“I’m trying not to one-hit wonder that band,” he confessed.

The comment says a lot about Sixpence None the Richer. One-hit wonder is not traditionally a verb, but it does seem to be something that happened to Sixpence.

The band has been many things over the course of its career: a folky duo; a moody, brooding indie rock band; a Dove Award–winning Christian act; a Grammy-nominated pop group; a teen movie soundtrack band; a group whose songs you hear every time you go to the grocery store; and, yes, something of a one- or maybe two-hit wonder in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with “Kiss Me” and their cover of the La’s “There She Goes.”

It’s because of “Kiss Me” that most people have heard of Sixpence None the Richer, and it’s “Kiss Me”—despite a deep and rewarding catalogue of five full-length albums and dozens of other songs—that seems to have kept the band in the public consciousness.

Sixpence first announced its breakup in a 2004 letter to CCM Magazine then came back for a Christmas album in 2008 and another studio record in 2012 before lying dormant for nearly a decade. 

Within the last few months alone, “Kiss Me” has been covered by Sabrina Carpenter on tour, interpolated into the single “Moonlight Floor” by Lisa of Blackpink, and even revealed as one of Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite “fight jams.”

You could say it’s serendipitous that these things happened just as Sixpence became active again—the band released a new EP in October and is in the midst of a 50-show tour—but it’s more likely that the band simply hasn’t left public consciousness in all these years. The song was that good.

When I spoke to Sixpence’s singer Leigh Nash the week the group left for its first tour in over a decade, she noted that “an entire new generation of really young people … are finding out about the band because of other artists covering Sixpence.”

She was quick to point to that “possibly being a mission thing, a God thing. … I think this is maybe God’s timing, but we’re gonna find out if it’s not.”

It’s possible that the current generation of fans isn’t familiar with Sixpence’s roots in the Christian rock scene, but 48-year-old Nash has no qualms about referring to her own faith or to the experiences the band had starting out on the church-basement-touring circuit in the early ’90s.

Nash and Sixpence’s guitarist Matt Slocum, the band’s only consistent members across three decades, met at a church retreat. Nash was Baptist while Slocum had Episcopal and Catholic roots, and it was clear from the beginning that faith was important to them.

They communicated with a maturity that belied their age; Nash was still a teenager and Slocum barely 20 when their first album, The Fatherless and the Widow, was released in 1994 on the independent Christian label R.E.X. Music. Their songs referenced Walt Whitman, the Book of Common Prayer, Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs, to name a few heady influences.

Nash said that from the beginning she knew there was something special about their partnership; she felt a sense that being Sixpence’s singer was a divine calling: “I definitely had a sense that these words were put upon Matt, and I get to deliver them.”

They quickly followed up their debut with This Beautiful Mess, a dark and distorted alt-rock record that won them a Gospel Music Association Dove Award, an experience which, Slocum told the Christian indie rock zine The Phantom Tollbooth in 1997, showed him what he called “the small, unsatisfying world” of contemporary Christian music.

In the same interview, Slocum lamented art being “manipulated for propagandistic purposes,” saying, “I think Christian artists should focus on creating works of beauty that will speak for themselves.”

The mid-1990s saw Sixpence tour the church-basement youth-group circuit with a number of other Christian indie rock bands. The scene wasn’t always the best fit—not that Sixpence’s songs weren’t often sincerely about faith in God, but Nash was also singing Slocum’s lyrics about depression, loss, and confusion. (This Beautiful Mess ends with the frantic “I Can’t Explain,” the title of which is a clue to Sixpence’s refusal to offer the “answers” some might have been looking for from a Christian rock band.)

Nash experienced this, sometimes viscerally, on the road. As a recent high school graduate, she recalled “a theology student” who just “berated me about not giving an altar call from stage, and it broke my heart.”

“He was just like, ‘Five of my friends didn’t know about Jesus, and you let them walk out of here,’” she recalled. “I should have said, ‘Why did you let them walk out? They’re your friends.’ I’m here to do what I feel called to do, which is, frankly, just to stand up here and deliver these gorgeous words that my friend wrote.”

After a few years of legal wrangling with their previous contract, Sixpence signed with legendary Christian rock impresario Steve Taylor’s Squint Entertainment label, one of several in the late ’90s that aimed to break Christian bands into the mainstream. (Charlie Peacock’s Re:think imprint did something similar with Switchfoot.) 

Sixpence’s 1997 self-titled album was a pop-rock masterpiece, though it seemingly failed to make its mark until “Kiss Me” became a grassroots radio hit. In 1999, the album was rereleased, “There She Goes” was added as a second single, and Sixpence suddenly became a household name. They were on TV, movie soundtracks, festivals, and the Billboard charts.

“I remember I was very grateful that all that was happening,” Nash said, “but when you’re younger, it feels like everything’s on the line. … We weren’t expecting what happened to happen at all. That wasn’t even on the board, and it happened. And I think as a band, it kind of gives us this feeling like, well, anything can happen.”

Sixpence All the Wiser

Mark Moring

Sixpence Calls It Quits

Mark Moring, with various reports

The success of “Kiss Me” led to a major-label release with a major-label budget: 2002’s Divine Discontent featured 13 songs, orchestral arrangements by Van Dyke Parks, and production from Paul Fox, who had worked for years with Slocum’s favorite band, XTC.

While “Breathe Your Name” did well as a single (the karaoke bars where I live still have it!), the band toured less and eventually announced their breakup when Nash gave birth to her son. Slocum continued to work as a session musician and played with several other bands, while Nash released several solo and collaborative albums.

Their current reunion is not their first—they released Lost in Transition in 2012 and toured sporadically—but Nash said the band is “in our truest form right now because we’re not really trying to prove anything.”

She and Slocum reconnected for dinner in Nashville pre-pandemic and planned to start collaborating again. Earlier this year, they began performing together as the temporary lead guitarist and singer of 10,000 Maniacs before releasing their new EP.

Nash referred to the sound of Rosemary Hill as “Sixpencecore,” and I’d agree that the EP sounds like the sum of the band’s historical parts. There are elements of sprightly pop, brooding rock, sweeping chamber pop, and even touches of alt-country—and subtle references to (lyrically) The Beatles and (musically) The Smiths.  

There’s a wistfulness to the record, a “softness and sweetness,” Nash said, touching as it does on themes of family and the band’s hometown of New Braunfels, Texas. 

After Sixpence finishes their current tour, an ambitious nine-week outing that ends in mid-December, Nash said they plan to begin working on a new full-length album.

She called Rosemary Hill “a little test case for all of us, the band included, to see what we could still accomplish.”

“We’re still very much in the testing ground, almost like a brand-new band. But we still sound like Sixpence.”

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer at Simon Fraser University and the author of TL;DR: A Very Brief Guide to Reading and Writing in University, Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll, and Dancing About Architecture Is a Reasonable Thing to Do.

The post Strike Up the Band: Sixpence None the Richer Goes Back on Tour appeared first on Christianity Today.

Dark In Here

The Mountain Goats

Merge Records

June 25, 2021

In 2016, John Darnielle told Christianity Today his favorite book of the Bible was Jonah. Five years later, “Mobile,” the first single from the Mountain Goats’ latest album, Dark in Here, retells it.

The Jonah story is one that seems to recur culturally—the metaphor of being engulfed by something unfathomably bigger than oneself is always relatable, somehow. Even last month, the world was briefly captivated by the lobster diver who found himself briefly swallowed by a whale, telling the Associated Press that “everything went dark” and he thought “OK, this is it … I’m gonna die.”

So it’s not a stretch to read a morbid belly-of-the-whale joke in the title of the album, Dark in Here—one of an astounding four albums the Mountain Goats recorded last year, and in fact one of three recorded solely in the cursed time-vortex month of March 2020. The other two are this album’s spiritual studio prequel, Getting into Knives, and a solo effort recalling Darnielle’s earlier home recordings, Songs for Pierre Chuvin; a live-in-studio set, the Jordan Lake Sessions, was made later in the year. None of these are really “pandemic albums,” but the Jordan Lake Sessions opens with “The Plague,” a song written decades before COVID. “This is not the first plague!” Darnielle ad-libs after the song. “No! People like me have been singing about plagues for a long time!”

Dark in Here is similar to recent Mountain Goats albums in that it continues the band’s honing of the fuller, soft-edged American folk-rock sound they’ve been pursuing since becoming a four-piece in 2015. The album is not thematic in the way some of their other work is (no professional wrestlers or Goth teenagers here), but it’s very much a piece with Darnielle’s writerly obsessions, none of which are far from the plague-related concerns that have gripped all of us in the last few years: human fragility, neediness, and desperation; the brutality of existence—indeed, the darkness that lurks in all souls, hearts, and minds—and finally, a deep, tragic, tender love for the world and everything in it.

