Remember Smooth, the Santana song featuring Rob Thomas? If that ubiquitous opening guitar riff has somehow escaped you, play the video;

In these December days of 2009, Smooth has a certain distinction. It was the number one song when this decade began. It actually reached Billboard’s chart pinnacle on October 1999 but it stayed there 12 weeks, making it the first #1 of the 2000’s (if that’s what we’re calling this decade). Now, it’s time to look back not only on 2009 but on the entire decade. As I recall just how many times I heard Smooth, I’m tempted to think it was the biggest song of the decade, but I would be incorrect.

There are lots of ways to measure “biggest song”; the top is a good place to start. Since Smooth crossed decades, it was actually bested by a handful of songs. These are the artists responsible for the songs with the most weeks at #1 this past decade:

Mariah Carey
Usher
Eminem
The Black Eyed Peas

Which takes the crown? Well, one group had one song at the top for 14 weeks and another for 12 weeks, making them the champ. And by saying “group”, you know I mean Black Eyed Peas. Can you name the songs? Curiously, they’re both very recent: I Gotta Feeling and Boom Boom Pow. I’m not sure there’s anything to the latecomers dominating the chart, since Mariah tied for the lead with We Belong Together from 2005.

Album charts show the opposite trend. The last few years of the decade have seen a steady string of albums top the Billboard chart for 1 or 2 weeks. The album champs? Eminem, N*Sync, and the Beatles (with their “1” collection) were all from 2000, but all were bested by Usher’s “Confessions”, which lasted 9 weeks on the top.

And this is fun: can you name the biggest One Hit Wonder of the decade? You’ll know it if you ever watched American Idol. It’s Bad Day by Daniel Powter, number 1 for 5 weeks in 2006, making it that year’s biggest song. At least we’ll remember his name, even though he hasn’t cracked the Hot 100 before or since.

Coming Friday, Billboard promises to name the top artists, songs, and albums of the decade. We’ll see how the number ones compare to the rest of the pack.

I promise, this is going to be a post about our recent cruise, but first please permit me to comment on my favorite awards show, the Grammys. It will all fit. Trust me.

What, you ask, was the biggest news from the recent announcement of Grammy nominations?

Not the number of times Taylor Swift and Beyonce will compete head-to-head in the same category (think VMA and Kanye).

Not the appearance in the Best Rock Instrumental Performance, alongside the likes of Jeff Beck and Steve Vai, of country star Brad Paisley for Playing with Fire.

Not the similar outlier on Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance. You hear Bob Dylan, John Fogerty, Bruce Springsteen, and Neil Young and you don’t expect to add Prince to the list.

Not even the brash deletion of an entire category of nominations: Polka is gone! Oh, the humanity!

No, the biggest surprise is a certain song nominated in Category 33: Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. The aforementioned Beyonce is there, along with Kanye, Jay-Z, Ne-Yo, Rihanna, T.I., even Justin Timberlake. But one of the five nominated songs is the biggest surprise of the Grammys: I’m on a Boat, by the Lonely Island f/T-Pain. This is the trio of writers from Saturday Night Live responsible for classics like Lazy Sunday (“We love the Chronic-WHAT?-cles of Nar-ni-a!”) and several other off-color digital shorts. I laughed really hard when I saw I’m on a Boat on SNL, and on the occasion of our cruise, I just had to show it to Amy, despite the incredibly coarse language that is apparent through the beeps. I knew at some point on the cruise I would be singing the autotuned “Never thought I’d be on a bo-at!” and no explanation would do the line justice. Now, against all odds, the song is officially Grammy-nominated.

So yes, we cruised over the Thanksgiving break, and since it was in fact my first cruise ever, I did on several occasions croon, “Never thought I’d be on boat!” along with lines about my flippie-floppies and the following gem:

“I’m the king of the world, on a boat like Leo / If you’re on the shore, then you’re sure not me-oh!”

We stayed a night in Orlando and toured Downtown Disney long enough to buy cool Legos before driving over the Port Canaveral, where we got our first glimpse of our massive Royal Caribbean boat, the Monarch of the Seas. Seriously, there are lots of cruise ships and all, but ours was THE Monarch. All other ships bow in her presence. So there.

After unloading our 47 suitcases, we checked in at the terminal and the gastronomical abundance got a kick-start: free cookies and lemonade! In the terminal! We weren’t even on the Monarch yet! I already knew I was in for a good ride.

