We’ve talked about the demise of the band Yellowcardthree days ago, but today we’re going to delve into Yellowcard’s lead singer William Ryan Key‘s solo career. Although during his tenure in Yellowcard, Key was known on stage by his middle name, Ryan, the singer wanted to craft a solo career in his own right without relying on Yellowcard’s popularity. With two EPs released in 2018, first Thirteenand then Virtue, Key’s solo music career went on pause until his EP earlier this year, Everything Except Desire. During the the gap between these projects, Key worked on reimagined Yellowcard songs and wrote and recorded with an ambient electronic side project called JEDAH along with fellow Yellowcard guitarist Ryan Mendez.
Bowery Street (in pink) in Manhattan, photo Wikipedia
WHO DO I THINK I AM? Listening to Yellowcard and William Ryan Key’s writing, we get a nostalgia for home. But where is home for Key? Yellowcard is famously from Jacksonville, Florida, and Key writes about that state fondly throughout Yellowcard’s discography. Key played with the band Craig’s Brother in California before joining Yellowcard and the band even relocated to California to further their music career until they got tired of the state by their third record. The final song in Yellowcard’s discography, “Fields and Fences” longs for Tennessee. And in a concert in Belgium (see video below), Key talks about how most of his Virtue EP was inspired by New York City and the fond memories that he spent there. Today’s song, “The Bowery,” takes its name from a street and a neighborhood in southern Manhattan north of Chinatown and west of the East Village. The song may be a reference to the small venue, Bowery Ball Room, which may have hosted Yellowcard at one time. The geography of the song seems like if Sufjan Stevens had written a New York album, but it certainly has a different style. Perhaps a local would find the word play in this song on the nose, but my knowledge of NYC is lacking.
MAYBE IT’S A RITUAL. From the moment I heard this song on Lead Singer Syndrome, I was fascinated with the lyrics of “The Bowery.” My mind made a lot of connections, about “fools rush in where angels dare to tread,” about Upstate, the line about burning the garden and “a sacrifice/ a drink on ice.” I’m not sure what Key is writing about, but the theme seems partly religious. Why break bread? Why burn the garden? Is it the Garden of Eden? What’s the sacrifice? Is it a love song? Is it a commitment? Is it a healthy relationship, rushing back to a person? Not to mention the meditative electric guitar that ties the song together, almost like a slow worship song in a rock ‘n’ roll church service. There are really too many unknowns to make a guess what this song might mean to William Ryan Key. The song reads like the speaker is okay with being used because the person using him is so amazing. In fact, the speaker rushes to say, “I’d go running if you tell me to Upstate,” and then in the same breath laments that “I’m too late.” The speaker quotes the listener saying “you said ‘I’m a loyal one. I’m a lot of fun.” And in the reflection from the song, the speaker says “I was wrong to feel so overcome,” meaning that sometimes the relationship wears him down, but he has to change his attitude. I’d like to be completely wrong about this song and to find an interview in which Key provides clarification about this song, but until then I have to be comfortable with being “so close, and so far.”
Everything Switchfoot has done musically rests in the shadows of their 2003 album, The Beautiful Letdown. While Letdown was sonically superior to their prior albums, the once surf-rock band still needed to finish evolving after their commercial blockbuster record. I’m biased to think that Nothing Is Soundis lyrically and musically superior to Letdown, but that may be because of how Letdown lost its novelty over the countless plays on youth group trips, on Christian radio, then on rock and alternative radio, and finally on pop radio and in some TV shows. Subsequent Switchfoot releases garnered less attention.
LAST WEEK SAW ME LIVING FOR NOTHING BUT DEADLINES. Two albums after Letdown, Oh! Gravity.attempted to bring Switchfoot back; this time with an experimental album with a flair for the avant-garde. The poppy second single stalled on the adult contemporary chart and was never released to pop and alternative radio as planned. But Switchfoot’s fidelity to their Christian fans continued to drive record sales and concerts. And while the Guitar Hero-themed,star-studded video for “Awakening” never impacted MTV or VH1, it certainly did well on TVU. The music video starred actors Tony Hale, Adam Campbell, and Jayma Mays. Hale plays a straight-laced office worker who challenges his friend, Campbell, to a game resembling Guitar Hero, on the console, and the guitar controllers are made of cardboard. It was fun to see Buster Bluth rocking out with guyliner and his tie around his head. And around that time there was also talk about how Hale was actually a Christian in Hollywood, though he wasn’t aligned with the evangelical coalition. Of course, Switchfoot’s lead singer Jon Foreman was also one of the more liberal voices in the mainstream Christian Rock community.
