Composing Scripture Songs

00:13
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the Essentially Translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. My name is Rich Rudowske. 

00:18
Rich Rudowske
I’m the Chief Operating Officer here at LBT. Today we are talking about scripture and music with LBT missionary Rob Veith, whose serves as an ethnodoxologist and consults on projects with several partner organizations. Rob has a background in music production, among many other things, and has a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from Liberty University. Joining us is Rob’s wife, Eshinee, who serves as LBT’s training coordinator and who also has a musical background. As you will hear in our conversation at the end of the episode, we’ll invite you to consider how you and your congregation, or small group of folks that you share your faith life with, could benefit from composing your own scripture songs and the value in going deep with scripture through creative processes like the one we’ll describe. Enjoy today’s episode. 

01:00
Rich Rudowske
Well, today we are welcoming Rob and Eshinee Veith to the podcast, and we’re going to talk about composing scripture songs. And this is something that Rob and Eshinee are both passionate about, have done quite a bit. And for the listeners here, we talked about making this episode, and then I sent them a Psalm 70, 71 and 12, and said, hey, what can you do with this? And that’s how we got started. And really, that’s all the knowledge I have in general about the process. So we’re going to let Rob and Eshinee walk us through what happens next. When you record scripture, you select a scripture and do some work to compose it. But first, I just want to have the listeners get to know you two a little bit better. 

01:45
Rich Rudowske
So tell us some about how you got involved in Bible translation ministry and what you were doing before, how God led you to serve with LBT. 

01:54
Rob Veith
Well, Eshinee started that. 

01:57
Eshinee Veith
Yeah, I was with youth with a mission in Haiti, doing a discipleship training school. And as a part of that time, we were actively praying regularly for God’s plan for our lives. And in the process, I learned about Bible translation, and that became something that I was really excited about and really wanted to do. And so this was before email. And so I wrote letters to Bible translation people that I heard about with Wycliffe, and a series of letters got me to the Canada Institute of Linguistics, studying linguistics for a summer in British Columbia. And while I was there, I found that, yes, indeed, I am wired for linguistics. I do have Bible translation skills. 

02:46
Eshinee Veith
So in the course of being there, I met Rob at lunch. I had heard some of his music. A friend of mine was recording music for me and also recording music for Rob and playing our music for each other. So I expressed an interest in meeting Rob. And so we met, and then I continued studying linguistics, and he continued working in the Seattle area for a tech company. And things got serious and he proposed. And I said, sure, just as long as you understand that means we’re going to be doing Bible translation. So I will be working with a translation project, and you need to find something useful to do while we’re overseas. And he said, sure. 

03:34
Eshinee Veith
So we reached out to various Bible translation organizations after we got married and had a great conversation with the recruiter at LBT, who, when we… email existed then. So we wrote to LBT, and Peter Slayton got back to us and said, yeah, I’ll be in your area next week. Let’s get together. So I told him about my interest in Bible translation, but then Rob had a conversation with Peter. If you want to share about that. 

04:03
Rob Veith
Rob taking most of the good. I mean, he interviewed me about my background and just said, you’re a vernacular media specialist. And then he explained what that would become. That was my initial work with LBT in vernacular media, and I’ve kind of evolved into the ethno- arts role that I have now. 

04:27
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, so. But your work with LBT wasn’t the first international work you had done, was it? You had done some things before that. Because that might have been quite a shock to say, okay, I’m going to marry this lady and do this thing. 

04:41
Rob Veith
I hadn’t planned on doing my first overseas. This is actually how I got into the work that I’m doing was I spent time in Ecuador in the early 90s, working with what is now Reach Beyond. It was then HCJB, or World Radio Missionary Fellowship. And my background is in writing and commercial art. And so I was there working on their magazine. And one of the things that I do whenever I travel is I try to look for. And I’ve done this before. I knew that this is how I was wired. I would look for music that could only come from the place in which I was. That would be my souvenir from a trip. And this is in the Andes mountains, which, if you know, folk music that has one of the great folk musics of the world comes out of the Andes mountains. 

05:29
Rob Veith
And so I wanted Andean group playing Andean folk music on a CD. And I could not find any decent recordings of Andean folk music from that area in the shops. And as someone who loves the world folk music. That was disheartening to me. And so I began with this idea. We need to document these musics from around the world that might otherwise be lost, which is similar to what linguists do with language. But I was thinking of it in terms of music. It didn’t become a missionary vocation idea for me until several years later, when I learned that there were people that worked as missionaries that were helping them develop church music and styles from around the world. And I wasn’t able to act upon that as a thing until after Eshinee and I got married. 