We boarded the Monarch, the first of something like 100 times scanning our little cruise ID cards, and went straight to the top deck where we were told they were serving lunch. Since we arrived even before the first scheduled boarding time and a full 5 hours before the Monarch took to her seas (which she rules), I pretty much expected a big deli tray. Wowzers, was I wrong! There was a full buffet, with dozens of regional cuisines represented, and more lemonade and cookies! I got a plate full of paella and we all found a table, but then I had to go try to change our dinner seating time. When I finally returned, my tastes had changed, so I switched to pizza. How cool is that? From paella to pizza in one meal, just ‘cause I wanted to.

I ate like a king (I was on the Monarch, after all) the whole cruise: lamb, duck, prime rib, a fabulous Thanksgiving feast, delectable desserts like opera cake and passion fruit mousse… I’m getting hungry just typing this. I also tried my first escargot, which was marvelous. Hannah’s take on the snails: “Delicious, yet disturbing.”

I did more than just eat, although that would have been enough to satisfy me quite nicely. We played in Coco Cay for a day, enjoying the Caribbean’s largest inflatable water slide.

It’s hard to think that just one week ago I was walking sandy beaches under sunny skies and swimming with sting rays. In Nassau we went on a snorkeling trip to a nearby reef, and once again I marveled at the little miracles of creation that God has tucked all over the earth, little treats left for us to discover.

As a family we won a bronze medal at the Pictionary competition; I proudly wore my medal the rest of the evening. Here’s one of my favorite pics from the cruise. I was so swept up by the food and our medals and all the frivolity that I decided to tap my glass and offer a toast. That’s milk in my glass. Amy thinks that Mark + Medal + Milk = Dork.

I haven’t even mentioned the rock wall and the girls’ speed climbing prowess, or the build-a-boat competition, or the towel animals, or the Straw Market in Nassau, or the wonderful food. Oh wait, I did mention that last one. Suffice it to say I could get used to life aboard the Monarch. So, I’ve decided that if the Lonely Island win a Grammy, we absolutely must cruise again. And you must join us.

I heard a song the other day, and I got a little sad. Not because it’s a particularly sad song (well, actually, it is a particularly sad song), but because it’s a little reminder of what Google has taken away from me.

The song was Time by Alan Parsons Project. It’s a breathy, languid lament that you probably don’t recognize by its title alone. It’s one of those songs you hear and then say, “Oh, I remember that song.” Here, listen to the song and see if you don’t recognize it. Of course, the possibility exists that you’re not old like me, in which case you are excused.

The song itself is not my point. I have a memory associated with this song. It’s from high school, when my buddy Steve and I were working on a slide show for a big school ceremony. The theme was something about history, and we wanted a string of songs about time.

This task was right in our wheelhouse. Steve is a kindred spirit for me, because we both have scary good musical knowledge and recall. Songs about time? Easy. Our lame classmates would have just played Time After Time in its entirety, even though Cyndi Lauper’s hit has very little to do with the theme of the historical passage of time. Instead, we went for Pink Floyd, and Alan Parsons, and maybe even a little Alice Cooper (I’m Eighteen) if I recall correctly.

These songs selections are no remarkable feat, to be sure, but they evoke a pre-Google time when developing such a list of tunes required a lifetime of music appreciation. Today, you just Google “time lyrics” and you get dozens of good choices. I’m also a little sentimental about the mechanics of making our slide show music montage. We would go to Steve’s older brother’s apartment because he had a killer music collection. We would play the song a bunch of times to decide just which clip we wanted. Steve’s brother also had the rare tape deck with an input volume knob, so we could fade songs in and out on the tape. Once we found our song section, we’d hit pause on the tape deck, then record. We would play the album or CD, start the tape rolling, and fade the clip in. Then we’d rewind the tape and play it again so we could cue it up at just the right spot for the next clip. This process took hours, days sometimes, for a few quality minutes of slide-show music. And let me remind you that the slide show used actual slides!

Today, you don’t need a killer CD collection. You download what you need. You don’t need a tape deck (for that I am profoundly grateful). You can chop up songs, and fade them in and out, with a mouse click. And you don’t need a lifetime of music appreciation to choose those songs.

