My (Seemingly) Top Five Songs

5. St Petersburg

Have you met Brooke Fraser? She’s that lady who composed ‘What a beautiful name’ under Hillsong Worship that led it to win some Grammy awards. It was a big christian hit since 2016.

Growing up in a Christian school (Ndejje SSS), I was taught to watch the music that I would listen to. I used to think it was a bad restriction until I realised the poison in many secular songs.

The spirit behind their inspiration is not the same as that of a born again. So I prayed to God to keep me to the point where He’d send me the right music.

I had first heard of Brooke in school choir through a song called Shadowfeet.

I later googled her and I discovered she had all this music lying about. This was in 2014. I decided to get all her music. I got hooked. Every time I buy a new device, hers is among the first music I get onto it. St Petersburg talks about Rembrandt. An artist who painted an art piece called St. Petersburg which depicted the story of the prodigal son during the medieval ages.

What happened to me through Brooke was; her songs were not labeled gospel songs but they’d blend in with what the world would love to hear. What captured my heart was the fact that it’s preaching subtly to all her unchristian fans and yet she’s not denying her identity as Christian and she hasn’t stopped preaching Christ.

I love this song as it portrays her heart, my talent, and God in the shadows. Her cold tone in the song is easy to sing along with and doesn’t require much expertise as it would for a Whitney Houston song.

4. Brutal Romance

This is Brooke still. Being Ugandan and not white originally makes it hard to cope up with the English in this song. I studied literature in high school and yet I can’t still quite fully comprehend the use of words in this song.

Yes, they are dark and spooky but yet not fully making sense. I guess I’ll need Brooke herself to explain its full meaning. ‘Epauletes of charm?’ ‘A silver thread?’ ‘A spinning slow dance’… can all be understood individually! But in the way she placed them, I can’t fully disentangle, and yet I can’t resist the song.

Only the bridge tries to make sense. The rest, I’ll just sing along with the orchestra! Man the orchestra progression towards the end always sweeps me off my feet.

3. Jesus Wept

Sia! I know she isn’t Christian, but oh well this song says ‘Jesus’. I heard it. It is a good one when one is at a low…her voice clearly expressed Jesus’ weeping in the garden of Gethsemane.

His weeping symbolizes the purchasing of our redemption from sin, that every pain he went through was an over payment for the price that humanity needed to bring to God in order to restore His relationship with us.

You can see Sia struggling with addictions of weed. But it’s as if at the bottom of it all, she remembers a man. Not a man per se, but God in flesh, who understood her pain, who walked her pain and who created a way to vanquish that pain years before Sia was even born.

It’s orchestrating conclusion as well creates an atmosphere of uplifting when listening to it. I love the atmosphere it creates every time. Such a timely reminder of how hell has not only been escaped, but has been set far away from us, as resurrection is our new normal!

2. Hallelujah Here Below

This was a song that got stuck on my replay early 2019. My, my, my. The artwork itself shows the beings that stand in the Throne Room of God. They worship him day and night.

The cast of the video of this song creates such a feel that goosebumps can’t resist but pop out your skin. I’m not talking about the first version. There’s a latter one where Steffany Gretzinger is featured.

It’s good to praise God for what He’s done as a father. But there’s also a reality of God as King, whereby we don’t need to come ask him a thing or thank him for anything, but just to look at him and stare, and get lost in awe of His glory and wonder and Majesty.

I hear angels sing whenever this song I play. My room gets a little bit cloudy as if the shekinah fully jumped out of the realm unseen to a realm I could touch!

Go check it out!

1. Blackout

This is currently my number 1 hit. Phasing in, I first encountered Steffany through the previous song, and also Bethel music’s Goodness Of God. Blackout has that pop feel overflowing with scriptural truths of who Christians are really meant to be on earth, but still the normal-day-to-day person may not easily realize it, and just dance along unbeknownst to him or her.

Speak of Brooke Fraser’s ‘Warmth in the veins, lead in the core’ and yet it’s clear that her chorus’ saying ‘Love and death’ is talking about God so LOVED the world that he sent His only begotten son to DIE for us that whose ever shall believe on him shall not perish but have everlasting life!

I like the new pattern of the Christian artists in these times. Not that our attention is to capture the heathens, but that we’ve come to fully grasp what Jesus meant when He said “Be cunning as a serpent and humble as a dove…”