Andrew McMahon has led three successful musical projects over the span of 22 years, starting with the pop-punk band, Something Corporate, the piano-driven band Jack’s Mannequin, and his solo project, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness. I first got to know Jack’s Mannequin in college during a class trip for my Intro to Caving class, a class you take when you need a P.E. credit to fit into your 16 hours of literature, education, and history classes, but it becomes more intrusive because you have to schedule caving trips. The class made me never want to crawl through another cave again, but I still listen to Jack’s Mannequin’s The Glass Passenger fondly. I dug into their first album, Everything in Transit, but my favorite is their final record, People and Things, in which McMahon’s lyricism and the piano/guitar melodies are the strongest.
I FOUND A TIDAL WAVE BEGGING TO TEAR DOWN THE DAWN. The Glass Passenger
was written and released after McMahon’s recovery from acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The record’s title refers to McMahon’s fragile state after his diagnosis. Not all of the songs on the album address this time in the singer’s life, but “Swim” talks about fighting against hopelessness. The music video includes fans and their artwork which contains messages of why they keep “swimming.” The central metaphor in this song reminds us of how big the ocean is that we are up against. It doesn’t let us off easily with platitudes or sugarcoat the battles, or even say that it’s possible to win. We just have to try and hope that the small efforts we make will keep us alive. We hope that the small strokes we make in the ocean through our struggles, others will join with us to offset the injustices done in the world.
I SWIM FOR BRIGHTER DAYS, DESPITE THE ABSENCE OF SUN. In some ways, last year seemed to be a finale of 5 bad years, starting with 2016. But when one problem comes to a close, we find five more to take its place. And yet, I think about today, being Easter, and what that really means to those who believe in the hope of Resurrection. Metaphorically, the resurrection of Christ takes place in the spring, a time when life is renewed after a season of death in fall and burial in winter. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus propelled his followers to make a religion that claims a third of the world’s population by some estimates. The significance around the belief in Christ’s resurrection has been the source of joy and freedom to many, but also used as power to enslave and weaponize against others. But no matter your belief–in God, in Buddha, in man, in family, in money–everyone believes in something. And that something doesn’t come easily. You have to work for it. You’ve gotta swim for it.
Early last year, Taylor Swift released a documentary titled Miss Americanawhich talked about her music up to the release of 2019’s Lover. While Swift’s country music past and her latest ventures with Folkloreand Evermore certainly can touch on Americana, if you placed Taylor Swift’s CD leaflets on a table next to Lana Del Rey‘s and asked anyone on the street to which lyricist better embodied the dictionary.com definition of “things associated with the culture and history of America,” Lana Del Rey would probably be crowned the real “Miss Americana.” But being the real, unrecognized “Miss Americana” can be just as problematic as the tainted past of the great country. Lana Del Rey is no stranger to controversy or acclaim. She is a polarizing star on the pop charts (when she chooses to release a hit) and pop culture. Sometimes called regressive to feminism, Lana Del Rey has been cancelled more times than most celebrities. Yet there is something about her words that many cling to satirically.
THE ONLY THING WE’LL TURN IS THE PAGES OF ALL OF THE POEMS WE BURNED. My first encounter with Lana Del Rey was the 2013 TheGreat Gatsbysoundtrack with her song “Young and Beautiful.” The anachronistic soundtrack added modern interpretations to the 1925 novel that I would have never made from my several readings of the book, and “Young and Beautiful” deepened Daisy’s seemingly shallow character to me. After hearing “Young and Beautiful,” I delved into Born to Die and discovered a dusty old closet, filled with elegant gowns, talk of old films and books, tales of yesteryear, hiphop beats and sixties style vocals. It was like meeting your grandmother as a teenager. I couldn’t get into her follow up Ultraviolence, although many fans consider it her best album. By her third record, Honeymoon, Del Rey settled into a not-so-Top-40 style of ’60s dream pop, losing the hip-hop catchiness, but keeping up with the lyrical intensity. LP number 6, Chemtrails Over the Country Club sees the singer become a California folk singer and adding higher registers to her normally alto voice.
