“If I Don’t Wake Up” – Chosen 4

“If I Don’t Wake Up”
Chosen 4
Malaco Music Group (2022)

By Robert M. Marovich

The prospect of death can be terrifying—just listen to Mozart’s Requiem—but it’s not terrifying at all to the Chosen 4.

On the mellow “If I Don’t Wake Up,” the quartet members reassure their loved ones that they “fixed it up with Jesus a long, long time ago” and are therefore ready to receive their crown and “golden shoes” when the great day comes. So there’s “no need to weep and cry,” because they are going to a better place, where they can finally rest from their labor. It’s a message of consolation wrapped in an equally comforting arrangement.

Malaco Music Group and its 4 Winds subsidiary are the standard bearers for gospel quartet singing in the twenty-first century.