MAYBE IT’S CALLED AMBITION. “Awakening” is a song about being revitalized. Many of Switchfoot’s songs are anthems to “Dare You to Move.” Today, “Awakening” gives me energy. Since the beginning of the 2022 school year, I’ve had a struggle to manage my time and make time for the things I feel matter the most. My blog has certainly suffered, but I’m proud of myself for keeping it going every day. Wednesday is my busiest day of the week, so I thought about pre-writing my Wednesday posts if I get a chance to get ahead. I thought about writing about sad songs or songs about having a bad day, just because if something goes wrong in the morning I tend to dwell on it all day. I often hum a mantra about being too busy and too tired on Wednesdays and other woe is me’s. But today I remembered that sometimes on my busiest teaching day, the kids aren’t too rowdy. Sometimes I can treat nothing as too urgent. A class doesn’t need to be elaborate on a day like this. And sometimes there are classroom moments, even on my busiest day, that remind me why I chose this profession. Whether it’s a spark in a student’s eye when he or she realizes something, or a kind word from one classmate to another, or shared food with the staff, every day can have its little blessings if we look for it. That being said, I want to sleep in a little later tomorrow!
The changing of seasons will fascinate me until climate change renders the seasons one blur of erratic weather. I always long for the year that I sit in nature drinking in the subtle changes of each day. I’ve never been one for grandiose ambitions, and there is some spark that ignites in my heart whenever I read nature. The semester that I took British Lit. II in community college, I felt so taken by the Romantics and their descriptions of the Lake District. When I listened to the speech with Wendell Berry in preparation for my Paper Route post, I felt that spark as well.
WEARY EYES. Listening to Wendell Berry’s speech reminded me of a dream I have had that I’ve never actually committed to writing. I had a fantasy about taking a full year off from modern life with all of its stresses and working on a farm–maybe my grandparents’ farm–and then writing a book about what I learned over the course of one year. In this fantasy, I’d do all of the chores to keep the farm going, working alongside my grandparents or the farm owner, basically working as a farmhand. I’d rise in the morning before dawn, feeding the cows. I’d work until sundown doing whatever tasks in the field I was told to do. I’m sure I’d be really bad at everything at first, but I’d practice and get better. Eventually, I’d know the right questions to ask my grandfather about how he’s kept the farm going all these years. I’d begin to see patterns and maybe understand the business of a small farm. I’d find out why he kept certain animals and not others. As the year goes by I’d get to help out with making maple syrup, planting corn, baling hay, and raising cows from calf to slaughter. The evenings I’d work on my writing, and I’d read novels instead of watching TV.
FORGETTING ALL THE REASONS YOU USED IN THE PAST. But this is just a fantasy. My grandfather died in 2015 while I was in Korea. I think of me, a boy who was pretty much good for nothing when it came to outside work–sure I could hammer nails–really has no business in the great outdoors. I never showed much interest in agriculture when I was a kid. It was computer games and indoor things mostly. But every time I look outside and see change in the seasons, I think about that dream to be closer to nature, to be closer to my grandfather who tilled the earth until his death. And I realize that it’s arrogant to think of a life being closer to nature as being stress-free. I’m certain I’d be more the guy from Into the Wildthan Bear Grylls. I’d struggle to provide for myself let alone make a business about it. But there’s something romantic about the literal struggle to survive compared to city living with my current struggles. And none of this has anything to do with Kye Kye‘s song “Seasons.” It’s just a thought that popped into my head when I heard the song today. It reminded me of my “Bike Mix” playlist from years ago when I was riding my bike to work before I felt that was completely unsafe. I thought about the scenery I saw as the seasons changed, when summer started to cool into fall, when fall cooled into winter, and winter started to warm into spring. I never rode in summer, though. I keep cycling through the seasons, expecting something new without changing anything about myself.
