An Abstract, Artistic Music Album For Your Next Bible Study

hen Joshua and Kaitlyn Rose Leventhal first started talking about Tapiseri, they were just two friends who’d met on social media, sharing thoughts about art and faith. Joshua, a musician and worship leader, imagined an album that would weave together stories, scenes, and themes from the Bible. Kaitlyn, a visual artist, envisioned a series of distinct but connected abstract paintings. The two artists are now married, living in Vancouver, and expecting their first child. For the past three years, they’ve been working on the music and artwork they dreamed about as friends, a project which has grown into a multivolume concept album, book, and art piece. Tapiseri, Volume I releases on September 4. Tapiseri, a transliteration of the Greek word for tapestry, is a fitting image. The Leventhals’ project encompasses 25 songs across three albums; its album artwork, a series of paintings, can be viewed separately or as a whole. Throughout Volume I, sparse instrumentation blooms into lush, symphonic textures. “Blessed” takes listeners from the intimate to the cinematic, meditating on both the detail and expansiveness of creation: “I’ll sing over the world I have composed, / And rest after the work I now behold, / And call it all good.” “Cursed,” which narrates Genesis 3, is at once dark and hopeful, pulling listeners out of the despair of the chorus (“You will toil and you will rust, / As will your children’s children”) into the exultant bridge: “You’re not ready to fit eternity in your skin, / But the day will come when I will bring One who can.” The Leventhals spoke with CT about the process of creating a multimedia work of art that invites viewers and listeners to meditate on Scripture in a new way. It’s not unusual for artwork to be an important part of an album, but for Tapiseri, the art and music form a unique multimedia project. Can you talk about the idea’s origins and your collaboration process? Joshua Leventhal: Back when Kaitlyn and I were just friends, we started talking about art and faith. I was in production for my first full-length record at the time, and she shared that she’d always wanted to do an art piece collecting individual works that coalesced into a whole. Kaitlyn Rose Leventhal: I think that was early 2021. We revisited the idea more concretely in 2023, after we got married. At first, I imagined that each visual piece would have a shared color palette. Then I had the idea of making individual tiles that would come together as one. Each song has a tile; when we release them as singles, you can see the pieces. JL: There are keywords in the lyrics that turn into shortcuts through the entire work. They’re introduced in Volume I and they show up in songs the whole way through. Similarly, in the visuals, you see lines and fragments that don’t necessarily contain a discernible image, but as the work comes together, you begin to understand what they represent and how they relate to each other. It was important to me for this project to offer beauty for beauty’s sake but also serve as a discipleship tool. This art can exist as art, but it can also help people enter into the story of Scripture in a more embodied and participatory way. I grew up in Michigan, and the nondenominational church I attended always had a gallery space. They often brought in creatives to display their photography or painting. I think that experience was pretty unique. As a college student in a fine arts program, I was told explicitly not to make religious art and that I wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist if I did. But by the end of my college career, I was trying to let my Christianity be a whisper in all of my work. After college, I really started to let my faith breathe more freely, and that’s when all of this artwork started pouring out of me. By that time, I had gone fully abstract.