Brother Claude Ely – Satan, Get Back!

I grew up Catholic and Catholicism is definitely a much more formal stoic presentation than you find in the music of the Pentecostal holiness movement or the gospel music of, for instance, Brother Claude Ely. For me this kind of music is much more about creating a kind of frenetic, direct relationship with God.

Brother Claude Ely was the first Pentecostal preacher, I believe, to sign with a major label and he wrote a bunch of the songs that are on this record and that have become standards today, in a way. One of the things that I really love about this record, and that I wanted to honour or replicate in my new record, is the texture of the recordings and the fact that basically a lot of them are field recordings of what's happening in a church or a worship service. You get all of this kind of incidental sound of the people around him and there's a lot of tape hiss and whatnot so it has a real kind of authentic, documentarian, quality to it.

The point of a lot of this music is to have a driving quality that furthers your ability to have some kind of transcendental experience. I'm not the kind of person who will ever probably be able to record music that has a joyous quality in that capacity but I did try to pay homage to that with certain things like using repetition and kind of with the structural fragmentation of the record a little bit. But I don't necessarily think that I'll be making lively gospel music at any point soon.