Indelible Grace Hymnbook

This is the hymn from which we derived the title for our album "Joy Beyond The Sorrow: Indelible Grace VI." This hymn speaks of longing and of sorrow in this life. Christians believe that the sorrow we experience in this life is real, but that it is not ultimate. There is a day coming when the relationship we were made for will be fully consummated. The music for this text fits the longing and lack of full resolution by never going to a V chord (the dominant chord.)

I found this text by the great Scottish hymnwriter Horatius Bonar in one of the volumes of his hymns that I own. Bonar was pre-mil in his eschatology but I have found that his hymns about the earthly reign of Christ, which he expected during the millennium, work pretty well as hymns about the new heavens and new earth. (So much for authorial intent I suppose.) I actually didn’t expect this hymn to make the CD. I had written it and liked it, but just didn’t see it as congregational. But in preparation for recording the album I put together a sheet of about 20 hymns that I wanted to “try out” with my RUF college students, and we gathered at my house to sing them all. The students really loved singing Until The Daybreak and pressed me to include it on the record. (This same kind of thing happened with Come Said Jesus’ Sacred Voice on Wake Thy Slumbering Children too by the way.)

It was a blast to record this one! I had a little bass line idea that Cason developed into a real part. Ian laid down such a fat groove on the drums and then asked if he could add acoustic piano. We were all pretty skeptical about piano being a good fit for the track, but when we heard him do that little octave figure we were sold! The guitars were a bit of a challenge to navigate. I had originally written this on a “hi-string guitar.” Sometimes called “Nashville” tuning, a hi-string is an acoustic guitar strung up with half a 12-string pack of strings. You simply take the highest of each of the pairs and put it on the guitar. So the hi E and B strings are normal 1st and 2nd strings. However the G, D, A, and E strings are all an octave higher than a normal acoustic guitar. This tuning has a great shimmery sound and I have used it quite a bit on Indelible Grace projects. If you double the main acoustic guitar part on a hi-string and pan them left and right you end up with a 12-string guitar spread across the stereo spectrum. On “Jesus I Come” (For All The Saints) I actually used 2 different hi-string guitars. One of them was strung up as mentioned above, but for the other one I used a regular D string to get the lower note of the chord I wanted. Anyway, the little riff on “Until The Daybreak” needed to be played on the hi-string with a capo at the 2nd fret and the riff is on the A string. If you play it on a regular guitar the riff is in too low of a register to work right. To strengthen the sound of that riff we doubled it on a bouzouki that belongs to Andrew Peterson. (One of the great things about Cason Cooley’s studio is that people leave cool instruments sitting around sometimes.) We wanted a chunky guitar on the track too and so I took my ’65 Gibson J-50 and tuned it to open G (Keith Richards favorite tuning) and played the chords with that. So, there actually isn’t a regular acoustic guitar on this one at all. I also put my electric guitar through a talk-box I bought from Laura Taylor to get that wah-wah sound in the track.

I originally had planned for a girl to sing this one, but I had Jeremy just throw down a quick scratch vocal and he sounded so good that we decided to have him sing it for real! I’m glad we did that because it needed the energy from being higher in a guy’s range. When I do this one live I like to have the 1st line be just the melody and then add the 2nd part on line 2, and then add the 3rd part on the 3rd line so that it keeps building. (Try it – you might like it!)

I love the way this text urges you to engage your imagination to whet your appetite for the Wedding Day that is coming. Bonar invites you see it as if it is happening right now – “Morn of morns it comes at last!” and I love that boldness. Imagination is a vital, but oft-neglected, part of the Christian life and hymns like this can train our imaginations. God created us with longings and longings are inseparable from our imaginations. I’ve enjoyed immensely James K.A. Smith’s book “Desiring The Kingdom” and his argument for attending to the shaping of our desires in worship and Christian education. I think hymns like this one do a great job of harnessing the imagination to mold the desires of the heart.

Extra Last Verse (from "Hymns By Horatius Bonar" published by his son)

For the day of ended battle
For the victor’s palm and crown
For the day of recognition
When the King shall claim his own;
For the day when He who loved her
Shall in glory reappear
For the day of revelation
She is waiting, waiting here!