If this all sounds somewhat theological, that’s probably not an accident. Darnielle, raised Catholic, has long been interested in various stripes of faith, including a stint with the Hare Krishnas and a longstanding apparent interest in evangelicalism, from controversies about Larry Norman and alleged satanic “backmasking” on 1970s rock records (the title of his haunting debut novel, Wolf in White Van, is a reference to this lore) to his abiding love of Rich Mullins (whose musical style he seems to inch ever closer to with each album) to his occasional engagement with iconoclastic evangelical thinkers on Twitter.

While 2009’s The Life of the World to Come was the Goats’ only explicitly “Christian” offering (each song’s title was the Bible verse that inspired it), Mountain Goats songs tend to operate in two distinctly religious modes: the enchanted and the apocalyptic. In the former, narratives are populated by wizards, pagan gods, demons, and crystals; in the latter, junkies, murder victims, unhappy lovers, and broken families. Sometimes the two modes work in tandem. It’s always a bleak but enchanted world.

For evidence of this, take your pick: Dark in Here features several songs that might be about the rise of demons or beasts (“When a Powerful Animal Comes,” “Let Me Bathe in Demonic Light”), several conversations with dead people (“To the Headless Horseman,” “Arguing with the Ghost of Peter Laughner About His Coney Island Baby Review,” both sad and tender), an elegy for a lost holy place (“Before I Got There”), and one for a haunted place that wasn’t there (“The Destruction of the Kola Superdeep Borehole Tower”).

Dark in Here is a lovely, understated album that gently insists that darkness must be faced, whether in the belly of the whale, the depths of hell, or a balcony in Mobile, Alabama. The speaker in “Mobile” recounts the Jonah story in the verses but always turns it back on himself in the chorus, as he stands “waiting for the wind to throw me down.”

Like Jonah, he demands God’s wrath but seems to feel he himself ought to be the target. “Why do you hold back your fury? / Don’t hold back your fury” are the song’s last words. Lyrically, we leave the protagonist on the balcony, ever trapped in the dark night of the soul; musically, the sweet interplay of guitar, accordion, and piano that closes the song offers hints of tender mercy.

Because while darkness is, well, dark, it’s not necessarily bad. On the title track, the chorus includes the lines “Just beyond your limits / Find the new frontier / I live in the darkness / It’s dark in here.”

It’s somehow reminiscent of a lyric Darnielle sang 20 years ago, on his song “Elijah”: “Feel the fullness of time / In the empty tomb / Feel the future kicking in your womb.” Life in the darkness can also be a life lived in hope, in anticipation of joy in a world to come. As Darnielle sings on the second verse of “Mobile,” “And Jonah emerged from his darkness / Like a dancer crashing through the curtain.”

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is the author of several books including the forthcoming Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do (Cascade).

The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle Loves Amy Grant, Rich Mullins, and the Book of Jonah

Interview by Kate Shellnutt

The post The Mountain Goats’ Latest Pandemic Release Looks into the Darkness appeared first on Christianity Today.

Perhaps no band typifies the many paradoxes of this scene and its fallout than Luxury, formed in small-town Georgia in the early 1990s and still together today. The band itself is also hard to describe: maybe Morrissey fronting Fugazi, with sad Radiohead piano, English-major allusions, androgynous sexuality—oh and by the way, three out of five members of the band are Eastern Orthodox priests. (This is called burying the lede.)

And so Parallel Love, a documentary film by Matt Hinton, cannot help but be as strange and wonderful as the band it portrays and the music scene they stumbled into and (mostly) out of. Hinton’s first documentary, Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp, also touched on uniquely American religious music. His feature on Luxury, originally released for a short theatrical run in 2019, is available on Amazon, iTunes, and other streaming platforms on May 18.

If you’ve already heard Luxury, you may need no convincing that this band is interesting and worth nearly an hour and a half of screen time. For my money, they are quite simply one of the best, most compelling rock bands of all time. Instrumentally, they toe the line between precision and chaos, presenting a snarling, tangled mess of guitar riffs and feral drums anchored by fat punk basslines, overlaid by an ethereal crooning vocal. It’s gorgeous.

What is more fascinating about Luxury, though, is that they manage to almost by definition be the world’s most Christian band (lead singer Lee Bozeman once claimed Luxury was “the only Christian band”) while not sounding anything like what most people would think of as a Christian band. No songs about Jesus; no positive, “family-friendly” lyrics; no altar calls—in fact, it’s quite the opposite: Luxury’s songs are frequently about sex, sadness, and regret.

Yet the music is made by people who grew up in the evangelical milieu—Lee Bozeman and his brother, guitarist James Bozeman, were pastor’s kids—and, clearly, continue to treat their Christian faith with utter sincerity. The band’s non-priest members remain active in their respective denominations as well.

The two scenes that form the backdrop of the film’s title card set the tone: On the left side, the band’s guitarist, vocalist, and bassist, solemn and dramatically bearded, are draped in gold-trimmed robes, carrying giant crosses past a huge icon. On the right, the same men are prancing about at a sweaty, sensual rock show, aggressively attacking guitars and throwing down microphone stands.

The movie, which uses talking-head interviews with the band, critics, and others in the music business as well as archival footage, is more or less historical, chronicling the band’s journey from their roots at Toccoa Falls, a Christian and Missionary Alliance college in Georgia, to their signing with Tooth & Nail Records, the powerhouse independent record label that fueled the ’90s Christian indie rock explosion, to a horrific touring accident that hospitalized the band, to their eventual comeback and journey toward Orthodoxy and the priesthood.

The first part of the film is preoccupied with the question “Why didn’t Luxury ‘make it’?” The answer is most likely that they didn’t quite realize what they were getting into when they signed with Tooth & Nail and joined the church-basement touring circuit.

The film suggests the band signed with a label in the Christian scene because it was part of their social circle at the time, not realizing the implications. It’s difficult to imagine youth pastors being enthusiastic about the band’s raucous cover of Adam Ant’s “Goody Two Shoes” (“Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?”) or Lee Bozeman’s campy sexiness.

The Alternative Music Label That Shaped Evangelical Culture

Joel Heng Hartse

The film touches on this controversial aspect of the band’s early work, and it’s undeniable that the subject matter on Luxury’s first record coyly, if not overtly, flirted with various flavors of sexuality. James Morelos, a former publicist for Tooth & Nail interviewed in the film, calls 1995’s Amazing and Thank You “a queer record, even though they’re straight guys,” and it’s hard to disagree.

While this rock-and-roll flamboyance may have made Luxury an outlier in a music scene that tended to focus more on faith and evangelism, it makes the band’s musical and spiritual growth after the catastrophic van accident all the more intriguing, which is the focus of the film. They maintain a theatrical punk rock dangerousness, but it becomes tempered—whether by age or something else—with a kind of wounded maturity.

By the time we get to the band’s most recent album, its 2019 release Trophies, Lee Bozeman is singing the lyric “Change your life,” on more than one song, with the authority of a man who has had to, more than once. The way he carries himself, you almost want to take him up on it.

The movie was made as Luxury was recording Trophies, and it sort of comes full circle; now fully ensconced in their liturgical lives, the priests in the band seem more comfortable with being some version of a Christian rock band.

Freed from the constraints of an evangelical music scene that demanded a particular performative expression of faith, Luxury has by the film’s end become what you might call a sacramental rock band.

It’s not until the final scenes that the notion of “parallel love” is fully explicated by Christopher Foley, the bassist, who describes how his vocation as a priest helped him understand what the band does:

What does a priest do? A priest is one who … offers something up that then gets returned to us as something life-giving. We don’t take wheat and grapes; we take bread and wine, the work of man’s hands. And that’s what’s lifted up unto Christ, and that’s what gets returned to us as Christ himself, as something life-giving.

The question isn’t “Are you a Christian band or not?” It’s just “Are you, by nature of your life vocation, a priest of creation who offers up … everything that is your matter, you know, your stuff of life—are you taking it and offering it up?” And then if you’re offering it up, are you receiving it as something life-giving?

It’s easy to see a hunger for “something life-giving” in the band after their brush with death, and the moral seriousness and luxurious (eh?) aesthetics of Orthodoxy seem to have been a natural fit for a group searching for that elusive “something more” Christian rockers often vaguely sing about.

A band known for its DIY ethos—“wild and untamed,” as one music critic puts it in the documentary—coming to be associated with an ancient (and, in the United States, “foreign”) faith feels in some ways like the ultimate punk move. (The only other contemporary rock musician I know of who has converted to Orthodoxy, in fact, is Justin Marler, formerly of the doom metal band Sleep and cofounder of the punk-style Orthodox magazine Death to the World, which called Orthodoxy “the last true rebellion.”)

This is more or less where the story of Parallel Love ends, and even if you’re not considering converting to Orthodoxy—which several of the musicians interviewed in the film did, not only the priests in Luxury—when coupled with the rich, dense music of Trophies, it feels quite satisfying. One is left with the notion that any honest art made by a Christian, priest or not, can be an offering.

Luxury’s trajectory from accidental Christian band to purposeful one feels significant. Many of the ’90s indie rock bands from the evangelical scene were pushed toward making music for the Christian market when they were young and not particularly mature in the faith or otherwise.

