You could probably derive 2000s Christian Rock and Christian Rock adjacent bands from two sources: Linkin Park and Jimmy Eat World. Yesterday was an example of how Linkin Park influenced Christian Rock. Today’s example is Jimmy Eat World, particularly their 2001 hit “The Middle.” The first single released from Never Take Friendship Personalsees Anberlin remembering their poppier tracks from Blueprints for the Blue Market, but taking a much more mature approach to writing the lyrics. Rather than a complaint about how “Girls speak in code” and cliches that sound a bit sexist in today’s world, “A Day Late” relies on storytelling about something that could have happened in the past, and really shouldn’t happen now.
SO LET ME GET THIS STRAIGHT…Never Take Friendship Personal was an album all about relationships, and it was a perfect album for high school. While certainly not as big as Fall Out Boy, I found the lyrics on Friendship to be the perfect soundtrack to drive to school and back home every day Junior and Senior year. “A Day Late” tells the story about someone from the speaker’s past who admits that they had feelings for him. The speaker says thanks but no thanks because “insignificantly enough [they] both have significant others.” However, the song is left ambiguous because the speaker “must confess you’re so much more than I remember” and “Only time will tell” what will happen. The speaker decides to keep this person his “day late friend.” I’m not sure how his “insignificant significant other” would feel about this. It’s a fun, tongue-in-cheek song that probably could get a lot of scrutiny from the “kissed dating goodbye,” “true love waits” culture and those books sold a few shelves over in the Family Christian Bookstore.
WE ARE WHO WE WERE WHEN. In 2014, Anberlin decided to release a final album and tour the world for a final time. On this final tour, the band booked two special venues: one in Australia to record Never Take Friendship Personal from start to finish and one in New York City to play Citiesfront to back. However, in New York, Anberlin surprised fans with an encore performance of Never Take Friendship Personal, which was recorded and released the next year. Additionally, Anberlin played another date in NYC which was streamed on Yahoo! for a concert series the website was doing that year. While I would have loved to be in New York City to celebrate my two favorite Anberlin albums, I was happy that I could see the band for what I thought would be the last time live on the Internet, even in South Korea. Listening back to this live recording, Stephen yells out “One more time New York City.” Hearing that was like watching the series finale of a favorite show. Even though the album isn’t over yet, it feels like things are wrapping up. It’s not time to say goodbye quite yet, but departure is imminent. Say goodbye to your day late friend.
The BEC in BEC Records is short for Brandon Ebel Company and is an imprint label of Ebel’s other company, Tooth & Nail Records. Today, the label serves as the Contemporary Christian side of Ebel’s business, just as Solid State serves as the heavier music side; however, the distinction between the label imprint have not always been so defined. Case in point is Falling Up, whose career started as an explicitly Christian band but later became the creative outlet of vocalist and songwriter Jessy Ribordy to write his science fiction song lyrics. By the band’s third record, Falling Up had become much less about Christian music, and much more about abstract sci-fi landscapes, littered with Greek mythology. And after the band’s fourth album, the label and many fans had lost interest.
IN THIS MOMENT SYNCHRONIZED INSIDE. But let’s go back to the single that helped the band sell over 50,000 albums the first week of their debut Crashings’ release—“Broken Heart.” This was February of 2004. Linkin Park had redefined the rap-rock genre by mixing electronica and nu-metal. The prior year, Evanescence had released Fallen and harder music had found a spot on Top 40 radio. On the Christian side, Thousand Foot Krutch was killing it with their move to Tooth & Nail and their move away from rap-rock. Christian music could be explicitly Christian or not, and no one seemed to care either way. In fact, crossover success was seen as a pretty good thing. Groups on Tooth & Nail were finding their way onto Warped Tour and MuchMusic, MTV2, and whatever video stations that were still playing videos. Kutless was still a rock band and Jeremy Camp was a rocker with CCM appeal. And the mastermind behind this new wave of Christian Rock was Aaron Sprinkle, producing hit record after hit record. Crashings is an intense album that leaves you wondering where to categorize it, and the lead single, “Broken Heart,” is a good example of the genre-bending style of the record.
