There’s a song on John Van Deusen’s epic new album, As Long as I Am in the Tent of This Body I Will Make a Joyful Noise (Pt. 1), called “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship.” You’d be forgiven if you assumed this is a cover of the Matt Redman classic. After all, Van Deusen himself is a worship leader at a church in his hometown of Anacortes, Washington, and he’s clear that this recording—unlike many others from the two decades he’s been making them—is indeed a worship album.
But careful readers will notice that Van Deusen’s tune, while it borrows the lyric from Redman’s song, has a different title. (The original is called “Heart of Worship.”) And any listener will soon understand that Van Deusen’s “version” is a joyful subversion. It’s loud; distorted; played in an odd, shifting time signature; and, most noticeably, absent of any lyrics or vocals.
This isn’t typical of the whole album, much of which has more in common with mainstream contemporary worship music—big, anthemic crescendos; simple, repeated choruses; and lyrics focused on personal devotion to Jesus. Tent of This Body interprets the genre through Van Deusen’s immersion in Pacific Northwest indie rock and his personal struggle with what it means to love and praise God in the midst of disorientation and depression.
Still, the raucous, instrumental “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship” does feel like an important statement.
“It’s not a flippant ‘Your song sucks; mine is kind of cool and weird,’” Van Deusen told me in a Zoom call from his home in Anacortes. “It’s actually a nod. It’s my way of saying,‘I see you, Matt Redman.’ [And] it’s meant to say to the 14-year-old in Tennessee who might, for whatever reason, stumble upon this, ‘Hey, this is worship.’”
Van Deusen said he wants Tent of This Body both to be widely accessible and to push the boundaries of Christian music. This isn’t surprising given his artistic history. The son of a pastor, Van Deusen was a prolific songwriter from his teen years, cutting his teeth in Western Washington’s vibrant (and secular) indie rock scene alongside peers like Death Cab for Cutie in Bellingham, Washington; Modest Mouse in Issaquah; and Phil Elverum of The Microphones and Mount Eerie in Anacortes. Van Deusen won a Seattle-wide contest for under-21 musicians with his band The Lonely Forest, which made some half-dozen albums. The band toured extensively, was signed to a major-label imprint by Chris Walla of Death Cab for Cutie, and then broke up, all before Van Deusen turned 25.
While The Lonely Forest made rousing, even inspirational music—“Turn Off This Song and Go Outside” and “We Sing in Time” are as bombastic and uplifting as anything Switchfoot did in the early 2000s—Van Deusen describes his time in the band as rich and exciting, but also difficult, fraught with addiction and friction in his young marriage. That led him to leave the group and recommit himself to his faith.
The four-part solo album series Van Deusen released after The Lonely Forest’s breakup, (I Am) Origami, reflects this shift in priorities. It lays bare the sometimes-challenging balance between finding a steadfast faith in Christ and feeling alienated from the trappings of evangelical Christian culture—a chafing which many former (and current) evangelical musicians have experienced. Some, like Pedro the Lion’s David Bazan, end up leaving the faith. Others, like the band Luxury, find a home in another Christian tradition. Some contend with deconstruction and end up reaffirming their beliefs, like Joshua Porter of the band Showbread, who is now a pastor at an evangelical church.
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Probably the best-known album from Origami, 2018’s Every Power Wide Awake, is unabashedly worshipful, the product of Van Deusen’s own prayer life and Scripture reading as well as Oswald Chambers’s devotional classic My Utmost for His Highest. But it sounds almost nothing like stereotypical worship music, having much more in common with Seattle indie rock bands like Death Cab for Cutie or Sunny Day Real Estate. (For what it’s worth, The Gospel Coalition ranked Every Power Wide Awake at No. 4 on its list of “The Best Christian Albums of the 2010s.”)
Van Deusen describes the experience of seeking out art beyond the evangelical media culture of his youth in a way that will be familiar to many of his generation: “I left Switchfoot, Newsboys, and Audio Adrenaline for Radiohead and Nirvana. I found in other musical artists lyrical truth that felt authentic. And so I fled to this new land.”
But once he arrived and “tried to live a life without Christ,” he realized he was “really hungry for something more. … That’s where my second and, truthfully, the real spiritual journey for me within a religious context began.”
Van Deusen still often speaks of living in the “dissonance” between the Northwest’s musical culture, in which “you should probably be ashamed of yourself if you are going to make music that is religious,” and the world of church music.
“When I walk into a writers’ retreat with a bunch of Christian songwriters,” he said, “I’m thinking, Have you guys listened to The Microphones or Mount Eerie, or have you ever heard Sonic Youth? Did you watch Twin Peaks? Do you read far-future science fiction? Every once in a while, someone is like, ‘Yes.’ But in general I just don’t fit in.”
“And yet at the same time,” he continued, “I love my Lord and Savior so much. I love singing about him. I love talking to him. I love hearing other people talk about him. … When I get around other believers in Christ, even those who have different political views, when we start to talk about God’s love, God’s forgiveness, his grace, his mercy, his artistic brilliance that literally goes beyond comprehension—I love it!”
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It’s a beautiful and productive tension that comes out on Tent of This Body, where noisy jams, Weezer-style power pop, sound collages, and bombastic ’90s rock drums rub shoulders with polished-sounding praise choruses that wouldn’t be out of place at a Hillsong-style church service—the repeated refrain of “Hallelujah, what a love” on “You Never Let Go” or “Jesus, you are our home” on “You Are Our Home.”
Van Deusen hopes Tent of This Body will encourage listeners to imagine worship music as something broader than they might otherwise have, and perhaps to write praise tunes on their own terms—including out of a place of pain. While the sound-collage track “Self-Aware, Ready to Die” is only 30 seconds long, it hints at the depression Van Deusen described experiencing while making the album.
“I often felt this heavy sense of simultaneously feeling bliss in worshiping God and taking creative risks and being who I think God has made me to be, while also feeling a really heavy sense of ‘I don’t know how much longer I can exist in this dissonance’ that we’ve described—not just the dissonance of culture but just my personal dissonance of existence,” he said.
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Though these songs are overwhelmingly praise-oriented as compared to the occasionally darker (I Am) Origami series, the praise is still hard-won (or, to venture Leonard Cohen’s brilliant but now-cliché lyric, it’s a “broken hallelujah”). Songs like the raucous “Let Me Rest My Head,” which begs, “Silence all the feedback / Screaming and warning” or the plaintive “Answer Me God,” which demands, “What must I do to reach Your ear down here?” exist alongside the hopeful assuredness of “Knowing” and “You Never Let Go,” which sing of God’s faithfulness and providence.
“It’s a strange thing to make a worship record where I’m singing honestly and earnestly and I’m worshiping and I’m praising and I’m thanking God while also recognizing that this dissonance I feel, it doesn’t dissipate just because I’m doing the worshiping,” Van Deusen said. “I don’t know how to talk about that.”
Sometimes, though, you don’t have to talk about it. As in “I’m Coming Back to the Heart of Worship,” some things can be expressed with less—or more—than words.
Joel Heng Hartse is the author of several books, including Dancing About Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do: Writing About Music, Meaning, and the Ineffable. He is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
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