No easy chorus

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The spiritual turns taken by a perpetually fascinating musician.

In the mid-1990s, Peter Gabriel discovered the singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur and made him the first North American artist on Gabriel’s Real World label. A decade later, Arthur formed Lonely Astronaut Records and has since released most of his music on his own.

EICHER: WORLD’s music critic, Arsenio Orteza, says the new album wrestles with faith from a distinctively biblical perspective.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: Joseph Arthur has never shied away from exploring spiritual matters in his music. Consider the best known of his early songs, “In the Sun.”

MUSIC: [“In the Sun” by Joseph Arthur]

Audiences heard “In the Sun” on the TV shows Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy and in the films Saved! and The Bourne Identity. It was also recorded by Peter Gabriel, R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, and Coldplay’s Chris Martin. It’s sung from the point of view of someone beginning to entertain doubts, but its refrain, “May God’s love be with you / always,” is sincere.

The tension between faith and doubt running through Arthur’s songs makes them feel uncommonly alive. In an industry known for preferring its musical loose ends neatly tied up, Arthur’s dangle like live electrical wires. Artistically speaking, Arthur doesn’t put safety first. That mindset may explain why he embarked on his latest project, an ambitious trilogy titled You’re Not a Ghost Anymore.

ARTHUR: This is definitely a hard way to do it. It's not easy. Why do you always choose the difficult things? But somehow art is like that. Maybe life is like that too.

Arthur’s life has definitely been like that. In 2020 he publicly questioned a one-size-fits-all approach regarding the COVID vaccine and incurred cancel-culture-like repercussions. His longtime manager dropped him. His booking agent dropped him. A band that he'd newly formed quit en masse. And New West Records declined to release Arthur Buck 2, his second album with R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. Arthur doesn’t care to debate such issues anymore. More important to him now is the faith he had to lean on during his cancelled period.

MUSIC: [“I Wanna Know You” by Joseph Arthur]

Faith, by the way, is the subtitle of the first and so-far only installment of the You’re Not a Ghost Anymore trilogy, and “I Wanna Know You” is its opening track. Arthur based its lyrics on a conversation he had with someone about the necessity of Christ’s sacrifice, and the song embodies the back-and-forth nature of the exchange.

ARTHUR: That middle-eight part, “The heart of man needs a sacrifice, but that's not God's law or his voice, condemning yourself for what you think is wrong or right, but God is love. That's his only choice.” So, yeah, the narrator of that song isn't like a—isn’t like a spiritual expert. He’s—he is a seeker seeking.

Arthur himself remains a seeker in some ways too. He believes that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, but he’s a fan of the mystical self-help author Eckhart Tolle as well. And he still has questions, for instance, about Christ’s hypostatic union. Still, many of the songs on You’re Not a Ghost Anymore: Faith come from a place of a growing confidence in biblical revelation. Titles such as “Bear Your Own Cross” and “In the Shadow of the Cross” make that obvious. And several other songs take their inspiration from scripture directly.

MUSIC: [ “No Weapon” by Joseph Arthur]

I asked Arthur how Christianity came to win out over the other forms of spirituality he’s studied.

ARTHUR: Like the whole idea of “O.K., I can repent and I can start again” and the idea that Jesus is forgiving and the devil is the accuser, this is just—makes pragmatic sense. And just the idea of forgiveness being incredibly important too, like, to forgive everyone and everything, and that once you forgive, then you can be forgiven, and then you can come into the kingdom of heaven.

One thing Arthur isn’t likely to add to God’s kingdom is insipid praise choruses. He’s more interested in songs that afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

ARTHUR: There’s no balance of light and dark. I like the sort of—the grittiness it takes to get to a place of belief and faith.

That grittiness, like irritants in an oyster, is central to Arthur’s music. But instead of mere pearls, Arthur’s aiming for the pearl of great price.

MUSIC: [“Count It All Joy” by Joseph Arthur]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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