Friday, September 5, 2008

Doing Eagles and U2 songs in church

We're not exactly real stuck-up on doing pious songs in our worship band at church. In fact, we have a habit of doing non-Christian (or maybe somewhat vaguely Christian) songs -- sometimes we change the lyrics, other times not!

Here's a list of some of the songs we've done over the years:
  • U2, Still Haven't Found what I'm Looking for (we keep the verses exactly the same, change just the line from Chorus to "In Jesus, I've found what I'm looking for"). We add the special chorus from "Rattle and Hum" where we do "He will lift you up higher and higher / he'll be your shelter from the storm".
  • Tom Petty, Free Fallin'. Chris Harvey, a very funny visiting Australian minister, made up a bunch of verses to this real-time during a sermon -- chorus kept the same as original.
  • Eagles, Hotel California. You mean the song that's supposedly a reference to Anton Levay (sp?) and the Church of Satan? Yep. That was another Chris Harvey special where he made up verses on the fly with Christian lyrics. We've also covered the original version a couple of times when our band has played events that weren't at church.
  • Eagles, Desperado. We don't sing the actual song, but I often play the chord progression on piano for the song when I'm playing background music when someone is ministering and wants soft music backing.
  • Stevie Ray Vaughan, The House is a Rockin'. We made up our own original Christian verses for this, but kept the chorus the same.
  • U2, Forty. No change to original song.
  • U2, Where the Streets Have No Name. We've used the intro chords as the intro to another song (Chris Tomlin's "Not to Us"), and we plan to do the actual song pretty soon with no change to lyrics.
  • U2, All I want is you. No change to original lyrics.
  • Beatles, All You Need is Love. Just did the chorus on that one.
  • Beatles, The Word. Not sure what portions were done -- I wasn't there for that one (Darren's deal!)
  • The Troggs, Wild Thing.
  • Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild.
  • The Cure, Love Song (Whenever I'm alone with you -- you make me feel like I am whole again...)
  • U2, MLK (from Unforgettable Fire, Darren did this one without me there)
  • Coldplay, Yellow (another one Darren did w/o me there)

We have not yet worked in Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody -- yet.

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