• BC Christian News • SEPTEMBER ISSUE 1999 • VOL. 19 #8 • Formerly "Christian Info News" •

Terry Taylor gets personal again
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• Terry Scott Taylor: Glimpses of Grace, KMG, 1999.

IT'S NO secret that Terry Scott Taylor is an idiosyncratic fellow. As the lead vocalist and main songwriter for Daniel Amos, the Swirling Eddies and Lost Dogs -- three of the most adventurous bands in Christian music -- he has spent the past quarter-century freely mixing faith and doubt, sarcasm and sincerity, eschatology and just plain scatology.

Taylor's personal stamp is all over the work of those three bands. But once in a very rare while, he composes music so intimate that he has to release it under his own name. His first solo album, Knowledge & Innocence, was a deeply felt contemplation of death and loss, spurred by the passing of his grandfather and, apparently, his wife's miscarriage.

The following year, his grandmother died too, and Taylor released A Briefing for the Ascent, a spellbinding journey through picture galleries, wild forests, old hymns and Beatles covers that grappled with mortality. (Between the two albums, Terry also produced Daniel Amos's Fearful Symmetry, which similarly tackled death and the life beyond.)

These albums came out at a time when I had just finished high school and, having spent a few years getting into mainstream Christian music, had grown increasingly bored with songs that rarely got beyond encouraging people to convert. There was a lot of milk around, but very little meat. Taylor's albums were exactly what I was looking for.

After a decade of performing with his bands, producing various up-and-comers (including Jacob's Trouble and Poor Old Lu), and working for the occasional independent record label, Terry released his third original solo album, John Wayne, just last year. It didn't seem to come out of any specific trauma; rather, it focused on the day-to-day grind of getting through life and trying to maintain some sort of spiritual vision despite the world's depressing banality.

Glimpses of Grace collects most of the better tunes from these albums, as well as a few stray tracks that were previously available only on compilations, such as 'Will Have to Do for Now.' (It also includes 'Glorious Dregs' and 'With the Tired Eyes of Faith, two sombre tunes that were inexplicably tacked onto an otherwise quite flippant Swirling Eddies best-of disc a few years back; here, they sound much more at home.)

The liner notes make much of the notion that these songs, forged in the throes of deep introspection, show us Terry Scott Taylor at his most 'personal.' But as good and beautiful and true as these tunes are, the view they offer of his personality is actually rather one-sided. Terry's raucous sense of humor, in particular, is noticeably absent.

So it's with deepest gratitude that one welcomes this album's only new recording, a hidden bonus track of Terry leading the band in a cheeky rendition of 'The Happy Wanderer' at the Cornerstone music festival. There is a time to cry, to be sure. But there is also a time to laugh. -- Peter T. Chattaway

• Jacob's Trouble: Let the Truth Run Wild / Jacob's Trouble, KMG, 1999.

• Jacob's Trouble: Sampler Pack, KMG, 1999.

JACOB'S TROUBLE were ahead of their time. If these discs were released today they'd probably be taken as Barenaked Ladies wannabees. Based out of Georgia, the title track of their first release, Door into Summer (1989), was a cover of an obscure Monkees song. Too bad they didn't have the wealth of writers the prefab four got to pick from, or even a first rate in-house writer like Mike Nesmith.

The disc, produced by Daniel Amos leader Terry Taylor, sported A Hard Day's Night style artwork, and contained large doses of the wackiness DA was known for, along with a huge debt to '60s pop. Taylor stayed on for Knock, Breath, Shine, which offered more of the same.

By 1992's Let the Truth Run Wild, Mark Heard was in the producer's chair. The silliness was somewhat abated, but the debt to Daniel Amos was still too obvious. A final, eponymously titled effort the following year revealed a tougher stance, at times echoing Bryan Adams and U2, but without the grand statements.

Sampler Pack contains over an hour of material drawn from all phases of the group's career, including greatest hits along with rarities and live tracks. Vocalist/front man Jerry Davidson, addressing naysayers after a live version of 'Theme From the Monkees,' reasons: "If God can speak to one man through a donkey, why can't he speak to five guys through four Monkees?" A new song recorded specifically for this package shows the sound remains the same.

-- John Cody