“When I decided to make a comedy show about church, I knew almost immediately that music had to be part of it. Church and music are basically inseparable, anyone who’s been to a good service knows the music isn’t a warm-up act. It is the show. So here, in no particular order of holiness, are the songs that made me, and the show. See you at CHURCH!”
Mahalia Jackson – His Eye Is On the Sparrow
I heard this song for the first time in a tiny church in Mississippi when I was eight years old. A woman I had never met and haven’t seen since stood up and sang it, and I didn’t fully understand what was happening to me but I knew something was. A year later, Lauryn Hill sang it in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit and I watched that scene approximately forty-seven times in a row. It was the first song I ever put in my show. If you come and see me, you’ll hear it. That’s all I’ll say.
Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water
I don’t know how you listen to this song and don’t feel something. I genuinely don’t. If you can get to the end of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” unmoved, I’m not sure I can help you and I mean that with love. This song is what I want my show to feel like not every show, maybe not every night, but on the good nights; the ones where a room full of strangers decides, quietly and without discussion, to be in it together.
The Five Stairsteps – O-o-h Child
This is one of my favourite songs in the entire world, and it is an active dream of mine, a life goal, really, to hold an audience completely hostage and make them sing it with me. “Ooh child, things are gonna get easier”. It’s the most straightforward promise in music. Nobody asks for proof. You just believe it because you need to and because the song makes it feel possible. That’s what I try to do on stage. Make the impossible feel, for an hour, like maybe it’s just around the corner.
The Beatles – With a Little Help from My Friends
Because that’s the only way any of us make it. Through anything. Through grief, through bad years, through long Augusts in Edinburgh doing a comedy show everyday. You find your people and you hold on. It’s last because it’s the argument. For the show… and for most things worth doing honestly.
Brit Barron: CHURCH, Gilded Balloon, 5-30 Aug (not 10, 17, 24), 12.40pm