FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 7th, 2023
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Derek Webb is back with his latest album, The Jesus Hypothesis, out now. With this album, his first Christian music release in over a decade, Webb takes listeners on a journey through his thought-provoking musings about the nature of faith, doubt, and the significance of Jesus in our lives.
“My general creative ethic tends to be, ‘what I need and cannot find, I make.’ That has never been truer than it is on The Jesus Hypothesis.”
Derek Webb is nothing if not intentional, using every resource at his disposal to communicate the theme & content of his work, and one need not look further than the conspicuous genre of his new album to realize there’s something very curious about this new batch of songs. “I’ve always liked to say, ‘the word “Christian”, when applied to anything other than a human being, is a marketing term’. It’s a category I’ve mostly tried to steer clear of. In fact, it’s been a decade since I’ve released an album I’ve felt comfortable being rubber-stamped as “Christian”, but I eventually realized that’s precisely where The Jesus Hypothesis belongs.”
After 10 years in the Christian folk rock band ‘Caedmon’s Call’, 20 more years of solo albums (the majority of which were heavily preoccupied with God & Jesus, heaven & the Bible), it’s only now, as he no longer identifies as “certain of anything”, that he finds himself finally and ironically embracing the very thing he bristled at in those early years: ministry. “While I used to write mainly for myself, using words & melodies to work my way out of complex emotional or theological situations,” says Webb, “now I think just as much or more about, well, you.”
“If something I am able to write has the ability to find someone in a lonely and isolating moment and persuade them that they’re not alone, I am convinced that is my works’ greatest possible use (if it must be useful). This aspirational thought has pulled me through writer’s block, navigated me successfully through complex and typically untouched subject matter, and motivated me to keep going at times when I doubted if anyone would resonate or even listen.”
The result is an album full of deeply personal songs that deal boldly and vulnerably with assumptions about invisible reality. “While there’s no real certainty when it comes to things that are invisible (like God) and unknowable (like the future), we can and must hypothesize about them,” reflects Webb. The Jesus Hypothesis is both a return to the scene of the “deconstruction”, genuinely searching for beauty, meaning, and some kind of truth in the rubble, and a return to form, with Derek playing contrarian and reluctant prophet to even (and especially) his own assumptions about what may be just behind the veil.
Longtime fans will be delighted to hear that the ‘hypothesizing’ doesn’t stop with the subject matter, extending deeply into the intricate, experimental, and swaggering production. Firmly in the tradition of Derek’s most acclaimed albums, Stockholm Syndrome and Ctrl, The Jesus Hypothesis finds Derek’s longtime friend, collaborator, and ‘Caedmon’s Call’ bandmate Josh Moore in the producer’s chair, with stunning contributions from multi-instrumentalist and guitar phenom, David Stükenberg.
From the challenge & invitation to doubt & destroy the Gods of our making in “Some Gods Deserve Atheists”, to the gentle questioning of the man who is credited with having written the majority of the New Testament in “Sympathy for Paul”, these are songs designed to demand all of your attention. “Boys Will Be Girls” finds Webb offering a stark & loving response to the coming out of a dear friend, while “Car Crash” deals with the difficult end to a long & wild love story, written for and about Webb’s aging parents, following the transition of his father into a nursing home.
With his fans & patrons already heralding it as their “new favorite Derek Webb album” and “a masterpiece”, The Jesus Hypothesis is a remarkably fresh examination of ago-old questions from a veteran singer & songwriter who sounds like he’s just getting started.
The post Derek Webb Releases First Christian Album In Over 10 Years ‘The Jesus Hypothesis’ appeared first on CCM Magazine.
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