The Rock: Stories
The words “The Rock” are of course a double-entendre, the rock being the style of music on this first-of-three compilation, but more importantly, the words represent who Jesus Christ is – The Rock of our Salvation. I decided to lead off the album with the latest rock tune I have written, and then follow through in chronological order when I wrote the songs (with the exception of Death in the Womb, the oldest song on this compilation, but I wasn’t about to lead off with it!).
These 25 songs come from ten of my thirteen albums. Given that the first three albums were really demos, only Death in the Womb comes from them. Surrender, and Talk is Cheap were on the 3rd Demo, Living in the DMZ (1988), but the versions that appear here were rerecorded on Seasons & Souvenirs eight years later for production and higher-fidelity reasons. My thirteenth album, Azure Dawn (2014), is an instrumental piano album, so no songs on Legacy originally come from there. But other than that, these 25 songs come from 10 albums that span a 30-year recording career.
Christ is my rock, the foundation I have build the rest of my life on, having been suffocating in the quick-sand of a life not committed to anything but my own ignorant understanding and self-rational moralizing. Proverbs 3:5&6 tells us to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will direct your paths”. Nothing could be more true. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, the first and the last, and the chief cornerstone that provides the solid foundation for life. Pluralism manifestly doesn’t work, all religions are certainly not the same, and only Christ provides the platform and proof for reality and clear thinking about the value of all human beings, the purpose for our existence, and our ultimate destiny.