Review

Culture

Grace

Music

Race

15 November 2024

5 min read

Revisiting Amazing Grace inspires new songs

Today’s musicians capture both the barbaric and the beautiful.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

three folk musicians face the camera across a meadow

Angeline, Cohen & Jon.

John Newton’s Amazing Grace was originally written to accompany his sermon for New Year’s Day 1773 and has become the most recorded and most sung hymn in the world. Last year was the 250th anniversary of the hymn’s creation while next year is the 300th anniversary of Newton’s birth.

The former slave trader who became a Church of England minister and abolitionist, preached his sermon on the theme of God’s mercy as outlined in a biblical passage from the first book of Chronicles. There, King David prays ‘Who am I Lord and what is my family that you have brought me thus far?’ Newton found parallels with his own life, having been saved from sinfulness and a storm at sea.

Among the many events and projects marking the two anniversaries, a folk album entitled Grace Will Lead Me Home may well be one of the most interesting. That is because, while it celebrates the hymn and its legacy, this album also explores “the distance between the world’s most beloved hymn and a most vile and shameful period in history, the trans-Atlantic slave trade”.

As captain of a slave ship when he became a Christian, Newton continued shipping Africans across the Atlantic. Later, he became Curate in Charge at St Peter and St Paul’s Church in Olney, where he befriended William Cowper and wrote the words to many hymns, including ‘Amazing Grace’. Later still, he lent his voice to the abolitionist cause. Despite these tensions in Newton’s life-story, the love that people have for ‘Amazing Grace’, including those who are descended from the slaves that Newton shipped across the Atlantic, became very apparent in a series of interviews conducted as part of the project before the songs forming the album were written and selected.

‘I’m going to hear John Newton preach’ is a key track on the album in which Jon Bickley describes Newton’s transformation from “foul-mouthed drunken sailor” to the captain able to “talk about how Grace can set you free”. In between, however, Bickley notes that the slaves disembark “leaving a trail of blood across the quay” while “the Captain’s in his cabin” writing about grace. Bickley’s songs on the album culminate in a powerful plea for reparations for slavery entitled ‘Sorry’. He writes:

“300 years after the birth of John Newton the road to redemption for those nations who profited from the slave trade looks long and difficult but surely it starts by saying Sorry.”

Bickley collaborated on the album with two musicians who have also played on other recent folk albums exploring the transatlantic slave trade and its legacy. Both Angeline Morrison and Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne played on a project by Reg Meuross entitled Stolen From God, while Morrison had also released The Sorrow Songs, which featured Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, to considerable acclaim. Both artists brought the weight of their study as well as their considerable artistic talents to the Grace Will Lead Me Home project.

Braithwaite-Kilcoyne brought the profound and arresting ‘Press Gang Song’ to the album. This is a resume of what it takes to become a slave trader from a readiness to “sail the fierce sea” to the willingness to “abuse your fellow man lead him shackled in chains”, “brutalise and violate, disregard their cries of pain”, “cast them overboard to a watery grace”, “for when that you do you shall master your trade”. This was the journey taken by Newton in becoming a slave trader.

Morrison, whose ‘Grace will lead me home’ is based on the Christian hope of resurrection, also writes from that perspective in ‘The Hand of Fanny Johnson’ from The Sorrow Songs. There, having noted the universality of death which “comes for the rich and the lowly”, she sings:

“My dear mother said that a funeral is holy,
The sanctified earth receiving the body,
And in the hereafter that’s when we will all be
Remade, entire and whole.”

Stolen from God, while clearly noting and condemning the way in which European Christians viewed the degradation inflicted on others as their God-given route to wealth, also makes some words of Frederick Douglass, a former slave turned abolitionist, writer and orator, central to the song cycle:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference… so wide that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked… I love the pure, peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”

The song ‘Stolen from God’ makes this contrast its central theme:

“God made these hands to hold and caress
He made these hands to worship and bless
He made these hands to hold my own child
God made these hands to be mild”

Yet, those involved in the slave trade:

“You made these hands to blister and bleed
To slave for the white man and bend to his greed
To cut coffee for gentlemen cane for their wives
At the cost of my family’s lives”

As a result, your legacy is “written in blood, everything stolen from God”.

This contradiction in the Christianity that underpinned the transatlantic slave trade is central to the story of Amazing Grace and its legacy (see Bickley’s ‘The choir still sings Amazing Grace’). Newton did come to see the error of his ways and lend his voice to the abolitionist cause in support of those like William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and Olaudah Equiano. Meuross effectively captures the beginning of this change in a song called ‘Bridgewater’ about an early petition against slavery:

“Reverend Chubb Mr Tucket Mr White
Call on every Christian soul to join the fight
To stand up as a nation ‘gainst this wicked violation
Though it might be bad for trade you know it’s right…
O brother oh brother oh brother
First the tide must turn before the flood”

The Sorrow Songs, Stolen From God and Grace Will Lead Me Home are three deeply moving and challenging albums, with Morrison and Braithwaite-Kilcoyne as the exceptional musicians linking all three, that tackle the history of the transatlantic slave trade, unearthing both incredible tales and uncomfortable truths. The Church is among the institutions that need most to hear and receive the truths and tales these albums share.

