Spirit Dance

Here's an album I've been listening to not quite constantly this week: Bill Miller's Spirit Dance. (iTunes has song previews)

I've been a Bill Miller fan for several years. He's a folk singer from Wisconsin (currently Nashville, of course) who has blended his Native American musical skills with the mainstream American singer-songwriter folk style.

His songs are at once heartbreakingly real and powerfully hopeful, as he manages to look hard and long at the poverty and hardships of reservation life through the lens of Christian hope at its concrete best.

More importantly, he consistently manages to create a meaningful sense of place in his music. The songs are never wishy-washy, even as they're often fictional. They're in "paper mill towns" and along "reservation roads", on "sacred ground".