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View all podcast episodes: https://danielmount.com/podcast/
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Nailed To His Cross
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOZPsQNgtF4
Lyrics: https://danielmount.com/songs/nailed-to-his-cross/
Daniel J. Mount
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Transcript
Lightly edited for clarity.
Chad Berry:
Welcome to the Expository Songs podcast. We discuss songs where the main idea of a passage of Scripture is the main idea of the song. My name is Chad Berry, and today we’re going to be discussing the song “Nailed to His Cross,” lyrics written by Daniel J. Mount, and music written by Taylor Garms. Daniel, welcome to your own show.
Daniel J. Mount:
Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. I was surprised and delighted when you had this idea of, I think your phrase was, a turn the tables podcast.
Chad Berry:
That’s right. Yeah. I can’t remember where I ripped the idea from where somebody else did that. I think it was a Biblical counseling podcast where the typical host was the one being interviewed. So for any of the listeners who might be a, a little confused, Daniel obviously typically hosts this show. But for anybody who doesn’t know, Daniel is actually a rather prolific songwriter. And so I thought it would be kind of fun maybe to be the interviewer. and hear about one of the songs that he’s written. So it’s gonna be a good and fun conversation. I’m excited about it.
Daniel J. Mount:
I’m really honored that you’d ask. This is a lot of fun; I’m looking forward to it
Chad Berry:
So Daniel, let’s just go ahead and start where you typically start with your guests. Like I said, by now most of your listeners have probably pieced together a little bit of your background as a songwriter and your connection and commitment to music. But just for clarity’s sake, could you give us a little bit of a background of how you came to the Lord and your first interest in music and how you got into songwriting?
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. So I have the blessing of a relatively boring testimony from the standpoint of justification. Plenty of stories along the way of sanctification for sure. But I can’t ever remember a time where I disbelieved the gospel or I thought it wasn’t true. But I was age seven when I realized that if I had ever told God that I believed the gospel and that I repented of my sins and trusted in Jesus as my Savior, I couldn’t ever remember saying it. So to the best of my knowledge, I couldn’t ever remember saying it and articulating this, to God at least, before the age of seven. So at that time I would have called it a sinner’s prayer. But I prayed a prayer of repentance, of sins, and of faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord at age seven. And I think I was probably seven or eight when I was baptized.
Chad Berry:
That’s great. I like the way you put it. I can’t remember now already the phrase that you used, but kind of “story’s more of sanctification.”
Daniel J. Mount:
Mm-hmm.
Chad Berry:
My background is very similar, saved at a young age. I could tell plenty of stories of rebellion and repentance throughout my life, but yeah, very similar. So how did you get into—what was kind of your early exposure to music and what pushed you into songwriting specifically?
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. Well, I had the blessing of growing up in church from before I was born all the way through. And so I was around church music. In my younger years, my family was in some charismatic, even Pentecostal, churches, several of which are fairly contemporary with their music. So I definitely experienced a pretty good taste of 80s and early 90s praise and worship/CCM—Integrity, Vineyard, Maranatha, those sorts of things. And I’ve been to a number of churches through the years of my childhood, young adulthood, before settling in a Reformed Baptist place in more recent years. But, along the way, I experienced a lot of different flavors of church, but really in most cases it was a mixture of 80s and 90s praise and worship, and depending on the church, different levels of mixtures of hymns. And I didn’t mind it, but it just wasn’t particularly interesting to me either.
Chad Berry:
Mm-mm.
Daniel J. Mount:
I was just into other stuff as a kid early teen and—you know, nothing against it but it wasn’t anything that there wasn’t any moment that was like, “i want to do this”
But when I was thirteen, something interesting happened. But to tell that story requires taking a step back a couple years. So that’s ‘99. Early ‘90s or maybe late ‘80s, my parents heard a CCM hit called “Watch the Lamb” written by a singer called Ray Boltz. They wanted a copy of it so my dad went to the local Christian bookstore, told them what he wanted, and came home with the wrong cassette. He came home with Michael Card’s cassette In the Beginning, which had a song on it telling the story of Abraham taking Isaac up Mount Moriah called “God Will Provide a Lamb.” And I never actually found out why they didn’t return it—maybe the bookstore didn’t accept an open cassette, I don’t know. But they bought a Michael Card cassette by accident, early nineties, I’d say, probably, and it just sat on the shelf for good six, seven, eight years.
And when I was thirteen I just—random curiosity not having anything else in particular to listen to—I pulled it off the shelf and played it and I was fascinated immediately. For some reason, it being a cassette was on side two, so I started on a side two and one of the songs there was the song called “They Called Him Laughter,” which is a whole song about the meaning of Isaac’s name (Isaac means “laughter,”) and the biblical-redemptive elements of it. And then I was like, “That really caught my attention.”
But then, when I flipped over to side 1, and heard this song called “Jubilee,” on Leviticus 25 and the concept of Jubilee, but engaging it on so many different levels. Jubilee is fulfilled in our lives. Jubilee is in the eschatological sense in the end of time. Just a powerful lyric, but also an exciting energetic melody.
I was hooked. That was definitely for me. I went in one day from essentially zero interest in songwriting to this is what I want to do. But not having any background as a musician—I mean, my mom had taught me the scale, so I knew a little bit of music—but I didn’t play any instrument to speak of. A few notes on piano, but like taking a few lessons, nothing systematic. So it took me probably five years of writing every chance I could get. Basically through my teen years, I wrote 75-plus songs a year. All of which were somewhere between terrible and almost terrible. But somewhere around 2004-05, I started getting more of a sense of music theory. I started understanding playing piano better, a little guitar. and started to get to where some of the songs are ones that I might still even use today. So from about 2004 or 2005 on, I started writing something closer to usable songs. But along the way, I have written, I looked up the numbers before this, I have written 766 completed songs.
Chad Berry:
Wow.
Daniel J. Mount:
I’ve had 16 recorded through the years, released one CD, and I’ve also been active in church music. Definitely grew as a musician, leading here and there, specials, and I’ll mention in passing, done some occasional preaching also through the years.
Chad Berry:
Excellent. Thank you for sharing that.
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure!
Chad Berry:
I had another question that just came into my mind that I don’t think I already know the answer to. So as a musician, are you primarily self-taught or did you take music lessons beyond the little bit of knowledge you had at the beginning in your early teens?
Daniel J. Mount:
I would say primarily self-guided on the teaching.
Chad Berry:
Okay.
Daniel J. Mount:
I went through some instructional books, but I was mostly going through it on my own, if that makes sense.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
Both of my parents play some music. My dad plays some piano. My mom plays some piano and mandolin and guitar as well. and so they, like, showed me the scale showed me a few basics to get me going, but everything other than that—this isn’t a long story, I can just tell it.
So ‘99 was when I heard Michael Card’s song “Jubilee” and was like “that’s what I want to do.” A few months later, my family landed at a church that was meeting out of a rented chapel at the the local Christian school. We went there for eight years. So it was 2000 and there were, it was a small church, about 20, 25 people, and there was one pianist. And I think it was in 2000, 2001, she found out she was expecting. And we were looking at a situation where we were going to have no church musicians in about seven or eight months.
Chad Berry:
Mm.