WILL I LEARN TO LET IT GO? I remember when I first heard “Broken Heart” on the Saturday night program on the local CCM radio program. The song gave my stereo a workout. Everything about the song is intense–guitars, bass, electronics, drums–all at times fighting for control. What wasn’t intense, though, were Jessy Ribordy’s vocals. If you stripped the music away, you’d end up with a kind of emo-sounding *N-SYNC. When I both the album, it was on pretty regular rotation in the car. The middle tracks got a little stale, though the song “Jackson 5” was a massive collaboration between their friend Jon Micah Sumrall (Kutless) and Ryan Clark (Demon Hunter) and rapper Paul Wright. Crashings was a sonically-driven master plan for the future of Christian Rock that ultimately never came to fruition. Falling Up’s success peaked on the first record. Their follow up, Dawn Escapes, explored further sonic directions, but Ribordy’s vaguer lyricism that ultimately lost much of their Christian audience. Now there’s very little talk about Falling Up’s Christian radio days. The band had many fans until their end in 2016, but they are often excluded from the conversation on Bad Christian and Labeled. In some ways, it’s like the band never existed.
The story behind this song is what makes it fascinating for me. In 2011, French DJ David Guetta was recording his follow-up to his breakthrough record. In 2009, his collaboration with Akon in the song “Sexy Chick,” the radio-friendly edit of the song “Sexy Bitch,” had taken radio by storm. This was the early days of EDM finding its way from long-form tracks in the discotheque to topping the Billboard Hot 100 with shorter radio-format songs featuring pop singers. Guetta’s follow-up record was filled with pop stars of the day, but it was this track by a virtually unknown songwriter Sia Furler that not only cemented the careers of Guetta and the elusive pop powerhouse vocalist but EDM and DJ features in pop music. The story that follows reminds me not to give up on my dreams.
YOU SHOOT ME DOWN, BUT I WON’T FALL. If you watch musical talent shows (i.e. The Voice, American Idol, [a country’s] Got Talent), you realize that 1) a winner of those shows hasn’t made it to the radio since Adam Lambert and 2) if someone is going to make it to the radio, they have to be young, good looking and have extraverted star power. Every season of those shows you’ll see a mom whose kids have grown up and are looking for a second act or a dad who sang honky-tonk bars on the side and sadly most of those singers don’t make it past a few episodes. When an older star wins, ie. Taylor Hicks, little happens for that star’s career. Sia was not on a musical talent show, but she didn’t break through in her musical career until she was 35, a dinosaur in her pop-star years. Furthermore, “Titanium” didn’t immediately transport the singer to stardom. It was more of a “whose this?” until her 2014 solo breakthrough, “Chandelier,” when the singer was 38.
I’M BULLETPROOF, NOTHING TO LOSE. So who is Sia? Born in Australia and cousin of the former lead singer Peter Furler of Christian Rock band the Newsboys (gratuitous factoid for you), Sia’s musical career began in Australia. The singer of a defunct ’90s Australian acid jazz band, Sia moved to the U.K. and then to the U.S. to pursue music. She charted mostly, but few knew her. Eventually she gave up pursuing her personal career and shifted to writing for other pop singers. But when she penned “Titanium” for David Guetta, she recorded her own take on what the vocals should sound like. Guetta had offered the guest spot to Mary J. Blige and Katy Perry. But it was Perry that convinced Guetta to keep the original track with Sia singing. And Guetta did, without even telling Sia that he used her track on his album. The song was everywhere in 2011, especially because shows like Glee and movies like Pitch Perfect made singing powerhouse vocals especially cool. While Sia’s vocals are powerful, she is an introvert at heart. She hides her face on stage and uses actors to impersonate her in her music videos. “Titanium” is a power ballad that everyone, even introverts can draw courage from, and I hope it helps you crush your Mondays.
Released on April 7, 2014, High4‘s debut single cowritten and featuring Korea’s darling singer IU, “Not Spring, Love, or Cherry Blossoms” has been a staple of K-pop for the early spring. Since I’ve been in the Southeastern part of Korea, the cherry blossoms (in Korean 벚꽃, Americans typically know them by their Japanese name sakura) have bloomed at the beginning of April and peaked in the first half of the month. In Korea, cherry blossoms are nature’s first photo-op of the year. School is usually a little more laidback the week the pink and white blossoms peak, as everyone must quickly get photo before the delicate flowers fall.