Is that a bad thing? Steve and I used to start singing songs over others’ conversations, just because we knew the perfect song. We’d hear a girl complaining about a boy lying to her, and Steve would sing Honesty by Billy Joel. She’d declare that he needs to apologize, and I’d launch into Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word. I’m sure we were terribly annoying. We were – and are – crazy good at this game called Encore in which you are given a word and must sing a song containing it. We’ve been banned from playing in several states.

I even wanted to be the guy who picks out the music they played for sports highlight reels, like, as a career. I just didn’t know how to become that guy; it’s not exactly a career path the counselors tell you about.

It’s not like Google has completely robbed me of my quirky talent. Indeed, people still call or email to ask for song suggestions, and I always get a thrill. And anyway, my sadness is all terribly narcissistic. Why should I care that people don’t have to call me when they need the perfect song for a preschool graduation ceremony, and instead they Google “preschool graduation ceremony music” and the first hit is Top Ten Songs for Preschool Graduation Ceremonies? Should I really be bitter? Certainly this immediate retrieval of information has made the world a better place, right?

I suppose. Forgive me, though, if I quietly huff at the poseurs planning preschool graduation ceremonies playing Greatest Love of All when I think a Wayne Watson song would have been so much better. I shall remain the grumpy artisan decrying the new-fangled robots attempting to do his job more efficiently, but without that touch of humanity and experience. Maybe I should just get back into that habit of singing over nearby conversations.

“But time keeps flowing like a river, on and on, to the sea….”

Since Veterans Day was on a Wednesday this year, it coincided with our Awana program for the kids at church. One of our leaders, Mr. Tom, is currently deployed in Afghanistan, so for the last couple of weeks the kids have been collecting items to send care packages to his unit. The kids came through in spades, and Tom’s wife joined us Wednesday night to thanks the kids for their generosity and to show new pictures Tom just sent. It was a special evening.

I usually have very interesting conversations with the kids at Awana. They tend to share whatever’s going on in their life, however great or small, with wonderful enthusiasm and sincerity. Last night, a little girl came up to me as I was packing up and shared this: “My grandfather is a veterinarian.”

“Really?” I replied. “What kinds of animals does he work with?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Like dogs and cats, or bigger animals like horses?” I returned.

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “He was in Vietnam.”

I wondered for a few seconds why I was hearing this story about an obscure animal doctor in Southeast Asia when the light bulb finally went off.

“OH!” I declared. “You mean your grandfather is a ‘veteran’!”

“Yes,” she smiled. “He was in Vietnam.”

“Was he in the Army, or Marines, or what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “I just know he is a veterinarian.”

Nice interview with Steven Curtis Chapman on CNN.com.

Click here.

I did not floss last night. There, I said it. Mock if you must; I have confessed and I am open to your scorn. Naturally, you must wonder why I failed to floss last night, I who floss so diligently every night, sometimes even while camping. It’s a long story. Just the kind I like.

It all started with a phone call. I was at work. Amy called from home. “The sink broke,” she reported, as matter-of-factly as if this happens every couple of days at our house. It doesn’t. In fact, this was our original kitchen sink, a decade old. I knew the faucet handle had been a little wonky and I had tightened it in the past, so I hoped I just needed to fix a screw.

I left work late, since I had the crazy idea earlier in the day to go on my first ever cruise during the week of Thanksgiving, and I happened to check this cruise website, and there happened to be some really good cruise prices, and so I wound up booking a cruise for all five of us and Amy’s mom! But that’s another story. Back to the floss.

I got home, late, ready to pull out the screwdriver and fix the faucet. Amy had a big pot of water beside the sink. She said she was a pioneer woman and she had fetched the water pail from the outhouse. I laughed at her mixed metaphors, and then inspected the faucet. The handle was actually broken into two pieces, right at the base. No screwdriver would fix this.  I had never replaced a kitchen faucet before, but it didn’t look too hard. We ate dinner (my pioneer woman made delicious potato soup!) and then took off for Home Depot.

I should mention how nice it is that the kids are old enough that we can just leave them at home sometimes. None of them really wanted to go to Home Depot (what’s up with that? You’d think they’re girls or something!), and I really wanted Amy to come along for the faucet-picking-out process. So, we just left. And they stayed and worked on homework, except for Rebekah, who has swine flu. But that’s another story. Back to the floss.

