Soul Patrol! Redux

Well, a couple of days ago I posted about getting to see Taylor Hicks in concert coming up in March.

Since then, my fellow Soul Patrollers have been coming out of the woodwork...apparently, my blog's now linked on a couple of message boards. A big LutheranHusker welcome to all of you!

Steer clear of conversations concerning onions and thudding and all will be well in this little corner of the blogosphere. =)

To clear up a couple of misconceptions that I've seen pop up:

• I'm not a pastor. I do work in a church as a Director of Christian Education and Music, I do play the organ, I do lead Bible studies and Sunday School and all that kind of thing, but I've not been to seminary. I am in what the ELCA calls the candidacy process for an Associate in Ministry designation. If you think of it as sort of the church's equivilent of an associate's degree for laypeople, you're on the right track. I wrote some more about it, as well as my personal sense of call, here. In the past, I served in sort of a pastoral role for a campus ministry, but I did it as a layperson.
• I do live in Nebraska...though I'm going to the Iowa concert, I'm a Nebraskan through-and-through.

Glad to meet you all, and please feel free to keep reading. I like to write about a bunch of different subjects, just to keep myself interested more than anything else, I suppose. I've found that I tend to gravitate to the subject matters of faith, my family ("Sweetie" my wife and "Kiddo" my 3 year-old son), and great quotes from Scrubs (of which there are MANY to choose from). That being said, just about anything is fair game if it's something I'm interested in. =)

So today, knowing there's an audience out there who's interested in good music by under-appreciated artists, I'm gonna pimp two of my favorite newly discovered musical acts: Storyhill and Joshua Radin. Neither of them sound much like Taylor Hicks at all, but they each have a distinctive sound that touches me.

Joshua Radin is someone I stumbled across just last week. If you like Simon and Garfunkel at all, you've gotta check this guy out. Great lyrics, great singing, great guitar, and definitely with that Paul Simon vibe. One of his songs was on the soundtrack for The Last Kiss, and I'm pretty sure he's been featured in some Scrubs episodes as well. Here's a clip of him singing Star Mile live...if I didn't know any better, I'd assume this was some obscure Simon and Garfunkel song that I just hadn't had the privilege of hearing yet:

Now, for Storyhill. Storyhill is...in a word, awesome. Many, many thanks to my good friend RevScott for introducing them to me. They sort of have two home bases--Minnesota and Montana, and you'll find a number of references to both places in their music. They are a duo...Chris and Johnny both play guitar and sing and...very important for me...they also write all their own music. This is a clip of them playing Steady On. One note--the sound in this clip is way off from the video, so don't let that throw you off.

LH