I don’t know how it happened, but one day, I started listening to Charlie Hall. It’s not like I hadn’t heard of him before or heard any of his songs. A few well known are written by him, like “Give Us Clean Hands”. But he was never a worship leader with CDs that I would go and try and find like I would for, say, Chris Tomlin.

Whenever I came across a Charlie Hall song, it would always be on a Passion CD, with a few other worship leaders. When I did hear enough of his songs that I considered having a look at one of his CDs, I searched for “On the Road to Beautiful” and found that I didn’t recognize any of the songs. That stopped there.

Seeing things live is quite different from hearing or reading about it. Take universities for example. At one point, McMaster and UTSC were competing for the third spot in my application. When I actually went to Mac, I found I quite liked it there and promptly booted UTSC off my list. Later on, because I visited Mac, I had a look at their engineering programs, which are not bad. As a result, even though Mac is my third choice on my application, I would much rather go there than U of T.

Same goes for music. I’d listened to David Crowder Band’s “A Collision” before, at least a few times before Passion Toronto. But the songs I listened to on the CD were much different in real life. Take “You Are My Joy” for example.

The same thing happened for Charlie Hall. First, there was “Center”. Then “Marvelous Light”, the song on the Passion CD that I remembered. And finally, came that song that I didn’t know, which was because it was a new song, on “Flying Into Daybreak”.

Now Charlie Hall’s a bit different. A lot of his songs aren’t really for church worship settings, not really easy to pick up and sing like Chris Tomlin or Matt Redman. On the other hand, he’s not a crazy weird dude with weird songs that confuse people like David Crowder.

I wasn’t actually planning to buy “Flying Into Daybreak” or even download it to give it a spin as I usually do. Really, the only reason I thought about downloading it was because the album art was so awesome and colourful. After a few listens, I was determined to grab it once it came out at Blessings for $12.87 or however much New Music Tuesday is.

As a whole, I like this CD. There isn’t really any track that I hate on it and there are plenty of songs that I like. Those tracks are Micah 6-8, Marvelous Light, Song of the Redeemed, Bravery, Center, and Running With Your Heart. The bad thing is that Canada is stupid and Flying Into Daybreak is nowhere to be found. What happen?