Hard time, soft rock

When the Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jon Troast debuted in World magazine eight years ago, he was surviving as an independent musician by performing unplugged in the homes of his fans. They’d invite friends and family, pay Troast a $100 minimum, buy his discs, put him up, then say goodbye until next time.

Now, other than having doubled his price and expanded his merchandise to include Christmas ornaments of his own making, he’s still surviving that way. House show number 1,000 is on the horizon.

He’s still recording too, EPs to be precise. Since 2011, he has released seven five-song collections—each titled after a letter of the alphabet—and an A through D compilation (All the Brave Critters Kept Dancing). Recorded with some of Nashville’s finest Christian musicians and singers, the discs capture Troast’s gifts of humor, introspection, and encouragement in ringingly clear soft-rock settings.

“It was just a way to catalog the music,” he says of the series. “The original plan was just to do A, B, C, D, but now I’m planning to do the whole alphabet, which gives me a ten-year plan. My college guidance counselor might be proud of me right now.”

And if that counselor were to conclude from the devotional, overtly faith-based songs on the just-released G that something seismic shook up Troast’s life after F appeared in 2016, he’d be right. Out of the blue, the normally upbeat songsmith found himself blindsided by full-blown clinical depression. Just 38 at the time, he could hardly blame mid-life crisis. “I didn’t know what was happening. I just felt that the person I’d been was gone. I didn’t know who I was anymore.”

He turned reclusive. And much that had once come easily to him, from writing songs to studying the Bible, became a struggle. Finally, he put himself under a psychiatrist’s care and discovered the beginnings of long-term relief in anti-depressant medication.

“Initially, my pride made me a little resistant to taking [it]. I didn't want to admit I was weak. [But] I knew I needed help and was desperate.”

Eventually, Troast began “digging into Scripture” again, finding particular inspiration in the Minor Prophets. “They’re not always easy to read,” he says, “but that was part of the process of where the [G] song ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ came from: remembering that God has made promises, a lot of which we’ve seen come true, and just holding onto that.”

Troast’s ordeal, in other words, has made him wiser. “To be at the end of yourself,” he says, “is a great place to be because you realize ‘I’m not in control of anything’— and that God is much more concerned with our faith than our comfort.”

Another singer-songwriter well-versed in the Old Testament is Peter Himmelman. As well-known for being an observant Jew as he is for being Bob Dylan’s son-in-law, he has steeped his latest album, There Is No Calamity (Six Degrees), in the external turbulence of contemporary socio-politics, in the internal conflicts of those who strive to live righteously, and in the shadowy no-man’s-land in between.

The music ranges from taut, rough-and-tumble rock to tense, pre-storm calm, accompanying lyrics that leave no room for ambiguity. Yet, even at their most didactic, they have a come-let-us-reason quality. At their most confessional (“The unrepentant are the masters of the game. / They walk this earth without pity or shame” [“Rich Men Run the World”]), they sound like blueprints for contemporary psalms.