Albums 20: To You Who Bow (2017, GIA)

Finally. I'm so happy and proud to be able to introduce to you the latest recording from the Cooney-Daigle-Donohoo trio, To You Who Bow, released by GIA today at the 2017 NPM Convention in Cincinnati, Ohio.

We have been working a long time on this recording. I suppose I've told part of the story before when introducing Like No God We Had Imagined in 2015. We had recorded about half a dozen of these songs with the new songs on Like No God, thinking that it was an album. But when we stopped and listened to the results, it was difficult to imagine that anyone would want to listen to a recording with half Christmas songs and half regular "Sunday" songs at any time of the year, no matter who recorded them and no matter what the concept was. So we opted to take the Christmas songs we had recorded and take some "legacy" seasonal music from Safety Harbor, Stony Landscapes, Today, and Terry's wonderful 1998 recording On Christmas Day in the Morning, and create Like No God which was released two summers ago for NPM.

The title song from this recording, "To You Who Bow," was premiered at NPM in 2014 and was very well received, and was chosen to be included in the new edition of RitualSong which is being released this summer at the music conventions, including NPM. We had been negotiating with GIA since late 2013 on getting some new songs published, and after a long series of emails and meetings, by February 2014 we had letters of intent for about a dozen songs, including the new Christmas arrangements that were to appear later as Like No God, to be recorded. By November, the songs from the original agreements had been recorded, and I had already begun to express misgivings about releasing them together. In April of 2015, Michael Silhavy met with us, and we decided to go ahead an release the album of new Christmas music mixed with some legacy music, and explore recording some more songs to make a truly new collection of songs for liturgy.


After a meeting about content shortly after Christmas, in February of 2016, Michael thought that "If You Had Faith/Si Tuvieras Fe, a translation and SAB arrangement I had done of the Spanish folk song sometimes called Montaña, would fill a gap that GIA had in their NPM lineup for that year, and he asked us to go ahead and record that song right away so that a version could be ready in the summertime. At this time, we knew that we were going to include two songs from a 2013 compilation album called Gathered for God, those songs being Gary's lovely James Tayloresque version of Psalm 23 "The Lord Is My Shepherd," and my song "God Is Love," which ties together the statement about God in 1 John 4:16 with St. Paul's paean to agápe in 1 Cor. 13. We had recorded "Turn Around," "Gathered and Sent," "Send Out, Send Out," "Acts of God," and "To You Who Bow" with the Christmas music back in 2013-14. We decided to record seven more songs to make the new album complete.

For the tracking, we called in some of our friends from the olden days, notably Beth Lederman and
Matt McKenzie, along with Randy Carpenter, a childhood neighbor and lifelong friend of Gary's with whom he'd grown up playing in bands and making music. Beth and Matt both played with Gary in one incarnation of his ensemble while working at the Franciscan Renewal Center in Scottsdale, AZ. Beth is an amazingly talented jazz musician who is one of the busiest working women in the Phoenix area, with a great sensitivity to many Latin rhythms as well, so she is in great demand. Matt moved to Nashville back in the 90s, and has worked with Lyle Lovett, Don Williams, Patty Loveless, and most recently has toured with Olivia Newton-John's band. This incredible trio of musicians did the rhythm tracks for those last seven songs in less than three days in the spring of 2016.

Matt McKenzie

With the rhythm tracking done, Gary turned to a group of singers gathered by Paul Rausch, a McHenry choral director who had built a great program at McHenry High School over the years, and who had a group of alumni who were always ready to work with him again. Terry and I were constantly impressed and amazed at the way this group worked together, how whenever they felt out of synch on a vowel sound or an articulation they would confer on one member or another and come up with a solution in seconds. Four of Paul's sons, also alumni, also sang in this ensemble. An impressive group.

Over the next few weeks, Gary took the opportunity to add instrumental overdubs to the tracks. Over the years since writing the songs, most of them had acquired small orchestral scores; some, in fact, had been commissioned for small church orchestras. To achieve a consistent sound on the recording, Gary tends to seriously adapt parts I've written, substituting much smaller groupings of instruments for what I wrote, and the results, I have learned, are invariably better. In this case, we also got the help of local saxophonist and arranger Jim Gailloreto to write pop horn arrangements for "Si Tuvieras Fe," "Jesus Christ the Cornerstone," "Eyes on the Prize," and "Mary, Don't You Weep," and his parts are both playable for most players we tend to use in our churches and wonderfully adapted to the style and feel of the songs themselves. By the end of September, 2016, the recordings were pretty much in their final form. In November, Gary was able to deliver the mastered CD to GIA.

Terry doing her thing

It was a wonderful surprise that John Flaherty asked to use "O Agápe" at the 2017 LA Religious Education Congress in March of this year. John is one of the folks I like to bounce new material off of, and he remembered this one when he was in planning sessions for the Congress liturgies, and used it for a call to worship. Unfortunately, we were not able to have an octavo ready in time for the conference, but at least the song got some unexpected exposure on the left coast!

