This is, frankly, news that is going to profoundly interest a very specific subset of 1990s- and early 2000s-era evangelical Christian kids, and elicit the mildest of amusement from the rest of you, but:
Prince is covering a Nichole Nordeman song. “THAT Nichole Nordeman, Mallory?” I hear you asking. YES, THAT NICHOLE NORDEMAN. “The same Nichole Nordeman who released “This Mystery” in 2000, a CD my older sister Laura played every morning as she got ready for school in the dark in order to get to campus by 6:15 so she could snag one of the twelve spots for junior parking?” THE VERY SAME.
Prince’s cover of Christian singer-songwriter Nichole Nordeman’s What If, one of two new songs he debuted leading up to tonight’s Hit & Run tour launch in Louisville, Ky., has been in the works for years.
Nordeman says she received a call more than five years ago from Prince’s management asking for permission to cover What If, a hit for her on Christian radio in 2005.
“I didn’t hear anything else, so I thought it had just died,” she said.
But a January 2013 Billboard cover story showed Prince hadn’t forgotten the song, stating that he was rehearsing it with 3rdEyeGirl, the female backing trio whose lineup was still solidifying at the time.
“That was a huge honor to me, that he was playing it, even if it wasn’t an official recording,” Nordeman says.
Louisville radio station WFBK-FM debuted Prince’s version of the song Thursday afternoon after an interview with 3rdEyeGirl drummer and Louisville native Hannah Welton.
This either interests you IMMENSELY, or not at all. WHY? WHY? WHY? NO ONE KNOWS.
In a Facebook post about hearing Prince cover her song, Nordeman compared it to Tiger Woods asking to borrow your golf clubs or astronaut Neil Armstrong “asking if you’d like to take a walk.”
IT IS SO MUCH MORE THAN THAT. IT IS LIKE IF BEYONCÉ ANNOUNCED TOMORROW SHE WAS REFORMING DESTINY’S CHILD BUT WITH THE MEMBERS OF OUT OF EDEN. IT IS LIKE IF TINA BROWN ANNOUNCED SHE WAS LAUNCHING A NEW MAGAZINE WITH SUSIE SHELLENBERGER AND CALLING IT BRIO. THIS IS BONO JOINING DC TALK. THIS IS STEPHEN CURTIS CHAPMAN HANDING YOU YOUR MORNING LATTE WITH “DON’T TELL ANYONE YOU SAW ME” WRITTEN ON THE FOAM. THIS IS NOTHING I’VE EVER SEEN BEFORE, AND IT JUST VERY WELL MIGHT BE EVERYTHING.
Tags: ahhh, evangelical christianity, music, news
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The Toast posting about Nicole Nordeman is the chicken soup I never knew my soul needed.
Right? It’s like Prince recording a Nichole Nordeman song.
I haven’t thought about Brio in over a decade…
This entire post is giving me flashbacks to my teenage years as a devout teenager and Christian band groupie in nowhere Illinois in the late 90s, early aughts. The person I was would be so shocked to know I turned out to be a queer, pagan/UU liberal and not some missionary’s wife with four kids. It’s a cliched reversal, but so it goes.
Teen you sounds just like teen me!
I feel cliched too–became an agnostic/vegetarian/liberal in college/after huge life changes. And to think I applied to Brio Girl of the year twice (I was not a finalist) Life is weird.
When I was fifteen, through some weird connections, I interviewed and profiled Michael W Smith for Brio but I don’t think it ever ran. My memory is foggy because shortly after I completed the article, a mom in my church spent months trying to get me banned from youth group because I told my small group about a make-out session with a GIRL and one of the small group members told her aforementioned mom.
I just read on Wikipedia that is was still being published as late as 2009! I wonder if the archives are online.
Ahhhhh hahaha I saw her twice in concert (I was huge Avalon fan and she used to tour with them a lot). Somewhere I think I have pictures of us together. I loved Wide Eyed (it stands up… kinda) but not the other albums.
Also, I need to know what Out of Eden’s Kimmey sisters are up to these days and wikipedia is not helpful.
Oh man, Brio. I used to read it at the library and not totally understand why I was slightly annoyed by the articles on how to wear layers in order to show less skin with “today’s revealing clothing styles.” My first slut-shaming experience!
I don’t fully remember Nichole Nordeman, but I totally get the analogy “THIS IS BONO JOINING DC TALK.” Now I’ve got “Between You And Me” stuck in my head. Can totally picture U2 covering that.
