The music of Fr. Kent O'Conner

A few weeks' ago I ordered two CDs of Fr. Kent O'Conner, a priest of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. Fr. Kent was a year or two ahead of me in the seminary.

His first CD, The Musical of Tobit, is a light-hearted musical based on the book of the same name and is a delight. I think it might be a good musical for a Catholic school to perform some time.

Fr. Kent says this musical

is a fun and lively take on the "Book of Tobit" from the Old Testament of the Bible. "Tobit" is a rather unknown book in the Bible, and, in fact, it isn't even in all Bibles. It is one of those seven books of the Bible that appear in Catholic (and Anglican, I'm told) Bibles but not in Protestant Bibles. It sometimes can be found in a special section called "The Apocrypha." The story is kind of an adventure story. It is about a son being sent off to a faraway land to retrieve his father's fortune. Along the way he meets an angel in disguise, he casts a demon out of a woman, he gets married (to that same woman), and discovers the cure to his father's blindness. Everything finishes well in the end, and the story ultimately ends up being about God's Providence.

This CD is the "soundtrack" or the "original studio recording" of the musical. There are a variety of styles on the CD. For a little bit of bluegrass, try track 9, "Come on In," or for some good ol' rock 'n' roll, try "Media-Country" (track 6). There's also the toe-tappin' "Father to Son" (track 5) and what I call a "demonic tango" in track 11, "This is the Night." If ballads are more your thing, you might check out track 14, "Worry Not, My Sweet One," or track 3, "He Does This All the Time." People have told me that they also really like track 2, "Hello, My Friends," but I'm not sure in which style to classify that one. I'd like to think that there's a little something for everybody.

In his second CD, Saints, Fr. Kent has put writings of certain saints to music, including the "little way" of Saint Therese of Lisieux and the "late have I loved you" of Saint Augustine of Hippo. This is a splendid CD.

Of this CD, Fr. Kent says:

I think that sometimes people think of “the saints” as a kind of conglomerate of boring, holy people. That “the saints” are a bunch of people who spent their lives staring up to heaven and had no real personalities of their own. But nothing could be further than the truth. The saints lived real flesh-and-blood lives, and each had his or her unique personality.

This collection of saints is hopefully a good look into the diversity of the saints, and how each saint is quite unique. In this collection, there’s a mother who so loved her child she died for her (Gianna Molla), there’s a once-public sinner who laments his wasted youth (Augustine), there’s a teenager who wants to be a Jesuit more than anything (John Berchmans), there’s a man who laid down his life for a near stranger (Maximillian Kolbe), and there’s a guy who loves a good laugh (Philip Neri).

I recommend both CDs to you for your listening pleasure.