It’s worth noting that some of Luxury’s peers ended up in very different places: Some of the members of bands they rubbed shoulders with along the way abandoned music for financial reasons (believe it or not, it’s hard to make a living as an artsy Christian rock band!), moved into lucrative mainstream music gigs (the producer of Luxury’s first album now runs live sound for Leon Bridges), or in some cases had public “deconversions” driven in part by what they saw as hypocrisy in the Christian rock scene.

This isn’t to say that converting to Orthodoxy and/or becoming a priest is the only way for ex-Chrindie scenesters to find a spiritual way in the wilderness. While some Gen X evangelicals look longingly toward Rome, Canterbury, or Constantinople as possible ways out of the political and cultural pitfalls of their own traditions, the fact that the Christian rock scene was able to sustain a band as unique and good as Luxury says something about the big-tent ecumenism lurking in “nondenominational” church basements across the country.

Luxury’s cult popularity, captured in Parallel Love, reflects that scene’s openness to a variety of expressions of faith, be they as ancient as the Divine Liturgy or as modern as DIY post-punk records.

Bozeman sings, on Trophies’ “You Must Change Your Life” that “it takes a lifetime and a priest” to understand one’s place in the world. Perhaps it also takes a band like Luxury.

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is the author of several books including the forthcoming Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do (Cascade).

Hear Joel make his case for Luxury’s best album in an upcoming Zoom discussion with fellow music critics on May 27.

The post Punk Rock Priests Offer Up Their ‘Parallel Love’ in Music and Sacrament appeared first on Christianity Today.

I mean, yes, there’s a group of men who have been playing music under this name for the last 20 years, who recently announced their intention to disband, and who will play the first two of a hoped-for series of farewell shows this weekend. Both live shows sold out in Philadelphia, their hometown, but are available via livestream on the web.

Ask the band’s singer, Aaron Weiss (whom critics are legally required to refer to as “enigmatic”) what the end of mewithoutYou means to him, and he’ll tell you, “We aren’t breaking up. We never were really a band. That’s not a real thing. We never existed to begin with, and yet we will continue to exist in another respect after our last show has been played.”

To him, “‘2001 to 2020, 21, 22’—it’s all totally arbitrary. To me it feels very artificial,” he said in an interview. “I don’t begrudge anyone if they would like to have a kind of a tombstone to give it a lifespan, but it’s a very arbitrary way of looking at whatever it is that we are.”

mewithoutYou came to prominence in the mid-2000s during what some call the golden age of Tooth and Nail records, the Seattle-based indie record label most closely associated with Christian independent rock for the last thirty years.

At first glance, the band was seemingly peers with other rising stars in the Christian screamo scene, like the bands Emery and Underoath, though its particular brand of fractured post-punk fronted by Weiss’s unhinged, spoken/screamed poetry made the band unique.

Its first album, the angular and aggressive [A->B] Life (2002), was a breakup album tinged with faith. And unlike many albums of its ilk, it often sidestepped the now-cliché “is this about God or a girl?” question by describing searching for God due to being in the depths of unrequited romantic despair.

mewithoutYou didn’t really feel like an evangelical band at this point, though simply releasing records on Tooth and Nail usually pins that label to a group regardless of their intentions.

While the long trotted-out debate of what exactly makes a band Christian may have been put to bed long ago—the writer Keaton Lamle once pinpointed it as the time Jon Foreman of Switchfoot told a journalist his band was “Christian by faith, not by genre”—it’s a label that’s never sat well with many of the bands who have been involved in what tends to be known as “Christian rock.”

In the twenty-plus years I’ve been writing about the bands who have been tagged with this appellation, I’ve never known one that reveled in its ambiguity as much as mewithoutYou.

When I asked the band’s bassist, Greg Jehanian, what it had been like to be associated with the Christian music scene despite most of the band’s members seemingly not identifying as evangelicals themselves, he called the notion of a band being Christian “a bizarre concept.”

Jehanian, who not long ago graduated from George Fox University’s Portland Seminary, also described being comfortable with a certain uncertainty: “I didn’t mind that those expectations were there; as long as there was a healthy dialogue, I didn’t mind having those conversations. That was even part of my drive to go to seminary.”

In the end, he called mewithoutYou “a band who loves to make music. We have a chemistry; we have a familial bond; that’s what we do. And because Aaron is a person who wrestles and seeks when it comes to spirituality and faith, that’s certainly a prominent theme in our band, but I don’t think we’ve ever taken the stance that we’re doing this thing from an evangelical standpoint.”

Part of the reason people may have mistakenly seen the band as having an “evangelical standpoint” is a period during which Weiss was a well-known figure at Cornerstone, an independent Christian rock festival organized by Jesus People USA.

His Q&A “sermons,” in which he somewhat humbly—but seriously and loquaciously—engaged the audience with questions about what it means to be a follower of Jesus, were well attended and are still available on YouTube.

“I wanted to be a poet; I wanted to be a prophet; I wanted to be a Messiah,” Weiss said. “I wanted to be all these things as a frontman of a band singing about my ideas about God and souls and things like that.”

The band’s albums at that time, too, began to burn with a deeply passionate faith, arguably influenced by Weiss’s time living in intentional Christian communities like the Simple Way and Bruderhof. Catch for Us the Foxes (2004) opens with the stirring anthem “Torches Together,” a paean to Christian community. (“Tell all the stones we’re gonna make a building!” is one of its many rousing calls to solidarity.)

And if you ask at least some of the band members, their 2006 album Brother, Sister may be the peak of both the band’s creative output and their fervor for living in a countercultural and, perhaps more explicitly, “religious” way. (During one show this weekend, they’ll play the album in its entirety in honor of its 15th anniversary.)

“That time felt really special,” said Jehanian. “The energy around creating that record is really memorable to me, and I feel like we were tapping into our chemistry together in this really special way. At that time, a few of us were living in community together, so we were tapping into the spirit of that. It felt like there was a lot of integration between what was happening in our life at home and on the road and creatively.”

Weiss was a bit more circumspect, explaining that he doesn’t like to think of certain periods of the band’s career or his life as better or worse than others. But he cited similar memories, calling the mid-2000s period one when “we were more of one mind, and we did prayers together before practice, and we had a liturgy service that we did on some tours, and we had a potluck practice where people would come to the show and bring food, and then people from the crowd would come play an instrument on stage.”

Whatever the reason , Brother, Sister is clearly an album made by a band at the top of its game—it’s punishingly beautiful, introspective, and self-effacing while reveling in a blissful spirit of, well, worship, though not in, like, the Hillsong sense: choruses of Arabic prayers, plaintive guest vocals from Sunny Day Real Estate’s Jeremy Enigk intoning “That Light is God!,” simple devotional couplets like “Open wide my door, my door, my Lord / To whatever makes me love You more,” and a final, transcendent coda proclaiming “I do not exist / Only You exist.”

If this makes the band sound like they might have been a bunch of spiritually inclined hippies, their final record for Tooth and Nail, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright (2009) might appear to confirm this. The record almost wholly abandons the aggressive guitar attack and desperately screamed emotional lyrics in favor of simple, acoustic, fable-like folk songs, many about animals or vegetables or both.

There’s a touch of the religious savant to the record, a childlike faith akin to the spirit of bands like Neutral Milk Hotel (not a “Christian band,” but who can forget Jeff Mangum’s raw “I loooooove you, Jesus Chriiiiiiist” on In the Aeroplane over the Sea?) or the Danielson Famile (whose leader, Daniel Smith, coproduced the album). It’s All Crazy! may have been the time the band’s evangelical fans began to chafe at the way faith was addressed; the album features a song called “Allah, Allah, Allah,” and most of the record is inspired by the teachings of the Sri Lankan Sufi spiritual leader Bawa Muhaiyaddeen.

Though the band initially came to prominence in Christian circles, Weiss has never been shy about his multireligious spirituality. He and his brother Michael (the band’s guitarist) were raised by a Jewish father and Christian mother who both converted to Sufism.

In Weiss’s 2016 doctoral dissertation, he writes that he has “identified at different points with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam” and that his “central concerns in life are informed by values shared by all three traditions—love, compassion, gratitude, humility, kindness, mercy—and have taken from each a firm faith in the goodness, oneness, and unrepresentability of reality, i.e., of that which is called YHWH, G-d, Allah.”

When I asked Weiss whether he felt any tensions at having been associated with evangelicalism given his more eclectic faith, I half expected some of the cynicism of other bands I’ve heard talk about that scene, which some describe as narrow-minded and insular, but this was not the case for him.

“I have fond memories, and my heart is filled with a sense of love for those who I met during that time,” Weiss said of playing churches and Christian festivals. “You know, there’s ways that these things get interpreted and spun that can be divisive, and then you could say”—(here he puts on a self-consciously superior, sarcastic voice)—“‘Well, I’m not an evangelical, those people are evangelicals, and I see I through all that because that’s obviously bogus.’ And I don’t see it that way. At least not in my deepest heart of hearts.”

After moving on from It’s All Crazy! (which Michael Weiss once told Vice magazine was “an experiment that went wrong”), mewithoutYou seem to have found their feet in their second decade, reclaiming the punk energy of Brother, Sister tempered by a more melodic indie-rock sensibility.

