He Touched Me
William G. Gaither, arr. Mark J. Young

  No offense to Bill Gaither; it's a wonderful song.  It's just that the way it was always done seemed so lifeless.  Mark had heard the song, at least a couple times because he knew all the words to both verses and the melody.  (He missed one of the chords and didn't realize it for

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years, by which time he'd become so comfortable with all the instrumental parts that it was too much to try to change it.)  So during the late Last Psalm days he took the first verse as a schmaltzy three-four, then shifted to a comfortable four-four swing beat for the second to make it sound more excited.  Then he shifted to a fast rock and roll four with overtones of Jerry Lee Lewis with an instrumental verse, came into the last verse as the first verse repeated and let the song accelerate into the chorus as he spit words out as fast as he could manage them.  Coming to the end, he changed to a burlesque swing for the climax and banged out the last chords with the vocal frill, and a slide into a stinger.

It was arranged around the piano part, but always had the walking bass line so characteristic of jazz and early rock and roll, and the rhythm guitar part also had jazz influences in it.  John Mastick played drums on it back then, and he added the triplets to the measure in the middle of the last chorus, prefiguring the ending, which stayed with the song ever after.

Mark played it occasionally as a solo, although he never found a way to handle the instrumental verse adequately, but when Brittany joined the band it looked as if it would be possible to do it with Collision, so it got added to the repertoire.  It went inactive when she left, but Jonathan liked it and learned the piano for it, so it probably would have made it to performance eventually had Kyle not announced he was leaving for the Navy before Sara had her rhythm guitar playing up to the point where she could tackle the jazz chords.

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