Daniel J. Mount:
And I was—I might be remembering this wrong because as I recall it I was thinking I was 13. So it must have been earlier that year, before my birthday. So I was thinking well I’m 13. I’ve got a sister several years younger than me and everybody else is like single digits kids or adults who have full-time jobs or multiple children. Like nobody else is in a position to learn an instrument in seven or eight months. But I was like… Because I’m homeschooled, I have the flexibility, I can just kind of rearrange my life. And I just went like crazy trying to learn enough piano to lead congregational singing in about a seven or eight-month period and got there. I mean, was it pretty at first? No. And I’m still not like your mother-in-law is. But I learned enough to hang in there and keep the congregation going at roughly the same key and roughly the same tempo.
Chad Berry:
Okay, excellent. Just to fill in the gap for the listeners, when Daniel referenced my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law was a music teacher for her whole career. So you can imagine she is, she’s actually in the process of giving me piano lessons. So that’s a new adventure and it’s been wonderful.
Daniel J. Mount:
And I’ll just say and she’s our church’s primary pianist too.
Chad Berry:
She is.
Daniel J. Mount:
And I’m kind of a secondary pianist. I’ll fill in on a day she’s out or play a closing hymn or something.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, she’s wonderful. I could go on and on about my mother-in-law, so I’ll stop there. So you said you were about 14 around that time that you were doing that. Okay, excellent. And then one other question, just kind of to fill in some gaps for your listeners as well before we actually get to the song. The concept of expository music, you and I expressed and talked about what is an expository hymn in the first episode of the podcast talking about Isaac Watts’ hymn, “I Sing the Mighty Power of God,” which was such a joy to sing this past Sunday at church.
Daniel J. Mount:
It was!
Chad Berry:
But we were talking a little bit off screen about the, you know, for all intents and purposes to the best of our knowledge, you’ve kind of coined that phrase “expository song” or “expository music.” Can you tell us a little bit about what kind of sparked that thought and how you kind of came to that idea of expository music?
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. So I’ll just say for anybody who wants the more in-depth version of this story, Pastor Chad and I talk about it in a fair amount of detail on the first episode of this podcast. So if you go back to the first episode, you can definitely hear us talk about the concept and unfold it in a fair amount of detail.
Just briefly, as we say in the intro of every podcast, “an expository song is a song where the main idea of a passage of scripture is the main idea of a song.”
I was just observing a trend here about 13 years ago. There were a number of other factors to the story, which we go into in there—but I was watching more and more churches move from the sorts of topical sermons that I grew up hearing. nothing wrong, nothing inherently sinful about a topical sermon, but there’s definitely some weaknesses to a church that doesn’t go verse by verse through the Scripture. So I was seeing more and more churches move from topical sermons to expository sermons, but still sing the same sort of songs they used to sing. And I was thinking as a songwriter, but also a songwriter who sometimes preaches, I was thinking that there was an opportunity for growth in the area of what we sing also—in songs that engaged Scripture as thoughtfully as the sermons did maybe not as deeply although you can go really deep in a small area—you can’t have 45 minutes of content.
Chad Berry:
Sure.
Daniel J. Mount:
And the more I thought about it and the more I started looking at it the more I realized that was the starting point of English-language hymnody. Initially, we just had psalms, largely—paraphrased versions of psalms set to English rhyme and meter And then, once Isaac Watts was starting to write songs from other passages, he’s writing songs from other passages verse-by-verse through those passages. The next few generations of songwriters largely do the same.
A lot, not all, but a lot of Charles Wesley’s songs are verse by verse through a passage. A lot of John Newton’s songs are verse by verse through a passage. And you look at the other great hymn writers of that era. They generally weren’t starting with their feelings and only semi starting with a topic usually starting with a verse and trying to passage in trying to capture that passage in song as well as they can. We’ve just gotten further and further away from that through the years. There’s always been some! There are some good expository songs from every generation; there were just fewer of them.
And I decided that while my term was new, as far as I know—as far as I know, I more or less coined the term—the concept was very old and it was the original concept. and I was just encouraging a somewhat of a return to where church music used to be in the glory days of hymnody, the best days of hymnody—while trying to have the caveat at every point that I am by no means saying topical songs are sinful, that churches should never sing a topical song. Every church I’ve been in has sung topical songs, and those are very edifying, and there’s definitely a place for them.
But I think a church’s musical language is stronger when it’s a mixture of topical songs and a good dose of songs where the main idea of a passage of Scripture is the main idea of that song.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, yeah. So many things that I want to say, but I’ll refrain so we can stay on point. But yeah, you’re exactly right. And that trend, you know, we don’t want to call it the birth of expositional preaching because of course, you know, expositional preaching dates all the way back to the era of John Newton and Watts and those guys and even long before that.
Daniel J. Mount:
And back to Chrysostom.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, Chrysostom, and arguably to Jesus himself, you know, expounding upon the Old Testament. And it just makes sense that if we’re to let the Word of God dwell in us richly, Colossians 3, and that out of that flows and we address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, that part of that is addressing one another and the Lord with His own Word. Alistair Begg said one time at a conference where he was preaching that what God has to say to us is far more important than anything we could ever have to say to Him. And the way that we sing, I think, can really capture that as well, where the Lord speaks to us.
You know, as we say at our church, every Lord’s Day, we gather to pray the Word, to read the Word, to sing the Word, and to preach the Word. So I appreciate it. I know it was a little bit longer intro and actually getting to the song, but Since you host the podcast, very rarely do we get to dip into your background. So this is the opportunity for us to kind of dip into your vision for music and this podcast in particular.
Daniel J. Mount:
Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity to do that.
Chad Berry:
Absolutely. So for the listeners, if you’ve never heard Daniel’s song, “Nailed to His Cross,” let me encourage you to go ahead and pause the show now and go and listen to it. The song will be linked in the show notes. You can find it on YouTube, you can find it on Spotify, and you’ll be encouraged by it. And let me especially encourage you to listen to it if you’ve never heard it because there are a few questions that I have in mind for Daniel that are gonna gear in on some of the musicality of the song. And so having heard the song, you’ll understand the questions a little bit better. So, let’s just go ahead and dive in. The refrain of the song is based on Colossians chapter 2, beginning in verse 13. If it’s all right, I’ll just go ahead and read that passage for us real quick for the frame of reference.
Daniel J. Mount:
Go for it!
Chad Berry:
So this is what Paul writes, the Holy Spirit writes through Paul’s pen: “And you who were dead in your trespasses, and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our trespasses.” And then verse 14 particularly is where that chorus focuses in, “by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame by triumphing over them in Him.”
So before we get to the specifics of the lyrics. Can you just kind of tell us a little bit about the background of the song and kind of the inspiration of the song and what led you to this passage and what led you to this song in particular?
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. So I mentioned at near the start of the interview that I had that period of songwriting from about ‘99 through about 2004 when I just kept up a crazy pace of songs and wrote 50-plus every one of those years, 75-plus some of the years. And one of those songs in 2002 was my first attempt to write something from this passage. So the song that we hear today that was finished in 2013 was actually a second attempt, an attempt to come back and give it another try.
The initial effort was actually an effort at a true expository song, where I was going verse by verse through pretty much all of chapter two. And lyrically, it just wasn’t very good. And musically, it wasn’t very good. I was still learning the craft of songwriting. But actually, interestingly, even though I hadn’t thought about it in years, I was able to remember at least the first half of the chorus. It’s a crazy long chorus, seven or eight lines long. But just off the top of my head, once I remembered that I had done one, I was like, oh yeah:
“He nailed it to his cross
And made it void, forgiven, complete.
