God is close. That’s a truth singer-songwriter Mike Janzen learned during a difficult season in his life following a brain injury.
“It was hard. But what I found through those terrible seasons, where you’re suffering or after you’re suffering, is that God is close. That’s such a remarkable thing that the Good Shepherd takes care of you and holds you and keeps you and somehow makes His love and care known to you in those hard seasons,” Janzen said.
His recent release, “Songs from the Canyon: The Psalms Project, Volume III,” was a direct result of years of incredibly “terrible seasons” that Janzen experienced when he was unable to do little more than lie on a couch for almost four years.
In 2016, Janzen was looking forward to an exciting year. His music career was really taking off, with lots of opportunities writing songs in jazz and doing radio and orchestra shows. Then one night he got up with his stomach hurting, took two steps and passed out. He crashed face first into the tile floor of the basement.
‘Confined’
He didn’t think much of it at the time and went back to bed. But when he woke up, everything was blurry and sound “felt strange.” He called a friend who had a lot of experience with concussions and said it definitely sounded like a concussion.
Janzen was nervous when his friend told him it could take up to two weeks to recover, so he went into panic mode.
“When you’re a full-time musician and you own a house, the only way to make payments is to be working. There’s no backup plan,” Janzen said.
He was thankful that his friends helped him out. They would cover gigs and give him the check. Some raised money to help him with bills he couldn’t cover.
When he hadn’t healed after a few weeks, Janzen had a brain scan. It showed that it was a concussion but obviously needed more time for recovery.
There was so much he couldn’t do. He couldn’t go for walks, listen to music or play with his daughter. Because he couldn’t work, he was still worried about how the bills would be paid but he couldn’t do math.
“Really, I was confined to the basement and the darkness,” he said.
Meditate
Before all this began, Janzen had a friend who suggested he write an album about the Psalms. Because he couldn’t do anything else, he decided it would be a good time to start. Janzen couldn’t look at screens normally, instead having to squint with one eye open, but he could use that method to read some verses and meditate on them.
And meditate he did.
He spent hours thinking about one passage, and when he would hear a melody tied to a chapter or verse, he would hum it into his iPhone. One of the first was Psalm 42, specifically verse 8: “By day the Lord directs His love; at night His song is with me — a prayer to the God of my life.”
Janzen eventually had more than 1,000 voice memos with clips of melodies or ideas for a future project.
“The Psalms were so, so good for me because they reminded me who I was — that God loved me — and also reminded me of who God is and that He won’t leave your side when things are hard.
“It was actually a real lifeline to me, to be able to have the Psalms as prayers and words when I didn’t have any of my own to think of in those days,” Janzen said.
The thousands of voice memos eventually became several albums. The first two are very reflective and meditative with a gentleness to them, a result of Janzen only being able to handle soft, soothing music when he was first able to write again.
“You can tell that someone’s in the middle of recovery,” Janzen said, laughing.
‘Sonic journeys’
As he healed, the music changed. By the time he wrote the music for the third album, it was “more cinematic and wider.” Though all the songs for the three albums came out of the same season, this last set is more upbeat.
Janzen didn’t know what to do with the songs, but then he met a producer who wanted them. This producer “turned them into beautiful sonic journeys.”
Though the last album hasn’t been out long enough to get a lot of feedback, he had some listeners say that they would play the first two volumes consistently through times of major illness like cancer, death and trauma.
“These songs have a certain tenderness to them, I guess, and you can sense that someone’s gone through something so they really pull up beside people as the Psalms do and as God does in our hard times,” Janzen said.
“There’s a lot of hope for people who are going through hard things. Sometimes there’s a tendency to think that God is distant in our times of darkness or of valleys one has to walk through, but I think my music encourages the listener to venture deeper with God through the heartaches and cries of your heart, knowing that He hears us and that there’s a plan even in the hard things we go through.”
For more information about Mike Janzen and “Songs from the Canyon,” go to mikejanzentrio.com.