Amy and I had a lovely date at the Home Depot, and settled on a lovely faucet with a big tall spout which will be useful for filling big pails with water. No more trips to the outhouse! Since there were kitchen faucets there that cost hundreds of dollars, our new faucet was especially lovely since it rang in at $64. I also had a little thrill when I got to slide the wall of display faucets to retrieve the box stacked behind it. I like sliding walls to find hidden boxes. Do all diligent flossers have the same odd proclivity, I wonder?

Back home, I unboxed the new faucet and started pulling all the obscure items out from the cabinet under the sink. We had various cleaners, a gallon of ammonia, an almost-gallon-sized jug of bubbles, and no less than eight lunchboxes. Plus lots of icky stuff that missed the trashcan several years ago and, well, festered. Then, I followed my time-tested process for all new projects: I worked at it on my own for about 174 seconds, then I called Dad.

Dad knows everything about building things and fixing stuff. I marvel at his depth of knowledge and experience. I told him what had transpired during my 174 seconds of effort, about how I tried to twist the big nut that attached the water supply hose and the copper pipe twisted instead of the nut. He told me to disconnect the other end, then take care of the tricky part after the sink was off. I asked him how the sink was attached, and he told me several possible scenarios. We sorted out that this particular sink was held on by a nut in the middle, on a long threaded stem. I told Dad the collar above the nut was rusty. He said,

“Oh. That’s going to be hard to get off.”

If Dad thinks something will be difficult, I know that for me the task will be gargantuan. I was not mistaken.

I have my wrenches hanging neatly from a pegboard in the basement, so I went down to grab a few to find the proper size for the nut. They were all too small. I went down to get bigger wrenches. They were metric. I went down again to grab another handful. Then I went down seven or eight more times just to make myself more frustrated.

I found the right size wrench and realized the ordeal I would now face. There’s simply no good way to get to this nut. It’s all the way in the back of the cabinet, right in the middle, between two supply lines and the spray hose and just above the drain pipe and behind the two sides of the sink, which, by the way, are very rough and knuckle-scraping. I decided to disassemble the spray hose to make a little more room. Success! One task down, five-or-so to go. I could get at the nut a little better, and I got the wrench on it, and it moved, just a little. It is important to realize that I was twisted all under the sink, inside the cabinet, dodging that annoying strip of cabinet that goes between the doors, propped on one elbow with my neck cocked to one side and the wrench in the other hand. The wrench had about two inches of space to actually turn, no matter which way I approached the nut. I dropped it dozens of times. I’m sure there’s some plumbers tool that does this job in seconds, but I had no idea how I could possible get this nut all the way off the long threaded pipe when I was only able to turn it about 1/6 turn at a time.

I was hopelessly frustrated after 20 minutes of 1/6 turns and dropping the wrench and getting a sore neck and such. I finally pulled myself out of the cabinet and declared, exasperated, “I can’t do this!” We talked about calling a plumber we know, but it was late. Amy had to take Sarah to a Bible study that I was supposed to go to also. I stared at the sink. A weird Yoda-like voice popped in my head and reminded me that the nut was turning. It wasn’t turning much, but it had to be called progress. I pulled off my long-sleeve T-shirt and laughed a bit at myself clad in jeans and a plain white undershirt, looking distinctly plumber-like. I wanted to do my Marlon Brando “Stella!!” routine, but there was no one in the room with me. Instead, I crawled back under the sink.

I twisted that infernal nut, 1/6 turn at a time, for hours! It crept in its petty pace toward the bottom, at which time I had to disconnect the sprayer hose which is not held on by a nut but by a completely round fixture. Whose idea was that?  I went back to the basement for vise-grips, got the hose off, and went back to my little tiny turning. I was amazed that at no point along the length of this pipe was I able to turn the nut by hand. I tried. Oh, did I try.

I’ve often said that I could have been a stellar athlete were it not for my smallish hands. Stellar athletes have huge hands. I have small hands. And, during a recent cleaning-out-the-basement binge, I discovered that in high school I wrote very sensitive poetry. And also, I like to think of myself as a musician. So I have the small sensitive hands of a poet-musician. I am certain that dozens of men could have twisted that nut with one finger, but my small sensitive musician hands were no match. Instead, it was: twist the wrench just a little bit, take off the wrench, flip the wrench over, twist the wrench a little bit more, repeat. All while contorted all up under a cabinet. Curse these small sensitive hands!!

Amy and Sarah were back. I told Sarah to run out and get me one of those ratchet-plier things, which would have trimmed hours off this project. She laughed. I soldiered on, as best a sensitive small-handed poet-musician can soldier, and after two hours of little baby twists, with a shout of victory, my nemesis the nut was vanquished!

