Joy To The World

Third Day is the fifth artist on this site's backlog to record Isaac Watts's 1719 carol within the same review cycle, and this version stays close to the original text — no added bridge, no reworked verse — letting the arrangement's rock instrumentation carry the newness instead of the words. 'While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains repeat the sounding joy' reaches for the same scale as Isaiah 55:12's promise that 'the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.'

Watts's original text was itself a paraphrase of Psalm 98, and Psalm 98:4's instruction to 'make a joyful noise to Yahweh, all the earth' sits behind the whole carol's insistence that celebration isn't optional or reserved for a few — 'all the earth' is called to it. That five different artists on this one backlog have each recorded this same text within a matter of weeks says something about the carol's durability: its two-hundred-year-old claim about joy filling creation still holds up under repeated, independent arrangement.