He took the requirements in his hand
And put them under his feet.”
And I actually looked up, did some digging through some really old files. The rest of the chorus was:
“Let no one judge you by the shadows
Of the things which have been done.
Remember that the substance is the Son.”
Daniel J. Mount:
And that’s not terrible. The verses are worse! There’s a reason i’m not going to read the verses on the air!
But, so actually since 2002, I wanted to write a song from this passage. And I knew even from the start, I think at least within a day or two of having finished it, that song, I mean, that was like, I knew that was what I could do at the time, but I also knew it wasn’t that great like it was. It wasn’t something that other people would want to sing or that would be memorable for other people. So really at that point, I just kind of filed it away in a mental file of passages that I really want to write a song from and really wanted to revisit someday.
Ten years later—I think I may even come across that song title, at least—but the passage and the song concept came back to mind. 2012. And I will dig into it a little more, but that’s when I largely wrote the lyric that we see today.
I didn’t have a good idea for a melody, so one of my best friends is Ben Garms. He has a sister, Taylor, who’s a pianist, and I had been talking with Ben throughout the process of writing this song. That’ll come up a little more when we talk about verse two. And ultimately his sister Taylor wrote the melody.
Ben and I talked after we finished the song, and as best as either of us could remember, everything that went in the lyric was ultimately a line I wrote. So I am listed as the guy who wrote the lyrics, but Ben was definitely there through the process—very helpful in helping me think through the concepts, think through how I approach it. And I’d bounce ideas lines off of him. “Hey, what do you think about this? What do you think about that line?” So he was very helpful through that process and helped make the song what it is today. Even though I’m listed as the guy who wrote the lyrics because that’s the best of our recollections
Chad Berry:
That’s interesting. So one of the questions that I was curious and I kind of already knew the answer to this question because you kind of filled me in on some of the details with the garms and with the lyrics. So, was, you know, typically I’m always curious of how the song develops does melody come first as lyric do lyrics come first and so in this case it was obviously lyrics—
Daniel J. Mount:
Definitely lyrics in this case.
Chad Berry:
and then the melody was placed later. Excellent.
Daniel J. Mount:
Yeah, and I can also say more specifically, it was definitely starting with the chorus.
Chad Berry:
Okay.
Daniel J. Mount:
And then, because that’s the main idea of the song: Tell Colossians 2:14 in song as best as I can, best of my abilities at that point.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
And then I think it was actually a fairly linear process after that where… I really worked on most of verse one, then most of verse two, and then the bridge. I didn’t have any of them necessarily fully nailed down till later. I was definitely continuing to refine them through time. But I actually, other than the chorus being first, the process of writing the song was more linear than is even normal for me actually.
Chad Berry:
Okay, okay, that’s interesting, too. We, you know, I’ll touch on this. We’ll probably dig into the chorus a little bit more. But since you mentioned that that’s where you started—and that is, and even when you listen to the song, the musicality of it, the thrust, is in the refrain, is in the chorus. But one of the things that I love about the chorus, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, is it’s reminiscent of Spafford’s line in the third verse of “It is Well with My Soul,” where he says, “My sin, not in part, but the whole / is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more.” Was Spafford any kind of inspiration at all with any of the lyrics?
Daniel J. Mount:
Definitely not consciously. I mean, that is still one of my favorite hymns and at that point, I would have listed that as my number one favorite hymn
So it had to be somewhere in the back of my head, I guess. But not consciously, because I had already, ten years before, written another song from the passage. At which point I probably would have known “It Is Well With My Soul,” but it wasn’t my favorite hymn or that close to my heart at that point as it became later—I think. So in all cases I think I was pretty aware, having written from Colossians 2.14 before that—when I hear that verse of “It Is Well With My Soul,” I’m thinking about Colossians 2.14. So in my mind, I’m kind of associating them all and pulling them all, all the different references back to the passage.
Chad Berry:
Yeah.
Daniel J. Mount:
The conscious source of inspiration was the passage. The fact that it has a call out in “It is Well with My Soul” probably helps me love the passage even more.
Chad Berry:
Sure. Yeah, it jumped out at me really quick because not only is “It Is Well With My Soul” my favorite hymn of all time—I could probably listen to it on repeat from now until Jesus comes back—the third verse is also my favorite verse in the song. It’s also part of the reason why I love this song so much, because in “Nailed to His Cross,” you, and “It Is Well With My Soul,” Spafford, both communicate the depth of the atonement and the extent of the atonement that not an ounce of Jesus’s blood is wasted and that the shedding of His blood on our account truly does fully and finally atone for all of those who were being sanctified, as we read in Hebrews chapter 10. I really enjoy the song and I couldn’t help but draw on that connection.
So before we dig into the lyrics—and you may have to punt a little bit since Taylor wrote the melody, but the musicality of the song is really, really rich and this is why I encourage the listeners to especially listen to it if you’ve never heard it. The first verse starts—it’s low, it’s somber, and it’s talking about sin and the reality of sin. And then it builds into the refrain. And then also, I don’t know if, and this is kind of where my question is going, forgive me for bantering.
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure!
Chad Berry:
There is a lot of phrasing in the song where there’s pauses. So for example, there’s a pause at look, you know, if they could have looked ahead in time. And it’s almost where those, where those pauses in the phrasing deliberate to draw attention to those aspects of the, of the lyric? It feels that way.
Daniel J. Mount:
I think that as Taylor wrote it—because she’s a better singer than I am, I think she probably sang in that demo she first sent me—I think she probably sang that whole line without taking a breath, without taking a pause. The pause on “looked” and some of the other pauses are… You talk about detours.
I started recording the CD on which this appears, Somewhere East of Eden, in 2017, I think. Didn’t finish it till 2020. And part of the reason was that I came down with some autoimmune conditions, Hashimoto’s, and I don’t even know what else. Never fully been diagnosed. But I came down with some autoimmune stuff in 2018, early 2018, that really impacted me severely and messed for several years with my ability to really take a full deep diaphragmatic breath.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
So I had I recorded this track with the intent of singing an octave higher. And I recorded the chorus actually, I think, before I got. When it came time to record the verses, though, I had recorded some verse takes, but they were not there they were not usable. My breath was not where it needed to be to do the song justice. And I was trying to compensate by singing an octave lower, which I hadn’t intended to, and by pausing more than I probably should from a classical standpoint of singing phrases as a complete whole. So I’m glad that pause has meaning because from my vantage point, it was kind of an accident and a side effect of unexpected frailty.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm. Well, hey, in the Lord’s all in the Lord’s providence, my friend.
Daniel J. Mount:
Yeah.
Chad Berry:
But yeah, as I listened to the song, that stuck out to me too. You know, as you read the chorus again, we’ll get into it a little bit deeper as we go, you know—the line, especially, you know, “He carried it up Calvary” and there’s a pause there, “and nailed it to,” and then, “His cross.” And is it just your voice on the recording?
Daniel J. Mount:
Yeah, that was my attempt to sing four-part quartet harmonies.
Chad Berry:
Okay, I thought so. But yeah, deliberate or not, at least for me as a listener, the phrasing has the desired effect of really sticking the attention on the thrust of each phrase.
So let’s go ahead and dive into—unless there’s anything else that you wanna mention as far as some of the musicality behind it.
Daniel J. Mount:
I would have something to talk about when we get to the bridge.
Chad Berry:
Okay.