06:20
Rob Veith
And I saw that it’s something I could move into, because now I had a reason to. Prior to that. It’s hard to change careers when you have a successful career as a commercial artist. I did some coursework early on, and I’m working full time and going to school half time and not sleeping anymore. I didn’t get very far into the program before I just quit. I didn’t have an exit trajectory at that point. 

06:47
Rich Rudowske
So you mentioned that you were interested in the local style of music. That would be from local artists in their local style, which kind of dovetails some with language, written and spoken communication language. There’s no such thing as a universal language there. But people talk about music in a way as having a universal language. But you would say that there’s something universal about it. But there’s something very specific culturally about music, too. Can you tell us some about that? 

07:16
Rob Veith
Yeah. So music is a universal phenomenon, but in the same way that there are many languages in the world, there’s actually a lot more musical languages. And musical languages have grammar and syntax, and they have submeanings and they have idioms just like spoken languages do. But there’s a lot more of them and there’s bit more crossover. When I first got to Botswana, we visited a group that they have three drums in all their songs, and to my ears it was just the first time I got there, the drums were all playing entirely unrelated things, and I just thought, this is just cacophonous. I don’t understand what I’m hearing, and now I do. I understand exactly what I’m hearing, and I can separate what each of the different drums is doing, but I had to learn that language. 

08:10
Rob Veith
And in the same way, someone that has no background in Western music hearing a classical composition with 99 instruments playing different things, it’s cacophonous. If your music that you grew up with is three drums and you get a violin section, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s a language you can’t speak. 

08:33
Rich Rudowske
There’s something too, sort of the heart aspect of music then that if we’re thinking about worship, would speak to that. For example, just incidentally, we have sometimes joked about we’re sitting with folks singing traditional Lutheran hymns in the Lutheran tradition, which have some strange minor keys and things like that. And some folks that are not from that tradition find that difficult to relate to. But yet others who have grown up with that tradition really deeply resonate with that. So you find the same phenomenon music universally. Yeah, I guess that speaks to the importance of not just importing a certain style that is universal but really looking into what speaks to the heart. So how do you go about that? 

09:20
Rob Veith
Well, when I talk about heart music, I think of it differently than a lot of my colleagues do. If musics are different languages, your own heart music is going to be a combination of the musics that you relate to. So for me, I have this mix of American and British and African folk music. So the music that speaks to me is this kind of deep roots music from various places that I’ve spent significant time. And other people are going to have different root music. I don’t relate at all to Lutheran hymn, but for some people, that’s really powerful to them, but it won’t be the only thing that’s powerful to them. 

10:02
Rich Rudowske
Sure. 

10:02
Rob Veith
Right. You might really appreciate Lutheran hymnity and hip hop. These are your heart music. And so where I go, there’s two ways you can go about learning what the heart music is. There’s a great question that some colleagues of mine in Asia ask is how do you communicate important things in ways other than normal speech, which is the most open ended question about what are their forms of media that they use? What are the forms of art that they use to communicate important ideas? And it would always end up with music, but often there’s a musical component. So there’ll be some ways that they sing things, but there are also other ways that they communicate important information. I will often have people just, if we’re doing a music event, we’ll compose first and then figure out what we’ve done. 

10:59
Rob Veith
And especially if I’m familiar with the traditions that people are coming from, I can listen to a song that somebody has done and say, oh, you’re really into this and this and this. These are the things that mean something to you. One of the first ones I did in English in America, the first song composed was very Marantha, and I’m like, oh, Maranatha. And the lady that composed it was like, that was really important to me when I was a child. It’s deep in there. I didn’t even think about that when I did the song or something like that. I’m quoting her imperfectly. 

11:38
Rich Rudowske
Sure. 

11:38
Rob Veith
I hope I don’t offend anyone by paraphrasing, but that was what I took from the conversation. 

11:44
Eshinee Veith
Something related to this. When we speak of heart language and heart music, something that’s growing in the awareness of people who are working both in translation and in ETH musicology, is that people are multilingual. And so when we say heart language, it’s actually broader than that. Coming from a monolingual perspective. We like the idea that there’s a single language that speaks to people, and that’s what we need to work in. But the reality is, most of the world is multilingual, and they have a variety of languages that will speak to their heart, and it’s a matter of allowing people to use and interact in the languages that mean something to them. And in the same way, there are many heart musics. 

