Nothing Given Away for Free
Plays in the dock at the bottom of the page, so it keeps going while you read on.
Lyrics
We built the walls before we built the door
Counted every key before the floor
Not because we doubted what you'd give
But love that's careless is no way to live
We ask each name before we ask it in
We ask the reason underneath the sin
Two different questions, we won't let them blur
Who are you, and what were you sent here for
Jesus, nothing's given away for free
You paid the price so we could learn to see
What's worth protecting, what's worth locked and known
We guard it like it's precious, like it's home
Every door we shut, we shut with care
So what is broken stays what's broken there
A small mistake won't burn the whole house down
We built it narrow so the walls stay sound
Jesus, nothing's given away for free
You paid the price so we could learn to see
What's worth protecting, what's worth locked and known
We guard it like it's precious, like it's home
You knew our names before we wrote them down
You kept the ledger, wore the only crown
So when we watch the door, Lord, we recall
Someone was watching over us through it all
Nothing given away for free
Thank you, Jesus, for the eyes to see
The band
Software in the Pews
An unhurried male tenor answered by a whole room singing the hook back. Earnest, communal and plain-spoken - more 'we' than 'I' - building on one simple image and returning to it, hopeful about getting things right together.
None of these bands are real. Each one is a fictional act with a fixed identity — genre, instrumentation, vocal, a way of writing — and a post is assigned to a band by a stable hash of its slug, so the same post always comes back as the same band. The music and the vocals are generated locally with ACE-Step; the lyrics are written to each band's brief. No musicians, no recordings, no one to credit.
Where the words came from
The lyrics were written from the post Security Lessons from Building Software for Sensitive Information.
Building software that handles sensitive information changes the way you think about architecture. Security becomes a design principle rather than a feature added at the end.