In 2016, Yellowcard called it quits, echoing many other bands in a changing music industry. Best known for their fourth album, Ocean Avenue, Yellowcard headlined Warped Tour and were at the top of the genre thanks to MTV‘s Total Request Live and placements in video games. But the band that had once been played on pop and rock radio, soon saw waning promotion, particularly in their later years. With albums underperforming and internal conflict in the band, they released their self-titled final album in 2016. They have only reunited in a controversial lawsuit against rapper Juice WRLD, which the band later dropped after the rapper died in 2020.
YOU TOOK MY EDGE, SHARPENED IT IN CASE. My experience with Yellowcard was much like most of their fair-weather fans. Ocean Avenue was novel and fun. It was a time when bands could experiment with the format of a rock band to include something like, say, an electric violin on every track substituting for guitar leads. Their second album, Lights and Sounds, was slightly stronger but less impressive. Their third album, Paper Walls, felt like a rehashing of everything they’ve ever done before and that was the end of my casual fandom. Turns out, that album was born out of inner conflict, and it caused the band to go on hiatus. But after that hiatus, Yellowcard returned to the music scene with more mature songwriting and a better use of the electric violin. For the most part, the Jacksonville-Florida natives stuck to their “Boys of Summer” formula: mostly major keys, bright guitar tones, energetic bass, and drums pumping through the mix. But occasionally, they broke with the formula, most notably on 2014’s title track “Lift a Sail” and today’s song, ““Savior’s Robes.”
I WONDER IF YOU CAN RECALL MY NAME. The self-titled Yellowcardalbum is uncharacteristically un-summer-y in its stormy grey album cover. Some of the songs on the album match the cover art’s tone, but mostly it’s business as usual Yellowcard, and listeners wouldn’t feel that their final album is so far out of their typical musical reach. But then there’s track 9. Opening with a heavy distorted guitar and drums and an uncharacteristically angry-sounding lead singer Ryan Key, “Savior’s Robes,” sounds like it’s a dis-track to some bad blood in the band’s history. Yellowcard had a series of member shake-ups, some of which were bitter. The reference to “a devil in a savior’s robes” sounds eerily religious. Key had been a member of the Tooth & Nail band Craig’s Brother, and as a Florida band in punk/pop-punk had been around a lot of the early 2000s Tooth & Nail bands, according to Key’s interview on Lead Singer Syndrome.This song sounds more like it’s channeling that sound than the upbeat teens on Ocean Avenue. One line I found interesting: “You’re a devil in a savior’s robe / Made it easier to let you go / I never should have let you get so close.” It’s easy to let a devil go once you realize they are one, but the savior’s robe allows that person to get close. Is this a metaphor for a friend who betrays or literally about an experience with someone who uses piety as a way to draw others in? Is it the music industry? Is it the “cool Christian” youth groups? Is it the festivals that the band played alongside Christian bands? It’s a very icky feeling when you’re swindled by the oily Bible salesman. It’s quite a common story, and I have quite a few from working for a church school. Still, it’s even icky when they try to swindle people who don’t believe it. It’s actually quite embarrassing, or at least it was. No wonder why people are so programmed against religion.
IT WAS WRITTEN IN A LETTER TO ME. Watashi Wa was a band signed to Tooth & Nail Records in the early ’00s. The band was formed in 2000 when the members were still in high school. After releasing two albums on Betty Rocket, a small label, the band signed to Tooth & Nail in 2002. The next year, they released their LP The Love of Life. The band broke up two years later and singer Seth Roberts went on to form the band Eager Seas. Roberts negotiated with the label to fulfill Watashi Wa’s contract with his new band; however, Eager Sea’s debut record undersold the label’s expectations. The label decided to re-release the record as Watashi Wa’s final album titled Eager Seas, including the band’s most recognized song “All of Me” on the record. Roberts went on to form the band Lakes and signed to The Militia Group.