Yeah. I’m the same re: not fully remembering Nicole Nordman but getting Bono-DC talk. The chorus to In the Light is engraved on my brain. I also got the Steven Curtis Chapman reference because my Dad is still a huge fan of the guy.
DC Talk made GOOD MUSIC, and I will go to the mat for that.
I am forever here for dc Talk, Audio Adrenaline and Newsboys. FOREVER.
Yeah, the Proustian rush I get when I hear Christian contemporary music (which I just somehow KNOW, immediately, usually when I’m flipping the dial on a road trip through rural Pennsylvania) is akin to seeing a hair in your madeleine. It brings back the evangelical bullying that characterized my adolescence: rivalries to see who could be more anti-choice, judgments about the quantity and quality of one’s “quiet time,” and, of course, the competing arias of patriarchy (premarital sex! revealing clothing! female submission and silence!). I’m shocked that I emerged with an intact faith, though just the mention of Brio, Steven Curtis Chapman (who I always think of as the preferred choice for folks who found Michael W. Smith too secular), or a teen study Bible is a bona fide trigger.
Proustian rush, that is the PERFECT phrase for it. For me its when I hear Relient K again.
“Sadie Hawkins Dance” is a perfect song.
ETA: So is “For Moments When I Feel Faint.”
“Steven Curtis Chapman (who I always think of as the preferred choice for folks who found Michael W. Smith too secular)”
ahahahaha
Remember when Mercy Me’s “I Can Only Imagine” became a huge mainstream radio hit despite being 100% unabashedly about Jesus (as opposed to the Creed/Lifehouse style of straddling the line between mainstream and Christian rock)? That always struck me as really strange.
When DC TALKS. Got some non believers out there!
Again with the Proustian rush!
That album cover is SOOOOO then. I worked in Walmart electronics from November 1997 to June 1998. Seeing that design style puts me right there, like hearing “The Lights” by Juliana Hatfield, except it’s post-college despair rather than bittersweet high school melancholy. And Faith Hill’s “This Kiss” is suddenly in my head HARD.
Maybe I can fight it with “Baby Baby” by Amy Grant. There are no winners here.
(I’m glad I started bringing headphones to work https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_9DrxYkCks)
Ok, yes, Proustian rush is exactly the phrasing I was looking for to describe my reaction to this. Thank you for putting it so well.
Confession: about a year before I accepted that I’d lost my religion, I went through an uber Christian phase to try to patch together what was rapidly deteriorating. That would have been around 2005. Part of that was listening to contemporary Christian radio so… I must have heard this song. I must know it. But I can’t remember how it goes and I’m feeling weirdly apprehensive about looking it up.
What I’m saying is I’m stuck in an indeterminate state between “immensely” and “not at all’ interested and until I actually observe the event in question, I’ll remain here.
I did that too! “If I just Christian hard enough, all these doubts will go away!” It culminated, after my freshman year of college, in my serving as head female counselor at a very Christian youth summer camp. That pretty much got it all out of my system.
I would KILL to have Stephen Curtis Chapman hand me threatening-foam lattes every morning.
Oh SCC, write the soundtrack to my LIFE.
No, I mean Bono WAS on Focus on the Family, so it would have to be weirder than joining DC Talk. Bono joins a monastery?
But point taken. 90’s me is ecstatic.
Bono joins a monastery that requires a vow of silence?
*prays her lapsed-catholic Irish heart out for this to happen*
FOTF!!! shuddershuddershuddershudder
What? How? Other people know about Nichole Nordeman? I have to say teen me feels almost as validated as when Sixpence None the Richer was on a movie soundtrack.
SIXPENCE.
As a queer alterna goth struggling to find her place in the evangelical world, 13 year old me really relished Sixpence’s early, kind of abstract album THIS BEAUTIFUL MESS.
“…Nordeman compared it to Tiger Woods asking to borrow your golf clubs or astronaut Neil Armstrong “asking if you’d like to take a walk.”
I AM SO FULL OF CONFUSION AND FEELING. Like, wouldn’t Nichole Nordeman be iffy about a secular artist recording her music? Isn’t she going to have to explain and semi-apologize using carefully chosen language that will be reprinted in Christian music publications for a long time to come?
I’m just saying, I was subscribing to CCM Magazine in the mid 90’s, when people couldn’t write about George Michael without pointing out that he had SINNED, and the fact that Amy Grant had crossover success on secular radio was a favorite subject of think pieces as writers struggled to decide whether this diminished her testimony.