12:30
Eshinee Veith
When we first went to Botswana, a lot of the training has to do with identifying the traditional music of a community or a culture. And what we found instead, Rob would have a lot of interactions with people where he would find it’s not just the songs that are a part of their tradition, that are used in traditional ceremonies or on traditional occasions. But in fact, there were a lot of different music styles and traditions that touched people’s hearts. For example, in the lutheran church, people had a great love for the hymns that had been translated. This doesn’t nullify their traditional style of music. It’s just one of their many heart musics. And allowing people the flexibility to engage with scripture and engage with God in the many musics that are meaningful to their heart. 

13:24
Eshinee Veith
It’s very rewarding to see people communicating, not just in all of the languages, but all of the musics. 

13:31
Rich Rudowske
So tell us about some of the places where you have done this kind of work or engaged in a process like that, who you were working with and how you saw it bear fruit, or just sometimes you don’t get to be around long enough to see that. But how you saw the Spirit at work and what you saw happen in there, just give us a little insight into what this looks like. In some of the places you’ve done this. 

13:54
Rob Veith
I’ve done a lot of them, and they’re all special, and they’re all powerful, and they all turn out entirely different, and the process is different. Every time. I mean, I go in with a plan, and then there’s always a day when something goes so dramatically wrong that I have to abandon my plan. And that’s just the nature of these workshops. But some that I’ve seen powerful fruit from. I did a workshop in Psalms in narrow language, and it was an exciting one in that they finished translating the Psalms, and they were talking about how to release the psalms. And I had a conversation with some people on the translation team and said, we know the Psalms are like the song book of the Bible. 

14:41
Rob Veith
And I think, as somebody that’s in the periphery of the translation community, that if you haven’t translated the Psalms in such a way that they can be sung, you’ve kind of missed something there, because you have to think about translating the medium as well as the words. And they said, well, we think they can be sung, but who can help us write songs? I was cheeky, and I’m like, how long have you known me? How many times have I said, this is what I do? And so we organized a gathering where all the churches that were ethnically, this community, sent their choirs, and we composed about two cds worth of songs from Psalms. And that was how the Psalms entered the community. They left singing Psalms from the backs of the trucks. 

15:39
Rob Veith
And I talked to the consultant on the project about a year later and said that he and his wife are going to these churches now, and they’ve abandoned the liturgy. They aren’t doing sermons. They aren’t doing any of the prayers. They’re just singing Psalms for the whole service. I don’t know how long that lasted, but I thought, that sounds like a win. 

16:02
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, it does. 

16:02
Rob Veith
You know, that’s one of the ones. One of the most extreme projects for me was working in, which is in the Calhari, a group you’re familiar with. And the reason for that one is they were doing translation of certain key Bible passages, and very few people can read the language. And so a printed Bible would not have much impact. And the folks that brought me out there were saying that people are dominated by another group. And so if you want to become a christian, you have to become a christian kind of under this other group that’s there. Right. And the other group, they don’t have the Bible in their language either. That’s work in progress. It’s coming along. There’s a translation work that’s happening, but they don’t have direct access to the word even there. 

16:56
Rob Veith
So they’re working in several languages removed, several cultures removed in accessing the scripture. And so we wanted to do something that was just as close as we can get with a few barriers. It’s their language, it’s their cultural music. It’s them engaging with the scripture. And what was fun about this one is the people that came. It really felt like the wedding feast of the lamb in that a bunch of people had been invited and a bunch of people had agreed to come. And then in the last day, for reasons we don’t know, like 90% of the people that had signed up decided at the last minute they weren’t going to come. 

17:39
Rob Veith
And there was one guy who had signed up and who was coming, and as he was riding alone in the truck coming from the remote village to the village where we were holding the workshop, he said, take me back. Take me home. Take me home. And the guy that was driving said, no, I don’t want to take you all the way back there. So even the one guy that was there, the first. So they just reached out and gathered anybody. Do you own a musical instrument? Come to this thing? Do you know how to sing? Come to this? And so they didn’t come with any church music background, and so they were playing instruments that had…I gone to any other group in Botswana. And when the Naro bring their church choirs in, they know how church music is supposed to sound. 

