Mixtapemotions

  • Machines” by Paradise Now, Friday, March 22, 2024

    Imagine being a new band in 2019, releasing your first EP which has earned enough hype to put you on a big tour with a veteran band, only to have that tour canceled because the industry came to a halt with the pandemic. That’s what happened to brothers Sam and Ben Taylor and their friend Nathan Beaton of Paradise Now. The Welsh band did not tour with Disciple in 2020 as planned, however, they released an extra EP called Lockdown Mixtape to lead up to their full-length debut, We Never Die, both released in 2021. The band’s social media has been quiet since the release of the LP.

    IT’S GETTING OLD. In 2019, Tooth & Nail Records revealed that they had signed a new band. The label posted a photo of the band’s silhouette and asked fans to guess who had been signed. I commented “dc talk?” which got a few laughs from the community. Sometimes when a band is signed with Tooth & Nail Records, listeners know who the band is. Often it’s a band connected to the scene; someone who has opened for a bigger Tooth & Nail act. Often these bands have a well-grown pre-signee fanbase. On the Labeled Podcast, host Matt Carter has talked about how the label doesn’t usually sign a band from out of the blue. Yet some bands seem random on an otherwise connected label, and Paradise Now seems to have come from out of nowhere. The band’s Spotify biography talks about the band forming an eclectic sound in Wales “without a local music scene.” There are a few famous Welsh bands, such as my bloody valentine, Manic Street Preachers, LOSTPROPHETS, and Badfinger, and solo recording artists, such as Tom Jones, Duffy, Donna Lewis, John Cale, and Bonnie Tyler–but according to Paradise Now, the local music scene is just whoever happens to wander into Bridgend, and music lovers couldn’t build a niche rock scene as in America and even London. 

    WE’RE BETTER NOW. Unfortunately, it seems that Paradise Now has become the all-too-common story of a Tooth & Nail band underperforming and then disappearing. This month, Spotify shows that Paradise Now has only around nine thousand monthly listeners. However, looking at streaming numbers of other smaller Tooth & Nail bands, Paradise Now’s nine thousand monthly streams look average. However, I wonder if Tooth & Nail will resurrect the band. Paradise Now being in Wales seems to be a great barrier to their American audience, especially with being able to jump on tours. Perhaps the band’s momentum was a casualty of the pandemic. But today, we’re not looking at the band’s debut album, but we’re going back to an obscure track on their EP, Supernatural. The band has a tight modern rock sound, influenced by worship music, hard rock, and electronic music. Three of the six songs appear on We Never Die in 2021. “WildOnes” gets a remix and today’s song “Machines” gets an acoustic version on the follow-up EP, Lockdown Mixtape. “Machines” is one of my favorite songs by the band. It showcases lead singer Sam Taylor’s earnest vocals, and the lyrics deal with fighting against “non-stop goals,” being wrong and trying to find “a better way,” and begging the listener “Please don’t judge me quite yet.” It’s also one of my “chilly songs”–creating warmth out of a cold atmosphere. I don’t know when and if we’ll hear anything else from Paradise Now, but I think they are certainly worth a listen.

    Read the lyrics on Genius.

    Lyric video:

  • "Trouble" by Coldplay, Thursday, March 21, 2024

     


















    In 2018, I met a young man who claimed to like “Indie music. You know, like Coldplay and Imagine Dragons?” I hope I didn’t roll my eyes in the middle of the conversation because it was extremely hard to bite my tongue when he had just named two of the biggest bands in the world. The kid in his early twenties talking to me in my early thirties at the time did, however, remember a time when calling Coldplay indie was more accurate. My first exposure to Coldplay came in 2001 when they released their third single “Trouble” in America. Specifically, I remember watching the music video with my dad on MTV or MTV2. While “Yellow” may be the more remembered single from Coldplay’s early days, I only have recollection of hearing the song a while after hearing “Trouble.”

