New album explores meaning of Christmas

Christmas has a new soundtrack this year with the release of Kalispell musician and songwriter John Gabriel Arends’ latest album “Little Strummer Boy.”

Arends said he wrote the songs featured as more than just a few holly jolly Christmas carols, aiming to ask and answer questions behind the “meaning of Christmas.”

“When you hang around Christian culture around Christmastime, we have all these little cliché sayings of ‘Remember the reason for the season,’” Arends said. “And that started to get under my skin, like...what does that actually mean?”

Arends was raised in a Christian household, but for the first time decided to look deeper into the story he’d heard since childhood.

“So as I started diving into the Christmas story of Jesus coming, I realized the significance of the story is that it starts before Jesus, that he comes into a culture where it’s extremely dark. There was oppression, there were murders, there was racism,” Arends said. “The significance of Christmas isn’t just religious ritual or some sort of sacred holiday, but it’s about God being with us.”

With that discovery, Arends said he began to look back over his own career as a musician and see the reality of that statement.

His parents, both professional musicians, left it up to Arends to pursue music himself. His father, Paul Arends, handed him a guitar, showed him where to put his fingers and said “good luck.”

He learned the basics of acoustic guitar and began volunteering at his family’s church in Kalispell, The River, leading worship and different events until “someone good came along.”

When no one else did, Arends began putting some serious effort into practicing and learning different instruments and writing his own songs.

Though his aim at the time was to work in graphic design, music began to turn his life in a different direction.

His skill level began to grow along with his exposure, and before he knew it, he said he’d produced two albums and was traveling around the world, performing and writing for churches, groups and events.

He began working on his latest album after much encouragement from his mother, Margie Arends, who had been begging him to record some simple Christmas songs for years.

When he finally sat down to start, he said he decided that if he was going to do it, he would go all out.

Over the course of about a year, he wrote all nine songs on the album and, using recording and editing equipment he’d collected over time, he began producing them, completing much of the work on the road.

Recording took place wherever his travels took him — from churches he visited to school gymnasiums — and took two weeks to complete.

He sent the completed album off for mastering and the product he got back was a mix of songs much different from his usual alternative rock style.

“Little Strummer Boy” consists primarily of acoustic guitar and vocals provided by Arends, but includes accompaniments of bells, violin, Native American courting flute and a few other “surprises” from other musicians.

While playing at a conference, Arends met a world-renowned pastor from Mozambique named Surprise Sithole.

Upon hearing of Arends’ project, Sithole decided he needed an African voice on the album and provided a narration of the Christmas story from an African perspective as part of the last song on the album, titled “Surprise Track.”

His experience in creating the album, Arends said, has driven his desire to help his listeners experience God in a new way this Christmas, not just as a memory of a silent night but as an ongoing present and future event.

“Because when Jesus came, it was nuts. Angels showing up, people having dreams from God, signs in the sky … virgin birth,” Arends said. “And that was just the beginning of Jesus’s ministry.”

“I don’t believe that God has stopped any of that. He’s alive,” he added.

The message and significance of Christmas, Arends said, is that “basically, God is in a good mood.”

According to him, that first Christmas was just the beginning, and the reason for its celebration is alive and moving today.

The opening track on his album, “Heaven is Opened,” talks about the unexpectedness of God’s message to the shepherds through a sky full of angels.

“It was the opposite of what they expected,” Arends said.

Instead of delivering his message to religious leaders, God chose peasants in a field, and rather than a message of judgment and doom, his angels spoke of peace on earth, according to Arends.

“The lyrics talk about how God is accessible to us as individuals, regardless of how much we deserve him or not,” Arends said. “What I’m hoping is that people are going to listen to this and have their minds open to the possibility that God might step into [their] life and do something. Maybe just realize that God doesn’t hate them, that God loves them.”

“Little Strummer Boy” is available for purchase at johngabrielarends.com as well as on iTunes, Amazon and all other major music outlets.

Reporter Mary Cloud Taylor can be reached at 758-4459 or mtaylor@dailyinterlake.com.