18:25
Rob Veith
And they come in with that as a preconceived notion of how church music sounds. The guys in the community had no preconceptions, and so they had their four string guitars and their setinkane and their segaba, and they just started playing this stuff. For me, as someone who loves that traditional music, this is a powerful thing to me, to hear this music being played the moment we didn’t get on tape, because the guy, Eshinee has a video of this guy, that he’s playing the segaba, which is kind of a shepherd’s instrument. And as he’s jamming on it, one of the younger guys begins to sing the 23rd Psalm over this, and an old guy who was there says, you’re doing it wrong. Here’s how you sing to a segaba. 

19:21
Rob Veith
And there’s a way that you sing to the segaba where you don’t just sing all the words linearly, you kind of riff on certain phrases. And so he started doing this riffing on the certain phrases. It’s very traditional, very deep tradition. But he’s doing the 23rd Psalm, and the guy that was doing the vocals, he got really sick after that, was not able to record a final version of the song. As he had done it. But we have a little bit of it on video. But just that kind of thing happening is very powerful. 

19:51
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, that is the shepherd’s Psalm on the shepherd’s instrument sung a shepherd’s way. That’s pretty cool. So let’s talk some about the process here, and then we’ll talk some about the value of this kind of thing for folks in the US. So what we did here was, I imagine there are different ways that a group would go about selecting the Psalm, but in this case, we selected a Psalm, or it could be any scripture portion. Psalm 77. I chose verses eleven and twelve out of there. But the whole Psalm is fair game. Let’s just walk through. Let’s say that’s happened somehow. Groups collaborated and decided that’s the one we really want to do. So what happens next? 

20:33
Rob Veith
Okay, well, and there’s two ways that I approach it, and it depends on how much time I have. What I’m often doing with churches these days is a kind of half day seminar, and then I acknowledge that everything that we’re doing is highly compressed, and if left to my own devices, I will spend more time on it. And so that’s what I did with this particular psalm, is I allowed myself the time it took because I didn’t have a deadline before lunch. Had I had a deadline before lunch, it would have been a very different thing. The ideal process is I will read the Psalm. I read the whole thing and kind of get a feel for it and then let it sit for a day. And I’ll do that until I start understanding it. 

21:17
Rob Veith
I’m always asking myself this question of, so what is the Psalm about inherently, and what is it saying to me today? And what I’m doing is just in the abstract, I’m looking for what is the kind of the centerpiece? What’s the part of it that’s speaking to me most strongly? And in the case of, if I’m given an assignment like I was with Psalm 77, you gave me what you thought of as the key verses. So I already knew the answer to what are the key verses. But it’s then what is the rest of it saying? And how can I render those verses in such a way that is informed by what I’m getting from it? We tend to, in our culture, read silently. We’ll just open a book and read along, and your brain interprets what you’re reading as you go. 

22:04
Rob Veith
But if you read out loud, you have to add interpretation. So if I’m just reading, I cried out to God for help. I cried out to God to hear me when I was in distress, I sought the Lord at night. I stretched out my untiring hands, and my soul refused to be comforted. It doesn’t really mean very much. What’s important about that – I cried out to God for help- is that I cried out to God for help. I cried out to God for help, not other things. I cried out to God. I cried out to God for help. You emphasize different things based on what you think it means, what you think the important part is. 

22:42
Rob Veith
And so after I’ve let it sit for a while, I read it out loud, and I’ll read it out loud, trying to define the meaning in how I emphasize words, how I phrase things as I read through it. And there’s a process of kind of cycling, reading through in cycles and exaggerating that interpretation. It almost sounds like you’re preaching the Word at that point. Like a pastor will say, we’ll read the Word and then exposit upon it. The goal with this reading is you are expositing in how you read. You aren’t saying, here’s what I think it means. You’re saying, hopefully by how I read it, you understand what I think it means. If you follow that. 

23:29
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. 

23:30
Rob Veith
So I cried out to God to hear me. I cried out to God to hear me. And you can play with it in different ways. And some of the songs that people have done, I’m not sure what the meaning is. I hear it this way, and this way. And so they’ll repeat it several different ways. 

23:50
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

23:51
Rob Veith
Based upon what they’re getting out of it. And so that’s what I’ll do for a while. And as I’m doing that, I know that you’ve given me the core of the song, you’ve given me the assignment. And there’s things that I’m thinking I want to pull these other things in that are speaking to me about as commentary on this key verse. And with this one, I’ve done that. I pulled out the lyrics that I had there. I pulled out the first part, and there’s a part at the end that really spoke to me. I have the NIV up here. It’s not nearly as compelling as some of the other ones I read. I pulled up different translations as well. 

24:35
Rich Rudowske
Okay. 