Ten Stories (2012) is a concept album inspired, Weiss said, by “the story of a tiger from a circus staying in the cage after a train was derailed, because it was institutionalized and had formed the habit of being in a cage,” which he read in William James’s Principles of Psychology in a grad school course.

It’s a sprawling and ambitious record, set in a quasi-magical historical-fictional world, and most of the songs are sung by “animals telling different stories, messing with free will and determinism,” according to Weiss. (The animals are conflicted about many of these things; at one point the existential lyric “By now I think it’s pretty obvious that there’s no God / And there’s definitely a God” is attributed to a bear.)

Pale Horses (2015) is comparatively understated, a record haunted by the death of Weiss’s father and a sort of apocalyptic paranoia about the state of global affairs. Jehanian recalled that during the recording, the band had some “conflict interpersonally, but that actually fed the creative flames,” making the album “something that reflects that tension but was actually cathartic too.”

On what would become the band’s final album, [Untitled] (2018), the band sounds perhaps the most like themselves that they could, if such a thing is possible. It’s blisteringly loud in places—if you think one of the tracks is going to be straight-ahead tuneful rock all the way down, give it a few minutes and you’ll be hit full in the face with a throat-shredding scream—but there are also moments of sublime, fragile, melodic songcraft. (“New Wine, New Skins” is especially pretty.)

The penultimate track (“Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore”) showcases both and feels like a microcosm of the band’s whole oeuvre: Sufi chants, Christian spirituals, and existential dread mix over a spacey, reverb-y groove, and snatches of far-off-sounding dialogue seem to mimic the drifting apart of the band itself (Weiss having left Philadelphia for Idaho to start a family and perhaps pursue an academic career).

AnAnd so this weekend marks what has been dubbed “the Beginning of the End” for the band. Even if the group will soon no longer play together, mewithoutYou—Christian or not—has helped do what the author David Dark calls “expanding the space of the talkabout-able” for twenty years.

Weiss's summing up of his experience in mewithoutYou likely echoes that of many of its fans: “My God, how rich our journey has been,” he said. "How wonderful it's been, really, how beautiful it's been, how many lessons there have been, how many rich and subtle mysteries.”

These are things that will continue to linger for many listeners, including a large evangelical contingent, long after mewithoutYou longer exist. If they ever did.

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the faculty of education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is the author of several books including the forthcoming Dancing about Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do (Cascade).

The Alternative Music Label That Shaped Evangelical Culture

Joel Heng Hartse

The post mewithoutYou Does Not Exist (But Is Kicking Off Its Final Shows) appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ’n’ Roll

Randall J. Stephens (Author)

Harvard University Press

344 pages

$35.16

What Sanneh’s piece got right, thankfully, was its attention to just how common Christian pop music is today—how central it is, in sometimes unrecognized ways, to American popular culture. (Though when he says this would have been hard to imagine in 1969, I’m not so sure; “Spirit in the Sky” was a hit single that year, and the previous year saw the release of perhaps the most overtly religious rock record of all time, The Electric Prunes’s Mass in F Minor.)

Indeed, Christian rock has had a strange and circuitous journey back to the center of American culture. Randall J. Stephens’s The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘n’ Roll describes this sometimes paradoxical path. Stephens traces the roots of rock music to the Pentecostal church and catalogs the racial, political, and religious backlash from some of the same denominations that birthed it, forces that built to a frenzy in the mid-1960s. Later he shows how the tide turned, with rock being absorbed into the evangelical movement that created what we now know as “Christian music.”

Between Rock and a Hard Place

If this synopsis sounds complicated, that’s because it is. (I even left out a couple other pendulum swings.) Stephens is an academic historian, and this is perhaps the most comprehensive history of Christian rock yet published. Armed with an astonishing array of archival material, from pamphlets to sermons to newspapers and magazines, Stephens blows through nearly 70 years of church, music, and cultural history in 250 pages.

The book begins in the 1950s, when musicians who cut their teeth playing the emotional, high-energy music of the Pentecostal church began to take that same fervor to the emerging rock-and-roll scene, often to the chagrin of their pastors. Stephens details the anguish that both Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard felt about performing secular music: Both occasionally swore off rock out of what appeared to be genuine concern for their souls, but they usually came back.

These musicians were between rock and a hard place. Their churches often condemned them for embracing the worldly, sexualized tropes of rock and roll, while at the same time mainstream society rejected them for being associated with lower-class, low-culture Pentecostalism. Though Stephens is careful to maintain a focus on the music itself—a strength of the book; many academics take an interest in Christian culture for political or sociological reasons—he does have a thesis about what made the church, and indeed mainstream Christian culture, so squeamish about rock music: in short, racial (and occasionally gender) anxiety. He details stomach-turningly racist screeds against rock music, appearing in pamphlets and lectures associating rock with “primitive” and “savage” depictions of both African and African American culture.

By the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, the backlash against rock reached perhaps its zenith with anti-Beatles sentiment, which, Stephens shows, actually predates John Lennon’s 1966 boast that his band was “bigger than Jesus.” This was the age when the clash between the “Christian establishment” and the “rock counterculture,” which can seem today like a tired (and untrue) cliché, was actually a vital national debate.

Stephens then describes the surprising shift—and it was surprising, in 1972—that happened when conservative Christianity embraced rock music, driven in part by the musings of Christian leaders who wondered if churches really were failing to offer an exciting alternative to the ascendant counterculture of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Incredibly, it worked. The Jesus movement, with its “combination of the hippie counterculture, neo-pentecostalism, and a general antiauthoritarian primitivism,” led to an explosion of Christian rock music that helped fuel the growth of non-denominational churches like Calvary Chapel and the Vineyard—which in turn, Stephens writes, went on to “reshape” evangelicalism. (As, indeed, they would shake up secular rock music—Stephens devotes several pages to the dismissive reactions from rock critics to Bob Dylan’s Vineyard-influenced Christian albums.)

Though the rock-ification of the evangelical church ultimately seems to have won the day, given the current prominence of Hillsong-style worship music, Stephens’s final chapter describes the fundamentalist backlash against the evangelical embrace of rock. Televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart— Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin, as Stephens occasionally reminds readers; a fact which basically sums up this whole tangled business in a nutshell—denounced Christian rock as worldly, Satanic, and theologically suspect. We know how this turned out: Stephens describes the continued acceptance of rock music in the late 80s, leading to the second explosion of Christian rock in the 90’s, which he touches on briefly in his epilogue.

More to Be Written

The Devil’s Music ends its dense exploration of Christian rock history here. As someone whose primary interest in Christian rock is ‘90s-oriented, you might expect I would find this disappointing. Even so, I have to conclude that the scope of the book feels appropriate. We are just now beginning to gain enough historical distance from a phenomenon as big as DC Talk’s Jesus Freak to truly understand its cultural, historical, and musical significance. Stephens’s work is broad, and it takes the interplay between church, music, and secular culture seriously. Those who grew up with Christian rock as an utterly normal part of their lives, who can’t imagine a time when it would have been controversial to have an electric guitar in church or to listen to a Beatles album, will find this history revelatory.

Ultimately, though, I want to see more: not just more Christian rock history, though that would be interesting, but more writing about Christian rock that takes the music itself seriously. The Devil’s Music is one of only a handful of recent books—there are maybe a dozen in the last 20 years—that does so. There is more to be written about Christian rock: maybe an ethnography that will make Christian rock pop off the page the way James Ault’s Spirit and Flesh or T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back did for church life; maybe an anthology of Christian music criticism (it exists, stretching back to Christian youth magazines of the 1970s); maybe an oral history of ‘80s and ‘90s underground Christian rock; or maybe more explorations of classic Christian albums. (In fact, the Bloomsbury Press’s popular 33 1/3 series, which consists of small books on classic albums, has just released a volume on Jesus Freak.)

This stuff is worth documenting, and not simply as novelty. Christian rock is a large, complex, and important cultural phenomenon. As Sanneh points out in The New Yorker, fully half the top 20 songs on last year’s Billboard chart were performed by acts with (at least) Christian roots. The history of Christian rock is strange and fascinating, and it is our history—not just as evangelicals, but as Americans.

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. He is the author of Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll: My Life on Record (Cascade).

The post The Strange Journey of Christian Rock and Roll appeared first on Christianity Today.

“Reckless Love” reached No. 1 for Christian airplay last week, with more than 10 million listeners, according to Nielsen Music.

It’s also back at the top of Billboard’s hot Christian songs chart, thanks to a boost from none other than Justin Bieber, who recently posted a clip of himself singing the chorus on Instagram before performing the song as part of an impromptu worship set during the Coachella music festival in California. Earlier this year, Israel Houghton offered his gospel cover.

But when worship songs make it big, they also get subjected to a degree of theological scrutiny, and some have questioned whether the message of the hit song misrepresents the nature of God’s love.