Daniel J. Mount:
We can get into that now when we’re talking about musicality, or we can get into that later. But there was, there’s an interesting little side story on the bridge.
Chad Berry:
Let’s touch on that when we hit the bridge.
Daniel J. Mount:
Sounds good!
Chad Berry:
And we’ll get all that together. So verse one, if it’s all right—
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure!
Chad Berry:
Read the lyrics for verse one.
Daniel J. Mount:
Go for it!
Chad Berry:
So I’m tempted to sing it, but I want your listeners to continue listening to your podcast. So: “When Abel’s offering cost his life / when Moses struck the stone / when David stole Uriah’s wife / a lamb could not atone / But if they could have looked ahead in time / they’d see a spotless Lamb who took their crime.”
So as we read through verse one, just kind of get us started. You mentioned that the chorus was kind of the main thrust of the song. So where are you leading the listener to in verse one?
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. I’ll start with where I’m not leading the listener. I definitely—once I had a draft of a chorus that I was pretty happy with and I was like, “I think there’s something to this chorus. I think I can build a song around it and this is better than the last effort. I don’t need to just shelve it again for another 10 years and come back to it in 2022. I think I can give it a try now.” So once I reached that point, my default gear is to say, “Can I write the song I want to write from the surrounding verses?” And really I had already tried to do that 10 years before, 2002. And almost every verse is a verse of the song, of the surrounding verses. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I need to have it expository in the sense of: This is a Colossians 2:14 song, but not expository in the greater sense—the Isaac Watts sense where it’s a Colossians 2 song, every single verse captured in that flow of thought. I realized that the chorus I landed on seemed to suit itself to one of those panorama-of-redemption songs that starts at Eden and works its way to the cross or beyond, to the judgment day.
Chad Berry:
Excellent.
Daniel J. Mount:
And I can talk further about the verse in a general sense, but if you had any other specific questions, maybe we talk about those and then if there’s anything else we hadn’t covered I’ll get to it.
Chad Berry:
The only thing that I would mention and I don’t know if this will fill in any of what you want to say generally about verse 1 is one of the things that I noticed and I’m assuming this is deliberate is When I when I read and listen to the lyrics of verse 1, what I think about is narrative. Okay, this is the narrative, or the examples of the need for atonement, and the reality of sin and the perpetual nature of sin, with three different, very specific examples. And then, of course, pulling in some Hebrews concepts that the blood of bulls and goats, a lamb can never take away the sins. And then verse two is almost building on the theological framework of the sin nature and the necessity of the atonement. So as I look at verse one and two, it’s kind of like verse one is example, verse two is theological. at least as a listener, that’s kind of the take that I’ve got. So, yeah, I mean, fill out your thoughts as far as verse one.
Daniel J. Mount:
Verse one might be the most interesting story, just from a craft of songwriting perspective, when it comes to anything in the song. Because what I did was I really wrote myself into a box kind of in a good way it made me have to think and made me have to really work at it. I kept narrowing down and narrowing down the parameters of who I actually could give as examples in this chapter by several other criteria.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
And the first criteria is I started with sins that were so grave that the sacrifice of an animal wasn’t enough. that was like, I’m thinking about great sins. And yes, the blood of bulls and goats never fully takes away sins, but there were sins that under the Old Covenant were considered pretty well covered from the standpoint of the legal clearing under the Old Covenant if you offered an animal sacrifice. And so really my starting point really narrowed down the list pretty quickly: I have to come up with examples. that aren’t that.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
Examples that the punishment had to be greater than an animal sacrifice could cover.
Chad Berry:
Mm-mm.
Daniel J. Mount:
Because I thought: Only then will we see the impact of the cross—where eventually I knew I was going to work back toward the chorus that I more or less already had. And that was a challenge enough, but I had a first line of—so what I’ll do when I write is I’ll have placeholder lines. So there’ll be a word or two that I know is not quite the final word, but it fits the rhythm and gets the general idea, and then I’ll come back and try to clean up the wording later. So I had—my first line I think was, “When Cain took Brother Abel’s life.” That’s a little clunky, I knew it was a little clunky, I wasn’t going to have it there quite like that but it was more active tense, and we’ll get to it when we talk about the chorus the chorus is very—it’s past tense, but it’s active, it’s not passive
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
And I’m like, I’m going to write as active as I can, tell the story in an active, vigorous way I had recently been reading some books on fiction and non-fiction prose writing which talked about how good writing doesn’t rely too much on passive tense and doesn’t rely too much on adjectives and especially adverbs. Let the verbs do the work, keep it active tense. And I was and still do try to apply some of these principles to songwriting. Something you do tend to see—most people who talk about songwriting don’t talk about this, but just anecdotally look at the songs that really succeed well, they tend to do that well.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
Bit of a detour there. So I was trying to go active tense and that Cain active tense worked pretty well and Cain’s sin—God had to banish him from human companionship. He had to become a fugitive and a vagabond for the rest of his life.
Moses: Okay, that’s good. Because he struck the rock, God had to ban him from entering the promised land
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
David sin with Bathsheba: God had to take their first child’s life. You know, they couldn’t just go and offer another lamb, and then those sins are covered. These are like the really serious sins of the Old Testament. Not that there aren’t others, but those are some of the ones that came to mind.
So I’m set, right? Well I got stuck again because I wrote the first four [lines] as a chorus. And then: “But if they could have looked ahead in time / they’d see a spotless Lamb who took their crime,” that came later—pre-chorus or channel depending on your term. But musically it’s a little different. It’s not part of those first four lines in a sense.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
So I get the first four lines. Then I start working on “But if they could have looked ahead in time.” I really was happy with how that line starts to pivot, because you’re looking ahead to the cross. And then, “They’d see a spotless Lamb who took their crime?”
Now, I’m stuck! Now I’m like really stuck well, because there’s not just a criteria of sins that are too great for an animal sacrifice to cover it under the Old Covenant. You also have to now have sins that you can reasonably say are forgiven at the cross.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
And that’s a much more challenging box to fit in because Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross is sufficient to pay for every sin ever committed. We have to acknowledge that as our starting point. But we also have to acknowledge that it’s only efficacious for the redeemed. That’s a big word. But put in plain English, only Christians enter heaven with their sins forgiven.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
For everybody else who’s unrepentant, who’s unredeemed, the cross was enough to pay for their sins, but they’re not entering eternity with forgiven sins the same way that Christians’ sins are forgiven. So I realized I kind of wrote myself into this box where this song is only on solid ground theologically if I limit it to people for whom I have New Testament grounds for saying are in heaven.
And that’s where I end up Hebrews 11 because Hebrews 11 verse four, “By faith Abel.” That’s Abel. That’s the key thing. “By faith, Abel offered to God a more excellent sacrifice than Cain, through which he obtained witness that he was righteous, God testifying of his gifts, and through it he being dead still speaks.”
And then we see Moses and David all get shoutouts in Hebrews chapter 11 as well, where Moses chose to “suffer affliction of the people of God rather than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures in Egypt, for he looked to the reward.”
But then, key for this line of thought is Hebrews 12:1-2, which is just one of my favorite passages in all of Scripture. “Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith,” and so forth. Well, it says that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, referring back to the Old Testament saints referenced in Hebrews 11. So I’m like, these Old Testament saints are the ones for whom I can have the most confidence in saying their sins were among those that were forgiven at the cross. Hebrews is telling us that Abel, Moses, and David are part of our cloud of witnesses. So I can confidently say their sins were forgiven at the cross in a way that I can’t necessarily say for some of the other great sinners of the Old Testament.
