Songs for Holy Week

All the Lady Chapel songs in one place

the lady chapel where it all started | chattanooga, tn | 2023 | photo by meg settle

Welcome followers new and old. Last year I wrote and recorded songs for the major feast days of the Christian year. Since Holy Week is upon us, I wanted to share the Good Friday and Easter songs in one place. These songs are not available on streaming, so listen at these links. There are plans to release these songs on vinyl with an accompanying prayer book! So I’ll keep you posted.

I hope to come back to this project one day. But for now, I am busy preparing an album of songs about motherhood for my folky pop project Alva Leigh. If you’d like to know more about that, follow me on Instagram.

Happy Easter, friends - Allie

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On Good Friday, I was inspired by Janet Morley’s retelling of the Reproaches, an ancient call and response chant retracing the steps of our sorrow, defeat, and rejection of God, meditating on the Cross and asking for mercy. If God's dream is our closeness, Good Friday is when we begin to peel away our layers of blindness. I think of it as the remolding of a vessel or a field scorched for new growth. To feel the depths of joy and strength of true love, we have to find faith in our pain, otherwise we will just stay burned and broken.

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For Easter, I wrote about the easter flame. At the vigil service, you light a candle from the huge fire and carefully carry it home to be enjoyed whenever you need a little Easter magic. I love the symbolism of “bringing home the fire.“ After 40 days of darkness and silence, we see Christ our light. A fire that divides but never goes out. We are gathered into the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, transformed by his life and teaching, and it’s like we are rising with Him, into something new.

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Got 15 minutes?

With each song, I released a 15 minute podcast called Evensong. If you’re not familiar, Evensong is an Episcopal / Anglican service of evening prayer that follows a set order of hymns, psalms, readings, and prayers. You can listen via the audio player in each post or where ever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to follow along with the order of service, there is one in each Substack post or on page 117 of the Book of Common Prayer.

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Thanks for listening. If you want to learn more about this project, start here! <3