sarah masen

Steve Stockman

Sarah Masen is a beautiful human being. Without doubt culturally good looking
too. She is a gentle and tender soul. Aye and maybe a little bit whimsical too.
Beneath all that she is a mind and heart and soul that is searching deep within
herself and her world and her God for what this big hurting and hopeful world
is all about. Beneath the tenderness she is courageous enough to ask the
hardest of questions. Beneath the beauty she will look in the face of the
world’s most ugly realities and provoke the questions and grope for some
direction towards answers.

Dreamlife Of Angels is Sarah Masen made sound. It’s as accurate as any artist
could ever be in describing themselves through their songs. It’s a stunning
work of musical breathtake with it’s catchy melodies and the little brushes of
musical accompaniment. It’s got quirky little phrasings that have you alert
with surprise and the most sensitive of little aural thrills. Whether it’s the
tranquil shuffle of the hopeful Valley, the stillness of Love Is Breathing
about her daughter Dorothy Day Dark’s birth, the folksome endearment of her
Supertramp cover Give A Little Bit, the acoustic funky David Gray-like groove
of Midnight or the rockier Hit N Run, less is more and the more you listen the
more you get from the spaciousness of John Jennings (Mary Chapin Carpenter)
production.

Where Masen stands apart is in her literary approach to songwriting. She is a
young woman in love with words and ideas and imagination. She has this God
given ability to express the light and the dark and the shades where we all
walk in between. There are a few gloomy shadows and then there are these
moments when the bright makes the breaks in the clouds all sparkle and beam.
She describes her life with it’s recent marriage and even more recent
motherhood and the friends around her and tries to seek some insight to who we
are, where we are, what we are going through and how we start to hear somewhere
more worthwhile and peaceful. It’s an album full of hope and love and a new
kingdom coming in the midst of the old one. It’s dangerous because it’s honest
and it’s auspicious because it is grace drenched.

It may just be March and the first few months of the year are always a little
lacking in album releases but it may be safe enough to say even now that this
is the best album that will come out of the Christian industry in 2001. If
anything betters it you should buy it for sure.

—

Steve Stockman is a Chaplain at Queens University, Belfast, Ireland, where he
lives in community with 88 students. He used to book the bands for Greenbelt,
edits Juice magazine, has a weekly radio show on BBC Radio Ulster and a web
page – Rhythms of Redemption at http://stocki.ni.org. He also tries to spend
some time with his wife Janice and daughters Caitlin and Jasmine.