Day 13 - Larry Norman - I Wish We'd All Been Ready

13. Larry Norman - I Wish We'd All Been Ready
From the album Upon This Rock (Capitol Records, 1969)

After a brief stint with the band People!, Capitol Records released Norman's first solo album, Upon This Rock, in 1969. Many consider this to be the first full-blown Christian rock album ever recorded. Capitol gave him full artistic control of the music, lyrics and packaging. Unfortunately, he delivered an album that was too religious to appeal to a mainstream audience and too "progressive" musically for the Christian market. Norman was heavily criticized by various television evangelists, and Capitol deemed the album a "commercial flop" and dropped him from the label. However, his music gained a large following in the emerging counter-cultural movements and sales of the album rose following its distribution in Christian bookstores.

The original version of the song appeared on Upon This Rock but a longer, better and far more popular version of the song was recorded on Only Visiting This Planet (Verve,1972). This is the version discussed here.

The song is about the rapture and takes it's inspiration from Matthew 24. Norman sings,

"a man and wife asleep in bed
she hears a noise and turns her head
he’s gone
I wish we’d all been ready
two men walking up a hill
one disappears and one’s left standing still
I wish we’d all been ready"

The song gained more popularity when it was included in the soundtrack of the movie A Thief in the Night and later inspired the Left Behind book series.

Here is the Only Visiting This Planet album version of the song.