“A lot of people have asked why I use the word ‘reckless’ to describe the love of God,” Asbury said in a Bethel Music promo. “I see the love of God as something wild, insane, crazy. The way that he pursues, chases us down, loves, I believe, is reckless. We were going after that really furious, violent language to speak of the nature of the love of God.”

Back in the ’90s, Rich Mullins sang about the “the reckless raging fury that they call the love of God.” Similarly, in the worship song “Furious,” Jeremy Riddle, also of Bethel Music, describes God’s love as “furious,” “fierce,” and “wild.”

About a decade ago, Christians were debating John Mark McMillan’s “How He Loves” over the line “heaven meets earth like a sloppy wet kiss.” More recently, concerns over the “wrath of God,” as sung in the hymn “In Christ Alone,” led certain churches to alter the verse or stop singing the song altogether.

The chorus of “Reckless Love,” co-written by Asbury as well as Caleb Culver and Ran Jackson with Bethel Music, goes:

O, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God

O, it chases me down, fights ’til I’m found, leaves the ninety-nine

I couldn’t earn it, and I don’t deserve it, still, you give yourself away

O, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God, yeah

The song unofficially debuted last year from Bethel Music before becoming the lead single off Asbury’s album of the same name, which released in January.

The singer explained, “When I use the phrase, ‘the reckless love of God,’ I’m not saying that God himself is reckless. I am, however, saying that the way he loves, is in many regards, quite so.”

Assemblies of God minister and theologian Andrew Gabriel pushed back against the distinction, saying that “you can’t separate God from his attributes.” In a blog post addressing “Reckless Love,” he stated that “God loves us with clear and thoughtful intention,” not careless abandon. Even the parable of the lost sheep does not necessarily convey irresponsibility since scholars say shepherds routinely watched each other’s flocks if one went away, he said.

Blogger Paul Yoo similarly made the case that the Bible does not portray such a free-wheeling Savior: “God’s love seems reckless because he is so unconcerned about himself or his well-being in the way he loves. However…the whole Bible shows us that God is not unconcerned with himself but is ultimately for himself.”

CT asked Christian music experts to weigh in on “Reckless Love.” Most agreed that it’s a good thing for Christians to examine the theology beneath catchy lyrics—and said it’d be reckless not to.

Wen Reagan, adjunct instructor of church history and worship at Duke Divinity School:

Reckless could be taken two ways here. One is with its common implication of “thoughtlessness” or “carelessness.” I think we can all agree that’s not a very accurate description of God’s love for us, and if that was the association here, then the song would be problematic. But I think there’s a second connotation, and one better supported by the lyrical context. We might call it “foolishness,” and I think that’s spot-on.

By the world’s standards, God’s love is foolish. It’s extravagant, inefficient, scandalous. It throws a feast for the returning son who ran away with the inheritance and blew it. It hands you its coat when you steal its shirt. It blesses its enemies. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. As Christian mystic Saint Therese of Lisieux explained, it’s never calculating or strategic. As songwriter John Mark McMillan put it, it’s a sloppy wet kiss. Or, in this case, as Cory Asbury sings, it “leaves the 99.” Other sheep, that is. What kind of shepherd leaves the whole herd just to chase down a lost one? Some might say a foolish one. Or a reckless one.

Todd E. Johnson, theological director of the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology and the Arts​ at Fuller Theological Seminary:

There are two words that are helpful here. Myth, or that which we expect… and parable, or that which we do not expect: the last will be first, marriages end in divorce, the Samaritan is the best example of faith, and the kingdom of God is like a shepherd who leaves 99 sheep in search of the lost one. This reckless shepherd is a kingdom example in that parable, a reckless example with which we are still uncomfortable evidently.

Popular worship songs, past and present, are often more poetic than prose. The chorus of the once-popular hymn “I Serve a Risen Savior” is a good example. Jesus does not literally walk and talk with us, nor does Jesus literally live in our physical heart. But we know what this means because we do not take it literally, but metaphorically, poetically. Even when interpreted poetically, songs still convey a theology that may or may not be universally accepted. For example, in the Stuart Townsend and Keith Getty song, “In Christ Alone” it is proclaimed—directly, in this case, not metaphorically—“’Til on that cross as Jesus died, / The wrath of God was satisfied” Some churches do not sing this song (some even have attempted to change the lyrics) because they do not subscribe to the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. Songs are powerful instruments of faith, both forming and expressing faith.

For this reason, we are prudent to ask if we do, in fact, believe what we sing and sing what we believe and make this a theological and pastoral question used in the choices of the diet of music offered for our congregation’s worship. To do otherwise would seem reckless.

Joel Heng Hartse, Christian music writer and reviewer:

Theologically and emotionally, [“Reckless Love”] seems good, although I always find it weird when worship songwriters insist vehemently on how much God loves “me.” I once heard a worship leader sing an original song that said of God “you journal about me every day.” I wish I were making that up. I guess I could see the bridge of this song as similarly self-focused (“There’s no shadow You won’t light up / Mountain You won’t climb up / Coming after me”), which I've never really liked. I change “I” and “me” to “us” and “we” under my breath when I sing this kind of song in church.

I suppose we all get our hackles up when we see lyrics that don't jive with our theology—think of the “wrath of God was satisfied” versus “the love of God was magnified” change to “In Christ Alone” (I was on “team love” in that one)—but it would probably be better if congregations just wrote their own songs instead of relying on whatever is topping the charts. In theory, if your worship is an organic process emerging from who you are as a particular body of believers, you'd be less likely to get wrapped up in larger cultural disputes and be able to focus on what is being produced in your own church and whether it is an accurate reflection of that particular body's expression of devotion, worship, praise, lament, what have you.

Sandra Van Opstal, pastor, liturgist, and author of The Next Worship: Glorifying God in a Diverse World:

Christian worship is formation. People remember the songs they sing more than the truth that is preached. Given the accessibility of worship songs, the entire theology of this generation globally is being shaped by a dozen or so musicians in three different countries. That is what disturbs me.

My concern is not whether in this one case reckless is the right word to describe God; that misses the entire issue. My passion is for people to understand that the worship industrial complex has become so influential that millions of people around the world are being discipled via iTunes. The narrative of God and faith is in the hands of a few worship movements who aren’t talking about how their social location, cultural values, and racial privilege shape their faith.

“Reckless Love” became popular because it is a catchy tune that speaks to all of our human desires to be loved and known, especially this generation that is less and less fully known given the forms of connection they use. A poetic song about someone’s personal encounter with God doesn’t rise to the top of the charts without the mechanism of popularity and privilege.

The post Bethel Music and Bieber Sang It. But Do We Really Believe in ‘Reckless Love’? appeared first on Christianity Today.

When Darnielle heads out on tour this month, theater and bar crowds will also get a taste of the religious themes and biblical references that pulse through his literary and often semi-autobiographical lyrics.

He reminded me twice that his 2009 release The Life of the World to Come appeared on CT’s list of best albums that year. Back then, the singer referred to himself as a “Catholic atheist.” These days, a 49-year-old father of two, he describes himself as a theist who prays to Jesus.

Regardless of the labels, Darnielle can quote Scripture as well as his songs would suggest (each of the dozen tracks on The Life of the World to Come had Bible citations as titles, and more than 100 songs in The Mountain Goats canon reference specific passages, creeds, hymns, and teachings), and he has an un-ironic appreciation for Christian contemporary music veteran Amy Grant and the late Rich Mullins. He said Grant’s collection, available on iTunes, saved his life during a dark period several years ago.

But what makes so many Christians drawn to The Mountain Goats’ music? According to reviewer Joel Heng Hartse, Darnielle brings an “unflinching gaze at truth” and a “large-hearted openness to the beauty of the world, the goodness of life and humanity” that resonate with believers over his decades-long career. “Even a song like ‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,’ the chorus of which is literally ‘Hail Satan,’ is really a song about how even people who seem beyond the pale of goodness are deserving of love and understanding,” Hartse said.

Those themes have carried over into Darnielle’s 2014 novel, Wolf in White Van, a National Book Award nominee. Always a captivating storyteller in his lyrics—with a lot from his own life to pull from, including a troubled relationship with an abusive stepdad, drug addiction, and experience working in a psychiatric hospital—Darnielle has continued to write. His next book, Universal Harvester, is scheduled to release in February.

Ahead of The Mountain Goats’ fall tour, the lead singer spoke about what spirituality looks like in his life now, from praying with his four-year-old son to grappling with God’s message in the Book of Jonah.

What are the spiritual rhythms in your life? How do you find yourself reflecting and connecting?

I’m the only theist in my house except for my older son. He’s four. He used to like to pray with me at night. He was going through a rough patch after his brother was born… I would stop to pray in the middle of the night when he’d be awake and struggling. And it would work. It would distract him long enough.

I’ll tell you a story that happened recently. We had a cat named Roz. Both our cats died recently, and they were old. They’d been with us since Iowa. This is so interesting because there’s a lot of levels to this… I had this prayer experience with my son, and Roz died. Children can’t understand that, but you want to tell them where the cat went. So I said, “Roz went to be with the Lord,” and we buried her in the backyard.

