Brian Doerksen
“This is the album I’ve been waiting my whole life to make, a Christmas record with new original songs that tell the story of all stories; God with all of us, even in our mess.”
“The album also features Christmas classics like ‘It Came Upon The Midnight Clear’ along with the Pacific Mennonite Children’s choir who join on ‘Stille Nacht’ (Silent Night) singing in my parent’s mother tongue of German, the birthplace of Christmas carols. Included with the original songs is a Christmas Edition of the known and loved ‘Hope Of The Nations’, a song for those who struggle with missing loved ones called ‘Saddest Season’ as well as the singles ‘Magical Lights’, ‘Just Before The Silent Night’ and ‘In The Dust (A Child Is Born).”
You call this album “the one you’ve been waiting to make your whole life.” Can you tell us more about that? Why was 2019 the perfect time?
I’ve always loved Christmas and Christmas music since I was a little boy. Then through my adult years, as I came to have a career as a songwriter and worship leader that led to working with a couple of different publishers and record labels (Vineyard & Integrity) and many times they encouraged me to do a Christmas project.
My response was always the same: If I’m going to do a Christmas project, I don’t want to just do my cover of all the usual Christmas classics; I actually want it to be mainly new original songs about the heart and story of Christmas.
On top of the labels, many individuals who loved my music would come up to me at events and concerts and ask for the same thing. For about 20 years I knew I wasn’t ready. Finally, in the summer of 2018 it felt like the right time and season in my musical journey, and in our family journey. One summer day, my wife Joyce went up into the sweltering hot attic of our old 1930’s farmhouse (the same house where I grew up since I was a boy and still live in) and pulled out some Christmas decorations, set them up in my office and said to me ‘It’s time to go to work on your Christmas album’. (When my wife speaks - I listen!)
So while every album I’ve written and recorded is precious and important to me, there was something about this one that felt like it was a lifetime in the making. I spent most of that summer and fall writing, and then carried on writing right through Christmas 2018 and through the winter months of the first quarter of 2019 until I had way too many songs to choose from. (Funny enough - I still sometimes walk around singing some of the songs we jokingly call the ‘Christmas runts’ - songs that didn’t make it on the album, yet still strong enough to be stuck in my memory.)
We started recording the first couple in November 2018 and finished the album in the heat of summer 2019 so it would be ready for Christmas that year.
A couple of years later, the album still feels fresh to me.
Tell us about working with Pacific Mennonite Children’s choir from Germany on “Stille Nacht” (Silent Night) and connecting with your roots.
Pacific Mennonite Children’s Choir is based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada. They have been an active choir for something like 50 years. In fact my wife Joyce sang with them when she was a child as we both grew up here in Abbotsford. As the name suggests, many of them are Mennonite in their cultural heritage, and the Mennonites (like my parents) had German as their mother tongue. So German is not a difficult language for them to sing in. I really wanted this song to be sung in German because Germany is the birth place of Christmas carols, and I have many memories of my parents and grandparents singing in German.
Christmas carols in general were a very important part of life in the Doerksen (pronounced ‘Dirksen’) household. My Dad led the singing at our Mennonite church so we heard the classic carols in English and German at home and in church all December long.
Sometimes “the most wonderful time of the year” can also bring up a lot of grief and pain. What was the inspiration behind your original song “Saddest Season?”
I wrote this song not just to express my own experience and sadness at Christmas for a few years, but to identify with many others who struggle at Christmas because of loved ones who are absent. My mother, Agnes Unger Doerksen, died on November 14, 2013 after years of fighting a long-term illness rooted in complications from my birth. Six weeks later, on Christmas Day 2013, I walked over to the piano and this song tumbled out with tears. (It was the only song with original words that I wrote in a 5-year period of wordlessness.) Christmas that year, and the next several years were like the words in this song.
I asked Carly Reirson, a family friend, former songwriting student of mine and a talented songwriter and recording artist to join me on the recording of this song because she also lost her mother to illness. We miss our mothers and other loved ones at Christmas most of all.
What’s a Christmas classic from this album that’s particularly special to you?
“Stille Nacht (Silent Night)” is perhaps one of the most beautiful songs every written (especially in its original language). “It Came Upon The Midnight Clear” is so special because of the way the melody just floats… the music has this ethereal and magical quality that conveys these words of incredibly good news starting with the most lowly of all - the shepherds. I could quote the whole lyric here, but words like the second half of the second stanza are just so tender and magical to me:
“Look now, for glad and golden hours come swiftly on the wing
And rest beside the weary road and hear the angels sing."
What’s your greatest hope as worship leaders begin leading these songs and arrangements at their churches this Christmas season?
My hope is that some of these new songs would help worship leaders and their congregations rediscover the wonder and heart of the ancient Christmas story. We know it so well: all the basics of the story (at least we think we do)! Sometimes we need some new melodies (and new arrangements of classics) to re-discover that heart and wonder. There is so much in our world now that is unresolved.
It’s messy. It’s dirty. And it’s into this mess, this ordinariness that “Emmanuel - God with us,” came, completely unashamed to be with us. I’m so thankful for the tenderness of that, and I hope that leaders and congregations will open their hearts to that tenderness this year.
Brian Doerksen | The Heart of Christmas
Lead The Heart of Christmas with your congregation. Resources available at MultiTracks.com.