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I was sitting recently, listening to Derek Webb’s album She Must and Shall Go Free. It’s an album. It has great individual songs on it, but it is a cohesive unit, 11 or 12 (I can’t remember) songs that form a flow of thought. It’s a wonderful thing. Caedmon’s Call’s 40 Acres feels like this (as does Share the Well), Andrew Peterson’s Love and Thunder feels this way, and the best example (in my favorites) is Rich Mullins’s A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band.

I love listening to albums that are albums. MP3 players, Itunes, winamp, and all those other convenient things with those shuffle buttons have kind of ruined albums for us. We hear whatever song randomly comes next (or, in the case of Itunes new Genius function, whatever song they think sounds good to follow up the song you’re listening to). We don’t usually sit down to listen through an album; we let music be the background we do things to, and we don’t exactly catch any continuity.

So, sometime this week, turn off the shuffle feature and listen to an album. You might find that the artist put some thought into the direction that the songs take you. That’s the sort of stuff that makes an album worth paying for.

Tonight, we were cooking and I popped this album into the CD player. It has legs. Seriously… this is like 10 years later? (Stop to check their website… yep, released in 1999.) This album is well worth picking up if you never heard it… or even if you did. It’s a solid, no skips listening experience.

A lot of times when I go back to albums I loved, I find that I loved them in spite of their quality, not because of it. This album doesn’t fit that mold. Lyrically, it’s gold. There’s depth, there is beauty, there are really great analogies, like 40 Acres of redemption to be found just along, down the way.

Seriously, go buy it… from a store, from itunes, from wherever. You won’t regret it.