BackstageThere is a smell I have known my whole life. Frankincense on a coal, first thing in the morning, the pale smoke unwinding into the courtyard air and climbing until you cannot see where it goes. As a boy I used to watch it and wonder about that, where does the smoke arrive? It rises with such purpose, as if it has an appointment somewhere above the rooftops. It took me many years to learn that the answer had a name, and the name is Yasu', Yeshua, Jesus, the Lamb who was slain and is alive.
This album is that boyhood question grown up. Frankincense and Glory is the whole richness of an Arab morning, the incense, the saffron, the qahwa poured for a guest, the cedars and the dunes, the lantern in the alley, the gold letters of the calligrapher, gathered into my two hands and carried up the stairs of praise to the feet of the risen Christ. Nothing borrowed from anyone else. Nothing aimed at anyone else. Only adoration, in the language my grandmother sang me to sleep in.
Why the title had to be these two words
The opening song gave the record its name, and the chorus is the plainest confession I know how to make: I bring You frankincense and glory, I bring You the whole of my story, rise like the incense, rise like the dawn. I wanted a title that held both the thing you can smell and the thing you cannot, the fragrant, ordinary morning and the weight of God's presence that the Bible calls glory. Because that is exactly what worship is. You take the small, physical, cardamom-and-coal reality of your day and you let it rise until it touches something you will never be able to see the top of.
The second verse of that song says something I could not have written when I was younger: every grain that burns is a word I could not say. That is the whole album in a single line. There are things a heart carries that will not fit into sentences. Grief that has no grammar. Longing older than language. So you do not say them. You burn them. You let the smoke of your poured-out heart be the sentence. And He reads it. Yahuah has always been fluent in the wordless.
Worthy, worthy is the Lamb who was slain, this is the confession the whole record is built to reach.
The land itself was already praising
I did not have to import worship from a foreign shore and translate it into my streets. The worship was already here, waiting in the cedars and the courtyards. That is the conviction that runs through the middle of this album.
"Cedars Lift Their Hands" takes the great trees of Lebanon and lets them do what the Psalm already said all creation does, the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord who comes (Psalm 96). "Indigo Midnight" is the quietest song I have ever made, a courtyard under stars, the heart awake in the watches of the night the way the psalmist was in Psalm 63. "Caravan of Praise" is the long desert road turned into a pilgrimage toward the King, because my people have always known how to travel far for something worth arriving at.
And then there is the table. "Bread, Oil, and Honey" is nothing but the meal my mother would set down, and the discovery, late and grateful, that the shepherd of Psalm 23 sets a table too, and lets the cup run over. When I sing it I am not reaching for a Western picture of God. I am looking at my own kitchen and finding Him already seated there.
Hospitality is a doctrine where I come from
You cannot understand this album if you do not understand the qahwa.
Where I am from, when a stranger comes to the door you do not ask his business first. You seat him. You pour the coffee, cardamom-dark, the first cup for the guest, and only after the welcome do you speak of anything else. To turn a guest away is not rudeness; it is a kind of disgrace. So when I read the parables of Yeshua and found Him telling of a master who throws open his house and sends servants into the streets and the lanes to bring in the poor and the outsider until the table is full (Luke 14), I did not feel that I was being taught a new custom. I felt that my oldest custom was being crowned. "Pour the Qahwa" is that recognition set to a Rast melody, Jesus is the Host, and the welcome we thought was ours was always His.
This matters for who the record is for. There are millions of hearts across the Arab world and the diaspora who have never once heard the name of Jesus sung with love in the maqam of their own grandmother, only ever as something foreign, something belonging to other people in other places. I made this so that a believer in Damascus or Cairo or the Gulf, or a homesick soul in Berlin or Detroit, could hear their own streets and spices and songs lifted up in praise, and know that they do not have to leave home to come to Him. He is already fluent in oud and ney.
What the souk taught me about the last song
The record ends where the market is loudest. "Hallelujah in the Souk" is deliberately the noisiest, most public song on the album, because I did not want to leave worship inside the quiet of the courtyard. The souk is where everyone is, the vendor, the buyer, the child underfoot, the whole clamoring life of a people. And Scripture promises that one day every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Yeshua is Lord (Philippians 2). Not the whispering tongues only. Every tongue. Including the ones that haggle over saffron and call the price of figs.
So the last track takes the confession out of the sanctuary and stamps it down in the marketplace, and then, this is my favorite secret in the whole record. Its melody quietly returns to the tune of the first song, "Frankincense and Glory," so the album loops back on itself and the praise never quite lands. It keeps rising. Like the smoke I watched as a boy.
I made this for the ones who thought the King belonged to someone else's country. He does not. He is worth the whole bazaar, the gold, the frankincense, the empty purse and the riches set aside. Bring Him the saffron of your mornings and the myrrh of your years, and let the smoke of everything you could never say climb the morning air until it finds Him. He is there. He has always been there, at the top of the stairs the incense climbs, waiting to be adored in the tongue you love best.
