Not (Just) About Dogs...and hangovers

If you don't know The Frames, you are long overdue. Check this out, with links to Pastor Steve Stockman's interview with singer Glen Hansard.

The disarmingly innocent story that Hansard pastorally tells about the D-Fer the Dog, at least the way he tells it on the phenomenal live CD, (see a different version in the video at top here) always gets me...

...Not because I am a cheesy sentimentalist, but because the segue from that stand-up comedy story intro into the delightfully devastating song is holy juxtaposition, non-sequitur sequitur that shouldn't work, but works..

This is much like how Bono self-effacingly (in this video)diffuses...and thus spotlights.. the serious-grief in


the "gospel song," "In a Little While." This song was never "just about a hangover....before it became gospel song." And
The Frames song in discussion was never about a dog.

The Frames song "What Happens When the Heart Just Stops," can be...well, hearstopping.
And grief-healing kickstarting.

Which means it starts your heart while you sing about it stopping.

That is naked gospel.


Connect it to holy grieving, lament, and

"Soundtracking Grief and Missing Jesus."

Here's another version of the Frames song without spoken intro):




Also calls to mind how Roger Waters ("Praying with Pink Floyd"), in a priestly-pastoral mode, allowed his audience/congregation to cathartically enter into holy grief and ownership of their human weakkness..or something like that, Check it out:

"Are there any paranoids out there tonight? Anyone who worries about anything? Are they any weak people out there tonight?...This is for you...."

Even though the "Clap! Enjoy yourselves is perhaps sarcastic, and in context of the CD from which the song comes, nihilistic ("annihilating nihilism and cultural masturbation" ...

What a call to worship/reality/grief/God.

And the opening hymn it is the invocation for is "Run Like Hell".
Watch it:


Heartstopping.