I did some much easier disconnecting, pulled the old faucet off, cleaned the gunk from under the old faucet, then installed the new sink, all in less than an hour. It was after 10:00, after everyone had gone to bed, in a quiet room, that I tentatively opened the water supply valves. No leaks! Hurray!

Of course, you know the rest of the story. I went to bed, tired and really rather dirty. I scrubbed my hands, but they were still pretty slimy. Slimy enough that, yes, I did not floss.

I should have felt a more profound sense of accomplishment after finishing this task, but I was busy lamenting how crazy long it took. Today, though, after the perspective gained from an almost-uninterrupted night’s sleep (did I mention Rebekah has swine flu?), I am a bit proud of myself. I have taken another stride in the footsteps of my father, and I am reminded how he acquired his vast knowledge of building and fixing stuff. He struggled (at least I assume he did), and made mistakes, and used the wrong tools, and wanted to quit, and then he persevered and figured things out and accomplished one little project at a time. I’ve extended his legacy by adding just a bit to my own, one little twist of the wrench at a time.

In the end, if not flossing because your sensitive smallish hands are grimy is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

This just in: the big Atlanta flood of 2009 was not in fact a 100-year flood. It wasn’t even a 500-year flood. It was a once ever flood. No prediction models that exist would have ever predicted a flood like the one we had in September. Remarkable.

For a limited time (probably until 11/10), you can listen to the new album by Steven Curtis Chapman, in its entirety, for free. Click here.

“Beauty Will Rise” will speak in profound ways to anyone who has suffered loss. As most folks know, the Chapmans lost a daughter in a horrible accident at their home. Chapman is a songwriter, and songwriting remains part of his natural ability to reflect, remember, and grieve. This album is the result, and the fact that he is sharing these remarkably personal songs with the world is a testament to the legacy of his daughter Maria Sue.

The lyrics find Chapman at various stages of grief: sometimes questioning, sometimes longing, sometimes relatively peaceful. “For better or worse, it just had to come straight out of my gut,” Chapman said. ”I cannot make it pretty. I cannot try to conform it to anything. It has just got to be whatever comes out. So I sort of put my fingers in my ears in a way that I have never done before as far as anybody speaking into the process.”

The raw honesty is at times gut-wrenching, as in the song Questions:

“Who are You, God? ‘Cause You are turning out to be so much different than I imagined. And where are You, God? ‘Cause I am finding life to be so much harder then I had planned.”

Ultimately, though, the album is about faith. Consider this story, and since I wouldn’t dare try to improve upon it, I quote it directly from Chapman’s site:

In the hours after Maria left to be with Jesus, Steven fervently prayed for a sign that she was okay, pleading with God just to let him see. “I remember just saying, “We know it is true. We know she is with Jesus. She is safe in the arms of the God who made her. We know she is okay. We know it, but could we just see something?” Steven recalls asking. “The next morning we went back to our house to get some clothes for the memorial service. We were not going to stay there and it was really hard to even go in the house because of the memories. We were walking through with friends who were holding on to us and we were going from room to room.

I walked into the kitchen and there is this little art table that Maria and Stevey Joy would sit at for hours. She loved crafts. She would cut out pictures. Scissors and glue were her favorite things. She would just cut and paste and draw for hours, and she often created cards for us. She would write the words she knew, “I love mom” and “I love dad” and then she would sign her name “Maria.”

Everything was cleaned up at the table but there was one little piece of notebook paper lying on her side of the art table. It was a flower, a six-petal flower that was kind of her signature flower that she would draw all the time. Only one petal was colored in blue, and the rest of it was just the outline of the petals. It had a little stem and it had a little orange center of the flower and it had little leaves at the bottom of the stem. I had noticed something else kind of bleeding through the back of the paper where she had written something and I turned it over and it was a little butterfly and then she had written the letters S-E-E. She had never written that word before. All that she had ever written as far as we knew was “I love Mom,” “I love Dad” and her name. Out of all the words that she could have written that day before the accident, she had written the word “see.” I was already weeping uncontrollably and at that moment I just really, really believed that God gave us that sign and that was the gift that Maria left us to say “I know you are wanting to see something, but see I am okay and I am where you said. It is okay.” That flower became so precious to us. It was my wife that looked at it and realized what we thought was an unfinished flower, was finished. Only one flower petal of the six was colored in. Then we realized we have six children. There is only one that is colored in; there is one that is whole and the rest of us are still waiting for our color. It just became such a gift to us.”

