Looking for something artistically bold, brilliantly executed, and spirituality inspiring in pop culture? Christian singer Lauren Daigle recently released a stellar record. Simply titled Lauren Daigle, it juggles pop, soul, hip-hop, gospel, and 1970s-style acoustic ballads to showcase Daigle’s raspy, powerful, and wondrous voice. A double album with 23 tracks, it’s a triumph.
Daigle has long been popular as a Christian artist. While Christian pop can be overly triumphant, on Lauren Daigle, the music also wrestles with doubt and sin. It employs the great music traditions of black America — jazz, blues, and gospel. These musical forms, which came out of the black church, acknowledge the sorrow of our sinful nature and the troubles of the fallen world. They also anticipate the final victory of Christ. The tension between those two things is the story of our lives here before we hopefully see God face to face.
The songs on Lauren Daigle are uniformly lovely and inspiring without ever being cloying. Her song “New” charges with a hip-hop beat, and in it, Daigle celebrates a friend who has let go of bad habits. The silky “21 Days” floats in strings and encourages a time of prayer to grow closer to God.
The gospel numbers are magnificent, and Daigle’s voice is at once pleading, reassuring, indomitable, and vulnerable. “Kaleidoscope Jesus” rejoices in nature, friendship, light, and “all the colorful ways” that Jesus “comes to meet us.” “Valuable” pleads for the importance of holy personhood in a cultural environment that often tried to debase women and crush the individual.
There is also an engagement with the turmoil of the world on Daigle’s album.“Ego” is so forceful with its choir and self-directed anger that thematically, if not musically, it could be a punk rock song.
She sings:
I’m done wrestlin’ with my ego
Lord knows it all feels so hollow
If you wanna go high, then you gotta bow low
If you wanna go deep, gotta rise above the shallow
I’m done wrestlin’ with my ego, ego, ego, ego
Ego, ego, ego, ego.
Then there’s “Don’t Believe Them.” G.K. Chesterton calls Jesus a rebel, and it is here that Daigle shows the same by challenging fellow Christians.
There are two sides to every story
The truth leaves where it don’t belong
It’s a tricky line that we’re walkin’
When we got so many people talkin’
And nobody thinks that they’re wrong
How you gonna love someone if you don’t forgive them?
How you gonna hear what they say if you never listen?
How you gonna stand up when the world wants you kneelin’?
How you gonna live out the words you’re preachin’
If you don’t believe them?
These lyrics wouldn’t be out of place on a Radiohead record.
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Daigle’s album ends with the inspiring “You’re All I’ll Take with Me.” It’s a prayer to a lost friend or mentor and conveys the sorrow of grief with the joy of a lost loved one living in your heart.
Lauren Daigle is an incredible talent, and Lauren Daigle is a great record. It offers hope in troubled times.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.