TELEVISION STATIC WAS QUITE OVERWHELMING. Bruce Springsteen has called Del Rey one of the best songwriters today. However, as a listener she is not always accessible. Just like you need to sit down to watch a movie, you need time to listen to a Lana Del Rey album. And 2021 is not a year with long flights or car rides. Furthermore, what’s the pay off? One listen may not do it, particularly with the experimental direction the singer takes. And with all that time sitting and listening to these lyrics that could be satire or serious, glorifying the old-timey pop culture built on racism and misogyny that is best left in the past. Having not gone too deep on Chemtrails “Yosemite” is a pretty good song, featuring some interesting drumming, a folk guitar, interesting production, and a stunning music video. If you do spend some time with this album, I would like to know–genius or pretentious?
Between their debut album Destination: Beautiful and their fan-favorite sophomore record The Everglow,Mae released Destination: B-Sides, which includes live and acoustic renderings of some of the standout tracks, songs that didn’t make it to the record, and demos that would make it onto The Everglow. The chorus of “Sun” contains the the lyrics “Destination Beautiful,” making “Sun” like the title track of the album, and one of the the most memorable tracks in the middle of the album, and it has one of the finest melodies on the album after “Embers and Envelops” and “All Deliberate Speed.”
IF YOU’RE WILLING, LET IT GO. In a 2018 two-part episode of Labeled(now available only to Patreon subscribers), Mae’s lead singer Dave Elkins talked about the inspiration for the songs on Destination: Beautiful. Many of the tracks had to do with a disagreement between Elkins and members at his church. Elkins wrote many of the songs, including the first track “Embers and Envelops” in hopes to repair the broken relationship. “Sun” also talks about this misunderstanding. The lyrics on the band’s debut album are vague and arguably immature compared to the subject matter in their more recent efforts, sticking to lines like “something happened.” No one is incriminated, and the song can be applied to the listeners’ own lives and is problems. Mae would eventually reject Christian marketing, and their recent efforts deal with band members’ deconstruction journeys and explorations into art and science.
WAITING FOR THE RAIN TO STOP. The moody weather of April showers, when days start out clear, only to cloud up and surprise us with showers, or a cloudy morning that clears for a windy afternoon before a weekend of rain, it’s a month of transitions. When the weather and life is in flux, it’s tempting to think of the time as a waiting period—waiting for things to settle down. You’re waiting for “Destination beautiful.” But you go through enough of these waiting periods and you start to realize that this is your life. What’s the ultimate destination of the weather? It’s best to just try to enjoy whatever it brings. What’s the ultimate destination of a life but the grave? Best to make the moments count and enjoy the rainy weekend around the corner.
In the summer of ’99 I was 12 years old. I spent the first half of the summer with my dad, a truck driver, as he crossed the U.S. delivering camper chassis and steel. A lot of kids would get bored looking at the Interstate for hours, but I always loved the journey. I loved maps and geography, and I was getting a firsthand experience of seeing what America looked like. Of course there were some boring parts. But what was best about the miles of cornfields was that the radio stations lasted quite a while– a lot longer than they lasted in the foothills of North Carolina. With my dad, I got to experience new (old) music that my mom didn’t approve of at the time. On the road I first listened to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side of the Moon, Steve Miller Band, George Thorogood, America, and so many others I could fill a whole blog post listing. We also listened to new music–Red Hot Chili Peppers, Goo Goo Dolls, and Sugar Ray.
IMPAIRED BY MY TRIBAL LUNAR SPEAK. One of the songs that was fun to hear on the radio stations across America was Len‘s summer hit “Steal My Sunshine.” Surfer-dude meets baby doll singing, with strange lyrics, and happy, vibey instrumentation that sound like it would make a dog happy, this song became quite an infection radio gem. Listening to this song again, it reminds me of a time when the radio was fun. You didn’t know what style of music you were going to hear next. The ’90s were a time when alternative rock had a place on the Top 40 along with Hip Hop and bubblegum pop. In the late ’90s rock started flirting more with Hip Hop and electronica, hence making unique tracks like this one. As the Canadian brother-sister fronted band failed to release a follow-up album to their 1999 hit You Can’t Stop the Bum Rush, the band and their style remains a kind of time capsule of the summer before Y2K. It would have been interesting to see where they could have taken pop-rock, though, into the new millennium.
