Good Friday Meditation at Pine Street Church

Pine Street Church, its band, and music program are supremely excited to announce our second annual "Good Friday Musical Meditation". Last year's inaugural event was a cover performance of Ray LaMontagne album Till the Sun Turns Black. This year we will be performing the album Kid A, by world-renowned British band Radiohead. The performance will take place on Friday, April 3rd at 7:30pm. Admission to this event is free. Donations will be graciously appreciated and will go towards music scholarships at the Off Broadway School of Fine Arts.

The musicians involved in this production are the best that Boulder and the Front Range have to offer. The setting is our gorgeous 90 year old sanctuary, and the moment is just right to gather and experience music together so that we might work to align our hearts and minds towards a more meaningful and intentional existence, seeking betterment of our lives and the world around us.

Released in October of 2000, Radiohead's Kid A has grown from its initially mixed reviews by both critics and fans into a universally-touted iconic album that shares a home on lists of the greatest albums of all time. Starkly contrasting to 1997's much-heralded Ok Computer, Kid A changed the landscape of music as we know it, blurring the lines between styles by incorporating sounds, techniques, and instrumentation from a plethora of seemingly disparate genres. The resulting phenomenon is an album that has taken listeners upwards of a decade to digest, and will surely continue down this path for years to come.

By the band's own admission, the meaning of Radiohead's music is not intended to be dictated to its listener by the band. Instead it stands, as does all great artwork, an opportunity for active experience. The season of Lent, especially Good Friday, which coincides with Passover, has become a time to reflect on deep issues both within ourselves, and the world around us. It is a time to consider our place in the universe, as well as the universe itself. Its a sort of spiritual period of cleansing where we not only discover and give up negative influences in our lives, but when we take up callings that lead to better existence for ourselves as well as our world.

The music and words of Kid A were largely influenced by the band's experiences around the worldwide successes of their previous album Ok Computer. The band was thrust into the modern day global media spotlight and all that comes with it. Kid A now stands as a testament to the destructive force a globalized civilization can wrought, both upon the planet, and the individual. There is truly nary a better time to experience this album than in this deepest season of reflection. On the 15th anniversary of its release, Kid A, perhaps more than ever, is able to give perspective as to how far we've come, or how much further we've fallen away, from the issues that inspired its creation. This experience is an opportunity of which we're passionately moved to be a part.

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