Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Music with a Mission & Joe Zambon

This past friday I hosted a concert to benefit a church in Peru I visited last year. This mission in Chimbote, Peru is incredibly poor but filled with faith. It was a privilege to visit the people there. I vaccilate heavily about why to go on a trip like that and ultimately I believe it is to return and share the plight of others with people here. So I decided to invite some friends to play some music to raise money for the people I met down there.















My roommate, Jeremy, and my friend Michael agreed to play and they sure did. It was a beautiful experience from classic Jesuit tunes (Take Lord, Receive) to covers of Gnarls Barkley (an insane acoustic version of "Crazy"), Sufjan, Decemberists, all kinds of good stuff. One of the highlights for me was one of Michael's original songs about loving your enemies. It was really beautiful to be in a room full of both Christians and non-Christians singing the radical words of Jesus about doing good to those who hate you.

Since then I have been craving something deep and acoustic, meaningful and intimate. Thankfully Jake over at the blah blah blog posted an interview yesterday with Joe Zambon, and after reading it I immediately went and downloaded it. It was exactly what I had been wanting. I already want to share it with pretty much everyone. I listened to it for the first time while making quacamole and baking tortilla chips and several times just said, "damn." It's that good. And I started to laugh out of joy at one point. I am being honest, here. It is a beautiful beautiful album. I am going to post a youtube video but I have to tell you this doesn't even come close to how smooth and warm the album is, you really just need to get it for yourself. Heartily recommended.