Music from the Road 2: Steven Curtis Chapman, Rich Mullins & Geoff Moore

If you could see my MP3 folder, you might wonder why a Steven Curtis Chapman track wasn't in the first post of this series. Chapman's music by far makes up the largest chunk of my music folder and its playlists. There are more tracks from Speechless in my all-time favorites list than any other album, and they have seen more play time than anything else in my library. In fact, back in the CD era (prior to 2005 or so), I transferred the disc back and forth from my truck to my home CD player so many times that I irreparably scratched up two Speechless discs, having to purchase a replacement twice. The only reason I didn't have to buy a fourth copy was thanks to the digital music era arriving in the mid-2000s when I finally had MP3 players both on my computer and in my vehicle.

The ninth track of Speechless is a simple but all-important declaration that when all is said and done, is the defining one of my life. This album was in my truck's CD player for most of my first-ever major road trip solo in early May of 2000 to Raleigh, North Carolina.

Rich Mullins' album "The Jesus Record" came as a two-disc set. The first disc features the low-quality microcassette demo recordings of the songs Mullins made in an abandoned church. Nine days after making that tape, Mullins tragically died in a car accident near Bloomington, Illinois (about 2 hours from where I live now). Disc 2 of the "The Jesus Record" is the posthumous studio-recorded versions of these songs, performed by the members of Mullins' A Ragamuffin Band.

Here's the microcassette demo version of "Surely God is With Us":

And the studio version of the song, by A Ragamuffin Band:

Geoff Moore's 1997 album Threads was another early addition to my CD library back in 1999. The title track was a favorite on those late night drives on remote, quiet curvy roads in the hills around Charleston.