But here then is where my desire for theological precision comes up against the artistic sensibilities. And in this case, the artistic sensibilities had to take a step back a little. Because my early draft was very active tense, which also applied to that first line. “When Cain took brother Abel’s life” as my placeholder line. It’s active tense, it’s vigorous, it’s good. But. I’m in a bind because I don’t have any ground to necessarily believe that Cain’s sins were nailed to Jesus’ cross.
Chad Berry:
Yeah.
Daniel J. Mount:
So I had to sacrifice some poetic vigor for theological precision and took that first line passive when Abel’s offering cost his life because we have reason to believe Abel’s—his offering wasn’t the sin, but we have reason to believe his sins were forgiven at the cross.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
It’s not as vigorous. but it’s a more defensible theological footing and you have to put theological accuracy first as much. As I’d love an active tense first line, I just had to make that call.
The other line that gave me pause here was when I said, “When David stole Uriah’s wife.” I wondered if that was too bold, too direct, too active tense. There’s this tension Christian songwriters feel because on the one hand we want to write something that works in our contexts. But on the other hand, there’s also a bit of an artistic desire to say something fresh, to say something in a way it hasn’t been said before. Because if everything in a song is not only a topic you’ve heard about before, but also sung in the way you’ve sung about it before, then why does the song even need to exist? So I thought about playing a little more safe with a David and Uriah line, but ultimately I did err a little bit on that in that case—because it’s still theologically accurate—I erred on the case of seeing something in a fresh way that may be pushing the edges of being a little provocative for a congregational song rather than saying a little more subtle and safer in that case.
Chad Berry:
That’s a wonderful explanation because that first line, I think the first line is also just from a poetic value. It draws you in.
Daniel J. Mount:
Okay.
Chad Berry:
Because at first it makes you think like, wait a minute, how did Abel’s sacrifice cost his life? Well, understanding that because he offered a pleasing sacrifice, Cain didn’t, Cain’s jealousy raises up and he murders his brother. That connection, I think, is really beautiful with Hebrews 11 and the Hall of Faith, that we do have biblical assurance that these three brothers, we can call them, are with the Lord, and that we, the Lord willing, will one day be with them. So that’s a really, really good and helpful explanation.
Daniel J. Mount:
Before you move on, I have to say I’m really grateful that you would see that positive as something that would draw you in, because my tendency is to view that line as almost like: Is this too much of a weakness? Is this going to keep the song from being as appreciated as it could be?
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
So I’m grateful that as you would hear the song, it works for you.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, and because it makes you think a little bit. And of course, the last two lines as you’re leading into the chorus, “but if they could have looked ahead in time / they’d see a spotless lamb who took their crime.” And you know, the way that we always explain it is that Old Testament saints looked forward to the cross. New Testament saints look back upon the cross.
Daniel J. Mount:
Mm-hmm.
Chad Berry:
But the depth and the breadth of what Jesus did in taking all of our sin and nailing it to the cross is—whatever perspective you’re looking at it from—is amazing. And so I love that line and then leading into the chorus. So we’ll go ahead and tackle the chorus if that’s all right with you.
Daniel J. Mount:
Well, I’ll just follow up on something you just said there, which is that the extent of what Jesus accomplished in our redemption can best be appreciated by those who realized and understood that what they had available to them prior to Jesus was inadequate. And David and Moses understood that.
Chad Berry:
Especially. Yeah, like you, I’m automatically thinking of Psalm 51.
Daniel J. Mount:
Yes.
Chad Berry:
And what does David say when he’s repenting of his sin? You know, ‘You do not delight in burnt offerings,” or I would give them, but the offering to the Lord, the sacrifice to the Lord is a broken and a contrite spirit. He had a very keen awareness that the sacrificial law was insufficient. to pay the debt that he couldn’t pay. To borrow your phrase from verse two, “to see a debt that we cannot pay.” Anything else that you wanna add on verse one?
Daniel J. Mount:
No, I thought I was done, but what you said there just prompted an interesting thought. I’m like, no, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I need to jump in with that one more thought.
Chad Berry:
No, that’s okay. That’s okay. So let’s do the chorus. So then in the chorus,
Daniel J. Mount:
Sounds good.
Chad Berry:
I just want to comment again: I wasn’t a music major when I was in Bible college, but I had a lot of friends who were part of the Worship and Pastoral Studies program at Boyce. And a lot of the worship professors would make statements, and the phrase that they would use a lot would be, “paint the text.” That the melody should paint the words of the song. And I feel like Taylor did such a great job in the melody painting the words of the text.
Daniel J. Mount:
She did.
Chad Berry:
So then the chorus reads: “When Jesus took the law’s decree / that said that I was lost/ He carried it up Calvary / and nailed it to His cross.” And, you know, it’s Colossians 2:14. I mean, it doesn’t get any more clear Colossians 2.14. What are some things that you’d wanna share about the chorus?
Daniel J. Mount:
I actually kind of touched on them a little bit when I was talking about verse one because it was the same sort of thing. Structurally, in that as I mentioned right at the start, I wanted the chorus to tell the story of Colossians 2:14 as well as I could. Snd I knew I knew the title I wanted to write—a song with a title “Nailed It To the Cross” or “Nailed to His Cross”—the cross / His cross, somewhere right in there with just a little bit of wiggle room, that was the song I wanted to write. So how do I get there? And I realized that the key inside—I fiddled with that one for a while, I think. It might have even been a few weeks, a few months, I’m not sure exactly, before I settled on this approach. But what I realized was I can turn the verse itself into a narrative and put in place the advice I mentioned earlier from books on effective prosem writing fiction or nonfiction: Don’t be heavy on the adjectives, as close to no adverbs as possible, and active tense rather than passive, I realized that I could let the verbs do the work the verbs carry the narrative forward and tell Colossians 2:14 in narrative fashion
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
So I have like when Jesus TOOK the law’s decree that SAID that I was lost He CARRIED it up Calvary and NAILED it to his cross. When you have the verbs verbs doing the work, it gives it a certain vigor and energy. And there’s an emotion here too. And the emotion came over time. And Taylor really brought out the emotion well; I had some ideas melodically and I knew they were not good. So I knew I needed to find somebody who could write a better melody for this song to have any chance of moving people. I don’t want it to sound like it was all analytical, because this is a passage that moves me really deeply, and that was why I kept wanting to come back to it but. By this point i’d been ten years trying to capture this, and probably several weeks to several months actively.
Some good songs are written in the a quick flash of inspiration. I’ve had that happen, and that’s cool and fun and exciting when it happens. But if you write enough songs, it doesn’t happen often. Many songs, and most of my songs, are the process of refining. And this was really something that simple, it seemed simple, it probably was weeks if not months of rewrites, rewrites to eventually get it to seem simple.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. One of the things that I love about the chorus and about the bridge, and I know this is deliberate, mainly because of what you said about painting the picture of the main point of Colossians 2:14, but it really captures the idea that we didn’t have anything to do with it. The only reason why we’re forgiven is because because Jesus went up Calvary and because he nailed our sin to his cross. And you know, you pick up on that in the bridge as well, which I’m sure we’ll dig into when we get there. But yeah, anything else on the chorus as far as, you know, that kind of being the main thrust of the song that you’d want to add?