He was looking around on the stairs one day. I think he saw a cat toy or something. He looks at me. “Roz went to be with the Lord,” he told me. Of course, my heart swelled. You see why people get into child evangelism because it’s amazing to hear a child talk about God. Jesus did the bit about having the faith of a child, and so it really reaches you. So I said, “Yes, buddy, that’s where Roz went. Roz went to be with the Lord.” Well, of course, another day had passed before he sees Daddy and wants to prove himself. He says, “Roz went to be with the Lord!” That’s also a lesson of how performative faith is. It’s a little further from actual faith, but it’s something people also do. It’s like if people are impressed by your confession, then you’ll make it again.

What kinds of things do you pray for?

My prayerful life is strictly one of thanksgiving. I don’t ask for stuff. I ask for mercy for other people. I don’t know the verse, but when Christ introduces the Lord’s Prayer, I take that really seriously. He doesn’t give us any examples of saying “help me get a job” or “help me.” The examples you get from the Gospels are “let this cup pass from me.” You can pray for relief, and you can pray for nearness to God, but giving thanks seems to me the point of prayer.

You said that you have a Catholic background. Do you label yourself religiously? Do you call yourself a Christian, a believer, a follower of God?

The thing is, I hate to say this to somebody from Christianity Today, but I pray to Jesus. That’s who I pray to. But at the same time—this is going to sound terrible—Christians over the years have made something of a bad name for themselves. So when you want to identify as a Christian, it’s sort of like maybe you might have fiscally conservative policies, but to identify as a Republican is to throw your hat in with some bad actors. And so I don’t know. I’m hesitant, even though Jesus is the person I pray to. That’s whose name I say in my dark hours, but I don’t strictly know that I identify as Christian. I have a hesitancy about it.

I think a lot of our readers can at least relate to the feeling of simply wanting to call themselves a “follower of Christ.” Tell me more about how religious themes in your work have been received by your fans, because I know there are Christians who love your music, as well as atheists and others.

I have a spiritual hunger, but everybody has a spiritual hunger. Most grown people, once you get past being mad about the Crusades and stuff—which is a totally valid position—are able to look at the Bible and say what a remarkable testimony it is of people trying to wrangle with ideas bigger than themselves. Anybody can look at the ministry of Christ and think it’s quite radical and quite transformative to human history. So I think—I mean, I’ve had people come from various places. There were some people who were bummed, mainly atheist rationalists. Most people grow out of that, but not necessarily into theism. When you’re in a reactionary place where you see the Bible and you are mad about it: now, come on.

You talked a little about this Amy Grant moment. What period of your life was that, where you felt like you had a new awakening or a new sense of connection with God?

I was going through a whole bunch of struggles that I don’t talk much about personally that involve my body, and I couldn’t sleep. I was having real trouble sleeping. That will get you into some dark places. The problems are ongoing, but I learned to deal with them. If you know these Rich Mullins songs, like “Nothing Is Beyond You,” Rich Mullins confesses to his doubt and fallibility constantly in a way that a lot of CCM people don’t. A lot of CCM people, they want to present themselves as models, or if they say that they’re fallen, that’s all they say: “Oh yes, I’m fallen.” Rich Mullins, like specifically, identifies his own ignorance, our own inability to comprehend things further, things that are beyond us. “Nothing Is Beyond You” is this incredible confession. I used to listen to that one every day. I listened to “Sing Your Praise to the Lord” and Amy Grant’s music for a long time. Her voice is so amazing, but also Amy Grant’s story. If you go find any Amy Grant story or video on the Internet, you will find a lot of professed evangelicals calling her a whore and things like that because she’s divorced. She got all kinds of abuse from the very community that both had nurtured her, but that she had given a lot to.

I was interested in that dynamic because I’m an entertainer, too. So I know people come to have expectations of you, and then if you don’t meet those expectations, they personalize it very incredibly when it’s actually your work. I don’t know Amy Grant, and neither do any of her fans. It’s just her work. So, there’s a lot of axes along which I was able to relate to her stuff. Plus she’s an amazing singer, and the musicians on her records are great.

How has your ongoing struggle with your body changed how you think of your work and your music?

I’m growing older. This happens. I think my relation to my body is going to be in constant flux. I used to be strict Augustinian: Body is just a cage for the spirit. But I don’t really believe that anymore. I’m not sure where I am at with it. But I do like what it does. St. Francis called his body “Brother Ass.” They used to call him “mule.” So, I like that idea because a mule’s alive, but it also is stubborn.

You quote the Bible so much in your music. Is there a passage of Scripture that has meant a lot to you, like a “life verse”?

Most people’s are going to be from the Gospels or from the Proverbs or Psalms, something like that, but mine is “Should I not pity also Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than”—I can’t remember the number, however many hundreds of thousands of people—“who cannot tell their right hand from their left and also much cattle” (Jonah 4:11).

To me, this is the greatest verse. I love Jonah to pieces. And it’s a very profound question God asks Jonah. Because God is saying, “You wish ill on your enemies. If you don’t wish ill on your enemies, I’m going to call you a liar. You do. If you have an actual enemy, you want harm to come to him.” Right? And in Jonah’s case, Jonah tries to help a bunch of people out according to his knowledge, and they just laugh at him. And then he goes out into the water. It doesn’t go well for him. Everything just goes to hell. When he comes back on the shore, nothing’s changed. God has changed his mind. The city doesn’t get destroyed.

God does a much gentler version of the Job speech. Well, you know you’re not looking at the big picture here. And that that is the last verse of the book is also a great thing. It’s the opening instead of the closing.

The post The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle Loves Amy Grant, Rich Mullins, and the Book of Jonah appeared first on Christianity Today.

“Play a sound with the certainty that you have an infinite amount of time and space”

— from the score of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s improvisational instrumental piece “Unbegrenzt” (Unlimited)

Intuitively, I—we, perhaps, in the Western world—feel like music should move. It should take advantage of polyphonic possibilities, be catchy, and make you want to dance or sing or nod your head.

We’re accustomed to music as an emotionally and spiritually cathartic thing, and it can be an overt guide and shaper of our experience. I’d know less about love if I’d never heard Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” and faith if I’d never sung “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Melodies and lyrics combine in ways that seem to open us up to meaning, moving us in ways neither can on their own.

But there is a kind of music that lacks both lyrics and melody, that largely lacks movement. This is the drone: a single note, played for a very long time. Drones have been used around the world for years, and traditionally they function as a sort of baseline against which a melody can be played. (Sometimes they’re an actual bass line.) Think of the wheeze of a bagpipe, or the sitar-like buzz of the tanpura in Indian raga (or the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows”). In Christian music, there’s the ison of Byzantine devotional chant, a low, sung bass note as the rich backdrop for the rest of the piece. The pedal bass notes of a church pipe organ function in a similar way.

There’s something seemingly sacred about drones; as Australian journalist David Rutledge wrote last year, they have “a transcendent, hypnotic quality that under the right conditions can elicit a meditative or even religious response. For those inclined to do so, it’s not difficult to hear God in a drone.” In traditional contexts, the drone is the anchor for a piece of music, the rock upon which a melody can be built. Rutledge interviewed the early music scholar Winsome Evans, who said a drone on a tonic (the first note of a scale) represents “the One,” i.e., “the Godhead,” and “it’s from that One that the melody evolves.” The drone can be a kind of stand-in for the rootedness of all meaning in God’s presence, the work of the Creator sustaining creation.

Modern drone music, too, is linked to divinity and eternality. In the 1960s, composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and La Monte Young seemed to attribute a deep spirituality to sustained notes, and many contemporary ambient music artists don’t bother with building melody on that mystical foundation. The emphasis is more on creating sustained sounds, and the feel of the drone standing for something much bigger remains. Stockhausen wrote a series of pieces (Aus den siben Tagen) which direct performers to simply play sounds for as long as they want or can, and to consider the cosmological implications of infinity. Young formed an improvisational group, the Theatre of Eternal Music, that played hours-long pieces based on drones.

There’s something of intentionality and slowness to this music compared to the pop and rock music that provides a backdrop for many of our lives, and that seems to open listeners up to transcendence in ways other music does not.

I first heard about drones because of rock music, though. Mercury, the 1995 album by the Christian indie rock band the Prayer Chain, opens with the ethereal “Humb,” built around a formless guitar drone created by engineer Chris Colbert. It doesn’t sound like a guitar at all, though. It sounds like . . . I don’t know, an ocean? A forest? It’s a beautiful sound, and one that got me interested in the spiritual possibilities afforded of drones: What is the potential of this kind of music for expressing the kind of awe and wonder we feel in the presence of God?

A friend and onetime bandmate of mine, Kevin Davis, records ambient music under the name betacicadae. I asked Kevin whether he thought there was any connection between drone and ambient music and Christian spirituality. “Centering prayer often uses a short single phrase (Christ is love, etc.), repeated as a tool to come back to a place of focus in Christian mysticism, like the mantra ohm in Eastern meditation,” he told me. “I think drone has an analogous musical effect.”