24:35
Rob Veith
And just to have access to them, partly because if I’m doing something that gets published, I don’t want it to be recognizable directly as one translation. If I’m doing a memory verse song, then it has to be word for word. But if I’m doing one of my own songs, then I don’t want it to be word for word because I don’t want to get sued for taking someone’s transition. 

24:56
Rich Rudowske
Okay? That’s a whole ‘nother podcast. 

25:03
Rob Veith
And when I’m working in a seminar in a group, I’ll often have. We’ll talk about the make-up of the group, so I’ll have somebody there that, it’s kind of my exegetical checker to make sure that I don’t change anything that’s changing the meaning. I did not do that this time because I’m working by myself. So I had those elements that I pulled out. So it’s the crying out to God, you hold my eyelids open, and the part at the end, your path led through the sea, through the mighty waters, and your footprints were not seen. And that just really spoke to me, and I’m not going to explain why because that would kind of invalidate the whole process. But there’s something about creating art that pulls something deep out of you. So that’s where the song was. 

25:51
Rob Veith
I had basically the lyric at that point. I had the rhythm of it, and I was able to read out loud, with a flow, the parts that I wanted to draw upon. And then I pick up an instrument, and I usually compose with. I have a ramke from South Africa that’s a four stringed lute. And I often compose on that because it forces me to use simple chords. A lot of these things about some of the African instruments that I love that really only play in two keys. And so it kind of forces you to simplify the harmonic structure you’re working with. And so I came up with the song that way, and I thought I was done for a while, but I kept telling, if this were a short seminar, I would be done, because you don’t have time to rethink your music. 

26:37
Rob Veith
At that point, though, some people take their songs away and say, I know this one isn’t done yet. I want to work on it some more. And that’s how I felt about this one. It was melodically and lyrically correct, and the rhythm of the words was correct, but it didn’t evoke the right emotional feeling that I had for it. And as is the way of right brain thinking, a lot of this is happening in my right brain, this recognition that this isn’t musically, it’s not there yet. And so I was in the shower. As often happens, I get creative inspiration in the shower. And I started actually, I imagined my fingers playing a number of unusual chords that don’t normally go together, but I could hear them. I thought, that’s what needs to be there. And so I went up. 

27:23
Rob Veith
This is like, 11:00 at night. I said, just go to sleep. I have to go upstairs. And I went up there, and I found these chords on the guitar. And the song is the same melodic contour and the same rhythm that I had before, but the chords happening underneath are entirely different. The original song, it’s very 1-5-1-4 american folk music kind of song. And this new one has a weird ringing tone and a descending bass line, but then it fits how I felt when I did the song. That’s kind of the process that I use to go through it. 

28:03
Rich Rudowske
Okay, so I think what we’ll do here is play what you composed and then come back and talk about it here. 

28:23
Rob Veith Singing
I cry loud to God? I cry loud and He will hear me? You hold my eyelids open? My hands are stretched out without weary? And I said, let me remember the song I once sang? Let me sing it again. I will remember the deeds of the Lord? I will remember your wonders of old? I will ponder all of your works? And reflect upon all your mighty deed? The water saw you and they feared you went through? And your footprints, they were unseen? I will remember the deeds of the Lord? I will remember your wonders of old? I will ponder all of your works? And reflect upon all your mighty deeds? I will remember the deeds of the Lord? I will remember your wonders of old? I will ponder over your works? And reflect upon all your mighty deed? 

31:11
Rob Veith
And then the third guitar solo will begin and go on for the next ten minutes. 

31:16
Rich Rudowske
Right. And the music video will have some scenery from South Dakota and something like that. 

31:22
Eshinee Veith
Black and white. 

31:23
Rob Veith
Black and white. 

31:26
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. So, as you’ve mentioned, this can be a fairly individual process. And so Eshinee has also worked on the same Psalm. Eshinee kind of talk through a little bit about your approach and anything that you’d like to share about the process from your perspective or reflections on the version we heard here. 

31:49
Eshinee Veith
Yeah. One of the interesting things about Rob and I working together is that sometimes on Scripture songs, we can’t work together because our inspiration will go in very different directions. We’ve actually had times when we were at church, and we would hear a verse, and we would both get song ideas for it. And we came home one Sunday, and I was like, you know, I’ve got a song idea for that. Rob’s like, I do, too. And it’s like, well, let’s work on it together. And so he started to play what he was working on, and I was like, nope, stop. Go upstairs. You go write your song. I’ll write my song because it’s amazing. 

