Sara Groves Tell Me What You Know INO Records Pop 11-06-2007

SCORE 94%

Sara Groves is an emissary, returning from the battlefield with the vision for those who can’t yet go. Tell Me What You Know comes straight from the front lines, and continues an important ongoing conversation.

Following her 2005 trip to Louisiana, delivering a tour bus and trailer full of baby supplies to Katrina victims, Sara Groves visited Rwanda in 2006 with Gary Haugen (of International Justice Mission), and met with Southeast Asian survivors of the sex trade. She’d be the first to refute any heroic implications, but saw the trips as an extension of her ongoing exploration of the purpose of her faith. Groves doesn’t see social justice in political terms. To her, it is a “Kingdom conversation. There are people behind these stories and statistics, and God’s heart for justice burns on their behalf.”

I see the former Midwestern English teacher as a chosen emissary, not unlike Old Testament prophets, sent to provoke and stir the hearts of God’s people through her profoundly artistic and insightful music. She speaks to the hearts of those who cannot travel the globe but can receive travel reports and spiritual direction from this young mother with a heart so similar to their own. Groves isn’t interested in being anybody’s rock star, making it quite clear where her priorities lie by opening her seventh album with “Song For My Sons,” a fresh energy bubbling through the track’s soft changes. You don’t identify it for the first few tracks, but there is an underlying burn to this new album, a simmering drive that you realize has been slowly building throughout her intelligent discography. Much comes to a head in Tell Me What You Know.

Second track, edgy rocker “In The Girl There’s A Room,” packs the power of a freight train, and the Mid-eastern twang lends credence to its topic: hope in the most horrific of circumstances. In this case it is Elisabeth’s story, a young believer kidnapped in her early teens to a foreign country and forced to endure eight months as a captive sex slave. Inspired by IJM stories and co-written with Charlie Peacock, Sara focuses on the hope Elisabeth never lost during her captivity: “In our hearts and souls/ an unstoppable refrain/ hope stands in defiance.”

This hope burns like a candle relentlessly undiminished through the eleven tracks of Tell Me What You Know. Not a bonfire, not an open pit of flame, but one solitary candle refusing to be shut out. The call shines with a fierceness through the soul-piercing truth of “I Saw What I Saw,” a sensitively rendered piano ballad describing the amazing forgiveness of Rwandans, accented beautifully by violin. You hear it again in the quietly folkie “Say A Prayer,” more of Elisabeth’s story and that of a father who risked it all to save his sons from a future of the slavery he has endured. It comes to a glorious head in the cleverly-written “When The Saints,” another quietly burning pop track that packs a surprising punch upon repeated listens. I love the way the background vocals build to an uplifting chorus of victory.

Other tracks grab you by the throat right up front. “It Might Be Hope” is sensitively encouraging, and though flowing gracefully, the weighty, significant “The Long Defeat” wrestles bravely with the value of one. Rollicking rocker “Abstraction” asks the big questions, and brings Joni Mitchell’s “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” to mind, while compelling standout track “Honesty” vibrates with purity and beauty. Groves gives it all back to the Lord on the sunny closer, “You Are Wonderful,” a nuanced praise song with a wonderfully whimsical feel and melodic Beatlesque changes.

It’s impossible to over-rate this gripping, thoughtful, delightful album. Straight from the front lines of battle, it is one of the year’s most important contributions.