Extralife

Darlingside

The Boston-based band here sings songs of the apocalypse in stirring four-part harmony. The sound is soft acoustic folk with warm horns and banjo riffs interlaced with violin and layered voices, but the words are of nuclear disaster: “As I begin to lose hold of / The fiery flowerbeds above / Mushroom clouds reset the sky.” The lyrics paint pictures—a solitary fawn eating clovers in a wasteland, the last of the human race holding on to hope in underground bunkers—yet the morbid subject matter doesn’t keep Extralife from remaining upbeat and leaving listeners wanting more.

No Story Is Over

Son of Laughter

Armed with a (Paul) Simonesque voice, an acoustic guitar, and a penchant for storytelling, singer-songwriter Chris Slaten (aka “Son of Laughter”) delivers a thoughtful, bright, and theologically robust exploration of redemption and brokenness. Slaten combines verbal virtuosity with ambitious instrumentation: layers of strings and brass and multiple stylistic turns within songs. In “The Hurricanes,” a narrative of suffering, he sings, “God, You are my rock, silent as a stone,” before returning to a refrain clinging to God’s promises. In “The Meal We Could Not Make,” he offers a captivating reflection on the hope of grace.

Black Panther The Album

Various artists

Pulitzer Prize–winning rap poet Kendrick Lamar produced this album, curated it, and wrote many of its songs, only a few of which are in the film that set box-office records. The album is laced with profanity, references to violence, and language disrespectful to women. It also explores Black Panther themes of racial justice, identity, reactive violence, and the burden of leadership, and includes some verses in Zulu. Lamar portrays himself as hero, villain, and flawed human being, allowing the listener to relate to each and to everyday hardships: “Trapped in the system, traffickin’ drugs / Modern-day slavery, African thugs.”

All The Light Above It Too

Jack Johnson

Master of mellow Jack Johnson returns to his mostly acoustic roots in this album, his first in four years: He offers lovely, nostalgia-driven vignettes of seaside campfires under the stars (“Big Sur”), a sappy-sweet love song to his wife (“Love Song #16”), and easy-grooving calls for kindness (“Gather”). But the Trump administration seems to have pushed Johnson from quiet environmental activism to vigorous protest: In “My Mind Is For Sale,” Johnson sings, “I don’t care for your paranoid / ‘Us against them’ walls / I don’t care for your careless / ‘Me first, gimme gimme’ appetite at all.”

—Andrew Shaughnessy is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course

ENCORE

Of all the songs performed in the 20th century, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is the most downloaded—7 million times. Jonathan Cain, the group’s keyboardist and backup singer, was the song’s prime writer, and his autobiography, Don’t Stop Believin’: The Man, the Band, and the Song that Inspired Generations (Zondervan, 2018), tells his story of coming to Christ amid moral failures, broken relationships, disappointments, struggles, and victories.

Cain’s odyssey was a struggle with theodicy—the problem of evil, pain, and suffering. It launched with a horrible Chicago grade-school fire that claimed 92 of his classmates and three nuns: Where was this good God when his classmates were either leaping to their deaths or trapped in a classroom to be burned alive? But his book, like his song promoting ninth-inning rallies, teaches perseverance: “Hold on.”

Cain is now married to prosperity gospeler Paula White, described on his book’s back cover as “personal minister to President Donald Trump.” —Jim Long