This is the list of tracks in play order:

Acts of God 

To You Who Bow

Gathered and Sent 

God Is Love
Eyes on the Prize (Hold On) (African American Spiritual, text adapted RC, arr. RC)

Jesus Christ the Cornerstone

Psalm 18: I Love You (ICEL text)

Psalm 29: The Temple and the Storm
Psalm 23  (ICEL text, music by Gary Daigle)

Turn Around 

Psalm 13: How Long
O Agápe
Psalm 104: Send Out, Send Out (ICEL text)
If You Had Faith/Si Tuvieras Fe (Latin American folk, arr. Rory Cooney, English text by Rory Cooney)

Mary, Don’t You Weep (African American Spiritual, text adapted RC, arr. RC)

Matt and Beth working it out

The “beating heart” of this collection is that Jesus is the “face of God’s mercy,” or as the gospel puts it, “whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” If Jesus is one who puts aside glory to be a person of service, healing, and reconciliation, that is also what God looks like, and the Holy Spirit who is the life of God enables us to live that life in God in this world in a community of mutuality. There are other gods that want our allegiance, most of whom are idols devised by us ourselves, and propagated by us when we decide that we have a better idea about civilization than the Sermon on the Mount. There are gods of war, gods of violence and threats, gods of money and influence. But we cannot serve two masters. The gospel invites us to listen to the voice that calls us with unswerving love in our creation and baptism, and to follow the way of Jesus to a world formed by loving service. The songs in this collection, in one way or another, orbit around that axis. Thus the title song, “To You Who Bow,” honors the God who “did not cling to godliness, but took the form of a slave,” showing us the slow, peaceful way to transforming the earth.

Two of the songs, "Acts of God" and "Gathered and Sent" were commissioned by Old St. Patrick's Church in Chicago for various events, thanks to the generosity of the parish and Bill Fraher, the music director at the time, who continues to direct their special events choirs after passing the liturgical baton to Dominic Trumfio, Jennifer Budziak, and Mark Scozzafave since that time. That parish's great tradition of energetic sung worship and supporting the arts in general continues to be a model for Chicagoland parishes.

Turn Around was commissioned for a parish formation program in Catholic social teaching designed by Jack Jezreel and the folks at JustFaith. The title, “Turn Around,” is a literal translation of the word metanoia, which is often rendered as “conversion” or “repentance.” What the word suggests is a literal turning and going in a different direction, starting from within the heart and mind of a person, then directing one’s actions in the world. It is a call to action that echoes the gospel call to “Repent (i.e., turn around) and believe the good news.” I think it might help congregations refresh and sense anew what conversion really is, hear the call again evangelically, and make a change toward the gospel.

God Is Love - Came from an idea that love is one, though it manifests itself in different ways. In the Greek of 1 John 4:16 and 1 Cor. 13 the word for “love” used by the authors of those letters is agápe, the highest of the four (or five, or six) kinds of love expressed by different words in Greek. So it made sense to me that, as St. Paul writes in Corinthians, if “love is patient, love is kind,” then we ought to be able to say that not only is the human person (especially the Christian) who loves is patient and kind, but also Christ, and also the God of whom Christ is the “living face.” In this song, with 1 Jn 14:16 for the refrain and 1 Cor. 13 for the verses, those concepts get blended in the choral third verse, in which the choir’s “God is love” refrain dovetails with the litany from Corinthians in such a way that the word “love” serves both as the end of one phrase and the beginning of another. 

Two songs in this collection, Eyes on the Prize (Hold On) and Mary, Don’t You Weep have been recorded by dozens, if not hundreds, of artists through the years, expanded and interpreted in the spiritual and folk traditions by artists as diverse as Pete Seeger, Odetta, Bruce Springsteen, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples, and Aaron Neville. As for me, I wondered as I listened to various versions which “Mary” was being referred to in the song, and I think it means Mary Magdalene. But maybe it was Mary the sister of Lazarus, I don’t know. So rather than try to pull it one way or the other, I wrote three different lyrics for different events: one for Mary, Lazarus’s sister, for the 5th Sunday in Lent, one for Magdalene, for Easter Vigil and the Easter season, and another one for all the Marys and the last Sundays of the year. As for Eyes on the Prize (Hold On), in this world, these times, we just need that song all the time.

Please give To You Who Bow a listen! I know that there are songs here that your congregation and will enjoy singing, and can become a part of your repertoire. And I'm prejudiced, of course, but I believe that To You Who Bow is our best "listening" experience since Vision. Gary has done a great job with this recording, and the nearly fifty singers and other musicians who took part in its creation have done a wonderful job.

A special word of thanks, too, to Alec Harris and Michael Silhavy at GIA who stood with us during this project, and to the amazing Andrew Schultz who designed the cover and all the enclosures and design work. We're very proud of our work with GIA over the twenty-eight years we've been working with them, and grateful for the support and trust we've received over the years from everyone there. Thank you.