Pope Francis' late 70's-style prog-rock album drops in two months. You can hear the lead single, which sounds oddly like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!" here. It's great. I'm not kidding.
A Pope making albums, however, isn't a new thing. In 2009, Geffen Records-- having previously signed Mary J. Blige and Nirvana, among others-- released Pope Benedict XVI's album "Music from The Vatican." Pope John Paul II's classical album Abba Pater dropped in 1999. The artistic director behind all three of these albums, Don Giulio Neroni, had this to say to Rolling Stone: "As in the past, for this album too, I tried to be strongly faithful to the pastoral and personality of Pope Francis: the Pope of dialogue, open doors, hospitality. For this reason, the voice of Pope Francis in Wake Up! dialogues music. And contemporary music (rock, pop, Latin etc.) dialogues with the Christian tradition of sacred hymns."
Music and religion are not strangers by any means, and even have a way of creating each other. I view religion as a way of telling stories, something music already does so well, both within individual songs and throughout albums. Consider Coheed and Cambria, a band whose music's job is to tell the story of the Amory Wars, a comic book series by their lyricist Claudio Sanchez. My favorite example of a solid concept album is Flying Lotus' You're Dead!, a delicate and beautiful space jazz trip into the afterlife, establishing a sort of mythos and asking interesting questions of human morality. It's a sort of riff on religious ideas of heaven and hell and it works perfectly without being insensitive or condemning.
Pope Francis' sound spans from its progressive rock base outwards, from Gregorian chanting to pop-rock. The Pope's lyrics and dialogue span four languages. This is going to be not only an accessible, powerful album to the right people but has the capability to be a prog-rock triumph, and something that you might actually find play on a radio station between "The Court of the Crimson King" and "Owner of a Lonely Heart".
