Creating art that’s inspired from the Word. That’s exactly what Cody Curtis and the team at Psallos do – put together beautifully arranged music to display books of the Bible. We talk with Cody this week about Psallos’s new album, Hebrews, and discuss some points on how to create art inspired from the Bible.

 

Who’s Our Guest?

Cody Curtis is one of the pioneers of Psallos, a Christian musical group. He’s professionally educated in musical theory, and currently works at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee with his wife and child.

Episode Links

Why wouldn’t you pick up Psallos’s Hebrews and support this awesome art?

Read It

*Below is an edited transcription of the audio conversation.

With me today is Cody Curtis, he’s the composer and director of Psallos. It’s good to have you on the show again Cody.

Thanks for having me.

Yeah, if you’re listening, Cody and I actually already had a conversation on worship music back in January of this year. It was episode 52, and if you enjoy this conversation, you should definitely go and check out that last conversation as well.

But for those Cody, who didn’t hear episode 52, and just to give all of us a refresher, tell us a bit about who you are, and sort of what you do on a more personal level.

I’m from Memphis, Tennessee, it’s where I was born and raised. And my wife and I, and our daughter Ellowyne, we currently live in Jackson, Tennessee. We work at a place called Union University in Jackson, and we’ve been here for about six years, and we’ve both did our undergraduate degrees at Union. It’s a fantastic school. If anybody’s listening and is looking for a great undergraduate education, definitely check out Union.

And so we did that, graduated from there in 2009, got my master’s in Music Composition at UNCG, it’s a school in North Carolina. And wrapped up my doctorate two Mays ago in, I guess it was 2016, in Music Composition at the University of Memphis.

So, composition, music composition, is what I love to do, what I love to study and learn more about. And so my wife and I, we’ve been married since 2009, and we have one daughter right now, her name is Ellowyne, and she’s just a blast to be around,

Cool. That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing that little bit. So Psallos, this is a big part of your life right now. Why don’t you, if someone’s completely unfamiliar with Psallos, and by the way, when I’m saying Psallos, to the listeners, it’s P S A L L O S. So maybe first, tell us what that name is, and then kind of get into what Psallos is, and then what the mission and vision of Psallos is.

Psallos is a … or Psallo is Greek word, it’s used five times in the New Testament, and it’s usually translated to singing or to make melody. The main place it occurs in our mind, whenever we picked it as our name, was in Ephesians 5 when Paul says, “Singing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, and making melody to the Lord,” and that’s the word there for making melody to the Lord.

And we picked that, we added the S to it, to make it sound even better we thought. Because we thought it encapsulated what our mission was, and that was to help people to make melody to each other, and to the Lord, but as a form of worshiping through music.

And our music, it’s not congregational all the time, sometimes our music is congregational, but it’s more on the artistic presentation realm of things. And, so I guess I would summarize our mission as to create worshipful art music. We really,