GALILEE OF THE NATIONS TO RELEASE
KAREN DAVIS’ SONGS IN THE NIGHT
Multi-Cultural Flavor of Her Israeli Homeland
Independent record label Galilee of the Nations, a subsidiary of City of Peace Media, is set to release Songs In The Night, a collection of music from worship leader Karen Davis. The CD reflects the multi-cultural nature of Davis’ adopted homeland of Haifa, Israel, where the Detroit, Mich., native has lived for the past 20 years. Songs In The Night, Davis’ newest recording since 2009’s The Lord Roars From Zion, will be available May 1.
Produced by Davis’ long-time collaborator, Gabriel Alonso, this highly-anticipated album explores the central theme of unified worship through songs of wonder (“Who Am I”), songs of exultation (“Be Exalted”), songs of praise (“Hariu L’Adonai”), songs of warfare (“Hodu L’Adoinai”) and songs advocating unity between Jewish and non-Jewish believers, referred to as the “One New Man” in Ephesians 2 (“We’ve Come Together”).
“Musically, Songs In The Night is a unique blend of styles,” says Davis. “The Jewish people in Israel have returned from the four corners of the earth. There are European Jews who are very involved with the classical music culture of Europe. There are Argentinean Jews who bring Latin music, Sephardic Jews with their Middle Eastern rhythms, and then you have people like me who grew up on Motown and R&B. All of these cultures have come together bringing their musical traditions with them. We have all these wonderful, ancient Middle Eastern instruments, like the oud, combined with modern orchestral arrangements. What you hear on Songs In The Night, is a musical amalgam; a blend of many sounds and rhythms and languages, all unified in glorifying Yeshua, our Messiah.”
Davis points to her own journey to faith in Jesus as Messiah, as almost a metaphor for Kehilat HaCarmel, the Messianic congregation that she and her husband David helped establish atop Mount Carmel in the Galilee region of Israel, where she serves as worship leader. “I was raised as a reformed Jew, the most liberal wing of Judaism,” she says. “We celebrated all the holidays and I went to Shabbat services every week, but there was no reality of the living God in the traditional services for me.”
Musically gifted, Davis studied classical piano from the age of four, and soon expanded her repertoire to include vocal training, painting and other artistic expressions. Hungry to be in the center of the artistic universe, Davis left her hometown of Detroit and headed for New York City where her brother worked as a professional jazz musician. Equally hungry for spiritual fulfillment, she dove headlong into the New Age movement.
“As someone with an artistic temperament, I was very sensitive to beauty,” Davis says. “I knew that there was some kind of eternal creative force, and New Age seemed to address that with all its talk about ideal things and eternal values. The New Age masquerades as light, but it is not the true light; it teaches meditation techniques that make you feel a sense of peace, but it is a false peace.”
One afternoon Davis was talking with a Christian friend, who told her about the true source of peace and asked her if she would like to pray to accept Jesus as her Savior. Davis repeated what she now knows as “The sinner’s prayer,” and although she did not fully understand what had transpired, she realized she was in the presence of Truth. She began reading the New Testament and quickly understood that it was a continuation of the Old Testament story she had known as a child.
“For the first time in my life I realized what it meant to be Jewish,” she says, “that God had called a people who would know Him in an intimate way, and that they were to share Him with the nations. A joy entered my heart that I had never experienced before. I felt like the whole meaning of my life was coming forth, that the love of God was transforming me, that the words from the Bible were expressing God’s personal love for me.”
Unable to sing about anything but the love of Yeshua, her Messiah, Davis quit her gig singing in a rock band. “I just couldn’t sing another love song between a man and a woman,” she says. “That’s not the message that the world needs.”
Although New York had been the center of her world, God put a burning desire in Davis’ heart to return to the land of her inheritance, and to share the gift of Messiah with the Jewish people in Israel. Once she and her husband David moved to Israel, she unexpectedly discovered that the Lord had also given her a heart for the nation’s Arab population.
“God had really spoken to us about the One New Man of Ephesians 2:14-15; that He had broken down the wall of enmity between us,” Davis says. “We are proactive in creating worship events where we can invite Arabic teams. There are three Arab musicians on the worship team at our Messianic Jewish congregation. Week after week we stand together and sing the Scriptures. In these end times I believe the Lord is forming one body, one voice, one heart, One New Man. I want to demonstrate that to the people in all the nations.”
To accentuate that Biblical truth, Davis invited her friend Amal, an Arab Christian, to join her on the song, “You Restoreth My Soul,” an intimate meditation on the 23rd Psalm, and on the album’s closing track, “We’ve Come Together.”
“We’ve come together, Jew and Arab, our voices woven together to create a habitation for the Holy Spirit. When we come together in that kind of unity,” Davis says, “He is very present.”
Like Kehilat HaCarmel congregation’s worship leader, the album is joyful, vivacious and relentlessly encouraging, without flinching at the realities of life in this war-torn, strife-ridden region of the world.
“The album is appropriately entitled Songs In The Night,” Davis says. “We live in difficult times. Since we moved to Israel in 1989, we’ve already lived through several wars. There is a serious drug problem in Israel among both Jews and Arabs. The city of Haifa, which is built on Mt. Carmel, has one of the nation’s highest concentrations of Satanism and New Age practice. The spirit of Baal is still very much in operation here. We take it very seriously. We choose to take an offensive stand.
“By His Spirit, our spirits rise up in the midst of darkness,” Davis continues, “and He will always be with us. That’s what I want to share with people. I want them to have a song in the night.”Songs In The Night, is distributed by Provident Distribution. For more information about Karen Davis or Songs In The Night, go to galileeofthenations.com.
About City of Peace Media, City of Peace Films and Galilee of the Nations:
City of Peace Media was established in Nashville in 2009, with sister company City of Peace Films, by Founder, President and CEO of City of Peace Media Yochanan Marcellino. Galilee of the Nations is a subsidiary of City of Peace Media.
The primary focus of the companies is to provide a framework where music, films and video with “redeeming value” can be developed, produced and distributed worldwide, bringing a message of hope, love and encouragement to this generation. For more information about City of Peace Media or City of Peace Films, visit cityofpeace.com or follow City of Peace on Twitter (@copmedia). For information about Galilee of the Nations, visit galileeofthenations.com or follow Galilee of the Nations music on Twitter (@galileemusic).
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