This song is the second part of 'Moments of Death'.
This song is the eventual turn to praise after the lament, following the psalmic structure of lament.
It looks at life after salvation, realising that personal pain is taken away by God, that life has value again.
Both songs reflect the constant cycle of my own faith, the difficult times and regrets, but ultimately remembering that I am saved, that I should not worry about the pains, sorrow and worries of the past, but I am human, so my mind wanders back to the 'Moments of Death', but as this is written as a lament psalm, I will return to the truth of my value and turn to praise.

Years Of Joy (demo)

This song is actually written in two parts, the first ‘Moments of Death’, a lament and ‘Years of Joy’, the turn to praise, but both songs can stand own their own individually.
This song took the longest to write out of all four. It has taken about a year and a half to write it and is essentially a song written as a means of processing my own past.
I was inspired by the lament psalms, in terms of their structure, with the honesty, feelings of despair and finally realisation and turn to praise.
Lyrically it explores some of the darker themes in my own life (although still kept very vague) of depression, fear, insecurity, lack of self-value and eventually falling into hate, the place of death before coming to know Christ. The bridge is also an honest introspection of the questions asked when you feel so far removed from God. 
I wanted to reflect this in the arrangement and melodies, letting the vocals go flat in several places to help show a place of tiredness and defeat, I also wanted to keep the piano accompaniment as stripped back as possible in the verses to help paint a place of loneliness.
To keep with the structure of the lament psalms I made sure that the end was a turn to praise, which is later expanded in ‘Years of Joy’

Moments Of Death (demo)

I set myself a challenge to write a song for just Bass Guitar and I had been playing around with chords that just used the root and octave 3rd, then layering effects to make some reverb, to give each chord a bit more texture, but still giving that feeling of sparseness.

The song looks originally at my response to the poem 'Ozymandias', the famous line upon the  ruins of a statue of the king in the desert saying 'My name is Ozymandias, look upon my works and despair!' 

This song reflects on this at two levels, firstly about people who spend their entire lives on building dynasties that will ultimately fade away on this earth and secondly about myself, about my own pride and self-seeking, that if I build for myself, everything I have will fade away to nothing and I will have wasted my time on material things of the world and not 'setting my sights on things above'. 

Ozymandias (demo)

To begin with the song is named Sevastopol in reference to the Crimean city in which during the siege of Sevastopol in 1854.
This song came out of out of a couple of places firstly and probably primarily as a response to the annexation of the Crimean peninsula in March 2014 and the escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine and to a lesser degree Russia and the West. Thematically it challenges the roles and responsibilities that leaders of countries have in those situations.
This song also came from a task during the year to write a song in a different musical style, so I decided with this song to experiment with Eastern European folk music to help bring a sense of authenticity to the subject and themes I was writing about and I tried to use instruments to reflect the genre and help paint the words I was singing, for example the military drums introduced in the second verse.
The song also reflects a personal view on war, ‘old friends now pointing guns at friends’, that war can pit neighbouring countries who used to be allies against each other and in the wider picture of humanity forcing ‘brothers’ to fight each other. It also addresses the cost of war in referencing from both Lord Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Last of the Light Brigade’ (‘We sent six hundred and twenty returned’), both recounting a battle during the Crimean war, where a cavalry brigade was sent by the British Military Command to their inevitable deaths due to simple miscommunication.

Sevastopol (demo)

Hate (Intro)

The second song of my project written in the style of hard rock music seeks to engage with worshippers that are struggling with present experiences of suffering and abuse.  The lyrics and arrangement seek to give an idea of time running out and continue the feeling of anxiety and a sense of abandonment. They also emotionally tap into anger in the suffering, almost asking the question “why me?” as the lyrics explore the viewpoint of a victim.
The song seeks to further draw out images of abandonment and lonely places, as the believer wrestles with the providence of God and what is happening to them, that place of insecurity, where the believer is unsure that God can see and hear them. The song seeks to engage at the place where the believer is questioning the promises of God leading to an outcry for divine help. 
The lyrics to 'Insecurity' were inspired by my own personal attitude to God over the course of my teenage years before becoming a Christian. It describes a struggle between the promises of God such as Jesus' promise to be with us always, but holding a subtle reflective tension of the world being against the believer in the background.
The feel of disorientation from Psalm 22 is kept throughout the lyrics, The believer, like the psalmist keeps looking around at what is going around him and wondering where God is in his situation and crying out for God to intervene.
The vocal tone of the song seeks to express a sense of anxiety and pain with undertones of anger. The song struggles between two internal voices, one that grieves for the situation the believer is in and the other that expresses a cry of help towards God that enters and develops towards the end of the song. My own experience of the final line of the song “Let me know you are here, my God”, crying it out, had an answer from God of “Yes, I am here”. What I wanted this song to do, was to allow someone struggling with similar confusion to have a song that helps express that with the hope that God would affirm his presence in their life in response to it.

