Top CCM Songs of the 1980s - #20

It's amazing that most of my memories of childhood have to do with listening to Christian radio. The CCM station in the St. Louis area actually did a fairly good job of mixing pop and rock until about 1986, when Amy Grand and Michael W. Smith had done enough to upset people in the Gospel Gestapo by injecting guitars into the mix (but more on their musical home runs later in this list).

Still, synthesizers were the flavor of the day in Gospel music for most of the 1980s, and some embraced the technology and worked wonders with it. Smith's The Big Picture featured programming that put that record ahead of its time, Crumbacher painted great pastiches with his layers of keyboards, and Petra took a lot of flak for their Beat the System album sounding as synthesized as it was.

Another pioneer of the synthetic was Michael Omartian. Known for producing works by The Imperials and Christopher Cross, Omartian released the album Main Stream along with his wife Stormie Omartian in 1982, and this album features the #20 song on my list, "It Is Done."


There was something comforting about the programmed keyboard riffs that laid the groundwork for the melody lines to rest upon, and the song rode along a wonderful long descent before building back up for the back half of the verse. The chorus was expansive, opening up into the melody that featured more space than you thought necessary for a song whose verse felt so dense. I don't think this song is perfect by any means, but the arrangement and vocal parts are expertly crafted, and the pace of the song moves along at a decent clip.

Lyrically, this one grabbed me as a young boy with that simple reminder that God already did the work of attaining salvation for me. All I had to do was receive it and understand that God's power was ready to work in me, as long as I kept my eyes on him.

Let your blindfold drop
You're standing on a mountain top
Jesus has you lifted up
And he will never leave you alone


The greatest lyrics are timeless, and that's why this song still tugs at my heartstrings almost 40 years later. Biblical truth pours out of this song whose only purpose is to encourage. Given that this comes from a man who would later produce and arrange the music for "We Are the World", the USA For Africa benefit song, the sentiment expressed in this song seems wholly appropriate.

Top CCM Songs of the 1980s - #21

There Is No Box.
Zach

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