    THEY SPUN A WEB FOR ME. Coldplay formed in 1997 when the members attended University College London. After releasing two EPs and signing to Parlophone Records, the band released their debut album Parachutes in 2000 and had their first hit with the album’s lead single, “Shiver.” The album was released just as interest in the so-called genre of Brit-pop was fading out of favor, especially in America, yet experimental British bands like Radiohead and Muse were maintaining and even gaining popularity with music hipsters in America. However, a band’s UK citizenship wasn’t a guaranteed hit back around the turn of the millennium. Coldplay’s gradual increase in popularity in the first years of the twenty-first century was at a weird time in rock music, mainly because the band was a mellow rock band. The lachrymose piano on “Trouble” sounded so different from what anyone was doing in rock or pop music. The song was slow and dark, and the ballad’s lyrics expressed a subject of remorse that perhaps only an established act could pull off as a minor hit between upbeat bangers.

    AND THOUGHT OF ALL THE STUPID THINGS I’D SAID. Coldplay certainly didn’t stay in the land of dreary Indie Pop. “Trouble” didn’t chart on the Hot 100, but the more accessible “Yellow” peaked at #48. The band’s second album A Rush of Blood to the Head began to see more popularity and by the time Coldplay released X&Y they had become a household name. Moreover, other British bands started appearing, such as Keane, and the pop-rock band became a huge trend in the mid-’00s as bands like The Fray, Snow Patrol, and OneRepublic racked up hits partly due to the genre’s playability in Prime Time television dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy. All the while, the comparison between Coldplay and U2 grew. Songs like “Trouble” had musical complexity, a trait selected against the evolution of marketability. Still, for all of the hipsters out there who hate Coldplay, please remember that the opening track of the soundtrack that popularized The Shins, Garden State, is Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic.” So, is Coldplay an indie band? Definitely not now. But just like hipster college radio darlings R.E.M. and those listening to The Cure before they were on the radio, Coldplay followed the process of building their career from college radio to MTV and then to the pop charts. 




  • "High Hopes" by Kodaline,Wednesday, March 20, 2024 (repost)

    Three years ago, I taught a lesson on Irish music to my students. I played examples of Celtic instrumental music. I showed videos of River Dance. I played sad songs like “The Parting Glass” and “Danny Boy.” Then I played some famous Irish artists like Enya,  U2, and The Cranberries. Then I played  Kodaline‘s “High Hopes.” When I asked my students which they liked the best, they said Kodaline. But that was kind of a stupid question for a music lover. There are times when I want to listen to Celtic bagpipes and jigs. There are times I want to go out and have fun in an Irish pub and hear Celtic punk rock. There are times I want to listen to U2, and it’s certainly not the same day I want to listen to Enya, but those days happen too. But like my students, I think Kodaline’s first album fits more into my everyday listening habits.

    BROKEN BOTTLES IN THE HOTEL LOBBY. While In A Perfect World  is a great everyday listen, you have to be careful watching the music video for “High Hopes.” It’s a beautiful love story between an older man and a somewhat younger woman. The couple meets when she runs away from her wedding and she saves him from trying to kill himself in his car. They begin their relationship when he takes her to his meager cottage.  The two build their relationship, but the tone of the video changes when they are lying in bed and he notices the scars on her back. Then, as the guitar solo starts, the couple is shot by a man carrying a shotgun. The two are in a pool of blood.  The man wakes up in the hospital and sees her bed is empty. At the end of the video, she hugs him from behind. Lead singer Steve Garrigan wrote “High Hopes” after a bad breakup. I think the graphic nature of this video is meant to be metaphorical. The woman saves the older man from his destructive ways. They fall in love but when he discovers her scars, the relationship reaches levels of problems that lead to another person/outside factor “shooting”  both partners. The end of the video could either mean she left him and he’s remembering her, and the embrace is just holding on to memories, or it could be that she left for a while but comes back to him. Either way, the video is a bit shocking, so I didn’t play it for my students. 