Make sure you listen to SEE, and gain a new appreciation for these words:

“It’s everything you said that it would be, and even better than you would believe. And I’m counting down the days until you’re here with me, And finally you’ll see.”

I don’t like to think of myself as an old man. I’m not quite in my 40’s yet, and by some measures of life expectancy I’m not even halfway through my time on this Earth. Still, I feel like an old man when I start marveling at how the world has changed all around me in such a short time.

The latest occasion for my “Hey you kids, get off my lawn!” sentiment is a bargain-bin CD purchase. I nabbed Billy Joel’s KOHUEPT for just a couple of bucks from… actually, I don’t remember which store. The memory fades when you’re old, see. It’s the live album Joel recorded during a rare concert tour of the Soviet Union. It is by no means his best work, but for me it’s more of a souvenir of another time. I remember seeing the double-album with its sparse Communist-red cover back in 1987, when album covers were glorious 12”x12” works of art. I remember wondering how the Dylan cover sounded and how “Allentown” would play before an audience of similarly disenfranchised Soviets.

I played the CD this morning and heard Angry Young Man. I remembered seeing Joel perform this song live a couple of times here in the USA, marveling at his piano rampage. Then I thought about playing the song for Hannah and Rebekah, our two pianists. And then I thought about discussing the concert’s significance with Sarah, who’s taking European History in school right now. Then I felt old.

What’s in Sarah’s history books was my life. I imagined my side of the conversation with my daughters about the CD.

“This was a huge deal back then. It was very rare for a US performer to be able to go to Leningrad and play a concert.”

“No, Leningrad doesn’t exist anymore. Now it’s Saint Petersburg.”

“Well, people couldn’t go there because the USSR was isolated from the USA. We were terrible enemies. I used to be worried that we would have a nuclear war.”

 “What was the USSR? Well, …”

They’re all such foreign concepts now, concepts relegated to history books. That’s a striking distinction. Everything that I have lived is contemporary for me, and everything in the history books is old. It could be 1942 or 1542 – it’s all history. Now, my contemporary is my children’s history. I know it happens to every adult, but the inevitability makes it no less jarring.

The opening track on the CD is called Odoya. It’s a traditional Georgian song recorded at the Jvari Monastery on a hill overlooking Tbilisi.

During a business trip I had occasion to climb that hill and walk through that very monastery. I simply got a visa and a plane ticket and I went. I took pictures (with a digital camera, even!). Once I was there, I was free to roam the country, the Republic of Georgia. A short time ago, in my lifetime, it was not the Republic of Georgia. It was just the USSR. I could not have visited, and I would not have been free to see the sites. The changes are astonishing.

They say that history and culture and events are cyclic, but today I disagree. The world I live in today is radically different from the world I lived in as a child, and it doesn’t feel like a cycle; it feels like a torrid rush. And even as I sound like an old geezer trying to explain to my children how the Cold War affected everything from the Miracle on Ice to Billy Joel to the nationality of the bad guys in professional wrestling, I take solace in this one thing. The world I inhabit today may be radically different than yesterday, but it is not fundamentally different, because it is still inhabited by people. People are fundamentally the same, and I think they always will be. We are beautiful but flawed beings, every one of us in need of salvation. That is constant. Today, I’m grateful for constants.

NOTE: This interview has been picked up by TitleTrakk.com so I suppose it’s no longer “exclusive”.

It was the top of the 12^th inning in a 2-2 ballgame, and the Cincinnati Reds had loaded the bases against the Atlanta Braves. Singer Matthew West watched the game with mixed emotions. He was happy to be able to catch a great game with his family on a sunny Atlanta afternoon (though he is a Cubs fan), but he was also eager for this extra-long game to end, since he was set to perform a post-game concert. Even so, the event that broke the tie was nothing he would have hoped for.

Cincinnati’s Micah Owings settled into the batter’s box with one out. The first pitch came and Owings swung but missed badly. Desperate for a double play, the Braves’ pitcher fired a two-seam fastball, but at the last moment, just as the ball was released, he sought to back off on the speed a bit. Instead, the ball sailed at 93 mph, straight at Owings’ head. Owings turned at the last moment and the ball struck him on the left ear flap of his batting helmet, violently knocking him to the ground.

