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An Early Christmas Present ...

Posted Dec 7, 09:24 AM | 8 comments | by Editor | Link

Go ahead and unwrap this early Christmas gift from the Emergent Village blog to all of you:

Brian McLaren 1978

Thanks to Heavenly Grooves for digging into the archives of Christian rock’s sordid and mysterious past, posting Brian McLaren’s 1978 “dreamy acoustic rock” album Learning How to Love! The recording features songs such as “Sailing Out On Life,” “Publican And Pharisee,” “I Wonder How You Love Me,” “I Believe In Him,” “Simple Things,” “Mary And Martha,” and the boogie jammin’ “Depersonalization Blues.” (Seriously, folks, this is for real!)

As Ken Scott at Heavenly Grooves describes it: “Learning How To Love features beautiful melodies layered with silky guitar work and soft lulling vocals. Over forty-five minutes of music to drift away to … Brian plays guitar, woodwinds, congas and keyboards, while four other guys add various instruments and/or bgvs. How come no one’s ever heard of this guy?”

Well, Ken …

BTW—My wife and I are going to see Brian in a couple of weeks as he performs a concert in Asheville with David Wilcox. I suspect Brian will probably be performing songs from the new “Songs for a Revolution of Hope” CD, but if he starts “boogie jammin’” on any Learning How to Love tracks, I’ll certainly let ya’ll know!

So Merry (early) Christmas.

Now here’s the challenge: The audio file is in some obscure .RAR format, which I haven’t been able to figure out how to open. So if you know how to “unwrap” this present (and actually be able to listen to it!), please post the info in the comments.

UPDATE: Thanks to the inimitable Josh Brown for turning the .RAR file into a .ZIP file that even us helpless Mac users can open!

Feel free to post your reviews of Learning How to Love in the comments!

UPDATE 12/16/2007: If anyone is interested, I’ve posted a wrap-up of last night’s concert event with Brian, David Wilcox, and Carrie Newcomer in Asheville over on my blog. I spoke to Brian, and he was actually pleasantly surprised to see his 1978 album get unearthed—apparently even he hadn’t listened to it in a long time!

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Welcome to the Reader's Forum

1Steph 12/07/2007 10:45 AM

rar is a compression format like zip. Do a google for winrar to get the program to unpack it.

2josh 12/07/2007 11:18 AM

give me a few minutes and i’ll reupload in a regular zip format. it’ll be a bit bigger. but easier to open without having to download any programs.

3josh 12/07/2007 11:37 AM

here you go.

regular zip. about 90mbs.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9KEIECW7

4James K.A. Smith 12/07/2007 09:31 PM

So Keith Green was proto-emergent?! Great stuff. A nice morning chuckle (at Brian’s expense! ;-)

5gavin 12/07/2007 10:26 PM

i swear this is barry gibb with a good boy haircut. haha!

6Brandon Cloud 12/08/2007 02:31 AM

i must confess i eagerly hit the download button hoping to continue the giggle this photo induced… but i was pleasantly surprised at how good this stuff actually is! yeah bry!!! nice stuff man. of course now im expecting the seudo-vannila ice doug pagitt album to emerge from the depths of the 90’s.

7eugene 12/08/2007 04:28 AM

umm…everything must change.

8Jonathan Scruggs 12/11/2007 01:04 PM

okay…so i haven’t gotten very far through the album yet, but the licks in the first song are total rip off’s of “stairway to heaven.” he was “high on Jesus” i guess.

this week has been a record setter on the emergent weirdness meter, i just ran across the great yoga debate featuring doug padgitt and john macarthur mono-e-mono, on youtube yesterday. we gotta hire a part-time media liaison.

by the way, steve, two words: stuffit expander. noob.