     I KNOW IT’S CRAZY TO BELIEVE IN STUPID THINGS. In 2021, Garrigan released his memoir, titled High Hopes: Making Music, Losing My Way, Learning to Live, in which the singer talks about his shyness and became the lead singer of the immensely popular Irish band. He talks openly about therapy and living with social anxiety and how music was the vehicle to a place of healing. For me today, though, “High Hopes” got me thinking about how futile it seems to get ahead. It seems that I’ll always be plugging along at the same type of job, even if I get more education. Every year the resources dry up just a little bit more, and you’re left feeling as if you should be grateful for your job in the ever-growing “hard economic times.”  Still, why are more duties added to the contract and no extra pay? Will the situation convalesce back to what it was? I think back to my hopeful outlook after just graduating from university and how oblivious I was to how the world actually works. And yet, the world keeps spinning around the sun. We have to have hope or else we go crazy. We have to believe that somehow the systems will work out or that we will find a solution hidden in an overlooked option. High hopes feel like friendly hills from far away, but as the day gets closer, they become jagged mountains. But we climb a mountain the same way we take a walk, one step at a time. 

    Read “High Hopes” by Kodaline on Genius.

  • “Whatever It Takes” by Lifehouse, Tuesday, March 19, 2024

    Lifehouse was a made-for-TV band from their 2001 debut. The band was commercially marketed to many shows and movies. But unlike many of the other artists filling TV soundtracks, Lifehouse had radio hits. The band had Billboard’s number 1 song of 2001, “Hanging By a Moment” and the number 5 hit “You and Me.” Both songs feature two different sounds of the ‘00s rock band. The band debuted with the post-grunge sounds on No Name Face. “Hanging By a Moment” eclipses the other two singles, “Sick Cycle Carousel” and “Breathing.” The band’s second album, Stanley Climbfall, also appeared as a sophomore slump, with the album’s two singles, “Spin” and “Take Me Away,” failing to impact the pop charts. Often this is the end of the story for pop-rock bands.


    I’LL KEEP US TOGETHER. While rock audiences were ambivalent to Lifehouse, the age of pop-rock was at its peak in the mid-’00s. Lifehouse continued releasing rock songs, but no longer with heavy guitars and drums on their eponymous third record in 2005. The TV-ready tracks saw the band return to Smallville and return to pop radio with “You and Me.” The band followed up their third record with 2007’s Who We Are. The three singles were moderately successful on Billboard’s Hot 100, but much more successful on the Adult Contemporary and Adult Alternative Airplay (AAA) formats. Today’s song, “Whatever It Takes,” was the band’s second single from the album. It’s a straightforward earnest ballad, of which lead singer Jason Wade said, “I think the main message of this song, at least for me personally when I was writing the lyrics, is just how difficult it can be to be in a relationship.” Unlike previous Lifehouse albums, RadioU and TVU didn’t promote the singles, though Jesusfreakhideout.com reviewed the album.

    DON’T HIDE THE BROKEN PARTS I NEED TO SEE. I always found the evolution of Lifehouse to be a fascinating study of music niches. Lifehouse was never a cool band. Their post-grunge wasn’t dark enough. A commercialized gravelly-sounding voice was no Kurt Cobain or even Scott Stapp, nor was the band mainstream “butt rock” enough to be like Seether, Three Days Grace, or the other post-grunge bands of the ‘00s. Instead, the band went to the AAA stations to save their career. I remember OneRepublic’s Ryan Tedder praising the AAA format as a sweet spot money-maker for songwriters. He said that the chart was “uniquely American.” Audiences aren’t rapt by these formulaic songs. It’s background music at a diner or hair salon. But tapping into this market and mastering the formula might get a number 1 hit from an otherwise Billboard top 10, or in Lifehouse’s case a top 10 for a low peak on the Hot 100. Music genre and marketing is interesting. Lifehouse was a TV-placement band, which made an uncool band cool. Why is the AAA chart uncool? I used to think it was because it was mellow, but there are a lot of cool artists who are maybe too mellow for the pop chart and too alternative for the adult contemporary format—Phoebe Bridgers and Sufjan Stevens, for example. What about Lifehouse, then, made them perfect for the format?