A dazed Owings was helped off the field and stitched up. He did not pitch again for 14 days, as his recovery depended not only on physical issues, but also on a psychological element. He’s a normally reliable hitter, especially for a pitcher, but could he become more tentative or afraid?

Matthew West understands. Like an athlete sidelined by a major injury, his career was brought to a standstill in 2007 after years of damage to his vocal cords necessitated surgery. His recovery involved two months of silence, days sometimes flooded by doubts. Like the athlete hoping to return to action, West wondered if would be able to sing as well, or sing at all.

Today, West is indeed back, perhaps stronger than ever. He had the most-played song on Christian Radio in 2008 (You are Everything), and he might very well attain the same status in 2009 with The Motions. Just like he identifies with the athletes on the field, he knows that people in the audience face circumstances that shake up their world and threaten their livelihood, so his surgery and recovery have become an important part of his witness.

During the game, West recalled the surgery and reflected on how life has changed since then. “My surgery has made sure that I stay very human, as opposed to being a guy on stage who has it all together. It’s been a powerful couple of years of being able to share from a very real and vulnerable place in my life, and to share what God taught me through that.”

Like anyone facing a trial, West struggles a bit with placing its significance in context. “I have to be careful not to overdramatize what I went through. The minute you think your problems are big, take a walk through a pediatric intensive care unit. You’ll quickly gain a better perspective of your own problems. In my own little world, though, this was the headline. We all have pain and tragedy in various degrees. Someone else’s loss of a job is my vocal surgery. It’s not like that tragedy’s worse than this tragedy. When it hits you, it hits you hard.

“My voice represented a lot more than just my voice. It represented my livelihood, my ability to provide for my family, my calling, what I feel like God has called me to do. That’s why I stopped pursuing other endeavors years ago. I went down this road with no backup plan, because that’s what I believe you’re supposed to do if God calls you to something, and all of the sudden I find myself thinking, maybe I should have had a backup plan! That’s a scary thing to go through.”

Fortunately for West, no backup plan was needed. With a concert just hours away, I asked him if he has changed his approach to singing, and if he thinks he sounds any different. “I think my voice is a lot more temperamental,” he observed. “I can tell if I’ve had 5 or 8 hours of sleep. When I’m tired, I sound like I’m tired. But when I’m on, I feel like my voice is better than ever, and that’s crazy! After I started singing again, I felt like I had gone through a tune up. A lot of people have told me that from my first record to this record I’m singing a lot better than I ever have. I’m so thankful for that.”

There is no lingering tentativeness in West’s songwriting. In fact, despite his history, he related that he still writes songs that are probably too high for him. He chooses a melody and a key for the song, and hopes to figure out how to sing it later: “That’s probably what got me into surgery!” Indeed, he calls The Motions one of his most difficult songs to sing, but one that just doesn’t sound right in a lower key.

Like the injured ball player returning to the batter’s box, West has changed his game – he now follows a strict 25-minute vocal warmup routine – but he confesses that he still has a little paranoia. “What happened to me could happen again. Those blood vessels could burst again. Last night, I was in the studio singing until about 2 a.m.; we have this deadline. I hopped on the bus, went to bed about 3. We drove here, and I didn’t sleep very well, and then I got up and started talking and singing [for the Braves’ chapel service at noon]. I start to think, ‘My voice feels weak, I hope nothing’s wrong.’ But you can’t live in fear. I can’t think about that too much because I still want to sing with all my heart and really go for it.”

That’s just what he did, once the 12-inning game finally concluded and a pair of players shared their testimonies. The eight-song set was punctuated with an energy that lifted the crowd and a host of money notes and falsetto unhindered by vocal trauma.

West had an easy rapport with the crowd, and even performed an original song entitled, “Thanks to All the Braves Fans who Stuck Around.” I wondered how many in the crowd caught the Lou Gehrig reference when he stepped to the mic and said, “Today, I consider myself…” before trailing off and laughing.

There were moments of choppiness in the set, such as the demanding chorus of “Next Thing You Know”, but I’ve always thought this add a realism that makes live music unique. The highlight was one of those moments that can only happen with a large audience, when Only Grace turned a capella and then turned into Amazing Grace. West stepped away from the mic and joined the chorus of thousands, singing passionately to none but his Creator and Healer.