All the Lost Souls - James Blunt

Three years after releasing his debut LP, James Blunt has released his second, highly anticipated album. All the Lost Souls presents a collection of songs that explore the nature of human frailty and mortality, and the phenomenon of celebrity.

Blunt has delivered some soulful and thought provoking new material and in several songs he alludes to Christianity, or a need for it.

In the song Same Mistake, Blunt says, “He’d seen my enemy. Said he looked just like me. So I set out to cut myself and here I go”. 

Blunt is describing himself as his own worst enemy. He attempts to rectify this by cutting himself, almost as though he is trying to cut the bad out of himself. The Bible tells us it is of great value to cut out sin.

1 Corinthians 5:6-7 tells us, “Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast that you may be a new batch without yeast – as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.”

The lyrics also bring to mind Mark 9 where Jesus tells us, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.”

While there is much value in the removal of sin, to actually cut oneself in an attempt to do so is dangerous and wrong. Such behaviour would be an erroneous and literalistic interpretation of the above passages. While Blunt’s lyric is powerful in its suggestion, the risk of mistaken interpretation by a teen audience, in particular, is possible.

Give Me Some Love is a sad song. Blunt seems to be stuck in a bad place, one that he cannot seem escape from. The chorus explains: “Why don’t you give me some love? I’ve taken ship-loads of drugs. I’m so tired of never fixing the pain. Valium said to me I’ll take you seriously, And we’ll come back as someone else, Who’s better than yourself.”

Clearly, the problem that is causing the pain cannot be fixed properly with drugs. What can fix these problems is a relationship with God. We as humans so often try to fill our lives with all sorts of stuff. We do it to try and avoid God. But this is empty and not beneficial.

John 3:19 says “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light”. By filling your life with stuff you miss out on the most important thing – a relationship with God. This is the only solution to the emptiness and pain.

Blunt seems to explore this idea in some of his other songs, albiet somewhat abstractly. In I’ll Take Everything, Blunt says “Holy Spirit rise in me. Here I swear, forever is just a minute to me”. In this song, it is almost as though he is calling out to God. Perhaps this is Blunt coming to terms with his own mortality, as later in the song he says, “I’ll join everyone ‘Cause all men die”.

“If she had wings she would fly away, and another day God will give her some,” Blunt says in Carry You Home. It is strange and slightly disarming at first to hear so many references and allusions to God in a popular CD aimed at the secular market. In fact, the examples of spiritual reverences given here are not all of them. It is, however, encouraging to see such thoughts being expressed openly.

All the Lost Souls paints a picture of a person searching for God and is a good follow up to Back to Bedlam. The themes of mortality and human frailty raise some interesting questions about God that Blunt will hopefully follow up on.

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