  • “Better Than I Used to Be” by Mat Kearney ft. AFSheeN, Monday, March 18, 2024 (repost)

    Mat Kearney‘s music has changed a lot from when he debuted in 2004 with his first record Bullet on Peter Furler‘s Christian label InPop Records. Kearney’s early work infused acoustic singer-songwriter styles with hip hop, a style the singer mostly abandoned by this third record, City of Black & White. Nine years after that stylistic departure and three records that didn’t seem to move far beyond the folk-pop sound, Kearney released a poppier, more electronic-inspired record, CRAZYTALK in 2018, which produced the single “Better Than I Used to Be.” 


    MY PLANE LEAVES TOMORROW. Teaming up with Iranian-American electronic artist AFSheeN for the first track on CRAZYTALK, “Better Than I Used to Be,” Kearney expands upon his sound. Although AFSheeN has worked with much bigger artists than  Kearney, remixing and producing, AFSheeN’s most streamed song is Kearney’s 2018 hit. The singer-songwriter has written for K-pop acts such as NCT and BoA and American artists Selena Gomez and Madonna. AFSheeN’s LA man-bun adds to the Nashville-bro vibe that Mat Kearney exudes in his discography; this time playing in the higher registers that synthesizers give a song rather than a guitar-based track. While the acoustic version of this track is worth a listen, the original propels   CRAZYTALK  to sound distinct from Kearney’s previous work. Elsewhere on the record, Kearney collaborates with Filous and RAC, a Portuguese-American remix artist. The neon pink album cover also sets an ultra-modern vibe for a Mat Kearney record. West-coast-born and Nashville-based, Kearney fits into the group of Nashville musicians who rub shoulders with country stars, CCM big-wigs, indie rock bands, and coffee shop singer-songwriters. CRAZYTALK attempts to transcend whatever sound that is. 
     
    BUT MY HEART HAS ALREADY LANDED. A strong point in Kearney’s music is his use of nostalgia. The “kids in the back seat” reminds listeners of their own youth. The video for the song, though, shows a youth who was less than ideal, growing up on the poorer side of town in a rough neighborhood. Kearney talks about this song being inspired by his relationship with his wife, actress Annie Kearney, though the lyrics and video hint that it could also be about family members or friends of the singer. But it is the love of someone special that makes Kearney claim that he is “better than [he] used to be.” It’s that love that drives him home from his touring and work. It’s that love that influences him to continue to create art. And while Kearney’s fanbase no longer pushes him up the Billboard Hot 100–the mix of Christians who want an edgier artist who might say hell or damn occasionally out of context and the left-over Grey’s Anatomy fans— the fanbase is still strong. I’ve still yet to try 2021’s January Flower, but I’m pretty sure that I can find something organic and honest on every Mat Kearney record, whether from ’06 or ’21. But is CRAZYTALK better than he used to be back in 2009 with City of Black & White? Not quite. It’s hard to beat an album that’s an artist’s musical awakening record when they shed the silliness of their youthful songwriting quirks and only refine the excellent parts of themselves. Today, adding electronics is kind of a lazy fix to try to keep things relevant. Somehow so many listeners–myself included–fall for those sweet electronic hooks.

  • “We’ve Only Just Begun” by Run Kid Run (repost), Sunday, March 17, 2024

    In 1996, David Josiah Curtis and friends formed a punk band called Side Walk Slam. The Southern Illinois-based band released an independent record, Rock Anthems from the Midwest, in 1999 before signing to a small label, Boot to Head Records, and releasing Two Steps Forward, Five Steps Back the next year. Then in 2001, the band signed with Tooth & Nail Records and released three records between 2001 and 2003. Little by little, the bare-bones punk rock band started incorporating more and more production on their records. By their 2003 record, And We Drive, the band even included a piano. It was after releasing And We Drive, that the band decided that Side Walk Slam had strayed from their Punk Rock sound so much that they decided to change their name, rebranding with a new sound and retiring the expectations that the band would sound a particular way. 

    YOU’LL HAVE YOUR UPS AND DOWNS. Run Kid Run released their debut record This Is Who We Are three years after Side Walk Slam released their final album. The three years between releases was a long period compared to the way that Side Walk Slam grinded out a record a year between 1999 and 2003. The band recorded their debut record with James Paul Wisner, who had produced Further Seems Forever, Dashboard Confessional, New Found Glory, and Underoath. The new sound of Run Kid Run was poppy and singable. The band’s video for “We’ve Only Just Begun” was even featured in American Eagle stores. Was this the band’s big break as Relient K’s video for “Sadie Hawkins Dance” was played in Abercrombie and Fitch stores?  

