The following is description of the album Forbidden Hymns by John Francis O’Mara. It’s a featured Speakeasy selection, and you can preorder it here.
In his first full-length album in a decade, Irish-American singer-songwriter, John Francis O’Mara offers Forbidden Hymns, a collection of thirteen songs encompassing Alt-Country, Americana, Folk, and Rock, exploring social justice, theology, hope, and heartbreak due October 10, 2025. Produced by Ken Coomer (GRAMMY winning producer, and drummer for Wilco, Uncle Tupelo, Steve Earle) and delivering with O’Mara in the studio for the Forbidden Hymns band are guitarist Kenny Vaughan (Marty Stuart, Lucinda Williams), multi-instrumentalist Chris Scruggs, John Lancaster on keys, the late great bassist Dave Roe (Johnny Cash, John Mellencamp, Dwight Yoakam) and backing vocalist, Vinchelle Woods. John Carter Cash (son of June and Johnny) joins O’Mara with the co-written “No One Gets Out of Here Alive,” – a deeply human and empathetic reminder to “love pure and strong while there’s time.” In addition to his career as a singer-songwriter, O’Mara is an ordained Epsicopalian priest and Liberation Theology scholar, (Princeton and General Seminaries) currently working toward his Doctorate in Theology with a Social Justice focus, from Howard University School of Divinity.
“But, why ‘Forbidden’? Look around! The social and political landscape has taken a very dark and ugly turn,” says O’Mara of his album. “Stateside, the innocent and most vulnerable are being kidnapped and denied basic civil and human rights, while literal genocide and starving children’s screams are live-streamed in real time. Elites and the billionaire class rule from their ill-gotten thrones. Truth, beauty, and conscience are being legislated into silence, banned, and literally ‘forbidden’. The soul of America, and the very soul of humanity, is at stake. Many among us are being made to fear raising our voices.”
“Many among us are not afraid! I’m here to tell you, not on my watch,” the songwriter continues. “This is the precise moment many of us have been preparing for, and I will not be silenced. We who believe that a world full of empathy, justice, dignity and love is possible, will not be silenced! This record will not be silenced! Time to turn up the volume! Time to sing Forbidden Hymns.”
Forbidden Hymns opens with dynamic, “Walking In Babylon,” where O’Mara’s dulcet and soul-stirring, tremolo-tinged vocals and Kenny Vaughan’s reverberating guitar hook, are on full display. The track opens with an a cappella fragment of Bob Marley’s, “Rastaman Chant,” – drawn from The Book of Revelation. O’Mara uses the ‘Babylon’ metaphor as referring to an occupying imperial force, under which ‘we the people’ suffer in exile. “In the shadow where the empire spreads, me and my brothers are breakin’ bread’. In the framework of the song, that empire is marked by brutality, poverty, and racial violence, particularly against black and brown bodies. The songwriter outcries, “if you can’t breathe, I can’t breathe…another brother layin’ in a chalk outline.” The song’s questioning lament is punctuated with a plea: “Somebody tell me that hope’s not gone? Everybody’s sayin’ they’ve had enough! Let the people sing, ‘what about love?!’”
The guitar groove of “Lately Mary” invokes early Elvis Costello, and this very sticky hook, straight ahead folk, pop-rock song winks at Springsteen. True to the motifs of the album, O’Mara bellows out core human questions, yet relevant for our times. “How we gonna fill these mouths to feed? Gonna take more than a rosary bead,” he sings. O’Mara critiques the nauseating trend of many religious people in the face of tragedy, poverty, and despair, which is to offer ‘thoughts and prayers,’ rather than substantial, empathetic help. In this song, we see “Mother Mary” as she was, in her plain humanity, a homeless, refugee, single mother facing her reality where “it seems again there’s no room at the inn.” Note that the cover art centers an historically accurate, brown-skinned, Palestinian, Mary. Caution: song causes contagious call and response crowd participation.
The delicate and acoustic, “Jesus Walked on Water,” features O’Mara’s intricate finger-picking, and pedal steel, driving this newborn classic. A title that might suggest another Gospel song from O’Mara, but this ballad is a curve ball. The songwriter asks a close loved one, “do you still believe in me? All this time it’s taken me? All this time been breakin’ me?” The song is a tender, direct and open-chested surrender, and an admission that he is no miracle-worker, and no prophet, just a man with nothing to offer other than, “for you, I would die.” O’Mara whispers a universally human question, “can you see me?”
