SONG.REVIEWS'His Eye Is on the Sparrow' covered across nearly sixty years by Ethel Waters, Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount, and Whitney Houston, plus three new songs that each hand a grief or a testimony to someone you wouldn't expect to be carrying it.
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Jonathan McReynolds says he first noticed Jamal Roberts during Roberts' run on American Idol -- and 'Still (Live)' is the rare reality-show-to-gospel crossover that actually justifies itself.
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Lecrae built a grief song around the image of headphones in Heaven, then handed verses to Killer Mike and T.I. -- two mainstream rap veterans a contemporary Christian record almost never gets.
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Phil Wickham's record-setting single isn't really a new song -- it's Rich Mullins' 1988 chorus with new verses -- and being honest about that changes how the achievement should be read.
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Whitney Houston recorded her version of the hymn a few months before her death; it was released four months after it, and the timing changes how nearly every line lands.
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A pre-fame Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount turned a Sunday-school hymn into the emotional peak of a mainstream comedy, and the duet still holds up as the definitive modern version.
Read review →Ethel Waters didn't just record 'His Eye Is on the Sparrow' -- she named her own autobiography after it, and two decades of Billy Graham crusade performances make the claim sound earned rather than borrowed.
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Greatest of All Time!Selena's signature song began with a decade-old memory of plastic flowers at a Sacramento concert -- and closed, at the end of her life, exactly where it was written.
Read review →'His Eye Is on the Sparrow' covered across nearly sixty years by Ethel Waters, Lauryn Hill and Tanya Blount, and Whitney Houston, plus three new songs that each hand a grief or a testimony to someone you wouldn't expect to be carrying it.
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The Lemoine Point is the debut LP from Blind Yeo, a lockdown-born Cornish collective who record wherever they can find room -- out now on the tiny Geneva label Bongo Joe Records, and drawing real comparisons to Stereolab and Gong from critics who found it before most of the industry did.
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Sam Fender wrote 'Rein Me In' as a solo album track. It only became a duet because Olivia Dean joined him on stage and the crowd wouldn't let it go back to being anything else -- and it went on to break a UK chart record that had survived since 1953.
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From a 1946 bluegrass waltz to a 1992 Tejano standard, this week's six-genre, six-decade run keeps turning up the same twist: the songwriter, the session player, or the credit line wasn't who the record made famous.
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Thorn Wych carves her own instruments out of tree branches in her Lancashire backyard and records them alone at home -- and Aesthesis, freshly repressed and back in Bandcamp Daily's Essential Releases, sounds so deliberately ancient that the only thing that gives it away as a 2025 record is the effects pedal.
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Try the site search with “rubberz” →American gospel singer-songwriter. His 2025 collaboration with Jamal Roberts, "Still (Live)," is nominated for the 2026 Grammy for Best Gospel Performance/Song. McReynolds has said he first noticed Roberts during Roberts' run on "American Idol" before bringing him into the recording.
American Christian hip-hop artist. "Headphones," a promotional single from his 2025 album "Reconstruction" featuring Killer Mike and T.I., is a song of grief imagining deceased loved ones "with headphones in Heaven" -- nominated for the 2026 Grammy for Best Contemporary Christian Music Performance/Song, alongside a Best CCM Album nomination for the parent record.
American contemporary worship artist. His 2025 single "What An Awesome God," which reworks the chorus of Rich Mullins' 1988 "Awesome God" with new verses co-written with Jonathan Smith, set the record for longest-running No. 1 in Mediabase Christian Audience chart history and crossed onto the Billboard Hot 100.
American singer and one of the best-selling music artists in history. Her recording of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow," cut in 2011 with R. Kelly producing for the "Sparkle" (2012) soundtrack, was released as a single four months after her death and reached No. 1 on Billboard's Gospel Digital Song Sales chart.
American singer, rapper, and songwriter, later of the Fugees and a Grammy-winning solo career, who appeared pre-fame in 1993's "Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit," duetting with Tanya Blount on "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" in a performance widely cited as one of the definitive modern recordings of the hymn.
American singer and actress whose career spanned blues, jazz, and gospel from the 1920s through the 1970s. "His Eye Is on the Sparrow" became her signature song and the title of her 1951 autobiography; she performed it at Billy Graham's crusades for two decades, including his first New York crusade at Madison Square Garden in 1957.
Texas-born Tejano singer whose 1992 hit "Como La Flor," written by A.B. Quintanilla and Pete Astudillo, became her signature song and a foundational record for Tejano's commercial breakthrough. She died in March 1995, twelve days after performing the song, for the final time, in Bryan, Texas -- the same city where its melody was written.
Citizen's lead single from Halcyon Blues is the most purely exciting three minutes and forty-three seconds a rock band has put out this year.
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