I got a similar response from Jesse Eubanks, who runs the Christian social justice ministry Love thy Neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, and who has also recorded several ambient pieces that incorporate drones: “I think drones offer a special invitation to the listener,” he said. “God is infinite and unchanging. Drones are about timelessness. They don’t focus on the question of ‘What’s going to happen next?’ and instead focus on ‘What exists now?’ They are like musical breath prayers. They can be an aid to being mindful to the presence of God—to practicing meditative prayer and contemplative Scripture reading. Sonically speaking, by the nature of their form, they help us in quieting the outside world and our own anxieties and hearing the Still Small Voice.”

This was all appealing. Like many of my generation, even though I’ve played and sung them for years, the pop-style songs I hear on Sunday mornings are less compelling to me than they used to be, and I often feel a yearning to try something different, musically, for worship. Last week, I decided to actually do it.

I persuaded my pastor to let me use the sanctuary of the Anglican church our congregation rents for a couple of hours one night. I asked my friend Matt Smith, who is a great pianist and has a cool synthesizer, to come along. We decided to play in the key of C—in fact, to play mostly just the note C, and add improvised flourishes as we saw fit. I brought a bass guitar, which I leaned against an amplifier for most of the night, letting the feedback do what it would, creating a long, loud hum. Matt turned up the reverb and the delay on his synth, holding chords for minutes at a time. We did this for about 90 minutes, Matt playing triads and single notes on the synth, me fiddling with the volume knobs on the bass amp, trying to control the timbre of the tones.

This was meant as a musical and spiritual experiment, to see what we could do with drones, and also if drones would “do” anything to us, or to the church. I was too focused on trying to create sounds to feel like I was doing anything close to prayer or meditation the way Kevin and Jesse talked about, but when I listen to the recordings, I can imagine, I do believe, that something unique happened.

I started to figure this out when I asked my friend Hedy Law, who is a musicologist at the University of British Columbia, what she thinks happens when drones are used for religious purposes. She talked about how religious music (especially in chants or drones or other hypnotic, repetitive forms) is an interpersonal experience—a group of people allow themselves to be taken to a sublime space together. “You can’t just play a drone” and expect it to be spiritual, she said. “It cannot be coerced. It has to be something very deliberate in order for that religious experience to happen.”

I asked her, then, what she thought happened when we played those long, sustained sounds in the church that night. She responded with another question: “What did you want to do?”

She explained that you can use a drone to create a religious space, but the religious experience is intersubjective. The experience of sonically transforming a space can only be understood in relation to some other space or experience. By attempting to change the sound in a religious space, you can suggest a different spiritual experience, perhaps. I realized then that my goal of filling the sanctuary with drones, feedback, and ambient noise was in part a reaction to the music I hear on Sunday mornings. The whole notion of slowness, patience, and timelessness is opposite not only to most modern church music, but to most of the pop or jazz or classical or folk music we listen to every day. I wanted to try something slower, more focused and contemplative.

What we played was nothing like a Sunday morning rendition of “Blessed Be Your Name”—not something better or worse, but utterly different. No choruses, no verses, no words, just tones ringing out in an empty space designed specifically for worship. There was a stillness and a solemnity in the room I’d rarely felt in a church before. I did feel like I was in a different place, somehow.

Drones don’t make timelessness or eternity or God, of course, but they can, I think, sonically shape a space—shape us—in ways that make us more attuned to these mysteries. And this music that is different from what most of us know, that’s supposed to not move, begins to feel like something other than music, almost: something otherworldly, outside of time, and even holy.

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll and is currently working on Dancing About Architecture is a Reasonable Thing to Do, a book on writing about music. He wrote about the diversity of language for The Behemoth’s issue 20.

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Language: The Cultural Tool

Daniel L. Everett (Author)

Vintage

368 pages

$15.93

The Language Hoax

John H. McWhorter (Author)

OUP USA

208 pages

$16.99

Halliday’s own theory of language, known as systemic-functional linguistics (SFL), considers the function of language to be just as important as its form, and places great emphasis on social context in understanding how language works. It could be considered a more realistic and helpful way of viewing language than the “traditional” linguistic perspective (associated with Noam Chomsky) that language as a cognitive system (“competence”) is the proper object of study, while actual utterances made by people (“performance”) are not.

As a language educator who admittedly finds himself in the “language as behavior” camp, I’ve been trained to see Chomsky’s neglect of performance in favor of competence as an oversight. But I think most non-specialists remain unaware of SFL, or of any alternative perspective in modern linguistics. The best-known popularizers of linguistic theory in recent years tend to be cognitive scientists who, while not denying the sociocultural aspects of language, focus on language from what we might call a more “scientific” perspective.

There is nothing misguided about studying, say, biological mechanisms or the cognitive processes underlying language, but I am disappointed by the way language, like some other areas of scholarly investigation, can be ceded in the popular imagination to “Science,” that magical secular religion that can “explain” language as soon as it gets some really good brain scans of people thinking about different words for “snow” or whatever.

Of course, neuroscientists and other scientists are doing good work. What I lament is that a sociocultural approach to language has not been of more note in the public eye. Where’s the Halliday, the Bakhtin, the Vygotsky, the Bourdieu? In addition to the cognitive, where is the social? What’s needed is an accessible view of language that accounts for both. Books by Daniel Everett and John McWhorter offer some hope: though their positions differ, both are the work of linguists who recognize the importance of engaging the relationship between language and culture for a popular audience.

Everett’s Language: The Cultural Tool is a welcome and significant book for popular linguistics, because he calls explicitly for more emphasis on sociocultural aspects of language while maintaining that the study of language is a rigorous science. Everett has specifically challenged Chomsky’s notion of “language universals” through his studies of the language of the Pirahã people of the Amazon rainforest, which he discusses in his earlier general-audience book, the riveting Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes.

Because Pirahã language and culture are unique, Everett insists that culture has an important influence on language, and that, because cultures are different, not all languages are in fact ultimately the same. Everett further argues that there is no need to talk of an innate “language instinct,” since language is simply one skill among many which humans learn. We figure out how to make or use tools from the people around us, and we develop the tools—including language—we need for our environments. Thus, different cultures develop different languages for their specific needs, Everett suggests, and Language describes this process in detail.

The first section of the book, “Problems,” deals with the human need to communicate in order to survive, arguing that not only human biology but also unique needs relating to the formation of community and social interaction eventually led to the development of language. Everett reviews arguments for language as a “biological tool” that “just grows,” similar to our arms or legs, but posits an alternative view of language as a cultural tool, “based on learning and general cognitive abilities.”

The problem of communication is solved not by language generally (the emergence of which Everett attributes to evolutionary processes, drawing an interesting if speculative analogy between early uses of fire and of language), but by languages in particular. In the second section, “Solutions,” Everett argues that while there are many similarities among languages, they may represent “common solutions to common problems” rather than giving evidence for an “innate universal grammar.” Everett builds a convincing case that “culture, cognition, and communication are the shaping forces of our languages.” He describes the many building blocks of language, from the human vocal apparatus to phonemes to morphemes to syntax to meaning, using examples from Pirahã and other languages.

The book’s third section, “Applications,” discusses the influence of culture on language, arguing that culture can influence not only surface features of a language but even the deep structure of grammar. One fascinating example includes the Amazonian language Wari’, in which speakers attribute quotes to other people in order to report the others’ possible thoughts or mental states—and do so without using verbs. This claim, like some others Everett makes about Amazonian languages, is difficult to grasp at first, but makes sense when considered in connection to his overall argument that grammar is influenced by culture. Everett refers to this as a Darwinian view of cultural and linguistic differences, since languages and cultures are different “to fit particular environmental needs.”

The final section, “Variations,” discusses linguistic diversity and revisits explanations of cultural influences on language, arguing that the many variations in language are of value to humanity as a whole, and ends with a plea for preserving linguistic diversity and endangered languages.

The marketing punchline of Language is “a guy who lived with an Amazonian tribe proved Chomsky was wrong,” but anyone who has taken up a branch of language study outside theoretical linguistics already knows Chomsky is “wrong” in the sense that the field he created doesn’t view the actual use of language as interesting or important. Everett convincingly marshals evidence from his own experience and other areas of language study to show how important the social and cultural aspects of human society are in making language what it is.

In 2012, John McWhorter’s generally positive New York Times review of Language lamented that Everett emphasizes the influence of culture “to a point that misrepresents what human languages are.” McWhorter’s The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language is a book-length argument against this emphasis, most obviously aimed at Guy Deutscher’s 2010 book Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages.

McWhorter aims to debunk a popular belief about language that can be attributed in part to authors like Deutscher: popular neo-Whorfianism, or the belief that language shapes thought and culture so much that the languages we speak affect the ways in which we see the world in very significant ways. In its strongest form, this idea has been rejected by language scholars for decades, but in the hands of journalists, for whom McWhorter reserves particular ire, the Whorfian notion that language “determines” how we think seems to have run rampant and led to silly and unhelpful assertions. (One need only to think of the canard that “Eskimos” have hundreds of words for snow—which, of course, depends on what one means by “Eskimos” or “snow” or even “words.”)

