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Label: BNC Records
Sound/Style: mix of modern adult pop and multicultural music with a faith emphasis
By Steve Morley
Despite her success as a songwriter, Beth Nielsen Chapman never quite attained the mainstream breakthrough her talent warrants. That might just be because the top-notch tunesmith, who’s been covered by stars from Faith Hill to Elton John, is an artist of depth whose path can be unorthodox. Chapman’s 2004 CD, Hymns, found her almost exclusively recording non-original songs—in Latin, no less—to revisit her Catholic upbringing and the effect the church’s music had on her. Indeed, Chapman’s soft spot for sacred verses and melodies finds expression in her own compositions, which lean toward the sentimental and seek to uncover connections between human love and spirituality. This has increasingly become a sort of calling for the singer, who spent the last decade collecting, writing and assembling songs for what would become her ambitious new double disc, Prism: The Human Family Songbook.
In addition to originals and material by other contemporary writers, Prism contains traditional numbers representing various faiths and people groups, indicative of the broad spiritual view she takes on the album. English hymns and ethnic songs from the Christian tradition share billing with everything from Hindu, Hebrew and hip-hop elements to modern songs with unity-based themes, such as “The Flame.” (“As different as we seem to be/ We are still the same/ Divided by our separate walls/ But joined before the flame.”)
Her own “God Is In” attempts to tie the album’s many threads together by simply attributing all things to one Creator. She stretches this notion to include not only religious beliefs of all stripes, but even unbelievers, in a welcome twist of humor that stricter followers might mistake for irreverence: “God is in those dancing pagans—each drop of perspiration/ God is in the atheist....and all those things that don't exist.”
Singing in an affecting quaver atop richly romantic musical settings, Chapman audibly aches to reconcile numerous schools of thought into a unified whole, even pausing to consider that the prayers of atheists, assuming they have prayers, are heard and received. Hopeful and idealistic sentiments in songs like “Shine All Your Light” ride uneasily alongside seemingly pluralistic ones like the claim in “My Religion,” which also suggests that music itself is worthy of worship: “My religion—I am a Hindu-Buddhist-Jew-Islamic-Christian/ Combining one soul, one vision/ Living peacefully where music is the only divinity/ And sharing your art, the sacred creed/ My confession of faith is to struggle/ Go out of my way/ And find love to the end of my days.”
This fusion of faiths, while aligned with Chapman’s dream of unity, presents a problem with her prism metaphor: If religious beliefs are separate colors produced by the pure light of a holy God, they must nonetheless remain distinct, not blurred into a single hue. The prism is a lovely poetic device for encompassing all expressions of worship, and Chapman does accomplish a fair degree of continuity in the mostly meditative and reverent songs she assembles here. Prism is a bold exploration of diversity that shines light on our shared impulse to seek ultimate truth. But not even a work of this scope can change the fact that when it comes to personal faith, the world can often be colorblind.
Audio Clips
"God Is In (Goddess In)"
"My Religion (Sweet Love)"
"Prayers Of An Atheist"
"That Mystery"
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