“Often, things fall apart,” says the songwriter, speaking from experience. “Dreams and hopes burn down. We are left with nothing but wreckage and ash.” “Ashes, Ashes,” is a subtle rocker, opening with a blues inspired guitar lick. Originally a piano ballad, John Francis pulled this treasure of an alt-country/Americana, guitar driven rocker, out of the smoldering ashes with the help of his longtime collaborator, melodic guitar-slinger Kenny Vaughan (Lucinda Williams, Marty Stuart). The first single released from Forbidden Hymns, “Ashes, Ashes” is reminiscent of early Wilco, in no small part due to the drumming and production of Ken Corner (Wilco, Uncle Tupelo). Bassist for Johnny Cash and Dwight Yoakom, the late great Dave Roe (for whom the record is dedicated) rounds out the low end of this reflective rallying cry about the aching beauty found in ashes, and the dazzling light behind the curtain of a world of shadows.
A soft, waltzy, guitar ballad, “Maria, I Would Dance With You But My Hands Are On Fire,” finds John Francis examining a biblical theme from an unexpected angle. Rolling Stone Magazine reviewed Dylan’s John Wesley Harding saying it was the “first Biblical Rock ’n’ Roll record.” Dylan might have been the first, but O’Mara’s is the newest. In fact, the chorus, which is also the title, is a direct quote from Bob Dylan. In the immediate aftermath of Dylan’s notorious Newport Folk Festival ‘going electric’, Maria Muldaur reached out to Dylan, and asked him to dance. Declining her invitation, Dylan gave her a very Dylanesque reply, “Maria, I would dance with you but my hands are on fire.” O’Mara borrowed this line of dialogue, reframed it, and breathed it into the refrain for this poetic piece. In the epic love ballad, O’Mara conjures pillars of fire in the wilderness, stages like cages, cosmic loneliness, and “canyons quaking like young lovers waking in the shelter of each other’s bodies.” Like Leonard Cohen before him, O’Mara consecrates religious and erotic thematic images, and lets them bleed into one narrative. The sacred and the sensual coexist when he serenades, “with God as my witness / the only prayer on my lips is / the poem of her sweet name.”
With its groovy guitar work punctuated by a tambourine playing double time, the earcandy folk-rock, poppy hooks and crooning of “Miracle,” invokes one of O’Mara’s heroes, the original Irish soul man, Van Morrison. Already in heavy rotation when leaked as a single in Switzerland, the songwriter sings, “she’s an angel in flight as she glides across the kitchen floor, into my arms…my, my, my!” There is supernatural magic in the romantic swooning of new love, “Miracle,” sings the praises of passionate bonds. O’Mara woos, “Woman, you’re the only woman in the world I’m wantin’.”
In a remote log cabin in the deep woods of central Tennessee, John Carter Cash (son of Johnny and June) and John Francis O’Mara were minding their own business one brisk morning, when a song came knocking. The two good friends stopped what they were doing, and let the new song in. The theme and feel of it brought John Carter back to some of his final conversations with his father. In that moment, JFO and JCC channeled a song that would soon tug on the heartstrings and water the eyes of audiences far and wide for many years to come. “No One Gets Out Of Here Alive,” is a hauntingly stark and vulnerable call to imbue each moment with the courage to love boldly, because life is fleeting. A deeply human and empathetic reminder to “love pure and strong while there’s time / keep the ends out for the ties that bind / let love be your only song, til the day that you die…,” lest we forget that our days are numbered. John Francis and John Carter performed ‘No Gets Out…’ for a live PBS taping, for 20,000+ fans in the Arkansas State arena, on the inaugural ‘Johnny Cash Music Festival’, also featuring George Jones, Kris Kristoffeson, and Rosanne Cash. The official DVD of the event was released globally, and featured this co-written masterpiece.
John Lancaster’s churchy Hammond organ and O’Mara’s solitary vocal open, “Mighty Power.” Written to be a gritty, spiritual marching order, to get to shoutin’ in both sanctuaries and saloons, and then spill out into the streets. “It is a declaration of spiritual empowerment. This is not a religious song, yet it rings out like a massive bell,” says the songwriter. Vinchelle Wood’s backing vocal delivery sweeps us right up into the rapture of a Black church revival. “There’s a mighty power inside of me, stronger than the wind and the waves / stronger than the sting of the grave / stronger than the poison I used to put in my veins…” O’Mara grabs us by the shoulders, shakes us, and invites us to encounter what some folks call a “higher power”, and then testify that it is ‘stronger than the Pharaoh and his armies / stronger than the twisted chains of slavery / stronger than the sorrow a-hangin’ on your city..”. Throughout, Chris Scruggs’ lap-steel talks in a heavenly tongue. Like a young Robert Plant, O’Mara shrieks, “Do you feel the power!!” asking the listener: “well, do you?”