Daniel J. Mount:
Not really. I mean, the goal, I think, from the start was to be as faithful to telling the story of verse 14 as possible, settle on the narrative approach. But even then, it just took a lot of refining, a lot of tweaks before it got somewhere that was usable.
Chad Berry:
Yeah. And then verse two kind of shifts gears in two ways, at least as I listen to the song and as I read the lyrics. One, it makes it more personal. We’re not just looking at examples of others, but we’re making it, oh, this is God’s law has said that I am guilty and that I am at fault. And then in addition to that, kind of building that theological framework of original sin and the theological framework of our intrinsic guilt. So I’ll read the lyric. It says:
I stood before Mount Sinai
And heard God’s holy law.
It showed me what I really was.
I earned the wrath I saw.
And when I saw the debt I could not pay.
Grace took me forward to another day.
I’ll just let you kind of lead in on verse two as far as, you know, where you’re taking your listener.
Daniel J. Mount:
I think I’m pulling a fair amount from the sentiment of Galatians 3, and I’ll go ahead and pull that up. It’s 24 and thereabouts. Let’s see here. I’ll start at verse 21. “Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law kept for the faith, which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor.”
So I’m pulling from Galatians 3. and I’m really kind of pulling from Hebrews 12 also. This verse was influenced by a chance I’d had about eight or 10 years before I wrote the second version to teach through Hebrews—the wednesday evening Bible studies at my church at the time. Hebrews 12 might seem on the surface like a collection of random sayings, but there’s this underlying order. It’s which mountain are you running to are you running to Zion or are you running to Sinai?
And then will you run to Zion effectively? Will you lay aside the hindrances the weight that so easily besets us the passages about fathers disciplining their children are all about running to Zion effectively. That is the underlying narrative of chapter 12. So we have these thoughts of Hebrews 12 and these thoughts of Galatians 3. Where are we running? But we’re starting at Sinai to point us to the mount of redemption, the mountain of the cross. And we have the law. Sinai is the mountain where God gave the law, but it also is used in the New Testament as an image of the law. So it’s the literal mountain, but it’s also the law represented in a broader sense, figuratively.
And the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ. So ultimately Sinai points us to Jesus. It shows us why we deserve God’s wrath so that we properly appreciate that Jesus took it in our place.
Because the goal here is to get us to the same point that David and Moses got in verse one: Of realizing that everything they could do in their best efforts, and even if they kept the law perfectly, wasn’t enough to forgive the worst of their sins and we need to get ourselves to that same point.
So pulling from somewhat of the imagery and ideas, Hebrews 12 is like the substructure. It’s what’s underneath this verse but not visible. Galatians 3 is really the more visible reference.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, that’s good. You know, I don’t know that I’ve ever pondered deeply that connection between Sinai and Zion and the connection between the two and how, if not for Sinai, could we even really run effectively to Zion? And the answer obviously is no, you know, because it’s the law that exposes our sin.
I remember I heard somebody illustrate it this way once where they said: The thing about your home loan, if you owe money on your house and somebody comes and they pay all of your debt except for 20 bucks on your mortgage and then you never pay that last 20 bucks, the bank is still going to foreclose on your house. They’re still going to take it away from you and you still don’t own it. And the same is true of our sin. We bring sin to the table that needs to be redeemed and that Jesus doesn’t just take most of it or almost all of it, but that He takes all of it and that there’s nothing that we can do to pay that debt. And I think you capture that so beautifully in this verse and seeing the effect of the law.
And then I love the last two lines where you say, “and when I saw the debt, I could not pay.” Because think about how many people in our world don’t see that. They think, “Well, I’m a good person.” You know, there’s not an awareness of how needy we are. You know, and then we talked a little bit about the line, about grace taking us forward to another day off screen—
Daniel J. Mount:
I can get into that some here.
Chad Berry:
—I’m sure you’re gonna get into that. But I like that line because it is God’s grace that takes and brings us to Mount Calvary so that we see the day where Jesus did, you know, where His death. where He did go up Calvary, nail our sin to the cross. So dig into that line a little bit more. The “grace took me forward to another day.”
Daniel J. Mount:
Yes, and just in passing before I dig into that, something else you mentioned, the two mountains? As I mentioned, I have this list of passages. I don’t think there’s a good song that captures the two mountains imagery of Hebrews 12. I mentioned that I spent a decade or more with Colossians 2:14 being on my list of songs I really hope that God will let me write someday. Hebrews 12 is still on that list. There is a song in there, but I hadn’t been able to find it yet. Anyhow.
So on that last line, that last line is probably the most interesting aspect of the song, because there was a disagreement, but I think the disagreement was handled well, and ultimately positive and beneficial in how it all worked out. It’s been eleven years, so my brain’s a little fuzzy on the exact details here. But my initial final draft on this verse wasn’t quite where the lyric ended up. As I mentioned, I wrote the lyrics for the song, but in consultation and talking it through with Ben Garms—and Taylor wrote the melody, his sister. Now, I’m a reformed Baptist. Ben and his family are Lutherans, conservative Lutherans, Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. And I can’t recall the exact wording, but there was something in my early draft that just wasn’t really Lutheran friendly. And I think it was the last line which in the final version says, “Grace took me forward to another day.” I don’t know if it was it, but it may have been something like, “And when I saw the debt I could not pay / it took me forward to another day.” I don’t think that was quite what it was, and I looked through all my old memories. As a matter of fact, I still have here the note paper I wrote the song on.
Chad Berry:
Oh wow.
Daniel J. Mount:
The problem though, if I hold it up close, is those who are watching on YouTube will be able to see that I wrote it in pencil so whatever I had—and that’s handy as a songwriter you need your eraser—but whatever I had initially on the [second verse] was something I erased by the time I have that paper I wrote it on. Either way, what I had in the lyric was in the general sense of “Mount Sinai took me forward to another day.”
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
Mount Sinai is taking us to the cross and showing us our need for redemption. And that phrasing, whatever the exact wording was, just doesn’t play well in the Lutheran context. Lutherans have a law / grace hermeneutic. A hermeneutic is a lens through which you look at Scripture. It’s how you interpret Scripture, the presupposition through which you interpret Scripture. And I want to be careful in how I say this because even though it was a cordial disagreement, it’s still disagreement.
Christian discourse is just better anytime somebody’s talking about an area where there has been some disagreement. If one takes the extra effort to try to throw in. nuance such that the other person says, yeah, you’re talking fairly about my position. You’re not caricaturing it.
So, Martin Luther’s own words in his The Formula of Concord, he said: “Everything that proclaims something about our sin and God’s wrath is the proclamation of the law, however and whenever it may take place. On the other hand, the gospel is the kind of proclamation that points to and bestows nothing else than grace and forgiveness in Christ.”
So, the law helps us understand sins, the gospel helps us understand grace. Great in so far as that goes. I get it. It is a generalization that I would agree with.
As that has doctrine has to continue to develop in Lutheran thought, there was a Lutheran professor in the 1800s called C.F.W. Walther who wrote God’s No and God’s Yes: The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, which is very influential for my friends’ thinking and their understanding of this hermeneutic. And his first thesis, one of his main ideas is, and I’m quoting directly: “The doctrinal contents of the entire Holy Scriptures, made up of two doctrines differing fundamentally from each other, viz. the law and the gospel.” So now where a Lutheran would differ from a reformed Baptist like me is the extent to which they take it because as it would be understood by Lutherans or at least those influenced by C.F.W. Walther, all doctrinal Bible passages are either a law passage or a gospel passage.
