Mr. Buechner's Dream

Christian Century, Dec 18, 2002

Daniel Amos, Mr. Buechner's Dream (Galaxy 21, 2001), available at www.danielamos.com.

In the contemporary Christian music subculture, assuming Daniel Amos is a person is a mistake akin to thinking Alice Cooper is a woman or Jethro Tull a solo artist. Daniel Amos is a band--by all accounts, one of the best Christian rock bands of all time--and its somewhat dopey name is a simple hybrid of two Old Testament prophets whose monikers the group thought "sounded cool" when placed together.

Daniel Amos was formed in the heat of the Jesus movement in 1971 at the Calvary Chapel revival in southern California. Thirty years and 16 albums later, the band released its masterpiece, Mr. Buechner's Dream. Musically, this record is for anyone who likes the Beatles, the Eagles or the Beach Boys, updated appropriately for today's "alternative rock" crowd. Theologically, it is a tribute to the visions of its titular hero, writer Frederick Buechner.

Mr. Buechner's Dream spreads 33 songs over two discs, offering a panoply of tunes that one reviewer described as "unique, full of life, and slobbered over with creativity." A fair number are pretty, lush and melodic--but Daniel Amos is famous for deconstructing false securities. Three songs into the project, sharp electric lines pierce the eardrums with a cruelty suggested by this opening lyric: "She had one foot on the ground and one foot in the air/ It seemed the world held her cold hand while the angels brushed her air." This portrait of one waiting (and wanting) to die introduces one of the album's persistent themes: the difficulty of maintaining faith in a world that is not the way it ought to be.

The main three behind Daniel Amos is singer/songwriter Terry Scott Taylor, an intellectual who continues to reflect upon his teenage Jesus freak persona with an ambiguous perspective that Paul Ricoeur would call a "second naivete." Taylor can still appreciate the simple piety of those who move mountains with "fumbled prayers and bloodied knees," but he loves to lament and lampoon the more stultifying aspects of modern religion.

Daniel Amos's first album (way back in 1976) opened with a number ridiculing Jehovah's Witnesses ("If you're really Awake, you'll make no mistake ...") and closed with a ditty about the fate of skeptics when the Rapture comes ("Oh my! You'll fry / As we wave good-bye to you"). Life goes on, and the man who wrote those songs has since read Dostoevsky, Eliot, William Blake, Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz. For the most part, Taylor's fans have followed him through the maze, and many of those who are buying and loving Mr. Buechner's Dream still remember those crazy times when they put "Honk if you love Jesus" stickers on their cars and thanked the Lord every time they found a good parking space. "We've always tried to be honest," Taylor once said, "even when we didn't know what else we were doing." For that reason, the band's full oeuvre offers a soundtrack for a faith journey, complete with all the highlights, disappointments, embarrassments and occasional insights that such a journey entails.