I recently posted on ways that I think theologically about the body in musical performance. Here are a couple of videos to illustrate what I mean.

Steve Vai, “Building the Church”

In this clip, among other bodily wherewithals, you will see involuntary knee-lifts, tensely gritted teeth, excessively squinting eyes, mouth wordlessly agape and head tilted back, and pinky finger guiding the rest of the hand as a ballast while rarely touching the fretboard. Each of these, and dozens more moments, can signal to a fan the ‘yes’ to a life-giving more toward which one is led through the music, through the body.

Alanis Morissette, “Baba”

Here, we have Morissette’s loose-swinging dangling deadweight arm, shoulder shake-turns, extempore finger-shapes, the backward-stepping prowl, the head-opening-enunciation-as-if-pulled-backward-from-behind — not to mention her band exuding their own somatic shapes at every turn in the music.

Musical bodies and fans’ histories meet in moments that, in their accumulation, can add up to a genuine arc in a spiritual life, built largely and sometimes entirely on what we so easily call “secular music.”

Tommy Beaudoin, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York