Friday March 30, 2012 / 8:00 p.m., Doors open at 7:00 for silent auction / $13 advance or $15 at the door / All ages

To be bent towards the breach is to be compassionately drawn towards the brokenness of the world with the hopeful intent to redeem, renew and restore desperately impoverished communities.

“… Brooks Ritter offers one of the most intense and purposeful vocal performances I’ve heard in a long time.” — Subvergent.com

“Brooks Ritter sounds like someone on the verge of mega-stardom, yet humbly decides to offer sincere melodies … instead of indie-rock swagger.” — The Black and White.

The artistry of Brooks Ritter is a seamless garment. An indivisible blend of voice, musicianship and songwriting that is capable of communicating the wide range of human emotion and illuminating our hopeful, fallen, love-sick, grasping condition. His lyrics are insightful and honest, his music displays the rare kind of versatility that makes you think and makes you move, and his voice is an instrument capable of subtle nuance and supple power that glides effortlessly through the realms of rock, folk and soul.

Louisville, KY singer-songwriter Jamie Barnes grew up spending his Saturdays playing loud rock music in the garage and his Sundays singing four-part acapella hymns from the church pew. Graduating from the confines of car storage to various music clubs around town, adulthood found him taking cues from artists like Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen and Low. His lo-fi demos managed to make it out of the bedroom and onto the desk of the owner of Silber Records based in Raleigh, NC. By age 20, He had quit school, gotten married and had signed his first record deal. Two LPs and an EP later, Jamie built a small following in the college-aged market as well as overseas in Belgium, France and much of Scandinavia. His 2007 release, The Recalibrated Heart (released by NYC’s Sonablast Records) found its way on over thirty AAA top 40 lists, gained him top billing on stages all across the United States and earned his songs onto several movie soundtracks. Barnes made his Sojourn Music debut with his own arrangement of “Joy to the World” from Advent Songs in 2007. A year later, he became a full time music minister with Sojourn and focused more energy into writing tunes for the church. Now closing in on 30 years of age, Barnes’ latest offering, The Mercy Seat EP, is comprised of a few revised hymn texts, tracks of deep spiritual introspection and lamentation over the darkness of the human heart and the hope of light beyond its mortality.

This page was posted Sunday, January 1, 2012.