By Tommy Womack
–I don’t always like modern Christian records. They’re often maudlin affairs percolating with manufactured ecstasy. But nothing captures my fancy more than a healthy dissertation on the Historical Jesus. Leave it to David Olney to marry the two notions without the fakery of the former or the dry academic tedium of the latter.
The Stone is Olney’s second installment of a series of six-song mini-albums Olney is planning, each one tied together by a theme. (The first was called Film Noir and was Raymond Chandler set to music.)
One of Olney’s greatest strengths is his ability to take on the roles of the characters in his songs and deliver top-notch first-person narratives. In The Stone , he takes on the roles of a small-time huckster posing as a faith healer, the criminal Barabbas, a Roman centurion and – seriously – the donkey on which Christ entered Jerusalem. (That last one isn’t so much a stretch when you consider how Olney once wrote a song about the Titanic from the perspective of the iceberg.)
Most of the tunes come across in their first verses as completely contemporary situations. For instance, in “Brains”, the “cops” drag a suspect down to the “station”, where they grill him under what you presume to be a white hot overhead lamp.
“I wanna know who’s the brains behind this operation!” the cop sings. The suspect gives up his boss, and walks out with “30 coins shiny and new.” Up until that line, the tune could have been a thoroughly contemporary piece. Such O Henry endings are prominent in the record.
This article, was written on Good Friday, a timely date. The subject of The Stone , of course, is timeless.