SONGS FOR A HEALTHY SOUL - Take Back The City

Mon 20th Oct 2008

Stocki starts a new series on "songs for a healthy soul" by looking a little deeper at Snow Patrol's new single take Back the City...

Snow Patrol's Gary Lightbody’s lyric writing has always been romance based, mostly on the broken hearted side. Though he has squeezed some universal profundity into such melancholy, Take Back The City is a new departure. In the most recent Q magazine Lightbody explains that the song is about his home city of Belfast which he has learned to fall in love with again. When Lightbody left for University in Dundee at the beginning of the nineties Belfast was a besieged city. There were a couple of years when every road into the city had police checks and people were being shot almost daily. By the time Lightbody returned, three years ago, the city had had a decade without bombs and bullets; it was a place revived with new shopping centres, city centre bars and clubs and music venues big enough for Snow Patrol’s success. Just like the returning sons Belfast is thriving!

Though the negative side of Northern Ireland’s conflict haunts Take Back The City it is a song about loving the city, enjoying the city and reshaping the city. Lightbody sings about the broken record of entrenched political sectarianism and about the futility of picking sides in a historical fight he doesn’t understand. The main thrust of Lightbody ode to home though is about sucking the marrow out of the city, sometimes admitting to partying too much. Where I have personally been inspired is in the verse:

“God knows you put your life into its hands
And it's both cradled you and crushed
But now it's time to make your own demands.”

I am sure Lightbody does not have the same missional take on this that I do but this is a very interesting take on our relationship with our home cities, towns or villages. The city shapes us, cradles and crushes us into the adults we become but after that we are the shapers of the city. Vocationally my task is to vocationally shape and direct students to take their place in the real world as World Formative Christians. This verse will be quoted over and over again. The city that they live in that is the very subject of this song has made them who they are... now to make it what they believe it should look like when “God’s kingdom comes and His will is done on earth as it is in heaven.” Take back the city!