32:27
Rob Veith
Totally different. 

32:28
Eshinee Veith
Totally different. We have totally different directions that we will go with exactly the same verse using the same methodology. And it often shows up in different chord progressions. I also compose with a limited instrument. It’s the only thing I can really compose on. And so I have certain chords that are going to emerge time and time again. Rob will work on things, often for long periods of time. And I’m kind of like… I work in flashes of inspiration plus a little bit of analysis. That’s how I work. And so when I got your scripture verses first, I opened to different versions until I found one that I liked, the rhythm of how it sounded when read out loud. And I settled on the ESV myself. 

33:14
Eshinee Veith
And one of my methods is I will take the sentence that’s in front of me, and I’ll rewrite it on paper, kind of a literate approach. First of all, I’ll rewrite it on paper according to, like, semicolons and commas and stuff like that until it looks like a chord chart that you would sing from. And then I read it out loud, and I will look for the patterns. Like in this I saw, I will remember, and then I will remember. So I knew that those were going to be the beginning of stanzas, just because that’s how they look. And the nice thing about Psalms, when you’re working with Psalms for Scripture songs, is that many of our English versions will actually write them out in stanzas. So it really helps with the reading it out loud and thinking of it as stanzas. 

34:01
Eshinee Veith
So already my mind is thinking these are stanzas, and so it’s primed to produce stanzas. So then when I was reading it out loud, I will remember. And in both of our versions, you’re going to hear remember is going to sound like that, because that’s how remember sounds when you say it out loud. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. And it’s the same number of syllables. It’s really quite neat and tidy, which makes it easier to do something repetitive. And what I’ll often do is if I like the sound of something, I’ll just do it again, which is sort of like it’s cheating at rhyming, basically. So I did verse eleven. I repeated it, and then I just basically sang it out loud. 

34:47
Eshinee Veith
The way that I work is it’s not like I’m writing the song. It’s like my brain is writing the song for me. All of us write silly songs. I think somebody says something ridiculous and you write a silly song in response to it. We all sort of do that spontaneously. Parents will do that for their kids. They’ll sing song little things to them. How do we do that? It’s just something that our brains will spontaneously do because we have music that’s been instilled in us. So I trust my brain to do that for me, and I just open my mouth and sing something. The first line was just, I will remember the deeds of the Lord. I was like, ooh, I like that. I said, yes, I will remember your wonders of old. 

35:33
Eshinee Veith
I was able to just copy the last part of the first one, and then I just did that a couple of times, and I sang that a few times until I was like, yeah, that’s the melody I like. And I tweaked it here and there until it was exactly the way I wanted it to sound. And then I thought, okay, I can’t ignore verse twelve. So I was like, I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. I was like, oh. So I just did that again. And so the thing about it, when you produce songs in this way, it will sound like it’s always existed because it’s coming out of all of the stuff that you have already put in you from other sources, other music sources. 

36:16
Eshinee Veith
And so I’ve heard it said at other scripture songwriting workshops, somebody will do the song, and then they’ll stop and they’ll say, that’s a song already. And I’m like, no, right. It isn’t. 

36:29
Rob Veith
It happens all the time. 

36:31
Eshinee Veith
There’s something songs that come out of the rhythm of the words and that come out of the music that we already know, that come out of the intuitions that we formed based on music that we’ve been listening to for decades. It sounds very natural. It sounds like something that already exists. And no doubt, we do pull little licks and little melodic intervals and patterns. We pull that from different places. So I suppose you could reconstruct the songs from all of the songs that we’ve put into ourselves, but we don’t really have to. Rob, what’s the phrase about artists, bad. 

37:05
Rob Veith
Artists, good artists borrow. Great artists steal. 

37:10
Rich Rudowske
All right, well, let’s listen to Eshinee’s version of the Psalm. 

37:22
Eshinee Veith Singing
I will remember the deeds of the Lord Yes, I will remember your wonders of old I will remember the deeds of the Lord, yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deed. I will ponder all your work and meditate on your mighty deeds. I will remember the deeds of the Lord Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. I will remember the deeds of the Lord. Yes, I will remember your wonders of old. 

38:26
Rob Veith
Both of these methods are valid, and both these are part of the process. 

