Episode 068: The Hillbilly Thomists, Vol. II

[Music] welcome to godsplaining contemplative preachers contemporary age each week join the dominican friars as they consider all things catholic hi there welcome to godsplaining this is father jacob bertrand janczyk here in washington dc and i am joined by our father patrick briscoe up in providence say hi father patrick hi father patrick that's funny the last episode that i recorded with father gregory he did the same thing so i'm gonna you guys aren't picking up on what it means to say hello on an episode so i'm gonna have to change that next time uh but it's not just the two of us today usually it's just the two of us on our on our podcast we have uh the pleasure of being joined by three other friars it's a whole group of us here we're probably going to talk over each other the whole time but in any case it's great to have some of the members of the hillbilly thomas with us who are working on releasing their their second album in the coming months hopefully in early 2021 um so we are we're here with them to talk about the album we're going to get a few sneak peeks at some of some of the tracks which is really exciting um but by way of introduction they're kind of just sitting here looking at me but by way of introduction we have uh father thomas joseph white uh father justin bulger and father jonah teller who's clapping for himself uh if you're watching the the video but uh yeah really excellent to have there's video yeah we go we go up on youtube and we're we're super popular we have like 300 views on all of our yeah it's it's great i would have worn something completely different well the angle of your camera is not really doing it but that's all right we'll we'll edit that down so it's great um so father thomas joseph he uh he entered the order in 2003 uh he was ordained a priest in 2008 uh studied at oxford for his doctorate he's uh the founder of the domestic institute currently in rome uh so he's he's at the angelicum in rome so uh he's joining us from across across the pond and then father justin bulger entered the order in 2013 was ordained in 2020 same year's father jonah father justin's up at providence college uh with father patrick not in the same room not in the same space but that's how we do things here on god's landing because we don't know how to mix and use more than one mic in one room and father jonas here in dc and he's uh he's finishing up his license living at st dominic's also entered 2000 uh no you didn't enter in 2013 what year did you enter you did in 2013 it was ordained in may so um great it's excellent to have you all here uh father patrick let's talk about the new album real quick and then we can listen to them rather than listening to us yeah i think that's great uh so the new out the hillbilly thomas released their first album under the band name just the hillbilly thomas and after months of agonizing discussion father justin you came up with a new name of the album what is it volume 2. i just thought that would blow our listeners away they wouldn't see it coming no one expects volume two no they don't really creative so uh could you say a little about the inspiration of the name oh volume two well it was the second one uh it seemed to follow well from the first and yeah we just couldn't agree on uh another title and so this seemed uh modest compromise minimally classy and um something that we could just maybe perpetuate into the future many more volumes to come hopefully the thing that i like about it is you're linking this up between a project that is ongoing right this this thing that was the hillbilly thomas you released the first album and now we get volume 2 an expansion of the project but this album is different from the first album in important ways the first album had a lot of different takes on some songs that people knew on the first album one of the songs that i love is your arrangement father justin of amazing grace um if our listeners have not heard that they need to stop whatever they're doing stop the episode go list new amazing great let's come back to the episode um how is this album volume 2 different from the first album um so this album has a lot more original songs so um i enjoy writing music so i wrote some songs over the last few years and those um are featured on the album as well as thomas father thomas joseph white so he wrote a handful of tunes as well so yeah i think that's the biggest difference we have a couple standards i heard the voice of jesus say um we we also cover hard times by stephen foster which is a great american classic but most of it is original right right now um as we as we kind of dive into this conversation here before we go any further father thomas joseph could could you talk about the origins of the hillbilly thomas maybe for people that didn't hear the first album where did where did this project start what is what is it what are the hillbilly thomas well he'll be thomas started very informally i think that's the most accurate way to describe it um i think you know i always liked bluegrass music and uh when i entered the order in 2003 the novice master that's you know the person who's responsible for our formation asked us to have a personal broadening uh hobby on thursdays and i thought it would be fun to learn to play bluegrass mandolin and uh so you know we started playing a little bit in the novitiate with guitarists and mandolin and other things but anyway in subsequent years when i came to washington the house of studies father austin litke had entered the order and the two of us began to play with a couple other people and uh we played bluegrass music uh kind of after or in priestly ordinations you know kind of in informal settings and i think austin at one point just said that well we should call the hillbilly thomas for the famous reference from um uh flannery