And Thou Shalt Call His Name: Sixty-Four Names, One Roll Call
If you grew up in a church in the 1980s or 1990s, there's a decent chance you've seen the poster. Black background, dozens of short phrases stacked in tall, tight capital letters, each line a different color so the whole thing fades from red through gold and green down to violet. At the top it says "And thou shalt call his name Jesus," and under that it lists his names; Prince of Peace, Lamb of God, Lion of the Tribe of Judah, Dayspring... thirty-four of them.
Rose Publishing printed it. It hung in Sunday school rooms, youth group basements and it was sold laminated and as a greeting card. It's been out of print now for a while now, but it still turns up on resale sites. It reads like it just wants to be sung. I did find an industry article dedicated to classic merchandise from Christian bookstores that described it in more detail.
Sadly, a list of names normally doesn't automatically translate into a song, though... It's just a list.
Regarding there being "power in a name", there's a truth to that. I cover some of this in the song "Wyrdz" where Adam is tasked by YWHW with naming the animals. I also recall singing the Johnny Cash sang "A Boy Named Sue" by memory when I was 14 years old and wondered what it would be like if my father were to have named me with the purpose so that ensuing ridicule would force me to "get tough or die" because he knew he'd be absent. As a result, I have a bit of a fascination with names and always enjoying asking others about the origin behind their name and whether the know what is means or not. My name "James" is a form of "Jacob" and means "supplanter," and is thought to mean a man in control of his own actions and will.
The List
I started by researching and building the list properly. The poster has the header name plus thirty-four more names. I went through the usual sources for the rest: Bible Resources, Crosswalk, Blue Letter Bible, the King James Bible Online names page, the bigger Rose wall chart, and the "I AM" sayings from John. Anything that wasn't already on the poster went into a second table, alphabetized, each with the verse it comes from and a line about what it means.
That second table ran to over a hundred entries. Some are household names (like Good Shepherd and Bread of Life). Some are a lot less familiar. Shiloh, from Jacob's blessing in Genesis 49. Desire of All Nations, from Haggai. Governor, which is how the King James renders Matthew 2:6. Horn of Salvation, from Zechariah's song in Luke 1, where "horn" means strength, the way an animal's power is in its horns.
The brief for the song was simple and a little unreasonable: use as many names as possible, and every name that was on the poster has to make it in. (Phew!)
Writing a List Song
List songs either live or die on two things... 1) groove and 2) a reason for the list to exist. Lyrics that resemble a simple roll call get old by the second verse, so each verse walks one stretch of the story, and the names get placed inside a scene instead of just being read off a page.
Verse one is Bethlehem. "Bright Morning Star above a Bethlehem night, Horn of Salvation in a manger's light." Verse two is the ministry years, on a Galilee hill, ending with Lazarus walking out of the grave. Verse three is the cross and the resurrection: "Man of Sorrows on a hill outside the wall." The bridge is the throne room, and it reads almost straight out of Revelation 19.
The verses are rhymed couplets with four stressed beats each, running a syllable long here and there because the names themselves are long. There's one slant rhyme that I kept on purpose, "torn" and "born", in the line about the Suffering Servant.
The chorus is a call and response where a lead voice throws out a name and the choir shouts back "call His name." That's the hook, and it's the line from Matthew 1:21 that opens the poster. The pre-chorus is the only place the song stops to say what it's doing: "Every name a promise, every name a flame. Heaven wrote them down, and thou shalt call His name."
One spelling note. The song says "Saviour," with the u. That's the King James spelling, and it's how the poster prints it, so it stays.
All told, sixty-four different names show up on screen and every name from the poster is in there.
The Sound
The genre is Southern gospel soul using a Hammond organ with a Leslie, piano, upright bass, a drum kit that starts brushed and ends driving, horns on the choruses, tambourine, a powerhouse male lead with some grit, and a full choir answering every call. I generated it in Suno with a style prompt asking for a hushed organ intro that builds to a roof-raising finish and a hard button ending with no fade.
It came back at about 121 BPM, which I know exactly because Suno allows for exporting of MIDI for the stems. The tempo map was useful later: it gave me the beat grid, and the drum track gave me the exact time of every crash cymbal. There are six of them, and they mark the section changes. The biggest one lands at 4:07.9, on "His" in the last "call His name."