    YOU’VE GOT YOUR DESTINATION. Run Kid Run fully embraced the Christian pop genre with their second record, 2008’s Love at the Core. Their piano ballad “Freedom” shows how far the band went from their punk rock roots. On the Labeled Podcast, lead singer David Josiah Curtis talked about their sophomore album being the band’s peak and their inability to follow up the record because of the seismic change in the Christian music industry between their second and third record, 2011’s Patterns. He talked about touring with Hawk Nelson and thinking about seeing that band as a model of success in the Christian music industry—headlining church shows, and touring on a bus. But success is a model based on inequality, and simply putting in the time in the music industry doesn’t necessarily equate to success. Run Kid Run disappeared after their third record. Curtis took a part-time position at a church, and the other band members started taking more time with their families. The band played a few one-off shows, but ultimately haven’t come back with a full-length since Patterns. However, in 2022, the band reunited, not as Run Kid Run, but as Side Walk Slam to play the Audiofeed festival in their home of Illinois. Curtis explained that the band felt free to play both Side Walk Slam and Run Kid Run songs under their original moniker. Punk Rock purists just have to put aside the band’s love for a catchy melody.

    Read the lyrics on Genius.


  • “The Beautiful Letdown" by Switchfoot, Saturday, March 16, 2024

     

    Jon Foreman became the liberal long-haired surfboard philosopher to millions of youth group kids in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. The San Diego-based band Switchfoot, firmly based in the West Coast faith-based music tradition, often challenged the ideas of capitalism in Christianity and the over-politicization of Christianity, while never seeming to have found all parts of the solution in organized religion. And yet, lead singer Jonathan Foreman, offered that while the “faith of our fathers” isn’t perfect, he has not found a better solution. The Beautiful Letdown was the band’s thesis statement–

    Foreman had been rewriting this thesis statement for three albums, and after their fourth record, he would expound upon that statement.


    I WILL CARRY MY CROSS TO WHERE I DON’T BELONG. Whereas my mom could tell me every track on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors or The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls, many youth group kids my age know every track on Switchfoot’s Beautiful Letdown. Five of the 12 songs from Letdown were released as singles on Christian radio stations. The title track wasn’t a radio hit and given its track position and that it is a slow song that’s not the most memorable track on the album. However, the lyrics express discontentment with a failed American dream. The song always reminded me of “Amazing Grace.” Both the John Newton-penned hymn and the Jon Foreman-penned ballad express a shift in perspective. “Lost” and “blind” become “found” and sighted. The “Beautiful Letdown” is about realizing that all the world claimed to offer is not as good as it was promised, allowing the speaker to realize: “I don’t belong here.”  

    EASY LIVING. Foreman is iconoclastic to the American religion of capitalism. Switchfoot’s earlier albums were influenced by punk–a then trio of surf rockers. Adding a fourth member to the band, keyboardist Jerome Fontamillas, and signing to a major label arguably made them less punk-rock and much more refined in sound. But socially, Foreman keeps the punk rock lyrics, waging war against capitalism. Today, the message to the Christian right might be a spicy jalapeno to choke on, but the occasional Switchfoot song between Newsboys worship track and Chris Tomlin didn’t make liberal voices on Christian radio too exorbitant. And after all, everyone is the agonist in their own story, so unlike the lyrics of “Ammunition,” passive Switchfoot listeners wouldn’t necessarily feel that “we’re the issue.” But for some of us who listened, twenty years later, thinking back “when the world was younger,” the systems we were born into–Christian-centered capitalistic nationalism, often white and heteronormative–gave us an identity and a goal. We, too, Switchfoot listeners have discovered that the proprietors of this belief were corralling us into a future that was just as broken as the ‘90s/ ‘00s get first-world rich American dream. We all must carry our crosses to a place where we don’t belong.

