sarah masen

Carry Us Through

Album Sleeve

Carry Us Through, Sarah’s second re:think records release, was born
somewhere in the creative tension between folk and pop with visible
shimmerings of modern rock blues and gospel reflecting light here and there
from the surfaces of the songs. Produced by Charlie Peacock, the project is
layered, crafted, and accessible, and yet, unlike her first record, Carry Us
Through has moments that seem unstructured melodically or rhythmically. If
you pull back a step, though, you suddenly see how those brief moments of
nonstructure fit perfectly into the overall structure. And that, Sarah says,
is reflective of life, of our weakness, undoneness, and failed attempts
woven back in to the larger unseen pattern of sanctification and redemption
that God ordains for our lives and for His creation. And, as she says in the
hauntingly worshipful song Wrap My Arms Around Your Name, it is not an
on-again off-again thing, rather Salvation is forever taking place.
One gets a sense of greater maturity from Sarah on Carry Us Through, both in
the subtlety and diversity of the music, and in the focus of the lyric.
There is a profound awareness of the brevity and frailty of life balanced by
a holy courage to live, to love, to believe, to feel, to worship, to drink
deeply of each moment without trying to possess or control it.
It seems I said to Sarah that you have given up control, or recognized that
you, that we, that no one ever really has any control-and yet, whereas most
people come to that realization through some tragedy, you seem to have come
to it from the opposite direction, from the devastation of love.
Yes, she replied, the more we open to love, the more we feel, and the more
we see what we have to lose, but we must keep opening to love more and more
despite the fear of pain and loss, for greater love is always the path that
God leads us along.
In the rolling reflective opening cut on Carry Us Through (Seasons Always
Change), Sarah writes There’s goodness and there’s pain / and the heart goes
round again I and for now it never ends I and so you take another
day/because the tenderness it breaks us I and we learn to love that way and
that too I think is a good summary of what this album is about.
But she says it most directly in the song Carry Us Through, and I suppose
that’s why, of the ten titles on the new project, she finally settled on
this one as the umbrella to represent all the rest.
We grab existence by our defeats I And somehow laugh when we are weak I Were
being made strong from underneath… I Don’t be afraid to pray just like a
child I Lord carry us through.
The more you love, Sarah says, the more you feel the frailty, but the more
you love, she says as well, the more you feel the grace of God.
Even the songwriting process has mirrored for Sarah, in smaller form, the
frailty and grace that she has come to recognize in and around her. I’m so
afraid sometimes when I sit down to write, she says, that nothing will be
there, that nothing will happen, that the well will be dry. It feels like
stepping into a void. There’s a mystery that happens in the creative
process, but I don’t know how to make that mystery happen. It always seems
to happen when I’m not looking. It hits me when I’m not aware. We’re all
involved somehow in Jacob’s wrestling with God, in looking for truth, in
praying for it, in trying to figure out what all of this beauty is for. As I
seek to pray my way through confusion and create my way through self-doubt,
I’ve found that my efforts to do something-and this is true not just of
songwriting but of all of life-I’ve found that my efforts to do something
are always met by God, but almost never in the way that I thought.