One Man In The Middle brings you regular, unbiased and honest reviews of music albums and EPs from Christian artists and musicians in the UK and worldwide. Here we have Songs Of The People by Prestonwood Worship with an overall review score of 9.6 out of 10.

Album Information:

Songs of the People, a new album from Prestonwood Worship, the music ministry of the 42,000-member Prestonwood Baptist Church, which has two locations in the Dallas area. The project features all new songs from Prestonwood’s worship team led by Dove Award winning songwriter Michael Neale (“Your Great Name”) along with Prestonwood’s renowned mass choir and special guests Paul Baloche and Michael W. Smith.

“With more than 500 worshipers on stage, we really wanted to capture the power of a unified worshiping army, shattering the darkness with praise,” says Neale of the project. “Having our good friends Michael and Paul join us in writing and leading for this project was a true gift… our prayer is that Songs of the People will be a resource for worshipers around the world to bring their offering to the King.”

Review:

In Texas they famously do everything bigger! This definitely goes for churches too as the Prestonwood Baptist Church has 42,000 members across two campuses in the Dallas area. With a Church this size it is possible that worship can be lost as performance instead of true corporate worship and personal worship. It is exactly that this album wants to address in this live worship recording. The worship should be corporate and personal to all the members of the congregation and not just a personal ‘me’ centred worship performance from the front. To worship the Lord “in Spirit and in Truth” is as true for the band, the leader, the choir and the congregation.

Despite this not being about performance there are a couple of big-name guests on this album who have been inspiring heart-felt worship for years. Paul Baloche is the author of many well-known worship songs including “Open the Eyes of My Heart” and Michael W. Smith has made some phenomenally successful live worship albums. These musical heavy-weights add to the overall feeling that this album is something a little bit special. The other person of note is Michael Neale who is the lead worship pastor at Prestonwood, he himself is Dove Award winning songwriter.

From the very first track there is the feeling of a corporate worship event. The clapping and audience participation doesn’t stop as soon as Paul Baloche and Michael Neale start singing on “Songs Of The People” the first and title track, instead this participation and general atmosphere can be felt throughout this live album.

While this song kicks off the album the last part of the track either pays homage to, or borrows from the titles of a number of well-known hymns which actually feels a little sloppy compared to the writing for the rest of this track. Ultimately it doesn’t seem to gel properly and the same can be said of the next couple of tracks which don’t seem to quite take off properly either and although they are expressed with heart and soul by the worship leader they fail to hit the mark with the listener.

The album comes to life and starts to head towards its mark from “Our Story Our Song” which is led by Jordan Grizzard. This track does borrow from the classic hymn chorus “This is our story, this is our song” which brings a nice personal touch, but still doesn’t fire my heart up like the classic version! “Here in the Holy” cuts everything back to a solo from Jordan that really hits home with its soulful sound that really feels like a hearts cry. As the choir kicks in and other instruments build into the mix this is a subtly powerful song that speaks of our brokenness reaching heavenward in the holy moment.

The intro to “You Can Have It All” builds anticipation for the actual track with the strings playing an excellent version of “I Surrender All” where the following song echoes many of the same themes of surrender and sacrifice. Michael Neale is back as the worship leader and this track does work brilliantly to bring reflection and praise. “Grace So Marvelous” is a reminder of God’s grace that feels like a hymn in the way that it is handled by Rick Briscoe. This is followed with another song about God’s grace like an ocean which feels as though the tide has gone out a little bit after the brilliance of the previous songs, although I did like the guitars on this track.

It is good to see the ladies represented on this album by Emma Inman and Megan Duke on the latter half of the album. I would say that possibly bringing these ladies into the leading role on some of the earlier tracks may have helped to break up the early phase which didn’t quite feel right.

The album concludes with Michael W. Smith leading the church in a fairly plain worship track that leaves the album on a positive conclusion, but it’s certainly not one of his best tracks!

There is a fair variety of congregational worship contained on this one album there is a modern worship flavour that sometimes has tinges of hymnody, there is a 500 strong choir providing backing vocals and you can hear them at the right moments really helping to build the worshipful and congregational feeling of this album.

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