263: A Higher Power Ballad

There was something different about Justin Bieber’s performance of his hit song “Peaches” at the 2022 Grammy Awards. The recorded version, which spent thirty weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, opens with a full-blast chorus featuring driving percussion and ringing guitars. But performing live, the song’s instrumentation was stripped down, with Bieber alone at a grand piano, crooning into the mic. For a lighthearted song (“I get my peaches down in Georgia”), this intimate performance sounded overly serious on first listen. Slowly, the band built up, adding guest verses from Daniel Caesar and Giveon between seven repetitions of the chorus. Each time the chorus returned, the band got louder, the music pointing upward until a high-flying synth solo closed the song. 

It may have been a surprising arrangement of Bieber’s hit, but it was the same approach heard elsewhere in the ceremony. The same sort of slow climb was heard earlier in the night when Maverick City Music, the first Christian group to perform at the Grammys in twenty years, gave an uplifting performance of their song “Jireh” off their award winning album Old Church Basement. In the church tradition, the slow build is a common feature, beginning as a quiet prayer that expands outward as more voices join in. Naomi Raine, one of the group's seven members, describes it as “this common and underlying structure” that feels “supernatural and spiritual.” 

While that familiar structure pervades the Christian music landscape, Maverick City Music has a greater purpose in their music. “We are called to blur the lines as far as what is Christian, what is Gospel, those two have been segregated for too long,” says the group’s Chandler Moore. The expansiveness of the music is represented in Maverick City Music’s diverse makeup. The seven core members invite dozens of songwriters from countless backgrounds to songwriting camps to explore the traditions constraining boundaries. Having only started releasing music in 2019, Maverick City Music has released over seventeen combined LPs & EPs in multiple genres including Worship, Gospel, R&B, and Latin Pop. Consistent across all those records is that transcendent slow build. 

After exploring the discography of Maverick City Music, one starts to hear this song form all over pop music. In the case of Bieber, who is both friends with the group and has a religious background, his previous hit songs like “Holy” and “Anyone” also unfold in a slow build. The reworked “Peaches” Bieber performed at the Grammys even makes sense given the chorus’s final line “I get my life right from the source.” There has been a long history of stylistic exchange between the religious and secular world. There would be no Rock & Roll without Gospel, and Christian Contemporary draws its sounds from the 60s folk movement. Today, songs made for worship share qualities with modern power ballads, the former elevating the spirit, the latter coaxing our emotions. On the latest episode of Switched On Pop hosts Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan speak with Maverick City Music and listen back to songs both religious and secular that lift us up.

Songs Discussed

• Justin Bieber - Peaches (feat. Daniel Ceasar & Giveon), Holy (feat. Chance The Rapper), Anyone
• Maverick City Music - Old Church Basement, Jireh, Same Blood, Used To This, Nadie Como Tú
• Coldplay - Fix You
• Céline Dion - Because You Loved Me
• Luther Vandross - Endless Love (with Mariah Carey)
• But, Honestly - Foo Fighters

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