Angeline Morrison – The Sorrow Songs (Topic Records 2022)

Reg Meuross – Stolen From God (Hatsongs Records 2023)

Angeline, Cohen & Jon – Grace Will Lead Me Home (Invisible Folk 2024)

Review

Art

Culture

Music

Romanticism

Taylor Swift

6 October 2025

5 min read

Taylor Swift’s new album is fine, and that might be the problem

Ego, art, and the quiet tragedy of getting everything you ever wanted

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Taylor Swift, dressed as a showgirl, sips from a glass.

Taylor Swift, showgirl.

Taylorswift.com

Taylor Swift released an album last week and, from what I can see, the world seems to hate it.

Life of a Showgirl was written and recorded while Taylor was on her two-year-long Era’s tour, hence the album’s title. She would fly to Sweden between tour dates to record with the infamous producers, Max Martin and Shellback. This matters. Why? Well, because this means that each song on this album has grown out of the soil of unfathomable success; record-breaking numbers and history-making impact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the Era’s tour shifted the landscape of popular culture. Many critics have reflected on this context, citing ‘burnout’ and ‘frazzle’ as reasons why this album sits far below Taylor’s usual standard.

They implore Taylor to take a day off: put her feet up, recuperate, and re-gather her musical senses.

Then there are the critics who seem to be directing blame toward Taylor’s obvious happiness. If you didn’t know, she’s engaged to American footballer, Travis Kelce – and they, as a couple, are sickly sweet. Honestly, they’re defiantly mushy. They’re cheesy to the point of protest. They’re just happy – and, apparently, therein lies the problem. I’ve heard more than one critic quote Oscar Wilde in their takedown of Swift’s latest offering:

‘In this world there are only two tragedies: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it’.

This album, they say, is proof that Taylor Swift is victim to the latter kind of tragedy. She’s got everything one could ever want, and the world seems pretty agreed that her music is suffering because of it. We like to keep our artists tortured, thank you.

For the record, I don’t hate the album. But I don’t love it either. I resonate with The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis who writes that it simply ‘floats in one ear and out the other’. There’s nothing to hate about it, which, I guess, also means there’s very little to love about it. I’m not outraged, nor am I enamoured – and I say that gingerly, because I fear that’s the worst review of all.

So, in some ways I’m agreeing with the general consensus – Life of a Showgirl is not Taylor Swift’s best work. I don’t, however, think that her success, nor her happiness, are quite to blame for it. I think those are slightly lazy critiques, they’re shallow scapegoats.

I think, rather, the problem with this album is that Taylor has made herself the biggest thing within it.

When introducing the album on Instagram, she thanked her collaborators for helping her to ‘paint this self-portrait’ – the strange thing is that this ‘self-portrait’ feels considerably less honest or authentic than her previous, more conceptual, albums.

I’ve spent a couple of days wondering why this is and have come up with two theories.

Firstly, we tend to be far more honest to and about ourselves when we’re able to kid ourselves into thinking that it’s not actually our own selves that we’re talking about. For example, I think of Billie Eilish’s Grammy and Academy Award-winning song – What Was I Made For? – which she wrote to accompany Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. In an interview, Billie explained how writing a song about a Barbie somehow allowed her the space and freedom to create the most honest, raw, and revealing song she’d ever written.

We’re self-preserving creatures, you see.

If we’re knowingly speaking of, writing about, painting or in any way presenting ourselves - our ego gets in the way, preferring us to offer the world a shiny, carefully constructed façade.

Taylor, in intentionally painting a ‘self-portrait’, has unknowingly offered us less than herself.

And, now for my second theory. Every good self-portrait is actually about something bigger than its subject; they are able to point toward something more universal than the individual reflected. I think of Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, the way she used her hair to communicate societal expectations, or how she framed herself with wildlife, or the time she painted a necklace of thorns around her own neck – leaving an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of the beholder’s stomach as they think about the nature of pain and liberty. She painted herself, endlessly. Kahlo pointed to herself in order to point through herself – she was never the subject that she was most interested in, she was never the biggest thing in her own self-portrait.

Like I say, the problem with Taylor Swift’s okay-ish album is simply that she is the biggest thing within it. The key ingredient it’s lacking is awe; it leaves nothing to marvel at.

And that’s rare for Taylor.

I’ve often written that she is a Romantic in every sense of the word; concerned with the feelings and experiences that are powerful enough to knock us off our feet: big feelings, big thoughts, big truths, big questions, big mysteries, big language. These things have always been baked into her lyrics.

This album, in comparison, feels small. It doesn’t transcend Taylor Swift’s feelings about – well, Taylor Swift. She hasn’t quite managed to point through herself, she is the sole subject of her own self-portrait.

And therein lies its OK-ness.

Honestly? Therein lies all of our OK-ness. Taylor Swift may be anomalous in many things, but not in this - the presence of ego means that we’re all prone to self-portrait-ise ourselves. Left unchecked we are (or at least, we can be), what Charles Taylor calls, ‘buffered selves’; thinking of ourselves as the maker and subject of all meaning, shielded from awe and wonder.

But the best art will never flow from those who think themselves the biggest and deepest subject. Because, quite simply, we’re not.

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