Tomorrow morning, on my show The Think Tank, I'll be airing a tribute show in honor of the late Mark Heard. Heard passed away on August 16th, 1992. He was a brilliant lyricist, and a fine musician who remained on the fringes of both the "Christian" and "secular" music worlds throughout his career -- perhaps because he was, as his friend John Austin put it, "a marketing nightmare." His lyrics were too real and too honest for both (money-oriented) music worlds.

Heard was a Christian (though he had some understandable issues with the church). I wouldn't necessarily describe his music as "Christian music", though. I think Heard himself described it best, what he was trying to do with his words:
"I prefer to see myself as a writer who is a Christian, and I prefer to let my faith flavor my observations rather than dictate them. I prefer for my pen to act as a nerve receptor and write about the world - the real one - that exists outside society's and Christian society's simplistic, plastic, media-fed notions of what life is and what is important ... I prefer not to excommunicate myself from either the 'secular' world or the church, in favor of attempting to write in a way that is communicative to both but calculated towards neither."

Mark Heard's music remains a huge presence and influence on my radio show. He had a lot of friends, many of whom I also feature on my show quite often, and I'm happy to say that several of them agreed to participate in tomorrow's tribute -- including Buddy Miller, Phil Keaggy, Terry Scott Taylor, Pat Terry, John Austin, Jason Harrod, and Bill Mallonee.

I've had a lot of fun talking with these artists and putting this show together (I hope to do more shows like this in the future, with lots of partipants!) I hope that people will tune in tomorrow morning and learn a little more about Heard and his music.

In the meantime, you can visit his MySpace tribute here.