Festival of Faith & Music Preview Reviews: Half-handed Cloud

I will be attending Calvin College’s Festival of Faith & Music, March 31-April 2. Leading up to the festival, there will be a series of reviews of artists scheduled to appear as a preview of what to expect. Click on the icon for more information about the Festival.


If Half-handed Cloud was hoping to produce a Vacation Bible School (VBS) curriculum based on their album, Thy is a Word & Feet Need Lamps, there may be few churches which use it. The music is simple in ways, leaving lots of room for multiple participants with percussion and whatever odd horns you can gather from 5th and 6th grade students. However, don’t let the simplicity fool you; time signatures, drifting melodies, and song fragments would beguile the VBS choir.

Another reason you probably won’t see the Half-handed Cloud Vacation Bible School curriculum is the lyrics. They are incredibly Scriptural, ultimately pointing to God’s grace. However, these are not the family-friendly stories of the Bible; these are the “after-9 P.M.-on-broadcast-TV,” “rated M for mature audiences only” stories of the Bible.

“Everyone Did What Was Right in Their Own Eyes” tells the account of a Levite in Gibeah, a lesser known but similar story to Sodom where the crowds of men demand to “know” the Levite, seeming to want to have sex with him. Here, as in Sodom, a sacrificial woman is offered, the Levite’s concubine. She is ravaged and killed, and so he cuts her up and sends a piece to each tribe of Israel, warning them against such sinfulness (Judges 19).

Zimri is killed by Phinehas for sleeping with Cozbi, a Midianite woman, in “Let’s Go Javelin’” (Numbers 25). The sons avoid seeing a drunken Noah with his parts exposed by backing into the tent to cover him in “Pup-Tent Noah” (Genesis 9). Ah, and who could really resist, though, getting the kids choir to sin “Grandfather Foreskin” about that most uncomfortable topic of circumcision?

The music has that Appalachian sound combined with certain small elements of rock, sampling, and musicals. The similarity to Sufjan Stevens’ penchant for drawing together these diverse pieces is no surprise. Half-handed Cloud (a.k.a. John Ringhofer) has been a touring member of Stevens’ band, and Ringhofer’s albums are released on Asthmatic Kitty, the label Stevens’ owns. The music feels like thick 78s found in a trunk among the dust and forgotten years in your great aunt’s farmhouse attic. You crank up the record player for an odd collection that opens you up to an unknown world. This makes one of the acts that I most anticipate at next week’s Festival.

The opening track, “You Get a Horseshoe,” acts like an overture to a late 19th century Western town’s small stage production. Here is the album title phrase, “Thy is a Word & Feet Need Lamps,” a jumbled translation of Psalm 119:105, “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” This isn’t Amy Grant’s straight lifting of the verse into a lyrics. Instead, Ringhofer adds further pictures like “light for your horseshoe and light for your toes.” Here’s the grace of God revealing His desire to grow faith and truth in our souls. That grace comes through Half-handed Cloud’s simple grandeur and eccentricly clear phrases.

That light may not always be literally a part of these biblical stories, but Half-handed Cloud’s compositions contain lightness, hope, and 60’s pop syllabic harmonies. “Jael Peg Caper” bounces along in a new Magnificant of sorts, “Most blessed of women in Jael/Blessed is she among women and tents,” celebrating her bravery for hammering a tent peg through the skull of Sisera, the leader of the Canaanite army (Judges 4). The music bounces along, God’s will is done, its violent and messy, but the music points to the fact that there will be salvation and deliverance beyond these awful, mature-rating encounters.

So don’t expect the Half-handed Cloud Vacation Bible School to be coming to your church this summer, but I will not be able to resist putting together a Youth & Adult Bible Study based on these songs. If you’d like to eventually receive a copy of this study to be prepared for next fall, please email me. I’ll place on a list to be notified when it is available at SongDevotions.

Thanks to Half-handed Cloud and Asthmatic Kitty for the review copy.