Most Influential Albums: Day Nine

This is a bit of a departure. I really never invested much time in "church music" as a teenager. However, I decided to serve a mission at the age of 19, which meant putting the world behind. In other words, no Bon Jovi or Billy Joel or even Amy Grant. For missionaries this meant different things. For some it was a strict diet of MoTab (or in today's parlance, TabCats), for others it also included Enya. I didn't really listen to very much unless I was in a car area, which meant that the car stereo system had to be put to good use.

My first companion had a John Canaan's Our Savior's Love, which includes renditions of hymns such as "Come Thou Fount" and "Consider the Lilies" in addition to 1980s LDS classics such as "Together Forever" and "You're Not Alone". Oddly enough, this album takes me back to a specific time and place probably more than anything else on my list: early spring of 1995, driving around Poulsbo, Washington in a silver Nissan Sentra. We listened to it dozens of times and it's pretty well ingrained in my soul. I can still recall some of the vocals for those songs in my mind without much effort even though I rarely listen to them anymore. The album really helped me embrace religiously-themed music as worthwhile which was not really an attitude I had as a younger person.