The Shift Blog

After Easter, someone asked about where to find one of the songs used in our Easter videos. Good news: You can get the songs from several of our most popular videos in the album Shift Worship Music Vol. 1, available on our bandcamp page. Listen to the whole album online or download it for a minimal charge.

We know you don’t rely on this blog for music recommendations — and we hesitate to give them — but we realized today that we’re kind of digging a bunch of just-released music that is made for worshipping God. So we’re sharing. If you’re into something new and worship-oriented, feel free to mention it in the comments. 

(We’re including previews to each of the albums from Rdio, which we use and enjoy. If you don’t have Rdio, you can still listen to a clip of each of the songs. If you do and you’re logged in, you can listen to the whole thing.)

All Sons & Daughters
Reason to Sing
Just out today, but we’ve been camping out for it. It’s the follow-up to their first EP and two of our favorite worship albums — as a pair — of the last year. Great lyrics. Artful music and vocals. Quiet worship.

David Crowder*Band
Give Us Rest (etc.)
This one is everywhere since it dropped last week. Heralded as the DC*B’s “last album,” it is massive and multi-layered and deeply spiritual in the formal sense of the word — and kind of awesome. Wish we could have seen them live at Passion a week or two ago.

Homemade Worship By Handmade People
Rend Collective Experiment
Released two weeks ago, we’ve been enjoying several songs from this one. Lots of instruments and harmonies and some nice energy.

Come Sunday
Charlie Haden & Hank Jones
Seriously mellow church music played with serious jazz pedigree by two musical legends. Also just out a week, this is simply a piano and bass working through classic hymns and spirituals. Not for night driving, for sure. Better for the tail end of the day when you’re ready for some intentional drifting. 

Now that we’ve got past that awkward it’s-the-holidays-but-not-quite-Christmas-season season, the percentage of Christmas music in our playlists is ebbing upward. Toward the top of the list is the Christmas Songs Collection Vol. 1-3 from Folk Angel, which includes their brand new album Comfort & Joy. 

What Christmas music are you digging this year?

Every year, around Halloween, I declare, “No Christmas music until after Thanksgiving.” But I always cave early. Partly, it’s because we start making Christmas backgrounds and mini movies for ShiftWorship.com — and it’s hard to get in the mood without the right music. 

So it feels entirely appropriate to embed for you the new Sojourn Christmas album, A Child is Born, while we toil away crafting Christmas videos and countdowns well before the season starts stressing us out.

So enjoy — or click away and check it out this time next week. 

Someone on Facebook today asked about the song on our mini movie “Worship Everywhere.” It’s by Riley Friesen, and it’s called “I Move.” As far as we know, it’s not available anywhere else. So we decided (with Riley’s permission, of course) to make it available for free from our site.

To download the song, just go to the page for “Worship Everywhere” on our site. You’ll see a link for the song over to the right. If you like it, you can search for Riley’s band Staggerford on iTunes for more great music. (We recommend Greet the Blinding Light; it’s awesome.)

Redemption Hill Music is part of Redemption Hill Church in Richmond, Virginia, and they create and give away (mp3 and chord charts) new arrangements of old hymns (like the one below of O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing).

But that’s not all; they also tell fascinating, in-depth stories about the writing of these hymns, as well as offering helpful teaching about the content of each of the verses. Recent hymns getting the Redemption Hill treatment include Rock of Ages, Praise to the Lord the Almighty and His Eye is On the Sparrow.

Some beautiful and useful work here for the sharing.

O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing by RedemptionHill

We mentioned not long ago how much we dig an independent worship band out of Denver called Page CXVI, but that’s before we knew they were coming to our town to do a house show on August 20.

If you’re in the Lincoln, Nebraska area, why not join us at Jason’s house to take it in? You can buy tickets (and listen to their music) on their site, PageCXVI.com. Just scroll down to the bottom of the page for a list of upcoming events. Looks like they’re also headed to Wisconsin and a few stops in Illinois, but you should totally come to the one in Lincoln, instead.

Honestly, we don’t really know anyone in the band or sell their stuff. We just like how they make the great hymns sound so … great, which is why we were excited when they let us use their kind of haunting version of “Doxology” on our Obstacles Mini Movie last year.

See you at the show.