o'connor uh in her letters where she says you know people often think i'm a hillbilly nihilist author but i'm actually hillbilly thomas and uh that seemed right so you know that that was a great suggestion and then we played with some of these fellows when they entered but uh you know soon after austin and i kind of left the the student tayden were were um you might say uh you know act in full priest full-time priestly ministry and that's sort of when then justin took up the the ban and reformulated it yeah and it's not just the you mentioned father austin there it's not and we have three of you on as we mentioned at the top of the episode the the band is is more than just the three the three view how many how many on this album how many this new album how many friars are are part of that project i believe we're eight and i'm not mistaken that's awesome yeah so the um i think one of the one of the um kind of really beautiful things about about the hillbilly thomas and as father thomas joseph mentioned the the sort of informal or kind of uh kind of grassroots formation of the group is that it's it's something that comes out of uh out of our life live together uh i guess but if you kind of think dominicans and bluegrass i don't know if those are natural connections immediately father jonah what i guess if you could say a little bit about how this kind of works why this kind of works um both kind of within our own communal life but also as kind of producing uh bluegrass music how that works for for us sure well um i guess we we're always sort of hesitant to call it bluegrass music because none of us can actually play fast enough to qualify for it to be called bluegrass uh so it just that's that that genre seemed to sort of just get thrown at us and stick so uh we just we are playing faster we are playing faster we're playing faster but we're not playing fast yeah we are getting faster so maybe by you know volume 12 we can maybe call it bluegrass so that's that's a goal um but uh just for all the bluegrass purists who listen to god's plan and we just want to get out in front and say that we don't identify you know as a bluegrass band so you can put those clubs and torches down um you know we're americana i would say kind of rootsy uh still seeking a genre but um no but your your question that um you know what what the dominicans have to do with well folk music at all um since it's not you know it's not dominican chant or anything like that but uh we're preachers we're an order of preachers and so we uh spend a lot of time yes chanting and praying and contemplating and beholding god but then we go out and we encounter the world as it is and then we respond to it according to the gifts that god has given us and uh at this time in god's providence he's drawn together a number of friars who love music and love play music with each other and so i think it's really been a very natural response to something that we loved doing together as brothers that eventually became outward facing but originally it was something that we just enjoyed playing music together and so um that's how it became i suppose dominicans playing for lack of a better term bluegrass um but no i think that the preacher can make use of um any good thing uh for the sake of furthering the gospel and so we happen to be you know making use of resonator guitars and uh upright basses right now in our life that's awesome very cool now the the first album what father justin what do you can you remind me what year that was released it was the last couple years right the first album was 2017 okay december 2017 2017. so if you haven't checked out the first album that was just released a few years ago do that and um the reason i bring that up is because on the the cover of the first album is is not you all and it's not some sort of like art design but it is friars um and it's it's friars from a sort of bygone era it's a really cool picture of friars i believe from the 1940s it might be earlier than that 1920s 30s father john is saying no anyways you when you i i stopped talking let you talk about it you can tell us when that was but also with kind of americana uh kind of instruments i won't say bluegrass because i don't want to get father jonah upset again but uh yeah i guess tie in that tradition explain that that cover i've heard rumors about the the cover for the new album i won't i won't give that away but um where how does this kind of sit in the history of things because it's not just out of a sort of vacuum that playing music and this kind of music has has occurred yeah actually i think that picture is from the 1600s no it's definitely not yeah that was the first picture taken after the reformation is really impressive to show that uh indeed priests were men of the people that's right like 28 was it maybe 16 28 or 15. yeah 16 20 yeah definitely yeah flip that six uh yeah so i think this is why you guys don't have guests isn't it this is why we don't have you on the show actually okay um yeah so i think that's just a great image of um that uh yeah the image of our fraternity as dominicans that we always well at least we have enjoyed for a long time playing music together um enjoying each other's company um and uh and then sharing that so yeah i think it's just a great great image of the continuity of fraternity and music within our order that's great um all right so we're kind of we have a couple minutes left on this this end of our of our episode um and we're going to play for you a clip in just a moment of of one of the songs of jericho blues one of the songs on the album um i know father justin you're you're singing on this track uh did is this is is this a cover did you write this tell us a little bit about it before we before we tune in right yeah so i wrote this song it's called jericho blues so it's a blues song and you know one interesting