understanding companion. Great music can do all of those things but has the power to bend the listener to its will; transcending your current mood for its own, putting you in the frame of mind it designed for you.”
The Steve Goold Blog 
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
March 2, 2012 at 8:23 am
Seth Earnest
GREAT thoughts!
I’ve been thinking about this exact thing a lot this week—specifically regarding worship music and the general lack of the latter (Jesse’s definition of ‘great music’) happening with the vast majority of it. And I get discouraged. But opening up that discussion with its jungle of supernatural and metaphysical variables is for another time and place.
This is a fantastic and concise way to put words to a lot of what I’ve been processing through this week. Bravo Steve’s friend Jesse Norell!
March 2, 2012 at 10:27 pm
Steve Goold
Yes… the implications of this for worship are PROFOUND. I’ve been thinking about this a lot myself. Blog post brewing on that…
March 3, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Jesse Norell
Emotion is a huge part of every kind of music and worship is no exception. Emotion is not something to be used as a way of manipulating church-goers, but if worship leaders leave it out of the equation, they do everyone a disservice. My personal opinion is that worship music is getting better. However, when I led worship before I felt like a lot of good worship music existed, I felt like I had to deconstruct a song and reconstruct it until the song turned into something I would actually listen to. I still like to do this as I get to be creative even if I did not write the song. No matter what, worship leaders have to take responsibility for the songs they choose to play and how they choose to play them.
Thanks for your thoughts and please post if you have more!
March 5, 2012 at 1:50 pm
Ari Koinuma
That description is so spot-on it’s down right amazing. And it’s a great question to ask ourselves as we create music — does it really play the “good” or “great” roles for ourselves? If not, what’s getting in the way?