Photo by Trent Erwin
Fellow Bereans,
I have a few announcements to share.
First, thank you for reading my reviews, commenting, submitting song reviews, voting in the polls, telling others about my work, challenging me on my opinions, and complimenting me. I would have given up a year ago without your prayers, support, and willingness to engage with me!
Second, I’ve had extra time between my regular job and taking care of my family to complete extra reviews, maintaining an average of two extra songs per week. There are two reasons for this:
- I saved a substantial amount of travel time by working from home every day.
- I started developing a list of Bible verses by topic, making it easier to copy-paste references without researching said topics over and over again. This significantly reduced the amount of time per review.
Third, since my polling queue exceeded 100 songs, I’ll start running two polls per week, eight songs apiece, starting today. The bottom of this post contains two concurrent polls. The right navigation pane will randomly display one of the polls. I’ll run this format until:
- I can no longer keep up with four reviews per week; or
- The polling queue contains less than 20 songs.
Fourth, I am running an Elevation Worship poll next week. It will follow the same format as Hillsong polls.
Finally, I will begin (slowly) removing the “This review is upon request.” message that starts the majority of my reviews. I have three reasons for doing this:
- I am hoping that reducing exposure to the song submission page will reduce the flow of song submissions. While I am grateful for the interest, 100+ requests is overwhelming!
- When I started the website, I created my own schedule based on the Billboard Top 100 Christian songs and occasionally took requests. Now, I almost exclusively review based on submissions. Therefore, I have no more need to include it.
- It shows up at the beginning of the preview text for Facebook, Twitter, and email subscription posts.
Now, back to my regularly scheduled boiler-plate polling queue language.
Thank you for voting on my fourth May 2020 poll! Shane & Shane’s Though You Slay Me pilfered the top spot. There was a close tie for second, with Brandon Lake’s This Is A Move securing the second position.
As mentioned in my announcement, this post features two polls: dubbed “June 2020 A” and “June 2010 B”.
For these polls, I plan to only schedule the top two voted songs; however, you may select up to three songs for your vote. If there is a tie, the earliest submitted song(s) will be added to the schedule.
These polls will close at the end of May 16, 2020. If you don’t like these picks, consider submitting a song for review.
- The Porter’s Gate - Wood and Nails (Feat. Audrey Assad & Josh Garrels) 21%, 22 votes22 votes 21%22 votes - 21% of all votes
- Billie Eilish - All The Good Girls Go To Hell 19%, 20 votes20 votes 19%20 votes - 19% of all votes
- Steven Malcolm (Feat. Leeland Mooring) - Even Louder 18%, 19 votes19 votes 18%19 votes - 18% of all votes
- Henry Francis Lyte - Jesus, I my cross have taken, All to leave and follow Thee 14%, 15 votes15 votes 14%15 votes - 14% of all votes
- Michael Joncas - On Eagle's Wings 11%, 11 votes11 votes 11%11 votes - 11% of all votes
- Victory Worship - Beautiful Love 10%, 10 votes10 votes 10%10 votes - 10% of all votes
- William McDowell - The Cry 4%, 4 votes4 votes 4%4 votes - 4% of all votes
- Lou Fellingham - Miracle or Not 3%, 3 votes3 votes 3%3 votes - 3% of all votes
- Delirious? - I Could Sing of Your Love Forever 21%, 43 votes43 votes 21%43 votes - 21% of all votes
- Phil Wickham - Messiah / You’re Beautiful 20%, 41 vote41 vote 20%41 vote - 20% of all votes
- Matt Maher - All The People Said Amen 16%, 33 votes33 votes 16%33 votes - 16% of all votes
- All Sons & Daughters - All the Poor and Powerless 14%, 29 votes29 votes 14%29 votes - 14% of all votes
- Passion - King of Glory 13%, 27 votes27 votes 13%27 votes - 13% of all votes
- Planetshakers - Healer 7%, 14 votes14 votes 7%14 votes - 7% of all votes
- Matt Maher - Abide with Me 6%, 12 votes12 votes 6%12 votes - 6% of all votes
- River Valley Worship - Hope Has a Name 4%, 9 votes9 votes 4%9 votes - 4% of all votes
Comments
authormaryevans
Hi Vince,
So glad I stumbled upon your website. I am a songwriter, with my songs yet to be song by an artist. Do you know of anyone who could analyze my lyrics? The majority of my songs are like “The Blessing”, straight from the Bible. Thank you!
Vince Wright
authormaryevans,
Great question! If you use the Contact Me form, I would be happy to tell you what I think.
-Vince Wright
Neal Cruco
I didn’t know that you could run multiple polls simultaneously. That’s an excellent solution to the problem. After all, mathematically speaking, songs are piling up in the queue because they’re entering faster than they leave. So you need to either make them leave faster or make them enter slower. If you can keep up with four reviews per week, that’s a much better solution than just increasing the size of the polls (which heightens the bias towards popular songs).
As for the last poll, I’m disappointed that “Holy, Holy, Holy!” didn’t make it- I did think it would, but it was close. Considering that it’s a hymn, maybe you could use it to balance out genres? You did mention that if it didn’t pass polling, you might consider reviewing it anyway.
Vince Wright
Neal,
I learned recently how to run multiple polls! Democracy Polls comes with an active/inactive feature where one of them will appear randomly in a widget on the right. This format will empty 16 songs from the queue per week, except “specials”. Hopefully, I can catch up. I don’t like the idea of temporarily taking down the form.
As for “Holy, Holy, Holy!”, I might consider it if I can catch up. Right now, my main focus is on clearing the queue.
-Vince Wright
Neal Cruco
I don’t blame you. 89 songs is a pretty intimidating list. I’m just disappointed that it didn’t make the cut.
Jeffrey A Potter
I’m a fairly recent new viewer to your post. As I grow closer to Jesus in my walk with Him and try to find that line between knowing the truth and doing all things as unto the Lord while also not trying to come across as “my way is the only way to Yahweh”… I appreciate that you do these reviews and point folks to Scripture.
Music does have a way of reaching people…but music in and of itself can also lead people astray. And while we can’t please everyone… There is ONLY One Whose opinion we should be concerned with and it is JESUS’ 😇😎
May God bless ya’! 😇😎
Vince Wright
Jeffrey,
Thank you for your compliment and blessing! I appreciate that you took time out of your day to bless me.
I hope that the Holy Spirit assists you in your quest for Biblically accurate lyrics.
-Vince Wright