I remember well when I bought my first album from The Normals.  I remember reading about Coming to Life in CCM Magazine.  I remember making the connection in my head to the song “Everything (Apron Full of Stains)” from an earlier album.  I remember the trek to Mardel’s to see if they had a copy.  And I remember the time a friend at school let me borrow a pre-release copy of their third and final album, A Place Where You Belong.  I’ve tracked down most of the band frontman’s work.  I remember emailing him early in my time in Hawaii because I wanted to get digital copies of some songs I couldn’t find anywhere else (“The Longing” and “The Moral of the Story” and “The Phoenix”).  He graciously complied.  Andrew Osenga has been a part of the soundtrack of my life for a huge chunk, moving from The Normals to a solo slot and even to time spent in Caedmon’s Call.  So a kind of “retrospective” of Osenga’s work over at foundlinghouse.com is pretty cool.

One of the best things that the article brings out is the novel-ty nature of much of Osenga’s solo work.  Consider:

One could accurately say that Osenga’s writing grew up through years of musical experience. That tends to be the way of artistic endeavors, of course. People learn by doing. It might be better said, however, that his writing matured under the tutelage of Hemingway and Steinbeck. Osenga’s songs—and, in turn, his solo projects—often play out like novels, peopled with crooked or broken characters, worldly struggle, and otherworldly yearning. “The Priest and the Iron Rain,” off of his Souvenirs & Postcards EP, comes directly out of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and Osenga has cited Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven as inspiration for “Early in the Morning,” an ode to his neighborhood that appeared online as an acoustic demo and then on his full-length record The Morning. Other, less prefigured creations emerge from the milieu of Osenga’s literate mind as well. There’s Kara, the girl from a small town in Indiana, and her album-mates: Stanley, the butcher; Frank, the washed-up Baptist pastor; and Michael Brown, the divorced professor. These are followed by an entire cast of desperate smiles in “Broadway Bartender.” After that come the “Farmer’s Wife” and the unrequited love of “Marilyn.”

It is distinctly the classic American novel that feels most present in Osenga’s back catalog. Our national schoolchild regimen of postwar requisites—essentially every author from the Lost Generation onward—hinges on protagonists and anti-heroes who hover on the brink of dystopia, longing for a paradise that was promised but has not come . . .

I must admit: I read The Pastures of Heaven because of Osenga’s opinion of it.  It’s the only Steinbeck novel beyond The Grapes of Wrath that I’ve finished.

The article, which can be found and read here, is a nice way of putting Osenga’s musical career in grateful perspective.  His solo career was key in helping me anchor my musical collection with the Square Peg Alliance, which gives me a kind of root and link to Tennessee.

Here’s Osenga singing “Kara” from back in 2008.  Cool seeing Andrews Peterson and Gullahorn playing and singing background vocals.

(image from tollbooth.org)