I HAVE NO ONE TO HOLD HANDS WITH AND WALK. When I was growing up and dreaming about experiencing far away places, I thought about eating my way across Europe, seeing golden temples in Thailand or Cambodia, and experiencing the beauty of a Japanese spring. I haven’t been to Japan in the spring; however, a Korean spring is quite breathtaking. The rain and gloom of mid-March gives way to the blooming of peach and plum trees, then the cherry blossoms. And while it’s sad when the cherry blossoms fall, they are only the beginning of all the flowers that bloom until the cosmos in mid autumn. Before Corona, the country held cherry blossom festivals, where large groups of people gathered to walk and take pictures with the country’s favorite flower. As this song mentions, the cherry blossom time is when couples are more visible, often dressed as twins in the same outfit–a Korean practice that takes place year round. It’s a time when those alone may feel extra lonely, but it’s also a time of realization that the youth doesn’t last forever. Just as these fragile flowers last for a week, life too is pushing us forward.
IT’S JUST TOO MUCH, THIS SWEET SPRING WIND. This year was a bit of a cherry blossom disaster. 2021 holds the record for the earliest the cherry blossoms have ever bloomed. The weather was so inconsistent, warm then cold and back and forth and rainstorms to finish off some of the blossoms before they could ever bloom. The cherry blossoms 50 feet away started to fall as closer ones started to bloom. Not great for pictures. The peak in my area was some time in the middle of the week and by the weekend the cherry blossoms were washed away by heavy rains. Not great for couples. And Covid restrictions banned gatherings for more than four people. Not great for group photos. As the vaccines for Covid roll out, we can hope for a better cherry blossom season next year. But for CO2 output that is making the winters warmer, we’ll need another solution for that.
One of the biggest challenges of writing about music that I often run into is there isn’t always a lot to talk about. Just because it’s a good song, doesn’t mean that it is a conversation piece. New music is particularly hard to write about. It takes a lot of research, and it takes quite a few listens over a period of time to pick up the nuance. Furthermore, I mostly write about old music because I have memories associated with it. These memories are acquired over time, and can’t be forced onto a song every Friday with the new release cycle. But when a song has layers of meaning, or in this case, layers of history, not only is it easier to write about, but also I can connect with the song on a deeper level. I won’t be able to get into all of the layers that I want to in this short post, but I’ll see what I can accomplish.
I’M CAUGHT UP IN YOU. In 2019, Taylor Swift announced that she would be rerecording and releasing new versions of her back catalogue. This was a response to her failed attempt to buy back her masters which Scooter Braun had sold for $300 million. This would allow her music to be used without her consent and without her making money from the appearance of that song. Yesterday, Taylor released the first of these projects, a re-imagination of Fearless, her 2008 multi-platinum sophomore album, which rocked both the Country and pop charts. As we saw last year, Swift now shrugs off music executives’ conventions and takes control of her own musical direction. Taylor’s Version of Fearless is a long album. She released all of the bonus tracks from Fearless: Platinum Edition and some cut tracks from that era that never made it to recording.
YOU’RE UNTOUCHABLE, BURNING BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN. “Untouchable” is a cover of a song by rock band Luna Halo. First appearing on Sparrow Records, the band debuted as a Christian Rock band. Their debut album had the hit “Superman” and the song “Hang On To You,” written by fellow labelmate delirious. The band disappeared and changed members, but reassembled in Nashville to relaunch with their sophomore, self-titled record. The band’s greatest accomplishment, however, was Taylor Swift’s cover of “Untouchable.” Luna Halo never released a follow up album, and “Untouchable” launched guitarist Cary Barlowe’s career as a country music songwriter. Taylor Swift’s version of “Untouchable” highlights the lyrics of the song. While the verses are short, we get the image of a teenage girl in awe of someone she thinks is “untouchable” to her. It’s quite a different meaning when a late-20s Nathan Barlowe sings about a girl who’s out of his league. However, in 2021, very little seems “untouchable” for the superstar Taylor Swift. The star has seen the world, famously dated in Hollywood and the music scene. She’s become the celebrity who goes from hometown hero into her gated mansion. The star herself has become “untouchable” to many, yet you still hear of her doing incredible things for her fans. What’s the untouchable dream for Taylor? Is it justice from the music industry?
