Author, songwriter, professor, and former CCM Rock News Editor and regular feature writer John J Thompson will release his first new single in several years this week when “Sweet Marianne” comes out on Friday, July 24. The tune comes from the pages of his latest book, a “rock and soul fable” called The Ballad of the Lost Dogs of East Nashville (no connection to the real-life band), and features electric guitar and backing vocals by Phil Keaggy, accordion by Jeff Taylor (Bob Dylan, Emmylou Harris, Amy Grant, Keith & Kristin Getty), percussion by Steve Hindalong (The Choir, the real Lost Dogs,) and backing vocals by his longtime musical partner (and wife) Michelle Lynn Thompson of The Wayside. He is also performed last night at Hope Church Nashville with Scout and The Saints and Grable Howie both to celebrate the launch of “Sweet Marianne” and to support the organizers of a new festival called Holy Mountain. (Thompson’s group with his wife, The Wayside, will be playing their first official Nashville show in many years on August 16th at Sacrament Church in East Nashville.) Details can be found at JohnJThompson.com.

Longtime CCM readers may remember Thompson’s contributions to the magazine as a feature writer between 1999 and the end of the initial run. But his history with CCM goes back much farther than that. “The first time I had an article published by any magazine other than my own True Tunes News, was when CCM hired me to review a John Fischer and Noel Paul Stookey show at Wheaton College in the early 90s.” And while Thompson has been writing and recording music – primarily as The Wayside – as far back as 1991, most people outside of the fringes of the alternative rock or the Cornerstone Festival world only knew him for his work with True Tunes. In recent years he was featured in The Jesus Music film as a historian. He has two previous books, Raised By Wolves; The Story of Christian Rock and Roll (2000) and Jesus Bread and Chocolate: Crafting a Handmade Faith in a Mass Market World (2015). The Ballad of the Lost Dogs of East Nashville is his first novel. He currently serves as a professor and as the Director of Music Industry Studies at Lipscomb University and manages Community Music, the Chicago worship writers behind the song “Make Room.”

“I never stopped making my own music,” Thompson insists, “but I have been very busy for many years helping other artists and writers get their work out. I spent nearly 10 years working on this story and got to write several songs within the context of the novel. That was a totally new experience for me. But this one, “Sweet Marianne” is central to the whole story. It starts as a lullaby – just a chorus that a young father composes on the fly for his baby girl – but then it keeps coming back throughout the story. I wanted the song to grow that way, so I brought different friends in along the way. Dan Wheeler helped me expand it harmonically and even lyrically. Then when Phil Keaggy offered to record it and play on it, things really opened up.”

Thompson’s story includes a sort of “accidental band” made up of people of different ages, ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds, who initially come together in a garage in East Nashville just for fun. One of those characters, Cesar Jimenez, is a 70-something man originally from Mexico who brings a David Hidalgo (Los Lobos) type of accordion style to the mix. Thompson and Wheeler tapped Jeff Taylor to add that element to the track. “Jeff read some of the book,” Thompson explains, “He immediately understood what we were going for. He contributed such lovely, important elements. The accordion really does represent the prayer-like aspect of the song, and it was a dream to have that in there.”

As much as the song captures the essence of that spirit of his story, Thompson insists that it hits a different nerve he hadn’t even considered when he was writing it. “This really is the sound of community,” he adds. “I could not have done this on my own. I had to let people in, trust others with ‘my’ thing. The result is so much stronger than what I could have accomplished if I had insisted on control. Community and control don’t work together. That Thompson’s “solo” show on the 21st includes Sam Wade (who recently completed a 2-year run as the guitarist for the touring company of the massively popular Hadestown musical), and 2 especially talented Lipscomb students just adds to the sense of community found in the book, and his long story in music.

“We are collectively living through an era of toxic voices and fractured community on all sides,” he says. “There’s a verse that gets me every time I hear – or sing it. ‘Many the voices, many the choices, that told us who we are. Running on fumes, living in ruins, loving from afar. But there is a sound, calling us home, back to that light in the dark. Where we find our names, trade beauty for chains, and hearts that carry the scars.’ That, to me, is the Gospel.”

More info and links at JohnJThompson.com

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