“Something Just Like This” was one of the biggest hits of 2017. It reached number three on Billboard’s top 100. It was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Pop Duo/Group Performance category. The single has sold millions all over the world. “Something Just Like This” is a collaboration between Coldplay and the more recent…

The end of Arcade Fire’s latest album finds the band somewhere unexpected: the tomb of Christ. “Mary, roll away the stone,” frontman Win Butler rasps as “We Don’t Deserve Love” approaches its climax. “The men that you love always leave you alone.” Many reviews of Everything Now—the band’s worst-received effort by far, according to Metacritic—take…

You do not have to feel guilty about loving music. Please keep this in mind. Alan Jacobs, in his The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, writes, “read what gives you delight…and do so without shame.” Amen, I say, and don’t be afraid to apply this to the music you like, too. There…

The recorded version of “Seven Swans” on Sufjan Stevens’ album of the same name always seemed a bit too subdued for the apocalyptic revelation it presents. Stevens opened his recent show at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, BC (and all the shows on his recent tour) with that song, alone, spotlighted, scraping timidly at…

Sixpence None the Richer is my favorite band. I used to be embarrassed to say this, particularly in 1999, when their bouncy pop song “Kiss Me” became a ubiquitous, worldwide radio hit. I knew, and know, that the band was more than this one song, but “Kiss Me” on the radio, in 1999, was the…

I knew that there was rock music in China, and I was determined to get as involved in it as I could—which turned out to be not very much, since I have the Chinese vocabulary of a three-year-old child. It doesn’t help that Chinese people are, as a rule, very polite and complimentary to foreigners,…

I’ve probably been depressed all my life. How else does one explain the nine-year-old kid who sat on the playground bench and wrote after-the-nuclear-holocaust short stories? Nevertheless, it’s what I did. But depression doesn’t fit easily within the Christian template. “Consider it all joy,” the apostle Paul writes, “when you encounter various trials.” I struggle…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

For most of the week it has been raining. On Pascha we raised our candles—Christos Anesti! Christ is Risen!—and ate our lamb, sprawled out with friends drinking wine and eating sweet spicy tsoureki bread for hours, and fell early and exhausted into bed, the rain still thudding outside. Rain has been falling slantways against the…