A Re-Enchantment Record
A Re-Enchantment Record:
Interview with John Mark McMillan
By Daniel Dorman
“The mission of all prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth” — G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant
It is easy to forget; it’s easy to lose sight of the magnificence of common things. It is easy to sleep through a glorious sunrise (which happens to literally be the most ‘everyday’ of events). It is easy to grow numb to the strange and miraculous thing that it is to draw a breath. It is easy to forget that the Word became flesh...
When I got the chance to speak with John Mark McMillan, he told me a little bit about the creative impulse behind his most recent record Peopled With Dreams. He called it—and I love this—“a re-enchantment record.” McMillan said: “What I feel like I’m doing with my life... what I’m doing in the world is ‘re-enchantment’; this record is a re-enchantment record; it is a record of rediscovery, it is an album that is trying to re-see somethings.”
In between the release of Mercury and Lightning (McMillan’s 2017 LP) and beginning to work on Peopled With Dreams, McMillan confesses that he reached a point of depression, of purposelessness, of asking ‘why does any of it matter?’; McMillan said, “I found myself at this place in life where I wasn’t sure if I was going to transition into a different role, or if I was going to keep making music.” And, coupled with McMillan’s career crisis was something of an existential crisis. He found himself full of doubt, uncertain of what he believed. He felt the weight of being a respected Christian artist, looked to for answers, looked to for definitions, who had found himself uncertain of much of his faith: “When you have a reputation for being an honest songwriter and then one day you’re not sure if you believe in God, and your reputation and your job and your prestige is all built into what you think about God… that’s an existential crisis, that is an identity crisis, a career crisis: When all three of those happen at the same time you might be looking at a family crisis.”
Two things drew McMillan to keep creating: First, McMillan’s wife (Sarah) encouraged him to start the record in spite of his reservations: “My wife knew, for my mental health, I had to get started”. In retrospect, McMillan realized that it was only as he got moving that he was able to find some direction for the record (he used the analogy of being unable to steer a parked car). Second, McMillan records: “My world was falling apart and I had this conversation with a friend: he said, “what if you focused on what you do know instead of focusing on what you don’t know?”
McMillan continued: “I think part of the role of the artist is to push into the unknown, and faith really only operates in the arena of the unknown. But for this part of my life it was really helpful for me to focus on what I did know… this is what I did know: I have always been obsessed with the powers that led to my existence, I have always been obsessed with seeing and discovering those forces in other human beings. I realized, when I laid down at the bottom of my deconstruction, the only thing that I knew for sure turned out to be the pillars of the Christian faith: love God and love people… that in itself became a re-enchantment, it had to do with the way I see things.”
The direction McMillan found for the record—through the doubt, the pain, the purposelessness—was one of simple gratitude for the gift, the miracle, that is life, the miracle that is finding the imprinted image of God in another person. It’s best if I just give you his words:
“Life is a miracle… at minimum life is a phenomenon. I’m even speaking scientifically. When you look out into the universe, most of what you see is empty space and even the things you find that are not empty space you don’t find—at least we haven’t yet—you don’t find life… nothing is normal, nothing is truly normal. What is not normal is everything you see in front of you: The wall, your hand, the phone, and other people… these things are significant beyond measure, but our brains stop seeing those things… our brains go on autopilot concerning those things, I don’t think much about my hand; and then you meet someone who has lost a hand you think how much you love your hand; [or] my voice, most people don’t think much about having a voice, unless you are a singer and you lose your voice and you realize how significant it is to be able to speak, communicate, sing. We’ve been tricked into thinking that the world is really common and really normal and really insignificant; and we get tempted into believing that other people are insignificant; and then we get tricked into thinking that we are insignificant; but the truth is that couldn’t be further from the truth.”
One of my favourite songs on the new record, a song which for me is truly enchanting, also happens to be inspired by my favourite author. God is Young, McMillan explains, is based on a passage from G.K. Chesterton. Chesterton wrote:
“A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be an automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” (Orthodoxy)
McMillan told me a story which is too precious not to recount:
“Children haven’t yet learned to think of things in terms of what’s normal, everything is novel to them, everything is significant: and they are actually right and we are actually wrong... When my kids were really young and we were driving down the road in the country and they would scream, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car!’ And I’d pull over and say ‘What!’, and they’d be like, ‘Dad, it’s a cow! Oh my gosh, it’s a cow!’ Our dumb, dull, adult mind thinks. ‘So what it’s a cow? I’ve seen cows...’ No, I’m wrong, this cow is magnificent! There were cultures that worshiped cows and now I’m beginning to understand why, this is beautiful”
Another of my favourites off the new record is The Road, The Rocks, and The Weeds. The chorus reads:
“Well, I've got no answers
For heartbreaks or cancers
But a Savior who suffers them with me
Singing goodbye, Olympus
The heart of my Maker
Is spread out on the road, the rocks, and the weeds”
The whole song speaks to a truth foundational to a Christian’s astonishment at existence, the incarnation of Christ; this broken world, rife with injustice, is the world God stepped into to redeem. McMillan gave some background for the song: “I’ve always wanted to write a song that imagined Jesus walking around Mount Olympus with the other gods, and what they would talk about, what they planned on doing that weekend, and then the story of why Jesus... why he decided to leave [heaven]”. The very first lines of the song are a moving reflection on the mystery of Christ’s incarnation: “Come down from the stars / Show your human scars”.
More than a mere moment in McMillan’s career, he hopes that Peopled With Dreams is the first of many ‘re-enchantment’ records. He has come to believe that “this is the role of the artist in the world: it is to re-enchant the world; we don’t really create anything, what we do is we take pre-existing things and we re-contextualize them in a way that allows people to see them for what they really are.” For those familiar with literary history, McMillan is expressing a romantic view of art, a desire for art to shock us into a fresh realization of existence, a Wordsworthian awakening to the absolute wonder of common things.
With a couple of remixes and a live album set to be released soon, there are lots of reasons to keep up with John Mark McMillan in the coming months.
Daniel Dorman
Writer & Musician
Photography from Rise Up Agency