thing about this is i wrote it in an alternate tuning the delta blues tuning which um there's kind of a traditional standard tuning of a guitar and the delta blues tuning refers to the mississippi delta where blues kind of originated so i i dropped the guitar into that tuning and it's it's really fun uh blues is a simple genre but it's it's a beautiful genre because it's this great i think combination of of joy and suffering all in one thing and so in this in jericho blues we have the suffering of little zacchaeus who is wandering around jericho collecting taxes but of course uh is an outsider and is missing something namely jesus so it's kind of about his plight there in jericho great well let's tune in for a little little sample of the track and then that'll that'll bring us to our break so after the tracks stay tuned sit tight and and we'll we'll be right back with you here we go well i'm sure my lord [Music] well i'm sure my lord shall set your shoulders [Music] [Music] i'm just doing my job [Music] man stay tuned we'll be right back with godsplaining [Music] this is god's planning get up to date on all our latest episodes at opec.org godsplaining welcome back to godsplaining i'm father jacob bertrand here with father patrick and we're joined by the hillbilly thomas or some of the artists on the hillbilly thomas father thomas joseph father justin father jonah uh just before our break we got a real treat of listening to one of the one of the tracks on their new album or at least a little part of it uh which was really cool jericho blues a little a blues i guess the title kind of describes what it is but father justin described it told us a little bit about it um we're going to get a little peek at a couple of the other tracks too in the second half of this episode as we as we go on but before we do that uh father patrick and i we were wondering about how how you guys put this all together what's the how does it work how do you kind of come up with the idea how do you come up with the vision what's the what's the recording process look like are you guys stuck in a studio like i don't know like a dell or are you kind of doing your own thing what tell us about it just fill us out on on the whole kind of vision and process well dell's certainly an influence that's what i thought yeah i think one of the things that was really great about this album was we went up into the catskill mountains and we we stayed up in a a large house up there which the the province has access to that has a chapel associated with it where we could pray together and and uh continue like living the religious life but we we basically cleared out this giant living room with a wonderful dome sort of a ceiling like a swiss chalet so i had excellent acoustics and we set up all the recording uh instrumentation there and basically worked creatively on the songs together in a much more uh intense way than we were able to do last album just because of time constraints so we took 10 days to record the 14 songs which was a pretty brisk clip that was a fairly work intensive uh 10 days but it was also wonderful creative kind of process because we we would play the song uh that someone brought say for example father justin brought that song we would play it uh together and try to try different things at work bring the kind of uh ideas and innovations of different people to it and eventually decide what we want to record sometimes layer in more things afterwards so for us just as uh you know i think as priests it's not a typical thing to work together to record an album in that kind of creative way although some people here have that that background so you know to to kind of uh figure out what it is to be um to work together as a band and and play together and try new things creatively was really enjoyable and it shows up in the album in this last song you heard you can hear uh well you got just the beginning of peter gaucho's brilliant mandolin solo you can hear the slide of the resonator guitar in the background that i'm playing there's a very interesting rhythm guitar that justin's playing and of course his lyrics and um he's he's um making little references and motifs so he you know refers to the tax man there's an obvious uh image there of our reference to the revolver album beatles so we put in a lot of interesting things that were fun uh along the way and integrated and brought them into unity i've always felt that dominicans are great um well if we are great we're greatest when we're together i mean i do think dominicans are great i became a dominican because you know our charism is incredible but i've i felt we're always strongest when we're acting out of our fraternity right um that's one of the that's one of the beautiful things of the gods planting project it's a couple friars chatting but but clearly the fraternal element is is strong here and as part of what's driving the creative process um father justin or father jonah do you have do you have any particular like moments that that express that fraternity coming out in the recording process i mean just what it's like to to be with the brothers to be working on something together any um do any moments stand out from your time in the mountains well one aspect of it was um we had in this living room a lot of different instruments kind of just laid out that we all brought and so we would get up in the morning you know um have mass prayer breakfast and then go to the living room and say okay well we're going to work on this song this morning and different friars would kind of gravitate towards different instruments and we just pick it up try it you know try it see how it sounded and we would kind of rotate like that so um yeah there's kind of this uh yeah we're we're creative we can adapt uh we can kind of like respect the creativity and the adaptability of each other uh in order to create