MAYBE IT’S CRAZY. Maybe it was an abundance of incredible releases in 2003 that made Watashi Wa’s The Love of Life fall unnoticed from the shelf. I hadn’t even heard of Watashi Wa until I saw the band appear on a Tooth & Nail sampler given away with Further Seems Forever How to Start a Fire, and I bought the album at a discount several years after its release. In 2003, Tooth & Nail alone had released Anberlin‘s and Mae‘s debut albums, Beloved, Lucerin Blue, the first FM Staticrecord, Spoken’sA Moment of Imperfect Clarity,and Thousand Foot Krutch‘s Phenomenon. There were other Christian albums that I bought that year, too, like Skillet‘s Collide, Big Dismal‘s only album, and Delirious‘s Touch. Then there was Evanescence‘s Fallen, which I also bought in the Family Christian store before it was removed. Maybe also there was a lack of promotion. The band didn’t have a Christian Rock radio single unlike most of the bands listed. Years later, Watashi Wa’s music is fine. They are a mellower Tooth & Nail band in a time when edgier pop-punk was what was making the label sore. Seth Roberts talked about his perspective of how his band fit into the arc of Tooth & Nail’s success on the Labeledpodcast. Roberts talks about how he tried to make music that paid tribute to his musical heroes in Tooth & Nail history but ultimately failed to produce a record that drew the attention to make a profit for the label. Now sixteen years later, Watashi Wa is back with another tribute to Tooth & Nail’s glory days. I hope that this time around the band will get the recognition they deserve.
On Valentine’s Day, Taeyeon released her third full-length album, INVU. This album included her single released last summer “Weekend,” a song about feeling great and enjoying life amidst the everyday hectic routine. Sleeping in late, indulging in coffee and/or cheese cake, and generally “doing whatever I want,” “Weekend” is a bubbly K-pop single that welcomes the best two days of the week. And out of a lazy afternoon in bed with my boyfriend singing this song, I chose to be extra lazy and post this track as an excuse to convert my Spotify Friday Vibes playlist into an AppleMusic Weekend Vibes playlist. Hope you enjoy it!
Formed in Chico, CA, in 2002, Number One Gun released an EP and an album on Floodgate Records, a now defunct Christian record label, before signing to Tooth & Nail Records in 2005. The band split apart after recording their Tooth & Nail debut with lead singer Jeff Schneeweis forming the band The North Pole Project, and bandmates Christopher Keene and Jordan Mallory forming the band Surrogate. In 2007, Schneeweis changed Number One Gun’s name to The North Pole Project as all the original bandmates had left the band; however, what would have been The North Pole Project’s debut record was released as The North Pole Projectby Number One Gun.
I’VE DONE IT ALL, BUT NOT THIS. Schneeweis built a touring band to promote The North Pole Project, but when it came time to record the follow up, he decided to go at the recording alone. Number One Gun released To the Secrets and Knowledgein January of 2010, originally including a tenth closing track, a cover of Journey‘s “Don’t Stop Believin’”; however, iTunes pulled the track due to “content issues.” The album was rereleased containing only nine tracks: eight songs and one instrumental, less than 33 minutes in length. The album features a more refined production than the band’s previous records. Schneeweis blends his voice seamlessly with the guitars and other instruments on the record. The lyrics are abstract to the point of sounding almost randomly selected, but Schneeweis delivers these lines with such passion that the words almost take a meaning from the listener’s own experience. Almost.
I’VE GOTTA FIGURE OUT WHY THE WORLD IS SO BIG. Apart from not being a heavily promoted album, I used to take issue with albums that were less than ten track or an album that was ten tracks with one or more of them being instrumental. I only gave exception to bands who released music prior to the ubiquity of CDs, so classic rock was exempt. I think the reason for this pickiness was that music was expensive and I always wanted to get my money’s worth. So despite a sweet song about taking some time off in the forest, I needed several tracks that stood out before I forked over the money. Heaven forbid you had to skip a track on a short album! Nowadays that music is available on streaming services, I’m much more forgiving of short albums. But is still wish that those short albums—less than ten tracks or ten and an instrumental— would be called EPs!
