Crook & Psalter's First Album is now Streaming on Spotify
A four song demo is available now on Spotify, Apple Music and Youtube Music
This is also available on Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and iTunes.
Why?
Because I love the Psalms and am trying to share that love with my family. I cut my teeth in a church that only sang the Psalms a cappella. Although painful at times, it was glorious at others and left me with a deep love for singing Scripture. There’s really nothing like it. We sang Psalms from the Reformed Presbyterian Book of Psalms for Singing. All 150 Psalms are set to verse.
The problem, though, is that the tunes are quite difficult to learn, and it’s not that accessible. More basic metrical Psalters have been more helpful for my family. For the past few years, we’ve been singing a few Psalms from Dr. Timothy Tennent’s excellent Seedbed Psalter for our family devotions. All the Psalms can be sung to the tune of hymns that most Christians know.
I’m Making My Own
I liked that idea, so I’m making my own. 20 of them. One batch at a time.
All these Psalms are set to a common meter. For example, Psalm 2 is set to the meter of 76.76. The first line is 7 syllables, the next is 6, and it keeps repeating. Once you have the lyrics, you can sing them to the tune of The Church’s One Foundation or O Sacred Head Now Wounded. Other Psalms can be sung to other hymns and are set up to different meters, but that is for another post.
I wanted to make my own songs that would be popular with my family (or at least with me). I’ve been playing around with Suno AI for the past year, which is a magical tool for creating AI-generated music. I’ve learned a great deal about how to set better prompts to effectively leverage the AI.
This has been a huge force multiplier for my own discipleship as these songs reflect my own musical tastes, so I’m finding myself listening to them frequently and, importantly, remembering the lyrics, which in this case, are Scripture. It’s been sweet to do this with my daughters as well, although if they had their way, the songs would all be K-pop.
You’re welcome for not posting that.
The lyrics are based on the text of the NET Bible, which is a great translation loosely affiliated with faculty from Dallas Theological Seminary. They are quite liberal with giving consent for people to use their translation for content creation. Claude AI was used to help refine the four Psalms into a rhyming metrical Psalter.
Enjoy.