like thomas joseph said one thing there's a great kind of unity to the finished product one of the things that i heard i guess through from i guess talking to some of you and hearing about the the process was that uh you all learned or a couple of you learned how to play the upright bass just for the album like you hadn't played it really before is is that the case right yeah so i played the base you know that you go you know that's really good form the sideways base cosplay space um there's a there's a scene from school of rock where he's like cello and then like it's the opposite anyway um yeah so you just turn it like this and you play it and that's that's an upright bass now i did have to rent it and it's huge an upright bass is very large so it did fit in my little car and by the end of the recording process i kind of learned how to play it but so the beginning songs they don't sound as good that's okay that's part of the journey now i should also note that you know part of our adaptability and creativity is is even letting father patrick and father jacob bertrand you know into the group i remember in the beginning we would sing irish songs together right yeah we don't we're just going to talk about this album though so it could be the next that could be volume three yeah you know you know maybe no maybe the two of you should sing something right now you know no not yet not yeah i don't want to take the focus yeah exactly i do remember that father justin has an older brother who's a priest in the archdiocese of baltimore and his parish had these parish kind of festivals and one time there was a smaller group it wasn't the full band was there but i i did sing with them at least that was my one and only public appearance and the reason i wasn't going to bring this up is because i was never asked back to do that i've always told myself it's because i don't play an instrument and i just i just know it's personality but i think there's a lot more but i have to get to sleep at night so i'm gonna just say it's because i i don't bring anything else to the table but this shining personality and and some vocal notes so um all right well let's let's listen to uh a second track here we're gonna tune into part of good kind of jump in the middle of the of the song in a minute uh called bourbon bluegrass and the bible um i believe that this is this is a creation of father thomas joseph wright if i'm correct uh do you want to do you want to introduce us to the song what it is and and that sort of thing well you know there's some strange people in dominican order so this is a strange song by strangers such a good song this is probably a song about uh you know psychology and survival in uh in covet quarantine i think you know but um it it's uh it's a song also about uh imagery of the south and about uh uh based basic goods what are the basic goods in life in in when you're living in hard times cool well we're going to jump into the middle of it uh and just listen to give it a listen for a second here we go [Music] preacher don't lie there's whiskey in the still a fox and the rain done had his fill chicken in the breadband [Music] everybody's out in their disguise the light in the morning just hurts my eyes yes in the world and it's gone viral everybody's talking about a new revival but when it's a question of love and survival bourbon bluegrass and the bible [Music] there we go what a sweet song that sounds so awesome oh so the best part of listening to that was watching father justin here playing the air base and in his little room so we got it we got a taste for that uh yeah that was great i will say maybe one of the best parts of um the recording process was um just loving the songs like listening to them again like um as father thomas joseph put at one point like you can't listen to this song with your hands down you have to have your hands in the air if you're going to listen to us this that was a consistent theme throughout like we would finish a track when you say that's the best song i was talking about another song for that but yeah i mean i think i think sometimes we you know when you when you when you write songs or when you play them you but you know i mean that that song's full of flannery o'connor like imagery when you when you listen to it all well i mean at least there's there's a lot of homage to o'connor's uh violent southern gothic uh imagery in her in her books so there's a lot there's a little bit of that and some and actually others others of the songs as well so one of the things that's that's great that we've kind of been reflecting on is how things have changed in the group over the years and how you've you've done something new with this album um walking away from it what what are you really proud of having accomplished what what what were what were real moments of grace for you um in the in in the kind of post-production process in the sharing of the album that you've done so far one thing that stood out to me uh we've already kind of touched on this but how we would um so we'd present a song that someone wrote so usually father thomas joseph for me and we'd work with it so this actually moves nicely into the next track heaven or tennessee because um this is a song that father thomas joseph wrote but father jonah ends up singing it and again we kind of moved around with different instruments and if you listen to the the first little demo that father thomas joseph made you know in rome with his banjo singing a song he just wrote homesick for tennessee uh there in the eternal city a georgian homesick for tennessee it was a really beautiful moment yeah but so if you listen to that and then the final product totally different so that was um just i think just a beautiful part of the whole process and the experience um just that create i guess creativity and um looking at the the finished