Hillsong Worship, one of the most established church-based praise and worship collectives, has a catalogue packed with live albums—one for nearly every year since 1992—and those recordings capture congregations fervently singing along.
The album, Awake was made differently: Hillsong’s leaders brought their songs into the studio. “The sound of Hillsong Worship is the sound of the church, primarily,” explains Brooke Ligertwood, who leads the group and co-produced the album. “You put on a record and you can hear our church singing. Before we entered this process, we had to ask ourselves some questions: What's the sound of our community when you take it out of that live context?” Many of the arrangements build towards anthemic pop-rock catharsis, progressing from hushed single-voice intros to billowing guitars, keyboards and choral harmonies and churning tom-tom patterns, all treated with reverb and ambient effects that give the tracks an immersive quality. Here Ligertwood goes through each of the album’s 12 tracks.
Awake My Soul
“Sometimes when we're approaching writing worship songs for our church, you approach it in a way where you're asking yourself, ‘How can I best serve the congregation right now?’ But then as songwriters as well, it's our personal art. So sometimes the stuff that you write as a songwriter, you're not necessarily thinking about anybody else singing it, but it's your own way of processing or your own way of praying. This was one of those songs for me; I was actually picking my kids up from preschool when it came to me. It's a song about when you hear a group of people in a room praying or singing to God, what we hear is the sound of the music and the sound of singing, but what God hears is the sound that our hearts are making, the sound of faith. In return, when God manifests himself in a place, it's almost as if we can hear him walk into the room by perceiving it with something in our souls that was designed to be that antennae to what's happening in the heavenly realm. So, it's the idea of a sound begetting a sound, in a way.”
Awake My Soul
“Sometimes when we're approaching writing worship songs for our church, you approach it in a way where you're asking yourself, ‘How can I best serve the congregation right now?’ But then as songwriters as well, it's our personal art. So sometimes the stuff that you write as a songwriter, you're not necessarily thinking about anybody else singing it, but it's your own way of processing or your own way of praying. This was one of those songs for me; I was actually picking my kids up from preschool when it came to me. It's a song about when you hear a group of people in a room praying or singing to God, what we hear is the sound of the music and the sound of singing, but what God hears is the sound that our hearts are making, the sound of faith. In return, when God manifests himself in a place, it's almost as if we can hear him walk into the room by perceiving it with something in our souls that was designed to be that antennae to what's happening in the heavenly realm. So, it's the idea of a sound begetting a sound, in a way.”
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