    Jonas Brothers cover: 

  • "You Are My Sunshine" by The Civil Wars, Friday, March 15, 2024































    “You Are My Sunshine” is a popular folk song copyrighted and recorded by American singer-songwriter Jimmie Davis in 1939, though its authorship is disputed. Davis later became the governor of Louisiana, and “You Are My Sunshine” became the state’s official song. Davis’s recorded versions are not the definitive version of the song, though. Many artists have covered the song, such as Johnny Cash, Christina Perri, and  Zach Bryan. Each time the song is covered, the artist brings an emotional layer to the beautiful song. Cash anthologizes the song in the American songbook and Perri emphasizes the lullaby-like qualities of the song. 


    THE OTHER NIGHT DEAR, AS I LAY SLEEPING. “You Are My Sunshine” is a 

     cradle song many mothers sing to their children. It’s a bright love song with a twinge of

    melancholy that grows upon examination. It’s a song full of longing and desire with the

    full knowledge that the sun may be covered by the clouds. The speaker hopes that, just

    like the sun, the speaker’s love will appear every day. Even when the rain keeps the sun

    away, there is hope that soon the sun will reappear, just as the speaker’s love. The song

    is a phantom that haunts one of my favorite albums, Copeland’s You Are My Sunshine. Though the track doesn’t appear on the album, the pensive mood and the quiet

    moments of happiness saturate Aaron Marsh’s lyrics. Copeland did, however, record

    the song for their Grey Man EP, released after their fourth album. It’s an eerie-

    sounding version, reminiscent of the art song “Kite” from In Motion with almost

    creepy instrumentation but with just enough warmth to chase the residual icyness

    of winter. 


    YOU MAKE ME HAPPY WHEN SKIES ARE GRAY. Today’s version of “You Are My Sunshine” comes from folk-country band The Civil Wars. The duo comprises singer-songwriter John Paul White and former Dove Award-nominated CCM singer Joy Williams.  The Civil Wars version is the moodiest of the versions mentioned, which is indicative of the duo’s catalog. The group formed in 2009 and broke up in 2014, due to creative differences between White and Williams. The break-up of the duo caused a lot of fan speculation, which Williams has talked about vaguely. The duo was known for their intense chemistry, despite both members remaining married to other people throughout the duo’s tenure. Were the duo’s professional and personal relationships mutually exclusive? When Williams talked to Relevant Magazine’s podcast, she said that she had been “called every name in the book” both when she left Christian music and when The Civil Wars broke up. Some Christian and Country listeners assumed the worst about Willaims’ character. After releasing two critically acclaimed albums and an abrupt tour cancellation, the duo released a free download of “You Are My Sunshine,” which had appeared as a European-edition bonus track on their first album, Barton Hollow. The sadness of the version and the longing mirrored the fans who wanted just a little more from The Civil Wars.

     

  • "Take Me" (As You Found Me) [Live From Williamsburg] by Anberlin (reworked repost), Thursday, March 14, 2024

     Anberlin had recorded their seventh studio album, Vital, with Aaron Sprinkle when they set out on an acoustic tour. The band known for their energetic live shows decided to create an intimate atmosphere, reinterpreting some of their classics, fan favorites, and deep cuts. Anberlin actually did two acoustic tours, one before Vital and one after the album’s release; however, the tour is only captured in a one-night performance in Williamsburg, later released as a bonus disc with Devotion, a massive repacking of Vital. The concert starts with an album cut, “Take Me” (As You Found Me), from Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place, the album the band was still promoting. 

    YOU’RE HERE WITH ME. If there is an album that Anberlin would say is their peak sound, they would probably say it was Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place. The band delves into their post-punk influences. From the album’s promotion– the fashion chosen for the photoshoots, the talk of Dylan Thomas’ “Poem on His Birthday,” where the album’s title comes from, the quotes of Martin Luther King, Jr., working with the ‘90s legendary producer Brendon O’Brien— it felt like Anberlin was making the album that they wanted to. But it was the first Anberlin record I struggled through. I thought the lyrics were flat compared to their previous works, the songs were short and simple, and the album left me wanting a lot more. And the album’s mixing was shameful for a major label album. I wanted the band to explore the dark landscape they were sculpting with music and lyrics. The biggest single from the album, “Impossible,” was a similar track to some of the band’s biggest hits, but with a shiny major-label production budget. The song reached number 5 on the Alternative Rock charts.