Chad Berry:
Okay.
Daniel J. Mount:
Each passage is one or the other, not both.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
So a gospel passage will not reveal our sin and a law passage will not reveal grace. Now, I say doctrinal passages just to be clear, like when we’re talking about Lamech died at such and such an age, that’s not considered a doctrinal statement per se. There are historical facts, so we don’t have to say every single verse is a law verse or a gospel verse. But every verse that has doctrinal implications, they would say is one or the other, but cannot be both.
Now, I think that a law-gospel hermeneutic is as good as a generalization, but I as a reformed Baptist wouldn’t see it as universal truth. I wouldn’t see it as a yes-no binary that always holds. I believe there are law passages that clearly point us to grace like the Day of Atonement and the scapegoat and the Jubilee passages, Leviticus 16, Leviticus 25, and Galatians 3. The law is our schoolmaster. The law’s job is to teach us of our sin and our need for a Savior and point us to the the cross, point us to grace. I see it as a continuum. It starts with our sin, but as we understand our sin, the better we understand the law, the better we understand our need for a Savior, which leads us to grace.
So I had many hours—over several months, really—of just cordial respectful thoughtful conversation about this with Ben and his father Dave Garms. I read the Book of Concord through, read C.F.W. Walther’s book. So we both tried to understand the other’s position pretty well. And I still do personally believe that it would be fair to say of Mount Sinai that it points us forward to another day when Jesus took the Law’s decree that said that I was lost, carried it up Calvary, and nailed it to his cross.
But ultimately, after we’ve been discussing it for a while, I concluded that I could show respect to their theological tradition and still say something that was true and beautiful that I could still affirm as true by changing the reference from essentially whatever the exact wording was, Mount Sinai pointing us to the cross. to saying grace, the law / grace distinction, grace gospel, grace took me forward to another day.
And it’s not just a side doctrine for conservative Lutherans, as they would understand it, as best as I can understand, the law of gospel hermeneutic is one of those things that’s like central to what it means to be a Lutheran. So this isn’t a side doctrine, it’s something that really matters to them, it’s right up there with how they understand the real presence of the Lord at the Lord’s Supper, or how they understand the interplay of baptism and salvation for infants.
But we settled on something we’re both okay with. And I mentioned that, not to criticize either side, make a point of I was right they were right—we both still believe we are theologically—we settled on something that we both can affirm is true and beautiful. But I’m mentioning it because in the years since we’ve all watched so many Christian doctrinal debates just turn into flame wars.
Chad Berry:
Yeah.
Daniel J. Mount:
And I’m happy with how that one went because we stayed respectful, cordial, thoughtful the whole time. And I bring up as an example, this kind of stuff is possible even in areas that somebody really cares about. The song is a song that both parties like and really want to get right. And the cool thing was this became a Lutheran-friendly song. The Garms family actually recorded the initial version. It’s not on streaming yet. I think they’ll get it on streaming eventually. It’s just on a CD they sell. So you can say, if you will, that my version is a cover version.
Chad Berry:
Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I like I said, we kind of talked a little bit through that a couple days ago, but it really is. I don’t want to dwell here long, but the line is captured beautifully where, you know, I also as a reformed Baptist have no problem singing that line with full gusto and praise. It’s also, just poetically, it’s really beautiful as well. And you’re right, I appreciate you sharing all of that detail, because it can be a great example that, you know, just because somebody might be cut from a different cloth on secondary, on what are even secondary issues, there’s still our brothers and sisters in Jesus.
Daniel J. Mount:
Exactly.
Chad Berry:
Their sins have been taken up the same Mount Calvary and nailed to the cross as ours have as reformed Baptists. And It’s good. I mean, I feel like you could probably affirm that your thinking was challenged and sharpened by those conversations.
Daniel J. Mount:
Mm-hmm.
Chad Berry:
There’s great danger in just screaming into an echo chamber where everything that we get back is positive affirmation because we don’t grow that way. Anything else on verse two that you want to fill us in on?
Daniel J. Mount:
Not really. Just getting that word right was the big one.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, yeah. So let’s hit the bridge as the the hour grows late.
Daniel J. Mount:
Sounds good.
Chad Berry:
So the bridge just reads: “And when my sins are read on judgment day / I will not plead a thing except to say that…” And then back into the refrain.
And I’ve got to say there was a sermon clip that immediately came to my mind when I heard the song the first time. And it’s that sermon clip that of Alistair Begg that floats around a lot. I think I even played it at our church on, on Resurrection Sunday. He’s preaching and he paints this dramatic picture of the thief on the cross showing up at heaven and being questioned about why he’s there, you know, and then he’s like, “I don’t know.” “And what do you mean you don’t know?” And then he’s like, “On what basis are you here?” And Alistair says quoting the thief on the cross, essentially, “The man on the middle cross said I could come.” And he then goes on and explains that if we answer why we get to go to Heaven with anything other than “because He,” then we’ve immediately gone wrong. And I feel like you capture that with full force
Daniel J. Mount:
Thank you.
Chad Berry:
in the bridge of this song, because it’s so true. It’s not my faith. It’s not that. It’s because “Jesus took the laws decree that said that I was lost. He carried it up Calvary and nailed it to the cross.” So tell us a little bit about your thoughts as you were crafting that bridge.
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. Well, I had not heard that sermon by Alistair at the time I wrote this 11 years ago. I don’t remember exactly what year he preached it. He might not have even preached it by then.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, I don’t think he’d even preached it yet at that point.
Daniel J. Mount:
I think it’s 10-ish years old, but I don’t know if it quite goes back far enough. At least I hadn’t heard it yet. No, I just wanted to take it forward to the end of time and take it to Judgment Day. and I don’t think actually—I had a lot of trouble getting verse one right, a lot of trouble getting the chorus right. Took a while to get verse two right. The bridge was a little easier, as I recall.
It was pretty straightforward once a new word. It took some tweaks. It didn’t come first draft, but it was relatively easy. I don’t know if it was conscious inspiration or something I thought about thought about more after the fact. But it was… This song follows the structure of “Jubilee,” which was the song that got me interested in songwriting. Verse 1 talks about the biblical concept, the need for it. The chorus unfolds the concept. Verse 2 talks about the application to us, the fulfillment at the cross. Verse 3, or rather the bridge, is actually similar structurally in Jubilee and in this song. Off the top of my head, I’m not remembering the exact wording of the Jubilee bridge—oh. “To be so completely guilty / given over to despair / to look into our judge’s face / and see a Savior there / Jubilee / Debts forgiven / Slaves set free.” That’s probably as much an inspiration as anything.
Chad Berry:
I can’t help but ask this, was there, how much was the concept of the eternal security of the believer on your mind as you were writing this particular bridge?
Daniel J. Mount:
I know that I had become persuaded of the eternal security of the believer by that point, several years before that. By that point, I was already a member of a reformed Baptist church that was the first reformed Baptist church I was part of. It was 2010 was when I first joined my first reformed Baptist church. So I was aware of it. I don’t know if that was. I don’t know if I was thinking about that doctrine so much as I just wanted to tie it into Judgment Day and bring it back to—you know, effective songs, each time you come to the chorus, you see a little more in the chorus that you didn’t see the first time. And I wanted us to see this chorus in the context of Judgment Day.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, yeah, I and it I like how you cover in many ways you cover old covenant, new covenant, eschatological reality, which is you can’t get you can’t get more broad than that. So yeah, I like that. I like that. I will I will add one kind of one last thing before we start to shut it down. Back to some of the musicality. I think you had mentioned something that you wanted to say on musicality on the bridge.