38:30
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

38:31
Rob Veith
And the thing that I take away from it is it’s how we learn the Scripture, too. What I have discovered is I’ve learned the Word better by creating songs from it than I learned from a traditional quote, unquote, Bible study. Sit around and say, here’s what I get out of it. And the things, especially in the Psalms, that this one is great in that it’s full of praising and it’s full of lament, and they exist side by side together, right. And there’s an appeal to the word, and there’s an appeal to the goodness of God. And many Psalms are like that. And I found that at happy times in my life and in sad times of my life, the Psalms have been my soundtrack and that I’ve got a number of them now just inside. 

39:25
Rob Veith
I don’t forget them now because I have Psalms that I’ve made from them. Sometimes when you’re reading the Word, you get a sudden powerful insight, and you think, whoa. How did I never see that there before? And then five minutes later, you can’t even explain it. And if I’m in that mode and I write a song, then even if I can’t explain it, I have that insight every time I come back to that song. I don’t know what other people get out of it, but that’s what I get out of it. 

39:53
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, it’s true. When I was pastoring a church, part of our confirmation curriculum was to learn the Scripture verses, and they were set to music. Actually quite well done. And that’s the same for me. Those are some of the verses. I wasn’t a student, I was an instructor. But I remember those verses so well because of singing them. So let’s say you’re in a congregation or a small group of folks that have asked you to come and help them to do this. We’ve kind of talked about the value in that. Certainly you go deep in the Word and really wrestle with scripture, and certainly the Lord is going to work through that and put in their hearts. But I think the first question somebody’s going to ask is, okay, well, who’s the right kind of person to show up for this. 

40:34
Rich Rudowske
Maybe somebody says, well, I’m not musical. I don’t know really how to play instruments or stuff like that. Should I go to something like that if it’s happening at my church? 

40:42
Rob Veith
I take in a lot of kinds of people. Take in. That’s the wrong word. It’s like they’re strange. If you are already musical, you have an advantage, usually, unless the music that you know is so rigid that you can’t have fun with it. Every once in a while I run into somebody that…it’s like their classical music training gets in the way of them being a songwriter. But usually, almost always, if you have a musical background, you have a benefit. So people with a musical background, even people that have written songs before, will find value in exploring the Scripture this way. People that have not composed songs before will most likely compose songs in this event and will often be surprised that they have done so. 

41:33
Rob Veith
We’ve had people there that just like music and have no real musical background who have done great songs. It’s nice to have a good mix of people that have a… I always try to have at least one person who has a Biblical languages background or is a pastor, because as we adapt words to fit music, like I say, the second verse is the hardest one to write. Because once you’ve written a verse and you have a chorus, if you want to go on and write more, you kind of are committed to what you did when the first verse has to make sense. And so I want to revise the words a little bit to make it all fit together. 

42:18
Rob Veith
And you want to have somebody on hand that can say that’s still true to what it says or that’s not true to what it says anymore. Some people work alone, and some people will collaborate. And as you have people with mixed levels of ability and interest having little groups, it can be highly profitable. You have to be willing to work with other people, and there’s a certain amount of vulnerability in the seminars. You have to be willing to come in and teach a song that you’ve come up with, whether or not it’s ready. You have to come in and say, here’s what I’ve got right now, and play it for other people. And that can be hard. That’s hard for me to do, and I do this all the time. 

42:57
Rob Veith
But a willingness to get up there and sing off key and miss a few chords and have somebody come alongside you and help you do it better, that will get you pretty far. And these things can last. The ones I’ve done in the States have usually not been more than about 3 hours, but overseas I’ve gone as long as a week. And that’s a very different dynamic. Whether it’s a three hour thing or… 

43:24
Eshinee Veith
A week long thing, it’s all ages as well. 

43:27
Rob Veith
Yes. 

43:28
Eshinee Veith
One of the workshops that we did, there was a whole family that came, and the children, all elementary school age, all wrote scripture songs and wrote good songs that people still remember, that people went away singing and can still sing later. 

43:45
Rob Veith
And frankly, I think that it was the children in that case, that was the first one we did at this particular congregation. And having the children share as a memory verse song with the congregation. People were like, I can’t believe that little girl came up with that song. It spoke to the congregation. It was something that was nurturing in the congregation, but also said to them, we can do this, too. And so the next year was, there are more people that were more enthusiastic. They didn’t understand the first year, but the second year, they were really excited about hearing what would come out of the workshop. 

44:23
Rich Rudowske
That’s great. So what would be the value of a congregation or a small group of Christians having a workshop like this? 