In the ’70s Alternative Rock was a distinguishing term to separate mainstream classic rockers from experimental, independent rock bands. Sometimes called College Rock in the ’80s and the ’90s, it can be difficult to distinguish between mainstream rock and alternative rock of the ’90s and ’80s. More recently, the genre has been split between Alternative Rock and Alternative. But at the heart of Alternative music however its classified is genre-blending. Judah & the Lion had been cultivating a folk rock hip-hop sound from their inception, blending bluegrass instruments with modern sounds. However, the band’s sophomore album they defined the style of music they were making: Folk Hop N’ Roll.
HEY, MY LIFE IS REAL GREAT. Founded by lead singer and guitarist Judah Akers when he met an eclectic grew of musicians at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, Judah & the Lion started out as a Christian Rock act though started to distance themselves from the genre in their discography following the release of their first EP. The band name Judah & the Lion draws a comparison to the Old Testament poetry in which God is called “The Lion of Judah.” The band’s career started by winning a band competition at Belmont University, which is quite a feat as the mid-sized private Christian college is the alma matter of some of the biggest names in CCM, Country, Pop, and Indie music including Steven Curtis Chapman, Brad Paisley, COIN, Tyler Hubbard of Florida Georgia Line, Lee Ann Womack, Josh Turner, and LANY as well as being home to Mike Curb School of Entertainment and Business, founded by the music producer and CEO of Curb Records. The band gained recognition for their folk rock sound in the early to mid-’10s, but their sophomore record Folk Hop N’ Roll was their highest charting record and boasted the number 19 Hot AC radio hit and platinum-selling single “Take It All Back.”
AND IT FEELS SO NICE WHEN THE PEOPLE SING ALONG. Rocking an unkempt David Crowder beard, the former college basketball player Judah Akers and crew offer that post-R.E.M., Mumford & Sons sound that was off-putting to me when Judah & the Lion was blowing up in popularity. It seemed like this band was talented, but their particular sound wasn’t for me at the time. I think I became interested in them, though, when I heard an interview with Akers on Lead Singer Syndrome. Being no longer threatened by Jock Rock and listening to the band’s vision helped to make me realize their talent. Today’s version of “Take It All Back” (String Quartet Op. 9 in C Major) confuses me, though. I haven’t been able to find any additional information about this single. Did the band sample a classical composer or is the piece original? And if so, why is it the 9th opus? The band included this track on their second full-length record, and even with the EPs, J&tL hadn’t released nine records, I don’t think. However, there is a Vivaldi-like Mandolin Concerto sound to this song, which sounds similar to Vivaldi’s “Spring” from The Four Seasons. Lyrically, “Take It All Back” is a song about dreaming of the future. No sacrifice is too big for love. Money and fame are only possible with a support system.
Tracking the career of Aaron Marsh reveals a musical diversity rarely seen in artists today. Educated at a performing arts high school, Marsh learned horns and strings. He went on to form Copeland, which was a guitar-based rock band in their early days, taking influence from groups like Gin Blossoms and post-grunge bands. The band’s trajectory strayed from rock to experimental electronic music, and Marsh took on other musical ventures, featuring on several projects for bands like Underoath and Anberlin and producing other artists, such as The Myrid, Anberlin, and This Wild Life.
I FOUND YOU DARKER THAN THE SKY ABOVE. In 2017, Marsh provided the sung chorus on the politically-charged Propaganda track, “Cynical,” a song that lambastes American Christian white nationalism. However, a month before Propaganda’s Crooked Wayswas released, Aaron Marsh released a new project, Rabbit in the Snare, with indie rapper Ivan Ives under the moniker The Lulls in Traffic. Ives is a Los Angeles-based rapper born in Russia but emigrated to the US at a young age. His solo music incorporates classical music, traditional Russian music, and the Russian language, making for a unique hip hop sound. Rabbit in the Snare, though, sounds more similar to Copeland, particularly serving as a transitional album between Ixoraand Blushing. Prior to Rabbit, Copeland had flirted with darker electronic music on Eat, Sleep, Repeat.Marsh would include explicit lyrics on Copeland’s 2019 album, but Ives’ lines on the final track, “The Rope to Pull Yourself Together” were off-brand for Copeland at the time. The dark indie electronic sounds of Copeland-like melodies on Rabbit with the spoken word rap on the record doesn’t make for very active music, but it will steal the show if left as ambient music for coffee-shop listening.