I first encountered White Lies in 2009 on an iTunes sampler. The song was “Farewell to the Fairground,” a song from their freshman album To Lose My Life… Their follow up album, Ritual, was unimpressive, and I kind of forgot about this band until I heard their single “There Goes Our Love Again,” from their 2013 album Big TV. The album is certainly their strongest to date and plays like a New Wave album, taking influence from the most venerated post-punk acts of the ‘80s but released thirty years late. The song “Big TV” deals with themes of modern city life in regards to alienation, capitalism, and fleeting trends. Its electronic feel sounds like it’s the kind of music that would be playing late at night, coming from the blue light of a big TV in a studio apartment downtown.
AND YOU CAN GET ME WORK, BUT I CAN’T WORK FOR FREE. A few years ago, CollegeHumor released a video about Zen Buddhist riddles for millennials. The line that I chose for the sub-header reminded me of the CollegeHumor video. You should live in the city you work, but you can’t afford the rent. So why even bother? You’re chasing a dream while borrowing money, hoping that your dreams come to fruition. I often think about how service industries don’t pay workers enough to live in the region that the workers serve, so service workers have to live in subsidized housing or commute long hours. I think about Seoul. Gangnam has so many English academies with native English teachers. Some English teachers want to live there because of the weekend life they can have. However, the rent is so much and the pay is so little that you wonder what kind of life you can have?
YOU CAN RAISE A STAR FROM GARBAGE ON THE STREET. With the advent of social media, anyone can become famous. All it takes is a TikTok video and a few million views, and boom you can become an influencer. Maybe it’s not that simple, but it seems that there are more points of entry now than ever. However, with the explosion of content comes the constant need to maintain attention. It seemed that there was a time when pop stars kept making more and more shocking songs and videos. Katy Perrykissed a girl then posed nude on a cloud. Ke$ha talked about getting freaky downtown in a dirty strip-joint. Gaga was hopping on disco-sticks, Niki Manaj was talking about anacondas. And you may be wondering what’s next after 666 Nikes and WAPing? More shock? What’s going to keep our attention, especially if a star can be raised from garbage on the street? Maybe we shouldn’t build the pop scene on shock, and let the topics come up, perhaps, naturally?
K-pop listeners have watched the once teen star IU grow up. Debuting at the age of 15, the star is turning 30 this year. The soprano singer has been called Korea’s little sister, and her (mostly) squeaky clean image has propelled her to lasting success in Korea’s music scene. Flowers and spring are no unfamiliar topic to this singer, and her sweet, yet powerful voice is perfect for a spring day. My first exposure to the singer was her song “The Meaning of You” (너의 의미) and her feature on HIGH4‘s “Not Spring, Love, or Cherry Blossoms” (봄 사랑 벚꽃 말고) and she’s constantly played in Korea whenever the mood calls for easy listening.
IT’S LIKE THE FALLING PETALS, OUR IVORY COLORED SPRING CLIMAX. Choosing this song marks the end of a week of dreary album covers. IU’s Lilacalbum is a pretty spring album. And it’s no secret I’m a sucker for a good saxophone part in a pop song. Growing up in central New York, I always considered lilacs to be a late summer flower. However, the timeline for the blooming is sped up in the south. This year I completely skipped songs that dealt with cherry blossoms (벚꽃, sakura). This is the earliest they’ve ever bloomed and it has scientists worried about what this says about climate change. Last year I skipped cherry blossom season too, but mostly for fear of Covid. This year, the uneven blooming, the Covid restrictions, and rain to wash them away as soon as they bloomed made celebrating them seem tedious. Stay tuned next year for Korean songs about the cherry blossoms. Meanwhile, IU celebrates the flower of late spring-into-summer.
LIKE THE WARM BREEZE. “Lilac” symbolizes IU growing up, passing her 20s and entering her 30s. The music video is fun in every sense of a K-pop video. We see the singer boarding a train. The timetable at the station is a list of her previous releases. We see several looks for the singer, looking sweet and cute to sexy to tough, showing different eras of her career. The end of the video is a bit terrifying. The singer gets off the train. The cinematography of the video up until that point had been warm. The singer wearing vibrant colors and even the dark scene of the night club doesn’t feel lonely and the night on the train where she is fighting, the singer has a smile on her face. However, the last scene looks lonely. The singer is dressed in dull clothing and the expression on her face looks lost. Then another train arrives bathing the singer’s face in light. She smiles, but I can’t figure out if she is feeling excited or just pretending to be brave. The video ends with the words in English: “Spring is short, but it comes again.” The singer has commented on this album as being a transition to her thirties, so if springtime is a mindset, it can come again. But if it’s an age… Welcome to your thirties, IU. There are certainly benefits to casting off the cares of other people that weigh you down in your twenties.
