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Artist Description | Graham Kendrick
Graham Kendrick keeps on pushing the boundaries, returning with one of his most remarkable recordings to date. The album’s title, Out of the Ordinary, hints at the direction taken by the eleven songs; awed worship of God, fresh revelation of grace, mercy and majesty, and the hope of the new creation. Exploding our misconceptions that limit our understanding of God, Out of the Ordinary is one of those musical manifestos that marks a bright new dawn for contemporary worship.
Across songs such as Beautiful Mystery, What Can I Do?, Creation’s King and I Love Your Name, Graham revisits themes of creation, the transcendence of God, and the wonder of Christ’s incarnation, but does so with lyrics that are congregationally accessible yet never stale, personal yet never sentimental.
Graham’s concern that sung worship should include songs that are overtly Trinitarian is evident in these well-crafted lyrics, especially in ‘The way is open’, which plots the journey of the worshipper as we come to the Father, through the Son and by the Spirit.
The album carries on in the tradition of his previous two studio albums What Grace and Do Something Beautiful. This time around songs that have been co-written with several leading worship writers including Paul Baloche [Open The Eyes Of My Heart, Above All], Stu Garrard [co-writer with Martin Smith of numerous Delirious? songs], Tre Sheppard [of 100 Hours] and Dan Wheeler.
The fingerprints of producer Julian Kindred (the man behind Delirious?’s World Service) can be clearly spotted across the album’s eleven tracks. He has beautifully captured many special moments of inspired musicianship, musical arrangements are carefully crafted to back up the emotional range of Graham’s lyrics, while the man’s vocals are delivered with a degree of intensity and sensitivity never quite heard before. Complacency and safety clearly had no place in the studio: on this album Graham has never sounded so good.
Thematically ‘Out of the Ordinary’ draws deep and wide and, among the ‘congregational’ songs are reminders of his singer-songwriter roots, which like his classic Thorns In The Straw or How Much Do You Think You Are Worth, feature his ability to lay the heart bare by painting pictures with words and imagery. ‘Crucified Man’ stands alongside the best of such ‘artist’ compositions from down the years.
The Psalms supplied the source for several of the songs, reflecting Graham’s emphasis on the importance of using these ancient texts in personal as well as public worship, and some of these compositions can be traced back to his habit of often leading worship without previously composed melodies, but by improvised singing from the open pages of the book of psalms, which he dubs ‘Psalm Surfing’.
It is clear that while Graham’s back catalogue may be immense and his influence truly global, his importance as a worship leader lies in his integrity. ‘Out of the Ordinary’ could only come out of a life of devotion and sacrifice. As Graham writes on the sleeve notes ‘to worship is to be changed, to journey out of the ordinary into the beautiful mystery of God, caught up in the miraculous transformation of the whole creation that began with the resurrection of one Man from the dead.’ Yet again, by reflecting on his own journey, Graham leaves his listeners encouraged and inspired to carry on in their own pursuit of our God, who is far greater than we could possibly imagine.
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