WHEN THE NIGHT FALLS, YOU’LL COME BACK TO ME. I need you, but you strangle me. When you go, I miss the tightness. Maybe I’m the one who’s in the wrong? “Winding Ivy” throws the listener into the middle of toxic relationship. Beginning with the dissonance of feedback from electronic instruments playing a chord that sounds intensely desperate, the song quickly resolves into melancholy piano, laying the template for Ivan Ives’ rapping that sounds more like reading a story book or a letter to lover. The picture we get from Ives’ rapping and Marsh’s singing is a co- dependence between the “ivy” and the speaker, whom the ivy wraps itself around. The imagery leads listeners to visualize a place where ivy has overgrown the garden it was intended to decorate. When the ivy overtakes the garden, it blocks the sunlight when it grows up. It covers the patio furniture and strangles the gnomes. The garden tools can’t be found, and who knows what’s living among the ivy? Maintaining the beautiful lawn takes effort. The ivy must be kept in place, otherwise it renders your backyard useless. But take too much control–spread the Roundup too liberally, the beautiful ivy will die. Gardening is hard work. What a metaphor.
We all have a past and we are all measured by the mistakes and accomplishments that we’ve made in our past. And just because we want to turn over a new leaf doesn’t mean that others see the new us as we want to be seen now. Take, for example, today’s band, an indie rock band from New Orleans. After the demise of the Christian Rock band Earthsuit, several members went on to form an experimental rock band called MUTEMATH.
I’VE WORKED IN THE BLAZING SUN. Earthsuit gained acclaim both in and outside of Christian circles. Members of dc Talk and delirious? and Rebecca St. James all proclaimed that Earthsuit’s artistic, experimental yet well-produced record Kaleidoscope Superiorwas what the future of Christian music looked like. But Earthsuit departed from Sparrow Records and released an independent album, The Rise of Modern Simulation, that failed to reach the level of success of its predecessor. By 2003, the band that came “from ’98 to ’99, 2000 and beyond” decided to call it quits with lead singer Adam LeClave starting a band called Macrosick and backing vocalist/rapper/keyboardist Paul Meany forming MUTEMATH with fellow Earthsuit drummer Darren King and bassist Roy Mitchell. MUTEMATH produced an EP titled Reset which contained the band’s first radio singles marketed to Christian Rock radio: “Control” and “Peculiar People,” the latter being one of the band’s most explicitly Christian songs based on 1 Peter 2:9.
I KNOW THERE’S GOT TO BE ANOTHER LEVEL. MUTEMATH signed to Warner Music and the label tried to release their music through their Christian imprint, Word Records. Word released Reset, but when it came time to release the band’s eponymous debut, the band wanted more exposure than an obscure rack under the Christian/ Gospel section, so they sued the record label to remove any mention of their Christian past. While the lawsuit took place, the original version of MUTEMATH was shelved. The lawsuit ended with a re-negotiated contract, a re-released debut, and a radio single, “Typical.” With the release of their first album, MUTEMATH obtained coveted tours, late-night spots, and buzz that should have made them one of the staples in late ’00s alternative/indie rock. The band was also boosted when American Idol contestant Chris Sligh sang “Typical” on the show. What went wrong with MUTEMATH? I stopped listening past the band’s follow-up, Armistice because I felt that their style and mine were going different ways. Their songs no longer spoke to me the way that punk, emo, and pop did. Maybe the band never really followed up their first hit, but they certainly aren’t defined by it. But somehow, I still think that nothing beats listening to Earthsuit on my three-disc changer. MUTEMATH has some of those elements, but it still feels lacking.
Mixtapemotions 