product as as pretty different than what was um there at the beginning there's a lot of fraternal harmony in in working on it which you know doesn't have to be when you're doing something that's so demanding and creative it's really not obvious you all have this fraternal harmony and we had that and the other thing is i think uh you know we have some members of the band uh like you know just uh justin jonah uh also i think peter and uh anyway you know that they have a lot of uh a high level of i would call it like near professional or professional talent and jonas in just this case he wasn't you know is a professional musician for entering and i think it the those of us who are trying to contribute who are uh you know being brought along a little bit i think we found in the album making process we kind of reached into that you know more professional level and i don't mean that in the sense of uh you know in a kind of way that we became more formal or we became even necessarily professional musicians but we we participated participate in a process of what it is like for a band to really make an album it's just very fun but we did it in a christian context as as priests too so that was really interesting and i i mean i i know that for me for me i grew a lot just playing as a musician i played better than i've ever played before and i think that was true of a lot of people for the album because you put in everything you have father jonah you got to sing this this last song the heaven or tennessee that we'll play in just a minute um i guess if you want to answer the question that father patrick asked about what was kind of your the best part the greatest part or tell us a bit about oi and or tell us a bit about about the song before we before we put it on for a minute sure um i think i just echo a lot of what uh father thomas joseph and father justin have said but uh i think that the joy that we had recording the music is palpable on the album itself and that's something that you can't really replicate just by piecing together a song in a studio so it was it was good that you know we're in a retreat house we have a chapel right there so that the dominican life didn't have to end and so we kept praying the office we kept saying mass we kept uh you know having our meals in common so that all of these elements of our life um continued so that the album itself wasn't something that we did on the side but it just became a natural extension of our religious life and that was i think something that was really nourishing for all of us as for i mean this song itself i just loved it and so i was just sort of playing it to myself on the guitar in the living room and then father justin walked in and said well you're just gonna sing the song and uh which was a terrifying thing to hear uh because i had just sort of been was not intending to sing the song but uh it's great i mean the songs that father thomas joseph writes and that's probably justin wright they're just a joy they sort of beg to be sung um and um you know so i'm from ohio i'm definitely not from the south but i you know i tried and i'll leave it to uh you know father thomas joseph and all other southerners i'll just fall upon their mercy here uh you know for what i what i do with this song all right well we're gonna play we'll be the judge of how you did just right now you're from connecticut please that's fine but i'm good at judging so here we go let's tune in for a minute [Applause] [Music] [Music] it's without [Music] [Music] i wanna go far see my family [Music] i wanna hear angels sing in the midnight sunlight i wanna go to heaven [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's awesome i approve yeah that's really great wow remember this day there we have it all right well we're we're nearing the end of our of our time for this episode um thanks so much to the three of you father thomas joseph father justin father jonah for for joining me and father patrick here on this episode uh to give you all our listeners a little sneak peek at the uh at the upcoming album that that'll be released in early 2021 um if you haven't listened to the first album yet definitely do that go on to spotify itunes um buy a copy of the album that way they can uh rake in a little a little money to support the cause here uh but also stay tuned for the second one um one of the things that we're going to do here on god's planning for our listeners is we are going to uh have a sort of hillbilly thomas giveaway with some of the the new stuff and some of their merch and swags um so if you leave us a review in the apple store today uh we will we'll raffle off five of those kind of hillbilly thomas gift packages whatever we decide to put in them we don't know yet but we're gonna give you some stuff so leave a review if it's not a positive review you won't be entered into the raffle so leave a positive review and uh you might you'll be entered into the raffle to uh to win some stuff uh as always thanks for tuning in to godsplaining uh keep us in your prayers we're certainly praying for you like us give us a review share us with someone you think uh might benefit from from listening to us and until next time god bless [Music] thanks for listening to god's plan a work of the dominican friars of the province of st joseph visit us at 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Channel: Godsplaining Podcast

Views: 1,685

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: catholic, dominican friars, theology, philosophy, religion, faith, order of preachers, godsplaining, seekers, Truth, preaching, questions, searching, prayer, meditation, #music, #americana, #frjacobbertrandjanczyk, #frpatrickbriscoe, #hillbilly, #thomists, #wisdom, #catholicism, #christianity, #culture

Id: PR9DNuKm1JE

Length: 32min 49sec (1969 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 19 2020