I also tried using many different alternate genres and styles with the same lyrics, but the first result was the most joyous and impactful.
Timing Every Word
I like my lyric videos to know exactly when every word is sung. For this one I ran forced alignment with WhisperX, which takes lyrics you already know are correct and places each word in time against the audio instead of guessing the words from scratch.
I ran it twice: once on the full mix, and once on the isolated lead vocal. I expected the vocal stem to win, but it didn't... at least not everywhere. The stem was cleaner on the main lyrics, but the choir's "(call His name)" barely exists in the lead stem, so the aligner had nothing to lock onto. On the last line it shoved the whole response into the final tenth of a second of the file. Meanwhile, the full mix collapsed a couple of lines where the band got loud, cramming "Heaven wrote them down" into slivers 80 milliseconds long.
So I compared the two results, flagged every word where they disagreed by more than a quarter second (149 of them), exported a subtitle file with one word per cue, and manually audited it by hand using Subtitle Edit. This resulted in 483 words with each one having a start and end time that I personally verified as a human. Everything downstream was driven by those numbers.
The Video
I wanted the video to look like those screensavers Apple TV and Bing wallpaper show: slow aerial footage of real landscapes, weather, sunrises, underwater light. One rule: nothing made by people. No buildings, roads, boats, contrails, etc. Just natural creation under a song that's naming the Creator.
Claude Code read through the lyrics and generated a batch of prompts for 40 unique AI-generated video clips. I also had it respond with a one-line reasoning for each clip. Here's a few of the pairings:
- "Horn of Salvation" gets two wild Nubian ibex on a desert ridge before dawn. They live in the Judean wilderness, and the horns carry the image without needing a manger.
- "Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings" (Malachi 4:2) gets a flight of cranes crossing a huge low sun.
- "Door to the fold, Shepherd and Bishop of the flock" gets wild bighorn sheep walking through a natural sandstone arch.
- "Righteous Judge, Faithful and True" gets wild white horses running through the surf, because Revelation 19:11 is the rider on the white horse. No rider, no saddle.
- "Resurrection and the Life" is a camera moving out of a dark cave into daylight.
- The 4:07.9 crash cuts to a total solar eclipse breaking into the diamond ring.
The chorus clips repeat across all three choruses, but each chorus uses a different stretch of the footage so it doesn't feel like an overused, repeated loop. The clips were generated with Seedance 2.0 mini at 720p in both 6 and 10-second lengths. I ended up saving a couple of early takes at the wrong length to a folder named "bad." (I still ended up paying for it, so I may as well retain it.)
Assembly happened in DaVinci Resolve Studio, but I didn't drag 61 clips around by hand. Claude Code drove Resolve through its scripting API: it set up the project, imported everything, placed each clip on the exact frame where its line starts, and read every position back to make sure it landed. When a clip was missing, it left a red marker on the timeline saying which one and how long it needed to be.
All generated video clips for the background of this lyric video ended up costing about $7 using Atlas Cloud. I am endeavoring to produce the highest quality with the lowest possible financial budget with no regard to how long it takes me. I believe that the time that I spend in research, preparation, data wrangling, A/B testing, and manual timeline generation is an investment that I'm making in myself. It's a slow process, but it's paying off as I learn more from my mistakes, try new techniques, and am always pushing the envelope to try something new.
The Lyric Layer
This part took the most iteration.
Every line of the song shows up whole, all at once, but not as a single, flat row of text. The names are set larger in a classical inscriptional serif while the small connecting words sit beside or below them in an italic and the rows step in from the edge of the frame. When a name is sung, and only then, it turns gold with a light sweep across the letters, and its Bible reference fades in underneath. After that it keeps a faint gold afterglow until the line leaves, so the names pile up on screen the same way they pile up in the song. The choir's "(call His name)" sits off to the side in a lighter italic and never turns gold. On lines with three or four names, the references collect in a strip along the bottom instead.
The lyric layer is built using HyperFrames, which renders video from HTML. It uses one shared template with each line's word timings to produce 65 separate transparent clips. One clip per sung line is dropped onto their own track in the Resolve timeline above the video footage. Because each line is its own clip, fixing one means only having to re-render one.
