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The Stories Behind the Songs on This Single
Fri., Feb. 10. 2023 8:13pm EST
J. Jackson, lead singer and lyricist for ApologetiX here again.
Here are the stories behind the songs on our third single of 2023:
ASK GOD
I started this parody on January 4, 2023, planning to call it "Just Go" and make it about biblical heroes who were initially reluctant to heed God's call ... like Moses, Jeremiah, and Gideon. Then it dawned on me that the most important repeating line in the original I needed to rhyme with was actually "I like the nightlife, baby," because that's the real hook.
Around the same time, for some reason, I decided to listen again to "The Real Need," a parody we put out in May 2022. I'm usually too focused on new stuff to spend much time listening to old ApX releases, but I was so delighted with how God had enabled me to share a previously unsung portion of my testimony in that song.
Meanwhile, on January 3, 2023, a fan named Zach W. had sent me a Facebook message about the things he was looking for in a wife. What he wrote had nothing to do with outward appearance — just the inner beauty of a godly woman who followed the Lord. I replied and told him God gave me a woman like that in 2000 (although my wife, Lisa, is very beautiful on the outside, too) and that I hoped he'd get what he was praying for.
Anyway, all those factors helped inspire me on January 13 to do a song about how the Lord brought Lisa and me together. That story is quite amazing, but I don't have the space to write it here. I finished the lyrics on January 17, the night before Lisa's birthday, and we released "Ask God" about a week before Valentine's Day.
If you'd like to know more about how Lisa and I met, I wrote a full-length account you can read at http://apologetix.com/news/news-details.php?news_id=4676
RIDERS FROM THE LORD
Growing up, I was fascinated by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I didn't know much about them, but I bought a poster with a scary painting of them as a gift for a neighborhood friend when I was in my upper teens. I also recall ordering a back issue of Giant-Size Fantastic Four #3 from 1974 that supposedly featured The Four Horsemen. It proved to be a bit of a disappointment.
The real ones are found in the Book of Revelation. There's not an exact parallel to them in the Old Testament ... the closest thing is in the similarly apocalyptic Book of Zechariah, where there are four chariots, each with distinctively colored horses, representing "four spirits of heaven, going out from standing in the presence of the Lord of the whole world." Interestingly, they're in Zechariah 6:1-8 and the Four Horsemen are in Revelation 6:1-8.
I wrote my first version of this parody in 1996 or '97. It was about the same topic but was called "Riders Numbered Four." I was never totally happy with that title, but I loved the way the music matched the tone of the Bible passage. After we finally put "Riders" into production in January 2023, I realized the words needed some work.
By the time I was done with revisions, only eight of the 28 lines in the four verses remained from my '90s version. I was bummed that I wasn't able to put the horsemen in the exact order in which they appear in the Bible, but I did do that in one of our previous parodies, "Life in the Last Days" in 1994 and 2009.
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