"Psalm 120" and "Heffle Cuckoo Fair"
This is the 120th Psalm as you can most clearly see. To tell you truth, I have not lived a good life and nor do I expect it to improve in regards to my sin; I start off with this because when I have vain thoughts, sinful thoughts, bitterness, pretty much anything that isn't from God to start off Sunday it feels kind of Pharisaical for me to be uploading these Psalms a Sunday. It doesn't help that I came out of the whole dark country scene, and while I didn't get seriously involved as I could have, it plagues my mind to where I cannot really think about doing Christian music or anything of that sort professionally. In other words, it's hard to be a Christian artist when you are listed as a legal co-writer of a song entitled "Demons in my Head." It makes me quite angry too sometimes as I even told Darter I didn't like that song; I was an unsaved, borderline insane heathen, and I still thought it was a crap song! And I knew to some extent that it was quite wrong to listen to satanic music and things of that sort, but my foolishness has ultimately stained my reputation despite this. Maybe folk music professionally one day, but Christian folk doesn't seem to be a realistic goal anymore.
On a much less selfish and egotistical note, this psalm is a very good one as it expresses the sheer mercy of a God for the sake of punishing the unrighteous. Things tend to be, particularly in the new IFB, as they probably were in the early church (well they were in fact as Ananias is a chief example of this) but there is definitely a wicked element of flattery in true Christian movements; if not some weird doctrine to confuse faith-based salvation to vulnerable unsaved, it's flattery. Sometimes it's because they are babes in Christ so everything is grand to them, sometimes it's just pure vanity spewed out of the mouth of the spiritually immature. I used to be the former (I literally told three different IFB pastors they were my favorite pastor); either way I don't like it anymore. I don't like it in day to day life even; you don't know who actually likes you and admires you and who despises you heavily and wants you dead but flatters you for the sake of backstabbing. I felt bad enough burning bridges with my dark country pals without having the God conversation with 'em for the tenth time, although I probably should have communicated in better fashion and with more skill. But this psalm is pretty cool because of that; it is God's way of expressing to us the wrath flatterers will face in due time. God will humble the vain, false, flattering tongue, and that is a beautiful thing.
The tune comes from Peter Bellamy, who had actually set many English tunes to the poems of Rudyard Kipling. I was not inspired by Bellamy at the time, but coming across this inspired me in a vague sense. I wanted to set Elizabethan and other English tunes to psalms and so to think that a man had already done with Rudyard Kipling's content (some of which is highly blasphemous, racist, and just downright vulgar I will warn however) without any overly flashy playing and vain musical matter was motivating. It may be a traditional tune, it may be a Bellamy original, but it is an excellent and most fitting tune for psalm 120 I'd say. "Heffle Cuckoo Fair" contains somewhat of a jolly inspection of Heathfield Fair, an English traditional fair known locally to the region as Heffle Cuckoo Fair. It features nasally, bleating ole Peter Bellamy, Anthea Bellamy his wife, and Chris Birch who I seem to only see featured on Bellamy's albums.
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