McWhorter’s book, like Everett’s, is the work of an eminent linguist with a ready stable of examples and illustrations on the tip of his tongue, and The Language Hoax is as broad and multifarious as Language, though much shorter, wittier, and more relentlessly devoted to a single point: namely, the grammatical features of the language we speak have very little to do with our cultures, “worldviews,” or the way we think.

McWhorter begins by questioning whether “studies show” that language greatly influences thought, pointing out that many useful experiments have been done showing infinitesimal differences in perception between speakers of various languages, but that this does not mean that there are major differences of worldview that can be attributed to, for example, the fact that the word “bridge” has a different gender in German than it does in Spanish.

Culture and language are indeed mutually implicated, according to McWhorter, but not in the sense that language evolves due to environmental or cultural needs; rather, he argues that linguistic practices are influenced by culture. He mentions that some languages use the same word for eat, drink, and smoke, but it begins to feel absurd to speculate about what exactly the cultural “reason” for this would be, and how it would differ from the reason speakers of other languages use different words for these actions. Not only are these linguistic differences essentially random, says McWhorter, but even when studies allegedly show a link between grammar and culture—he cites Yale economist Keith Chen’s assertion that the Chinese language’s lack of a marked future tense leads the Chinese to save money for an unknown future—there is no reason to believe that it is grammar and not, in fact, simply culture that accounts for cultural difference.

In the book’s most entertaining and illuminating passage, McWhorter does a fine-grained reading of a single sentence he once heard a teenager utter: “Dey try to cook it too fast, I’m-a be eatin’ some pink meat!” Taking neo-Whorfianism to its logical conclusion, each English word is analyzed with a view to whether it says something unique about the “worldview” of the speaker. Why did he omit “if” from the sentence? Why does English have the pronoun they? Why does English distinguish pink from red, or meat from a live animal? As the questions pile up, the idea that each of these presumably random differences between English and other languages has some enormous cultural and cognitive significance begins to seem silly.

Indeed, McWhorter points out that English is rarely scrutinized in this way, but the languages of small tribes or others whom English speakers, perhaps rightly, wish to valorize or redeem (“these people are not savages—they make sense“) often are over-interpreted. The problem, he argues, is that this is unrealistic and insulting: the unique grammatical-cultural aspects of other languages are usually discussed in relentlessly positive terms (if the Chinese are thrifty, are some other languages wasteful?), and McWhorter cautions that there is a soft chauvinism in the fascination of neo-Whorfians with the alleged uniqueness of certain languages. It is, he writes, as if English speakers are saying, “What’s good about you is that you are not like me,” which is hardly valorization. McWhorter ends his book with an affirmation of the traditional linguistic view that languages have many surface differences but are ultimately “variations on being the same.”

While McWhorter’s positioning of The Language Hoax as a “manifesto” can make the book feel like a bit of a one-note samba, with each chapter offering a different version of the same argument, one gets the sense that its singular focus is necessary. Language-and-culture studies are frequently blown out of proportion by the media, and a lot of sloppy thinking about language use and its effects persists. (Sorry to break it to you, but language advice from the likes of Orwell and Strunk & White is not seen as particularly accurate or helpful by linguists.) McWhorter’s ultimate message—that language variation is worth study in its own right—is a worthwhile one in an era in which minority languages have been deemphasized (some would say killed, even) in favor of the world’s larger and more powerful tongues.

One need not side solely with McWhorter or Everett on the relationship of language and culture to appreciate what their work does for the popular understanding of language. If anything, both books show that the tangle of culture, language, and meaning is too important to limit to the purview of disinterested “science,” but a worthy pursuit for philosophy, sociology, psychology, and many other disciplines like those laid out by Halliday in his 1978 diagram. As Everett says in his introduction, “science is usually better than myths at explaining. But the myths arguably capture the grandeur of their subject better than science.” Whether you agree with Everett’s contrast of “science” and “myth” as two opposing methods of “explanation,” his argument is, I think, meant to transcend both: science and myth, and indeed all human attempts at meaning-making, are underwritten by language, ultimately the most useful and wondrous gift we have.

Joel Heng Hartse is a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University. He is the author of Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll (Cascade Books) and co-author of Perspectives on Teaching English at Colleges and Universities in China (TESOL Press).

Copyright © 2016 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

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Then there’s the boy. He’s also white, with perfect teeth and hair like a businessman from the ‘80s. He works too much/doesn’t care about the holidays/needs help raising his kids because his wife recently died.

Maybe the roles are reversed; it doesn’t really matter. The lighthearted conflict between them goes on for 45 minutes to an hour, until they kiss at the end. Cue the music, fade to the credits, and then it starts all over again.

This is the Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas spectacular, a nonstop lineup of variations on the romantic holiday movie formula. In 2015 alone, Hallmark has released 17 new Christmas-specific movies, adding to their expansive back catalog of made-for-TV films. This year was my first time sitting down to watch their feel-good movie marathon, but the plotlines were familiar to me as an evangelical girl who grew up longing for a safe, happy, magical world where it felt like Christmas every day.

While mainstream culture scorns the romance as lowbrow and naively idealistic, it remains a hugely profitable enterprise thanks to its loyal readers and viewers. Last year, from Halloween to Christmas, Hallmark was the No. 1 channel for women age 25-54, and a single one of their holiday films, Christmas Under Wraps, attracted 5.8 million viewers. (That’s double the viewership of most Real Housewives shows.)

Once-niche “nerd” entertainment gained popular esteem as it proved itself lucrative (think Marvel movies, Star Trek reboots, and the like), but Hallmark Channel-style romance continues to elicit a degree of derision. No one is more acutely aware of the reputation of these sentimental and seasonal romances than the women who adore them. When I asked a few fans why they tuned in, the answers came in sheepish sentiments: I know they are predictable but… they are calming background noise… I just like happy endings… Christmas is a hard time of year, and they make me feel good… I’m probably too idealistic, but they are just so full of warmth….

These caveats offer some protection from judgment and let others know that they are aware of the criticisms of the genre. But perhaps loving the Hallmark Channel at Christmastime isn’t something to apologize for. More broadly, it may be time a shift in our language when we talk about loving something that we know isn’t perfect.

My friend (and Christ and Pop Culture founder) Richard Clark once told me he doesn’t believe in guilty pleasures. Watch what you want to watch, he said. If you truly feel guilty about watching something, maybe you should turn it off. As I read what fans told me about these pleasant movies, chock-full of bland actors and hopeful messages, I realized there is nothing to feel guilty about. They contain nothing morally wrong or hurtful or violent or exploitative. And yet, people (mostly women), still do.

Perhaps our desire for elite taste beyond the Hallmark Channel fare comes out of a sense of pop culture classism. While exploring the enormous popularity of Celine Dion, music writer Carl Wilson presented a theory from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu wherein taste becomes a way “to set ourselves apart from those whose social ranking is beneath us, and to take aim at the social status we feel we deserve.” We see this play out culturally in our sneers directed at Celine, romantic movies, or even the incredibly popular Adele. Anything deemed so accessible by women—women from a wide variety of classes, in particular—automatically becomes an issue of bad taste for those who consider themselves more refined.

This gendered and class-based judgment should distress us as Christians, as people called to break down cultural distinctions and barriers, not create or uphold them (especially when we happen to be on the “winning” or “artistically savvy” side). No one, as far as I can tell, regards the romance genre as a bastion of artistic innovation or importance. But as another music critic, Joel Heng Hartse writes, “What is taste, after all, other than love?” So many people love these movies and find them as hopeful as they are improbable. Perhaps the enormous popularity of romantic holiday movies serves as a reminder of our desire see happy endings played out before us, at least every now and again.

To be honest, the few movies I watched as research for this essay felt only mildly pleasant. I chuckled a little bit. Immersed in a world of few problems and many beautiful people, I felt happy enough when they got together in the end. I will probably watch one or two a year (any more than that and it does start to feel a bit like a money-making cash enterprise, the movies subsisting to sell advertising spots). As the writer and Countdown to Christmas fan Addie Zierman told me:

There's also a little tiny part of me that finds it sort of nice—this idea that somehow during Christmastime people start to see things better. Truer. They let go of old hurts. They forgive their parents. The go home after being away too long. They make peace with their past. Things are made right in the end.

Those desires—to see and experience forgiveness, homecoming, peace, redemption—all stem from deep spiritual needs. And wouldn’t it be better if we didn’t judge people for seeking out those kinds of stories, if instead we strove to find the commonalities of desire that transcend gender, race, and class? Now that would be a Christmas miracle, indeed.

D. L. Mayfield’s writing has appeared in various publications such as CT, McSweeney's, and Image Journal, among others. Her favorite romantic comedy is “The Decoy Bride” starring the magnificent David Tennant. Her book of essays titled Assimilate Or Go Home: Notes From a Failed Missionary on Rediscovering Faith will be out from HarperOne in August 2016. Find her at dlmayfield.com or on Twitter.

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