Ivory Circle is a trio fronted by former middle school choir teacher, Connie Hong along with muti-instrumentalist Chris Beeble, and percussionist/drummer Rob Spradling. I found the band when I went on an Apple Music search to find songs on which Copeland’s Aaron Marsh was featured. Unsurprisingly, Ivory Circle has also toured with Copeland, and this track sounds like it could have been produced Marsh as it sounds like it would be at home on a Copeland record. Chris Beeble, however, produces all of IC’s work. The band has four EPs and today’s song comes from the middle release of their triangle series: Equilateral, Isosceles, and Scalene–the first of which is not available on Apple Music. I foresee a rainy weekend when I will delve into the albums, perhaps even purchasing the albums not available on their bandcamp page. I think it’s so important right now to celebrate and help indie musicians right now as they can’t make money through touring.
YOU CAN SEE MY BRANCHES ON THE GROUND. Some days you just don’t feel like trying. You’re the broken vase on the ground. You don’t want to want to be this pathetic, broken vessel, especially when you think that everyone else has it all figured out. Yet here you are. That’s the scene that Connie Hong’s soft-to-haunting vocals explore. Aaron Marsh serves as an outside perspective when you’re stuck on yourself. He represents the loved one Hong is singing to. He implores her to resist the natural urge to give up. While it may be a big or even impossible ask to reach out to a friend to “put me back together,” who hasn’t been in the circumstance when they are at the end of their rope and they need someone else to fix them?
IT’S WRONG TO FIGHT AGAINST A BEATING HEART. There often comes a mid-semester week when the school year feels overwhelming to me. Four classes in a row, disrespectful, dismissive (tired) students, the shuffle between online and offline classes, teaching-grading-planing-etc, promotional photos–lots of stuff to complain about, but who doesn’t have problems. I can usually keep my cool–shrug off a bad class and hope for a better one, but this morning I couldn’t calm myself down after an awful first period class. And my coworkers were of no help. I didn’t want to hear about their successes. I wanted time to wallow. For me wallowing usually turns to a time of reflection. From reflection I can go on and plan another intervention. However, Wednesday schedule had no time. And there was no place to be alone. What I was able to do was to take a walk in the school to a hallway to wing with few classes and few students/teachers. I could either be on time to the next class and take out my anger on the next class or I could try to calm down. I stared out the window for a good three minutes, focusing on the balding cherry blossom trees, meditating on how temporary emotions are. I thought about how I had been looking on these same trees for seven seasons, seeing children grow up. Ultimately one day is like a blossom in the wind, neither here nor there. That’s what put me back together, so I could finish my day.
When Acceptance released “Cold Air,” last summer, I was immediately taken by the catchy, ’80s New-Wave electronica meets The Outfield-style harmonies sang by lead singer Jason Vena. However, the rest of the album failed to pack the punch that their 2005 debut and 2017 sophomore record had. Acceptance had become known for their lyricism, Vena’s near perfect execution in his mid-to-high range vocals, and often haunting/mysterious guitar parts–all mixed and produced by Aaron Sprinkle. However, what Wild, Free offered was clipped guitars, electronics, and gruffer vocal takes by Vena. There were certainly some highlights, but other than “Cold Air,” there hasn’t been much to come back to–except for a song that got stuck in my head today: “Wasted Nights.”
A FADED MEMORY THAT I STILL KEEP IN MY HEAD. There are two types of people: process people and product people. Product people see task A and complete it right away and take a break until it’s time to solve task B. Then, there’s process people. Process people start many tasks at once and work a little here and there. Both types like their styles. I’m a process person. I often have five things going on at once. I watch TV while cleaning my house, but often miss scenes because I have to go into the other room. I have a planner full of tasks to complete by December, but if I have to move the task to next year because some other goal is important, I’m ok with that. Lately I’m challenging myself to completion, but honestly, for process people, we fear success. We want to constantly be in the process. So what happens when a process person dates a product person. You learn to cool down because it’s the weekend. The task for the other person is finished, and you need to learn to calm your racing mind. You need to learn the virtue of being lazy.
