What Liturgical Folk Music Actually Is (and Why It's Coming Back)

People keep asking what liturgical folk music is, usually because they want to know whether it’s going to preach at them. Fair question. Here’s the honest answer.

A liturgy is just a form you return to — words you say again even when you don’t feel them, a candle you light at the same hour, a shape you keep showing up inside until the shape starts holding you up. It is the opposite of a peak experience. It is the practice of the ordinary.

So liturgical folk isn’t worship music (which wants you certain) and it isn’t protest music (which wants you angry). It’s the third thing: indie folk theology for the long middle, where most of a life actually happens. Repeated, small, sung in the in-between hours. Sacred-leaning, but never asking you to perform a faith you might not have today.

That’s why it’s coming back. We are tired of being asked to feel enormous things on schedule. Music for doubt and faith lets you bring the whole ambivalent truth of where you are — and gives you a form to hold it in anyway.

These are records, the occasional letter, a few small devotions. Nothing more, and nothing less than that.