(Apart from The Toast, the only other magazine that has ever published my writing is Brio magazine, February of 1994. I was 12. They published my letter without asking permission. I have mixed feelings to this day.)
Didn’t Prince find Jesus a while ago and have a complete rebirth as an uber-Christian or something. Maybe that puts him in the clear.
prince found jesus a looooong while ago, see i would die 4 u, the ladder, etc.
4 the Tears in Your Eyes, The Cross…
He has always been religious, but I think he became a very strict Jehovah’s Witness a number of years ago.
I was just thinking about “Every Season” and getting weepy and then embarrassed yesterday.
So, can we talk about Lost and Found? Cool. Sweet. Perf, man. Taco Bueno.
Oh jeez, Lost and Found! Definitely saw them in concert numerous times.
Wow, this is…weird, you’re right. Did not expect to come to The Toast and see Nichole Nordeman.
(I was soooo into This Mystery. I sang the sad crucifixion bonus track in church once or twice.)
“IT IS LIKE IF BEYONCÉ ANNOUNCED TOMORROW SHE WAS REFORMING DESTINY’S CHILD BUT WITH THE MEMBERS OF OUT OF EDEN. IT IS LIKE IF TINA BROWN ANNOUNCED SHE WAS LAUNCHING A NEW MAGAZINE WITH SUSIE SHELLENBERGER AND CALLING IT BRIO. THIS IS BONO JOINING DC TALK. THIS IS STEPHEN CURTIS CHAPMAN HANDING YOU YOUR MORNING LATTE WITH “DON’T TELL ANYONE YOU SAW ME”” – that. THAT. All of that deserves to be needlepointed onto a pillow.
That said, I was super into Nicole in high school. That was such a weeeeeiiiiirrrd time for Christianity. I highly recommend Addie Zierman’s “When We Were On Fire” if you’ve ever felt the need to process the weird.
Despite the crazy fervor, managed to get out, find a non-denominational church (a real one, not just a “we’re non-denominational because it sounds cool but really we’re affiliated with _____”), and register as a democrat. Oh – and my husband and I twirled onstage during our wedding, thus thumbing our noses at the “no dancing” policy.
Is this a safe place to confess that I choreographed an interpretive dance for my church’s interpretive dance team to Every Season?
Oh middle-school me, how young you were, how contemporary, how Christian.
I didn’t know this song was a cover when Jazmin posted the song at The Hairpin, but the first thing I thought was, this sounds like Christian Rock! I feel like taking a victory lap for being right.
Whoa!
Now I am having vivid flashbacks to the Nichole Nordeman concert I went to in 2002, and also to Pokemon Silver, which I was playing on the car ride there. I remember specific Pokemon that were in my party at the time. I am 100% sure that I had Misdreavus, Sneasel, Murkrow, Skarmory, and Sableye in my Pokemon party on the car ride to see Nichole Nordeman in concert in 2002.
How do I remember this?? And why can’t I remember important things, like people’s names?
“This Mystery” was my jam in 2000. Now I feel the need to make a late 90’s/early 00’s christian contemporary playlist on spotify.
That better have some Rebecca St. James on it, then 🙂 Or some Avalon or World Wide Message Tribe 🙂
Please do this and post the link! 😀
This is not a post I expected to see. I’m going to mangle movie quotes, now.
“Ortbergs have layers. Like an onion.”
“Or a cake, cakes have layers!”
“No! Like an onion.”
He has always been religious, but I think he became a very strict Jehovah's Witness a number of years ago.
4 the Tears in Your Eyes, The Cross…
When I was fifteen, through some weird connections, I interviewed and profiled Michael W Smith for Brio but I don't think it ever ran. My memory is foggy because shortly after I completed the article, a mom in my church spent months trying to get me banned from youth group because I told my small group about a make-out session with a GIRL and one of the small group members told her aforementioned mom.
I just read on Wikipedia that is was still being published as late as 2009! I wonder if the archives are online.
When DC TALKS. Got some non believers out there!
I’m quite looking forward to this as when my sister went through a brief period of listening to CCM, she was the one I actually liked. I feel I now need to end this comment with a link to a Carman video, I find him repellent but can pour over his videos for hours. Just imagine Prince covering this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmvqJBaEx74
OMG. I used to listen to "Every Season" on repeat too, especially after my beloved cat died in 2001.
….Yeah, I know. I was a fun teenager.
BRB, crying.
That better have some Rebecca St. James on it, then 🙂 Or some Avalon or World Wide Message Tribe 🙂