O’Mara may be known for being “ripe with the kind of honest questions we used to rely on guys like Dylan and John Prine to raise” (Philadelphia Inquirer), but goddamn he can write a heartbreak song of love gone wrong. “Secrets Are Safe” is one of them, although the irony isn’t lost on us, because O’Mara is literally telling secrets. “Secrets Are Safe” hits like one of those songs that’s always been around, opening with the lines, “I guess I lost you somewhere between the moon and the falling snow / Or did I lose you out there, where my wheels were full of road?” O’Mara finds hidden treasure in the darkness of loss and pain, drags it out, and dusts it off to share it with the listener.
Forlorn and inconsolably sad songs are one of O’Mara’s signatures, though the phenomenon of “schadenfreude” comes to mind when listening to the lyrics of, “Maybe.” The listener can’t help but to glean resonant satisfaction from closure after all that pain. “Shadows stretch across our bed / across the words that we had said / how long have you known that you don’t know?” O’Mara is true to form as an Irish songwriter, and as G.K. Chesterton said of the Irish, “…all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.” This is a high and lonesome breakup song.
Touching the hem of U2’s garment, O’Mara’s band here is pulsing and driving, dynamic in tension and release. The tag at the end is gutwrenching, “My mouth still remembers the shape of your name.” Joining “Secrets Are Safe” and “Maybe,” “Wild Bleeding Heart” is third in the line-up of the broken-hearted trilogy on Forbidden Hymns. Once again, O’Mara spins together mythological images and literary figures to populate his landscape of cosmic loneliness.
Punching in at track 12, O’Mara delivers a riveting folk-rock pop song, in the vein of U2 or early Coldplay with the penultimate, “Heart Be Still” – an unabashed, tell it like it is, love song. The songwriter asks, “Love, could it be, that for love, the whole world bends the knee? / So come here to me! Come here! Come here! Come here! Come here to me!” Anyone who has longed to be near someone – and that’s everyone – knows this desire. “Gotta let your heart be still…next to mine.”
Closing the LP is the soaring, “Let it Be So,” which shines when the guitar solo nods at George Harrison, and the backbeat hits like Ringo. The song is the proclamation that another world is possible; a better world. If we are waiting for an anthem of change with a chorus to be echoed by everyone who still believes in justice, peace, dignity, and equality for all, our wait is over. John Francis O’Mara delivers that anthem, with the perfect ending to an exquisitely realized album: “Somebody say ‘Amen!”
About the Artist
John Francis O’Mara is an Episcopalian priest, theological scholar, activist, and acclaimed songwriter whose work bridges the sacred and the profane. With advanced degrees from Princeton Theological Seminary (M.Div) and General Theological Seminary (STM), and now pursuing a doctorate in Theology and Social Justice at Howard University, O’Mara roots his ministry in Liberation Theology and a tapestry of faith traditions including Celtic Christianity, Black Liberation Churches, and Native American spirituality. Hailed by Sojourners as “haunting as Springsteen,” dubbed by Wild Goose Festival as “one of the most prophetic voices of his generation,” and praised by Shane Claiborne as a “poet and instigator of movements,” O’Mara has performed everywhere from cathedrals to prisons, from UN gatherings to city streets, and alongside artists such as Sinead O’Connor, Mavis Staples, and Kris Kristofferson. Whether leading marches, teaching youth, or offering workshops and concerts worldwide, O’Mara shares stories and songs with theological depth, hard-earned experience, and transformative hope.
Related posts:
The Beginning of the World as We Know It: Civilization, Empire, & the Counter-Cult of Jesus with John Dominic Crossan
Changing the World with Faith, Hope & Love: Ecology, Identity, Class & Solidarity in the Way of Jesus with Joerg Rieger!
Receiving an Unshakable Kingdom | Your Invitation to the Magdalene Pilgrimage
From Holy Week to Holy Work: An Easter for the World Becoming
No comments yet.