BackstageI am a mountain man by name and by nature, but I have spent enough time listening to the music of the islands to know that the ocean preaches a sermon the peaks cannot. The mountain teaches you to climb alone into the quiet. The ocean teaches you that no one crosses it alone. This album is the second sermon.
Lōkahi is a Hawaiian word for oneness, harmony, unity, many made one. And I made a whole record around it because I have watched the church, and I have watched families, and I have watched whole peoples build walls so tall and so old that everyone forgets the reason they were ever raised. I wanted to sing those walls down. Not with my strength. With His.
A Word Before I Begin
Let me be honest about who is singing. I am a mixed-heritage believer who loves the music and the heart-language of the Pacific. I do not speak for the Hawaiian people and I claim no authenticity I have not earned. Every island word on this record is used with care and with an English gloss beside it, and every song of praise points to one Person only, never to a wind, never to a sea, never to anything made. I say that plainly because lōkahi itself demands honesty; you cannot sing about oneness while quietly taking what is not yours.
With that said, let me tell you why the oneness had to be sung.
What the Title Means
Lōkahi, one in Him. Not one in agreement. Not one in blood. One in Him.
The whole record stands on two Scriptures. The first is the psalm the opener quotes directly: Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity (Psalm 133:1). The second is the prayer Yeshua prayed the night before He died, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you (John 17:21). Read that again. Our oneness is not a project we manufacture; it is a participation in the oneness the Father and the Son have always had. That is why every unity song on this album routes through Christ in the middle and never around Him. Take Him out of the center and the circle collapses. He is the center that holds.
The Heart Behind the Songs
I built the album out of the everyday pictures of island life, because that is where unity is either real or it is nothing.
One Canoe, One Crew is the outrigger, hoe, paddle, together or we do not move at all. One side slacks and the whole canoe stalls. Paul's body of Christ, many members, one body (1 Corinthians 12), turned into a paddling song, with the Captain who never lost a single soul. Weave Us Together is the lauhala, the leaf woven strand by strand by a grandmother's patient hands, one frond alone tears and splits, but woven close it holds a basket's heart. That is Ephesians 4, one body and one faith, and Christ the Weaver who never wastes a single strand.
Lei of Many Flowers is my picture of gifts that differ, plumeria and pīkake and ʻilima gold, every flower different, but the string runs through them all and they hang as one. The orchid doesn't envy how the rose was made. And The Reef Stands Together is the one with the turn I love most: a billion coral polyps, each too soft to stand alone, building a reef that breaks the strongest tide, and here is the cinematic truth of it, the reef that breaks the wave still gives the lagoon its peace. The unity is not only strength against the storm; it is shelter for the little ones swimming behind it. That is Ecclesiastes, a threefold cord is not quickly broken (Ecclesiastes 4:12), with Christ the cornerstone.
And No Walls in His House is the reconciliation at the heart of the whole thing, straight out of Ephesians: he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down the dividing wall (Ephesians 2:14). The hand that hammered the wall sky-high is the hand He let be nailed down. Where the wall once stood, there are flowers in bloom.
The Song This Article Is Named For
Every record I make has one song that is the reason for all the others. On this one it is The Day Two Villages Sang.
It is a true-to-life picture drawn from the kinds of stories the islands know too well, two small churches on a green windward coast, two valleys that meet, forty years of silence between them over a boundary stone and a word said wrong long ago. Neither side would greet the other. And then an old grandmother, a tūtū named Leilani, lay dying, and she called both pastors to her bedside with one last wish:
Sing me home together or don't sing at all.
So two choirs that had not sung together in forty years came stiff and slow to a graveside. One choir started low. The other found the third. And the harmony rose like nothing they had heard, old men who had not spoken gripped each other's hands and wept on the green of the windward land. They buried her to one song, and the two became one ʻohana forever. They built one church on the very boundary stone they had fought over, and carved John seventeen into the wood of the door: that they all may be one.
I honor Leilani in that song as a faithful witness, not as anyone who saves. Yahuah alone reconciles. But He is not above using a dying woman's last request to do what forty years of arguing never could. God alone did what no man could do. Two became one, and the old was made new.
Who This Is For
This is for anyone standing on one side of a wall that has been up so long no one alive remembers laying the first brick.
It is for the church split down the middle, the family that stopped speaking, the two believers who both love Yeshua and cannot sit at the same table. Hear the reef: what one alone could never do, the many built together break right through. And hear the canoe: no man left swimming when the storm comes round. We reach an arm and we pull him to the sound.
And it is for the worn-down soul who feels like a stranger at the edge of every gathering, back row, outside, second class. No walls in His house. Come on in. There is no outside in the Father's house. The dividing wall is already broken low; you only have to walk through the door He is holding open.
The album ends where it began, on purpose, One in Him Forever, the log-drum heartbeat that opened the record isolated again at the close so it loops right back to the start. Because that is the shape of it: the multitude from every tribe and tongue, standing as one before the Son (Revelation 7:9), a circle that comes all the way around and does not end. Many islands. One Aloha. One shore.
Come sing the wall down. He has been holding the door the whole time.