44:31
Rob Veith
There are a number of potential goals. When I’m working overseas, I’m usually working in an area that it’s a minority language, usually underrepresented by music. And the music that they have is all translated hymns. It may not be meaningful. Now, being in this country, you do have, actually, most of the music we do in church is imported hymnity. It’s coming from Europe, and if you’re more contemporary, coming from Australia. So in that sense, it’s not coming out of our own cultural music, but we’re used to it in our church. And so it’s not as big of a need in the English speaking community as it is in, say, Albanian or some of the other places that I’ve worked. But there is still a value in creating something like Hillsong, right? 

45:19
Rob Veith
Hillsong is creating a lot of music that’s used in contemporary worship, and they’re consciously creating things for the broadest possible audience of worshippers. Audience is the wrong word, but the broadest possible. The ease of participation. The most people could just kind of jump in and sing this song, and there’s a lot of value in that, but there’s also value in congregations that create something just for our group, not exclusionary, but it’s like the church that I go to. We do a lot of our natural way of singing is very Americana. We’ve got a lot of, like, we have a banjo player and a fiddle player and accordion, and you can imagine the kind of music that we have there. And we can do Hillsong music, but we have to filter it through our musical language. And we do that, and it’s great. 

46:12
Rob Veith
But when we do stuff that’s just us, we can do things that have sounds, and we can write stuff that we know that our congregation is going to sing powerfully because that’s who we’re writing for. And so we could be writing for our own congregation. And there’s value in that. There’s also value in this as a devotional exercise, which is how I’ve been kind of talking about it. That’s how I use it in my own life. The first time I did this in the United States, it was at an event geared toward Bible translators. And Bible translators are people that spend a lot of time in Biblical languages. They’re using that part of their brain that does analysis of discourse and language. And what does this actually mean, and what did it mean in the original culture? 

47:09
Rob Veith
And this sort of a very left brain approach to engaging with the Scripture. And that’s good. That’s a good way to engage with the scripture. But if that’s your job, how do you do a devotional engagement with the scripture? And like many pastors that I know, they don’t have a devotional access because their job is to engage with it in a certain way. So they can’t just do it for fun is the wrong phrase, but they can’t do it for fun. They can’t just do it for personal edification, because every time they do it, they’re doing it for work. And so this is a way to engage with the Scripture in a way that you will learn it better, but it’s not in a way that you normally are doing. It’s more of an experientially oriented, intuitive, right brained approach to learning the Scripture. 

48:03
Rob Veith
So that’s where it’s valuable on the individual level. And some of these songs, even if they’re done on the most personal level, they become part of the soundtrack of a congregation, or they become part of the soundtrack of Christian history. We can’t really predict if you set out to write the great American hymn, you’ll probably fail. If you set out to write a meaningful song, you may write the great American hymn. 

48:27
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

48:29
Rob Veith
And you have to write a lot of really bad songs before you write good ones. And so if you don’t start writing, if you don’t start composing songs, you’ll never get around to composing the great one. 

48:40
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And so we are coming out of the time here at the time we’re recording this, where a lot of churches are starting to open back up and have their public worship. And then we can predict, Lord willing, that they’ll start to be able to do other in person things. And we will, at the end of the podcast, let folks know how you can, and your congregation can, reach out to Rob and Eshinee and invite them to do a workshop with you and kind of dip your foot in the pool to see if this is something for you and your congregation. And hopefully you can be built up by that and work with the Scripture in a different way and engage in God’s word in a way that speaks to your hearts differently. So, Rob and Eshinee, thanks for being on the podcast today. 

49:26
Rich Rudowske
Appreciate everything and we will talk to you soon. 

49:28
Eshinee Veith
Thanks, Rich. 

49:29
Rob Veith
Thanks, Rich. 

49:34
Rich Rudowske
Thanks to Rob and Eshinee for joining us on the podcast today. We hope that you caught a small glimpse of the power that engaging with God’s Word through a creative process like composing music could have for your small group or congregation. If you are interested in having Rob and Eshinee come out and work with your congregation or small group, click the link in the podcast episode description or send me an email at info@lbt.org and I’ll get you connected to them. Thank you for listening to the Essentially Translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible Translators. Look for past issues of the podcast lbt.org/podcast or on Apple, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 

50:11
Rich Rudowske
Follow Lutheran Bible Translators on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, or go to www.lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s Word in their hands. The Essentially Translatable podcast is edited and produced by Andrew Olsen. The executive producer is Amy Gertz. Music was written and performed by Rob Veith. I’m Rich Rudowske. So long for now.