'Insecurity' sees influence from CCR bands such as Thrice, Skillet and Memphis May Fire with a similar honesty in the lyrics as the influence of Nick Cave that is found in the first song. I tried to bring out the 'emotionally turbulent' sound to help enhance the lyrics that express the struggle with a very bad situation and God's promises.

The instrumentation and arrangement of 'Insecurity' uses two electric guitars, bass guitar, drums and various synthesizers, a set up that is commonly found within the hard rock genre. The guitars are split up into a lead guitar and a rhythm guitar, one working with the drum and bass groove and the other leading and experimenting with the melody.
One specific influence in the arrangement was the addition of a Chinese violin. In the last ten years more bands within the rock genre have incorporated different genres and styles of music to create a more 'unique' style. For example Thrice's song 'Music Box', uses an adaptation of the traditional Japanese folk song 'Sakura Sakura'. Another similar example of this is music from the Canadian-Japanese band Monkey Majik, as they seek to fuse Western pop-rock with traditional Japanese folk instruments.
'Insecurity' is a song written to help voice the confusion and internal struggle that someone might be feeling when trying to reconcile God's work in their lives with events that may have caused a large amount of suffering or trauma. 

02 - Insecurity -CFoxton

The first song of the project is 'Obscurity', a song written in the style of folk music. The song is looking to resonate with those at a place of confusion and those unsure of God's providence in their lives. It also looks to engage with those who are struggling with a constant feeling of threat in their lives, whether physical, mental or spiritual. I wanted the song to explore the idea of threat with the hope that it may help communicate to God, how a person might be feeling under the shadow of it. I have tried to keep a disorientating feel to the arrangement and lyrics to help create an image of disarray and an almost 'muddiness' to the sound. This has been inspired by looking at
particular sections of Psalm 22 with allusions to the other psalms.

Folk influence in music over the last decade has seen a bit of a revival in both the Christian and secular music scenes. Examples of this are bands such as Rend Collective Experiment and Gungor in the former category and Mumford & Sons and The Lumineers in the latter, so I wanted one of my songs to reflect this cultural shift in music. One artist who influenced the style and the writing of the song was David Eugene Edwards of the Christian 'progressive alternative folk' music band Wovenhand. 

In terms of arrangement and lyricism he brings a slightly darker tone to his songs which I wanted to reflect in this song. Another influence, one that has lyrically influenced both this song and the second song of the project steps outside of the folk music genre and into a genre stylised as nu-metal. Brian “Head” Welch of the band Korn, came to faith and started a side-project band called Love and Death, which to this day only released one album. Most of the songs on the album deal with Brian's struggle with addiction, suffering, abandonment and his belief in God. There is a directness and honesty in his lyricism which I felt helps engage and deal with emotions and feelings to God in a more effective way.

Coming to the lyrics in more detail, I felt that I should adopt the questioning attitude that we find in the beginning of Psalm 22 and expand it throughout the whole song to lay the foundations of the believer starting the musical journey in the place of questioning God. The believer starts out with asking and by the end of the song is desperately begging for God to answer and intervene, to set up the place where they are when we get to the second song.

In terms of instrumentation and arrangement, I selected a diverse group of instruments ranging from the grand piano heard at the beginning that sets the chord structure, to a selection of instruments to give the arrangement a 'folkish' musical feel, including an Irish mandolin, viola and a small percussion section. I also live recorded an acoustic bass guitar, with steel jazz strings, to emulate a double bass, to give a more authentic 'plucking' sound. 

The organ used throughout the piece represents the ongoing theme of threat throughout the song, building in during the song and suddenly disappearing from the sonic space. At various points the build-up of the organ seems to overwhelm the sound only to drop out. I wanted the organ to be what the believer is fearing, the darkness, what they think is following them and not wanting to look back at. 

'Obscurity' attempts to voice the questions that we may have when we feel that unsure and things are starting to go out of our control. It tries to draw out an attitude to prayer that is found in the psalms, that God will hear our prayers of supplication in the knowledge that he will answer. The believer that is represented within the three songs at this stage goes into a deeper feeling of abandonment and suffering, which is developed in the second song.


01 - Obscurity -CFoxton

Theology and Music student, songwriter, arranger, bass player, keys player and terrible singer - I apologise in advance...


Chris Foxton