BackstageI will tell you straight: Appalachian Shout is the loudest thing I have ever made, and I made it loud on purpose.
Somewhere along the way the church talked itself into believing that reverence means quiet and maturity means restraint. I do not find that in the record. I find a wind so violent it filled a whole house. I find a room so full of the Spirit that the building itself shook on its foundations. I find people so undone that the watching crowd accused them of being drunk before nine in the morning. That is the mountain I come from, and that is the mountain this album climbs.
Why I had to make it
I come out of the holiness-Pentecostal hollers of the high country, brush-arbor meetings, foot-stomped floors, the shout that starts in one voice and rolls down the ridge until the whole valley is on its feet. And I watched that fire get sanded down into something polite. Something scheduled. A worship set with a curfew.
So I built a record with no restraint in it. The opener, The Spirit Moves, starts a cappella, one tenor voice, no band, just "the Spirit moves, the Spirit shakes", and then the whole mountain comes in behind it. I wanted the first thing you heard to be a voice with nothing to hide behind, because that is how it started in the upper room. Joel had promised it: in the last days, says Yahuah, I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Not a trickle. A pouring. And when it came in Acts chapter two, it came as wind and fire and unstoppable speech.
What the title means
A shout is not noise for its own sake. In the record, a shout is a body agreeing with its Maker out loud.
Psalm forty-seven says it plainly, clap your hands, all ye people; shout unto God with the voice of triumph. Psalm one hundred opens the same way: make a joyful noise. The shout is what happens when the good news gets bigger than your composure. Track nine, the title cut, The Appalachian Shout, is that exact moment, the point in a mountain meeting where the singing stops being a song and becomes a roar, where the congregation quits performing worship and starts erupting with it.
A shout is the sound faith makes when it finally believes what it has been singing.
And "Appalachian" matters. I did not want a generic revival record. I wanted the fiddle and the clawhammer banjo and the ten-voice congregational holler of my own people, because the Spirit who fell at Pentecost fell on every man in his own tongue. That is the miracle nobody slows down for, the fire did not make them all sound the same. It let each man hear the wonderful works of God in the language of the country he was born in. Fire does not erase where you are from. It sets it ablaze. So I sang it in mine, high and lonesome, off the ridges, on purpose.
The heart under the songs
The engine of this album is Pentecost Fire, the third track, and the one I would point a stranger to first. It is Acts chapter two set to a fiddle scream: the fire that descends, fills the vessels, and "can't be contained." I built the whole song around that last idea. You cannot contain Pentecost. The minute you could manage it, schedule it, keep it inside the lines, it would not be the fire that fell in the upper room anymore.
Shake the Mountains comes right behind it, and it is a prayer straight out of Acts chapter four, the believers pray, and the place where they are gathered is shaken. But I aimed the shaking inward on purpose: shake the comfortable, shake the complacent, shake the church, shake the nation. Isaiah cried, "Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence." That is not a tame request. That is a man asking Yahuah to tear the sky open. I wanted a whole record that dared to pray it.
Now, a word of honesty, because the record earns it. There is a track called Snake Handlers and Saints, and I need you to hear how I hold it. Mark chapter sixteen does say signs will follow them that believe, and in my mountains some took up serpents from that verse literally. I sing about those saints with love, because they were hungry for a power the flatland church had forgotten. But I will tell you what the Scripture actually promises and what is only mountain tradition: the promise is that the Spirit is real and present and moving. Handling serpents to prove it is a tradition some of my people built on top of the text, and more than one of them died doing it. I honor their hunger. I do not command their method. The fire never asked us to tempt it, only to receive it.
Who I made this for
I made Appalachian Shout for the ones who have been told to settle down.
For the young man whose praise is too big for the room he is standing in. For the grandmother who remembers when the meetings ran till midnight and nobody wanted to leave, and who has been quietly grieving a church that watches the clock now. For the tired believer who has been running on a program instead of a presence, and who needs to be reminded that the Spirit of Yahuah is not a mood you set with lighting. He is a fire that fell on real people in a real room and shook the walls.
And for the one who is afraid of it. I know you are out there. You have seen the fire counterfeited and you have grown suspicious of loud. I understand. But hear me: the answer to counterfeit fire is not no fire. It is the real thing, tested against the Word, aimed at the glory of Yeshua and no one else.
That is the whole safeguard on this record, every shout on it lands on His name. The Spirit did not come at Pentecost to make people spectacular. He came to make them witnesses. The fire sat on their heads and then sent them into the street to talk about a risen Savior.
So let the mountain shake. Let the shout rise up out of you like it rose off the ridges of my childhood. Do not apologize for the size of it.
The wind that filled the house is still blowing. And the mountain, all along, was always meant to shake.