A few details that came out of testing:
- Text placement isn't guessed. A script sampled the draft cut three times under each line and measured how busy each quarter of the frame was. Each lyric goes where the footage is calmest.
- White text on a white sky is unreadable, which I found out on the first round of sketches. Now each lockup has a soft, feathered shadow behind it, and how dark it gets depends on how bright that corner of the footage measured.
- Lyrics used to start a quarter second early, which meant they'd flash over the end of the previous shot. Now every clip snaps to the footage cuts.
- "Heaven wrote them down" is the one line that doesn't appear all at once. It writes itself in, word by word, with a small star sparkle at the edge of each word, over the Milky Way.
- On the final chorus, at the eclipse, the whole line relights gold and holds.
One honest bug: The first full render displayed andSAVIOUR and GOD,hallelujah with no visible spacing because the gap between a small italic word and a big title was measured against the wrong font size. Twenty-two lines had to be re-rendered. Thirteen of them wouldn't overwrite because Resolve had the old files open, so they live on as "v2" clips. (Real projects have v2 files.)
Where the Time Went
The ideas took longer than the machines as this video didn't just make itself ex nihilo. The part that involved me the most was the list, the lyrics, the choices about what each name should look like, and sitting with the per-word subtitle file making sure "Shiloh" actually starts where Shiloh is sung. The final rendering, for what it's worth, was about twenty-three minutes for all 65 lyric clips and under two minutes for the final video. (720p video with 24 FPS is a lot easier for my laptop to process than 1080p at 60 FPS.)
I hope at least one of these sixty-four names is new to you. Enjoy & be blessed!
Watch the Video
Lyrics
Bright Morning Star above a Bethlehem night
Horn of Salvation in a manger's light
Dayspring from on high, Root of David's line
Son of the Most High, Immanuel, divine
Governor of Judah, Shiloh come at last
Desire of the Nations, promised in the past
Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings
Son of Man, the Consolation, and the King
And thou shalt call His name
And thou shalt call His name
Every name a promise, every name a flame
Heaven wrote them down, and thou shalt call His name
Jesus (call His name)
Prince of Peace (call His name)
Mighty God, Wonderful Counselor (call His name)
Holy One (call His name)
Lamb of God (call His name)
Lord God Almighty, the great I Am (call His name)
Alpha and Omega, Lord of All
Son of God and Saviour, Lord Jesus Christ, call His name
Bread of Life on a Galilee hill
Light of the World when the night was still
Door to the fold, Shepherd and Bishop of the flock
True Vine, Living Water, and the Rock
The Way, the Truth, the Life, Messiah, Lord
Great Physician, Friend of Sinners, Rabbi adored
Resurrection and the Life, one word He gave
And Lazarus came walking from the grave
And thou shalt call His name
And thou shalt call His name
Every name a promise, every name a flame
Heaven wrote them down, and thou shalt call His name
Jesus (call His name)
Prince of Peace (call His name)
Mighty God, Wonderful Counselor (call His name)
Holy One (call His name)
Lamb of God (call His name)
Lord God Almighty, the great I Am (call His name)
Alpha and Omega, Lord of All
Son of God and Saviour, Lord Jesus Christ, call His name
Man of Sorrows on a hill outside the wall
Our Passover, the Ransom paid for all
Lamb of God, the Suffering Servant, whipped and torn
Redeemer, Second Adam, Seed of Woman born
Stone the builders threw away, Chief Cornerstone
Prince of Life, the Firstborn, risen to the throne
Great High Priest, our Advocate, our Mediator too
Author and the Finisher, He's carrying us through
King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Lion of the Tribe of Judah
Righteous Judge, Faithful and True, Word of God, hallelujah
Chief Shepherd, Head of the Church, the Amen, the First and the Last
Lord God Almighty, Word of Life, the Rock that holds us fast
Jesus (call His name)
Prince of Peace (call His name)
Mighty God, Wonderful Counselor (call His name)
Holy One (call His name)
Lamb of God (call His name)
Lord God Almighty, the great I Am (call His name)
Alpha and Omega, Lord of All
Son of God and Saviour, Lord Jesus Christ, call His name
Alpha and Omega, first and last the same
And thou shalt call His name
Jesus (call His name)