    NOW THAT YOU’RE GONE. “Take Me” (As You Found Me) was supposed to be Anberlin’s breakthrough crossover hit, at least the way the band talks about it. Producer Brendon ‘O Brian loved it. Could Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place be Anberlin’s Joshua Tree? No. The storytelling in the song is too abstract, and the listener doesn’t know who the speaker is talking about. Is it God or a girl? The speaker both admires and feels betrayed by the subject. In the live stream for Dark Is the Way, As You Found Me, lead singer Stephen Christian explains that the line “Who’s going to drain my blood, now that you’re gone” refers to a divorced couple he met in Nashville. Even though they were divorced, the ex-wife took care of her ex-husband, driving him every day to receive dialysis. That context makes the song more interesting because it shows the conflict of love that seems to be implied in the song. It seems to be about a feeling of conflicted love–can’t live with that person, can’t live without them. With a little clearer songwriting, a mass audience could have gotten behind Stephen Christian’s passionate vocals–and the live version is much better. For Anberlin, “Take Me” is the song that could have been. 


  • “Going Under” by This Beautiful Republic, Wednesday, March 13, 2024

    Tooth & Nail Records became a front-runner in the race for general-market-ready Christian Rock. Feeding bands like Anberlin, Mae, and The Almost to major labels and supporting Underoath as they shaped the world of metalcore, the label defined a generation of Christian music. No longer were rock festivals giving Christian Rock the stink eye. But as the label’s marketing expanded to the general market, some complained that the message of the bands had been watered down. The name of Jesus rarely appeared in lyrics printed in the Ryan Clark-illustrated flyleaf in the crystal jewel case. That’s where Flicker Records and ForeFront Records came in, offering bands with distinctly Christian lyrics. That’s where we meet ForeFront Records’ This Beautiful Republic.


    DOUBT HAS NEVER PROVEN ANYTHING. This Beautiful Republic formed in 2004 when alumni of Toledo Christian Schools in Toledo, Ohio joined California drummer Cameron Toews. After the band’s lead singer left the band, energetic singer Ben Olin joined the band. The band signed to ForeFront Records in November 2006 and released a debut EP, Casting Off, in January 2007. In April, the band released their debut album, Even Heroes Need a Parachute. The pop-punk sound was new for ForeFront Records, which except for Stacie Orrecio’s mainstream success earlier in the decade and TobyMac’s solo career, had failed to keep up in the ‘00s. The Allan Solomon-produced project had a fresh energy for the Christian market. Solomon had many Christian records credits including Flicker Records’s Everyday Sunday and Sparrow Records’ Sanctus Real. The band released songs to both Christian Rock radio and Christian Hit radio, with “Going Under” being their biggest hit on Christian Rock radio and “Jesus to the World” on Christian Hit radio, reaching number 5 and 25, respectively. 


    FAITH AND FEAR ARE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE. This Beautiful Republic released two albums, with Perceptions released in 2008, a year after Even Heroes Need a Parachute. A feature with Aaron Gillespie of The Almost and Underoath on the song “My God” gave the perception that the band was gaining momentum. But with the shifts in the music industry, Christian Rock was becoming less marketable. This Beautiful Republic didn’t have a crossover-ready sound as their lyrics often twaddled Christian catchphrases. Shortly after the band released Perceptions, lead singer Ben Olin announced leaving the band. In 2010, the band left ForeFront Records and broke up in 2011. On some occasions, I remember this band. I saw the band at Cornerstone in a small tent and was charmed by Olin’s stage presence. There was an intimate feeling in a small afternoon crowd, the band dressed in the bomber jackets that they wore on their first album’s cover. Somehow, after the show, Ben added me on Facebook, which none of the bands did. He was a cool guy in a slightly less cool band. And while the lyrics may not hold up, I will always hold that concert in my fond memories. 

    Read the lyrics on Genius.