Brooke Fraser, also known as Brooke Ligertwood for her worship music work, released her second album, Albertine, in 2006, revealing both a maturing soul and songwriter.
Following on her debut album, What to Do with Daylight, the album unfolds a clear growth arc and the maturing of both soul and songwriting capacities.
Central to the album is the album’s title track, Albertine, where we learn of Fraser’s experience in Rwanda where she came into stark contact with the facts and sorrowful residue of the horrifying intertribal 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Fraser grieves in response, and she repeatedly wrestles in chorus’s lyrics with our role in fighting for justice in the face of despair and violence:
Rwanda
Now that I have seen
I am responsible
Faith without deeds is dead
Now that I have held you
In my own arms
I cannot let go till you are
It’s obvious that this experience—rooted, it seems, in the encounter with a daughter whose mother was killed in the genocide—permanently marked Fraser.
While she retains her earlier innocence and preoccupation with human love, childlike faith, and the beauty of life, the heavier themes from Albertine bleed into other track lyrics like C.S. Lewis Song (“‘Cause my comfort would prefer for me to be numb/And avoid the impending birth of who I was born to become”), Hosea’s Wife (“We are Hosea’s wife/We are squandering this life/Using people like ladders and words like lies”), and Shadowfeet:
There’s distraction buzzing in my head
Saying in the shadows it’s easier to stay
But I’ve heard rumors of true reality
Whispers of a well-lit way
These songs also reveal Fraser’s par excellence ability to skillfully integrate the truths of her bedrock faith without cheapening or flattening either the faith or the experienced human reality—something vanishingly rare.
Her genius emerges precisely in this ability to tightrope walk creatively, producing songs with universal appeal to varied listeners while never abandoning the core of who she is, and pointing back to the answer that she has found to be the only satisfying response to suffering.
The fullness of this evident growth via grief and life experience, however, will find its full form in the album that follows, Flags.
For now, the album still emphasizes her exploration of her own inner life as an early-twenties woman, on the verge of marriage and motherhood.
These latter category songs, too, reveal something worthwhile.
Heavy does not always equal the most profound; her sober but hopeful view of love—particularly as something to be held, led, and redeemed by divine love—is refreshing, especially as a kind of juxtaposition to the now characteristic bold despair of the 2000s that began to replace the familiar naivety of popular love songs that reigned until the late 1990s.
Deciphering Me is a good example of her contrasting approach:
It’s love, it’s love that holds us
We will be alright
It’s truth, it’s truth that shows us
If we’ll walk in its light
It’s love, it’s love that holds us
We will be alright
It’s truth, it’s truth that shows us
If we’ll walk in His light
Oh, can you feel the gravity falling, calling us home?
Oh, did you see the stars colliding, shining just to show we belong?
We belong
Fraser masterfully reveals the C.S. Lewis principle that faith reveals and colors everything by its light, and that this can be done with the full brightness of one’s creativity, artistry, intelligence, attentiveness, humor, and personality—without compromising quality or falling into thin versions of faith made of platitudes, denial, and a shallow encounter with oneself, others, and God. Without cutting out the most important foundation of her life, she finds herself among the best mainstream songwriters who embody an earnest telling of human experience.
To live principles deeply is not to partition oneself away from reality but rather to strive to live reality supremely well.
Fraser’s work invites us into precisely that.
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