I Stood There

I was quite certain I'd removed the chorus from the original arrangement of this song.

Then I found the original manuscript.

There was no chorus.

Apparently I have sung this song reasonably regularly for more than thirty years without retaining this fairly basic piece of information.

Memory is a fickle thing.

This is why I keep the paper.

I Was There

The manuscript also reminded me of something else I'd forgotten.

The song wasn't originally called I Stood There.

It was called I Was There.

Exactly when I wrote it is considerably less certain.

It was somewhere around the end of my teens. By the time I was doing one of my first army camps at Atlas Commando, I know the song existed because I have a very clear memory of trying to find contact details for Maranatha Praise.

This was before Google, websites and the minor modern miracle of being able to find almost anybody on the planet while sitting on the toilet.

I wanted to send them a demo tape.

Because, unusually for me, I thought this one might actually be good enough to publish.

I don't remember ever sending it.

Standing in the story

I was listening to a lot of Christian music at the time, and Ray Boltz in particular had shown me how powerful a song could be when it put you inside a biblical story rather than simply singing about it.

That idea fascinated me.

And I Stood There became my attempt to do something similar.

The narrator stands at the crucifixion.

He cries, Crucify him.

He helps choose who should be set free.

He drives the nails.

He places the crown of thorns.

He spits in Christ's face.

He gambles for His clothes and walks away with the prize.

Clearly, this isn't one historically plausible person having an exceptionally busy afternoon.

That was the point.

The “I” was all of them.

And the “I” was me.

Not guilt

I don't remember this as a song about guilt.

My faith was deeply personal to me. I believed—and still believe—that the people standing around that cross weren't some conveniently awful collection of human beings from two thousand years ago.

We are capable of being all of them.

We can be passionately committed one moment and remarkably good at denying everything we claim to believe the next.

Peter managed it before the rooster crowed.

Most of us have considerably longer careers.

For me, the significance of the crucifixion was precisely that I wasn't standing outside the story judging the people in it.

I was standing among them.

And still Christ looked at His creation and said:

Father, forgive them.

That's what I was trying to put into the song.

Not doctrine so much as what the doctrine felt like to me.

Looking up

The turning point comes when the narrator finally looks into the eyes of the man he's helped nail to the cross.

Everything becomes personal.

By the final verse he's on his knees:

Surely this was the Son of God.

And then:

Surely this is the Son of God.

I can't tell you whether teenage Warren consciously appreciated what he was doing with that change of tense.

I'm certainly not giving him credit now without documentary evidence.

We've established what happens when I trust him.

But the line still lands for me today.

The story stops being something that happened in the past.

The recognition is happening now.

Getting out of the way

When I came back to the song all these years later, before producing it with AI, I sang it through repeatedly.

Something about the arrangement bothered me.

I remembered the problem as a chorus repeatedly interrupting the narrative.

As previously established, the chorus did not exist.

What the original manuscript actually shows is that I repeatedly resolved the verses by repeating their final lines.

And that was what was bothering me.

Each time the story gathered momentum, the arrangement stopped to underline what had just happened.

Older me wanted it to keep moving.

So I changed the arrangement.

I didn't rewrite the lyric. I didn't modernise the language or try to improve what the young songwriter had been trying to say.

I just stopped making him repeat himself.

For once, he already knew what he wanted to say.

Somebody heard it

Years later, Mom talked to me about the song.

She described it as “very intense” and said it still brought up “such really strong emotions.”

But what struck me most was that she understood exactly what I'd been trying to do.

She said the person standing there “could apply to any one of us who may have been that man.”

More than thirty years apart, without me explaining the mechanics of the lyric to her, she'd arrived at precisely the place from which I'd written it.

She also said it touched her that I had thought that deeply about my faith.

For a song written to express something I wasn't particularly good at explaining, that's not a bad result.

Closer to the dream

There are old songs in this collection that I sang again purely because I needed a guide vocal for the production.

Some felt mechanical.

This one never has.

I've sung I Stood There reasonably regularly over the years because I still enjoy singing it. There's emotional weight in it, and when I sing it I can still connect with the thing I was trying to express when I wrote it.

When I finally heard the produced version, I didn't hear Ray Boltz.

I heard me.

There wasn't some enormous tearful revelation.

Just recognition.

Yes. That's what it was always meant to be.

Elsewhere on this site I've written about the distance between the thing I can feel and the thing I eventually manage to make.

Between the dream and me.

This was one of those rare early songs where I think I got unusually close.

Perhaps that's simply because the young songwriter did a decent job.

Or maybe on this one I was led by the Spirit.

Either way, more than thirty years later, I didn't need to change what he was trying to say.

I just needed to let him finish saying it.