Daniel J. Mount:
I do have one thing there, yes.
Chad Berry:
One thing that I’ll mention as far as musicality, I totally think as somebody who picks out the songs for worship, I totally think that this, it might be a little tricky at first for a congregation to get the hang of the feel. The range can be kind of wide. But I think this very much could be sung congregationally. I love particularly, so back to that emphasis of the pause on the last chorus, when you take the octave high, I’m assuming it’s an octave jump,
Daniel J. Mount:
It is the octave chump.
Chad Berry:
The octave jump on the last and nailed it to his cross. Again, I’m tempted to try to sing it, but I want your listeners to continue listening to your show. I just, the musical punch, it ends so perfectly. But what was the, you’d mentioned that you wanted to say something as far as musicality on the bridge.
Daniel J. Mount:
Sure. Well, I would just say I don’t view that jump the octave as something that is essential to the song. Congregationally, there’s no way to do it. That would put it out of any real range of being possible congregationally.
Let’s see here. Interestingly, if you don’t jump the octave. the entire song is one octave, which is on the easiest side of any congregational song. Like everything that Taylor did in that melody, rather amazingly, she did within the constraints of an octave. And when you appreciate how much she wrote a melody that feels like it soars, you appreciate the genius of that when you realize that there aren’t many hymns that we sing in church, even the ones we sing, there aren’t many hymns we sing that do what they do in fewer notes of the octave than this one does.
So it’s actually, I think I was already talking and thinking in terms of congregational music at that point, and she stated in those constraints unbelievably. I just want to jump the octave because I was doing a lot in Southern Gospel at that point. At the time I wrote it, I was still working for a Southern Gospel record company and I was envisioning if a quartet sang this, that’s what they would do, so just kind of wanted to do it here.
The Garms Family, when they recorded it, they did not jump the octave. You don’t have to. The initial version doesn’t jump the octave.
I just did it because I kind of feel like it gives a power punch to end the song that you don’t get otherwise. But it’s not necessary because that turns it into like a two-octave song range. You just can’t do that congregationally.
Chad Berry:
Yeah.
Daniel J. Mount:
So yeah, I just had to pull up the sheet music to check to make sure my recollection was right, but the song all stays within an octave, including the bridge. I guess because it transposes, it might be an octave and a note in that last chorus being one key higher.
Chad Berry:
Mm-hmm.
Daniel J. Mount:
So the bridge was interesting and it was the challenge to get right musically. Taylor wrote a first draft of the melody late 2012. And her initial draft had a bridge that was pretty similar to the sound and feel of the rest of the song. Like similar chord structures, similar intensity levels, so it kind of felt like the verses feel. I mean it was a little higher, probably a little more, but it was in that zone of feeling where the verses felt.
So over the course—mostly right around Christmas 2012, we sent a couple emails back and forth trying different things, and I think the key pivot point was an I sent and I just went search through my old email archives found this email I get the exact wording just for fun. I sent the email January 2nd 2013 and I said just to quote directly: “As it currently stands the song feels like something Steve Green that Steve Green would do today or perhaps that the Collingsworth ladies trio would do I love that feel it’s perfect for a song like ‘All We Need is You’”—which is another song we co-wrote that she finished right about that time but I said—“The lyric would lend itself to a feel like Steve Green would have done in the ‘80s or that Kim Collingsworth would do instrumentally. Would you be open to experimenting with a direction for the bridge and possibly the third line of the chorus that might be a little more dramatic musically?”
So she played around with it for a few days, sent a new version on January 8th, 2013, and emailed, “In the Dropbox is a dramatic bridge idea for ‘Nailed to His Cross’—sans the orchestra, choir, Lari Goss arrangement, and the kitchen sink. Is this the type of dramatic you were looking for?” [Laughter] And it was.
So I think of—this to this day, I don’t know if I’ve told anybody else or anyone that comes up in the conversation with them—I think of the bridge as the kitchen sink bridge. She threw every chord at it, everything including the kitchen sink. But musically, the kitchen sink bridge is the bridge we have today. We cleared up a few note tweaks by email with that day. I think January 8th 2013 was the day I considered the song finalized.
So it took a few drafts But we got there and where she landed was exactly where I felt like what it needed to really carry it into that final chorus.
Chad Berry:
Yeah, yeah, excellent. Well, this is really an excellent song. I mean, I mentioned the line where people will say, paint the text. My mother-in-law always talks about how we play the words. The words of the song are how you play the song. The words set the mood and set the tone. And I mean, you wrote an incredible set of lyrics.
Daniel J. Mount:
Thank you.
Chad Berry:
Taylor wrote a really, really good melody.
Daniel J. Mount:
It is. She did a good job!
Chad Berry:
It’s very singable. If my ear serves me correctly and it might not, there’s a couple of spots where she throws in suspension and it just works perfectly. I mean, she times it and places it so perfectly. And so it, it just well done.
Is there anything before we conclude that you would want to add or any further comments? before I do have one final question, but before we close the book on the song itself, is there anything you want to add?
Daniel J. Mount:
Not really, other than for those listening to this in the moment, it might not be possible to hear the Garms Family’s recorded version, but I believe within the next year they have hopes of getting it up on streaming. Definitely check out their version too. I mean, they’re better singers than I am. And so their version is also really special. I think their version is better than mine. And there are a few elements of mine that I like, but they’re just really good singers. They have done it on some live streams they did during early days of COVID. So I’m going to see if I can find it and link to a live version of their arrangement in the in the notes. So hopefully people can hear their version. Definitely check them out doing it.
And it was also special to me because Ben is one of my best friends. He was the one who sang it. So it’s really cool to me. He sang that one.
Chad Berry:
Very cool. So I’ll use what you just said to kind of segue into my last question. Where, between the places that you’re going to link, where would be the best place for us to find the Garms family? Website, social media, both?
Daniel J. Mount:
I believe it’s thegarmsfamily.com. Let me pull that up really quick to be sure. Yes, G-A-R-M-S, thegarmsfamily.com.
Chad Berry:
Okay. And then that’s the final question that I have for you. I’m, your listeners are pretty well versed with your podcast, but where are all the places and spaces where they can hear about what you’re doing, new music that you’ve got coming out, songs that are in the works, songs that have already been recorded, et cetera?
Daniel J. Mount:
Thank you. I am on the major social media networks, all links in the show notes. And I would also say, I guess one more thing worth mentioning on my website, danielmount.com. I have a Songs tab, and that Songs tab has the lyrics and I believe free sheet music for this song. Let me double check the free sheet music part. Uh, it’s not up there. I might need check on that. If someone hearing this wants to do it in your service I can at least get you sheet music
Chad Berry:
Excellent, excellent. Well brother, this has been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun for me!
Daniel J. Mount:
It has been!
Chad Berry:
I hope it’s been for you listeners. I hope this has been an encouragement to you to hear from the host himself about a song that he has done. And in conclusion, to hear future songwriter interviews, subscribe to this podcast on YouTube or on your favorite podcasting platform. You can also find episode transcriptions and the free 52,000-song entry expository songs searchable database at danielmount.com. Thank you for listening.