I THINK WE MET AROUND THE FIRST OF MAY. Billy Power had an interesting interview with Jason Vena back in 2015, in which Vena talks about how his first marriage dissolved while he was on the road with Acceptance. Vena explains that the two of them were high school sweethearts, yet distance proved too much for the couple. He spoke fondly about his second wife in the this episode. They met after Acceptance had broken up and Vena had quit music for a day job. Knowing Vena’s history makes me wonder which relationship he’s talking about in this song. To some extent, if you give more in a relationship, you receive more. This is not always true because everyone is different, and of course, this is not taking into account abusive situations. However, any given two people are not necessarily compatible. Relationships take time, and the pay off can be a fairytale romance or a bitter divorce after the seven-year itch. One line from How I Met Your Mother that I think about is when Ted is comparing his break up with Robin to “the emotional equivalent to an English degree.” You’ve learned the other person’s nuances, yet it won’t work on the next relationship. But then I think about if you don’t break up with that person. Wouldn’t it be pretty rewarding to study up for that A? Or should you aim for a C?
Last month I talked about NYVES, the Ryan Clark/Randy Torres electronic project. Today is the day after Easter and from all of the family Facebook posts about Easter, I feel a nostalgia for the holiday, which is not really celebrated in Korea, at least in the few churches I’ve attended here. Unlike holidays like Christmas and Halloween, none of my Korean students know about it, even though I teach in a Christian school. As for Adventists in America, most celebrate or at least acknowledge Easter, and there is often a special service the Saturday before Easter Sunday. Some Adventists also attend other Christian denominations on Easter Sunday for the special services, but we were always told to beware of the pagan traditions that include all of the fun stuff, like egg hunts and chocolate, although my family and many other Adventist families did celebrate Easter in that way.
I BELIEVE IN RESURRECTION. Ryan Clark’s music and artwork consistently deals with darkness. Even the most easy listening pop or CCM album cover he creates incorporates some dark elements. I think that what makes his art especially appealing to the youth group. Growing up in a conservative household, darkness was mostly censored. No movies with supernatural elements—no ghosts, witches or imagery that suggested anything dark, unless it pertained to chocolate. Christian art that touched on the dark elements was also suspect. I had to hide so many CDs from my mom when I was growing up. One that I bought at the Family Christian Book Store (that was later removed on request by the band) was Evanescence’s Fallen album. My mom found it, looked at the cover–Amy Lee looking gothic on the cover– opened the lyrics and read the lyrics to the last song aloud “Fallen angels at feet/ Whispered voices in my ear/ Death before my eyes/ Lying next to me, I fear.” She exclaimed that it was “pornographic,” and through the CD in the trash. Unbroken, we were able to rescue it and hid it away in another case. Skillet, P.O.D., and Demon Hunter, just to name a few, also used dark lyricism and imagery. And because of the repression at home and caused many church kids to devour this content.
WHEN THESE SHADOWS THEY CONSUME MY NARROW PATH. In my college creative writing class, we talked about how Christians could write songs using minor chords, but the song should end on a major chord. Life is full of darkness, but ultimately light will prevail, and the Great Controversy will conclude with God as the victor. I’ve been thinking of that cliche since then, and I realize that it’s certainly an excuse for sub-par art. Feeling restricted to a happy ending can lead to a damaging repression of truth. Sometimes life is just shitty. Some days, weeks, months, years can be shitty. This is true for anyone, even people of faith. Furthermore, some stories end tragically, and by all accounts the people who are looking at it from the earthly perspective we’ve only been granted can’t make sense of the tragedy. Ryan Clark and Randy Torres decided to end this project with “Light,” a track that seems to be a conclusion that is jumped to in the context of the album. However, on their follow up EP, they choose not to do that, ending on “Details.”My question is, how can faith be more than a band-aid? Sometimes in the rush to get to resurrection, we miss the details of the Garden of Gethsemane. And this rushing over the complex and nuance in order to “end on a major chord” ignores the church of the hurting. It ignores the uncertainty we feel about our future. It makes religion seem irrelevant to our lives.
Mixtapemotions 