I KNOW IT’S UP FOR ME. If you just take the song on the first listen, along with the embarrassingly awesome music video, you might conclude that it’s just a feel good song with some strange lyrics. However, on a deeper listen/read, you can see that the lyrics are about dealing with depression. The song talks about how other people can “steal [our] sunshine.” It also talks about feeling down when others are enjoying themselves. This is another example of a music/lyric paradox used in songs like “Rose-Colored Boy” and to a lesser extent “Float On.” “Steal My Sunshine,” is a pretty good pre-curser to Emo pop. As for how this song relates to me today, I’ll claim the weather. It was a beautiful day with the cherry blossoms in full bloom, only to get windy and cold. It’s like the sunshine was stolen. Well, and also this week has been long and the students have been crazy, which is another thing that can steal my sunshine. What about 80-100% chance of rain this weekend? Oh well. Other than that, things are pretty good.
A meme is a piece of cultural information that is spread through copying and imitation. These days we know memes mostly as the funny or political pictures people post online. However, by definition, Gotye‘s 2011 hit, “Somebody That I Used to Know” is on the level of musical meme-hood. The mega hit which has charted in the top songs of the decade, has left the artist, though, as a one-hit wonder. Gotye has yet to release a follow up record to Making Mirrors, but somehow no one can forget this song. It’s been covered, remixed, and parodied all over the Internet, and listeners still can’t get enough. Last year, YouTuber Hildegard von Blingin’ released a “bardcore” version of the song. Bardcore is a style of music imitating Medieval/Renaissance music, using older instruments and often adapting lyrics to sound more Chaucerian. While the line “send a wagon for thy minstrel and refuse my letters” didn’t quite beat the synth wave remix by Tronicbox, I’d still encourage my readers to check out that version.
YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO CUT ME OFF. In the spring and summer of 2012 I did a lot of driving. I had to get my paperwork together to go to Korea, and I couldn’t hack American bureaucracy by using the mail or courier services. Two trips to Johnson City, Tennessee to get stamps from the state in which I graduated college, two trips to Atlanta, and countless trips to around Western North Carolina to get the paperwork together, I listened to a lot of radio. I listened to the radio mostly because I had an old radio-turner device to play my iPod on the stereo. My 2001 Toyota Corolla came with a CD player, that had died some time before. If I drove a long distance, the radio stations would change, and I would have to find a new frequency to broadcast my iPod. However, this got old, so I just listened to the radio. At that time, I remember a few songs would play constantly–Carly Rae Jepsen‘s “Call Me Maybe,” “Lights,” by Ellie Goulding, and “Somebody That I Used to Know.” This song will always remind me of those trips in early summer, before my life changed forever.
YOU CAN GET ADDICTED TO A CERTAIN KIND OF SADNESS. Last year, the YouTube channel Middle 8 released a video giving the history of this song and a musical breakdown of why it became such an ear worm. The latin guitar and the xylophone which helped to carry the original song, however, are absent on this ’80s remix. Instead, listeners are treated to electronic drums, synths, and a raucous guitar solo–all absent from the original tune. This song might have you looking through the garage for some old VHS tapes beside the lacquered wooden vacuum-tubed TV set. But before you book that perm and change to bigger rims on your glasses, just consider how ridiculous you’ll look. This song brings to mind everything awful about the ’80s, and that’s why it’s so fun.
Shura‘s 2016 debut, Nothing’s Realmade a splash in the U.K. and Europe, but the electro-pop singer-songwriter didn’t make a huge impact on the American charts, which is a shame. Hits like “What’s It Gonna Be?” and “What Happened to Us?” were perfect hits for the mid-summer of the album’s release, and I find that I come back to it every spring to early fall. But while her contemporaries like Ellie Goulding and Carly Rae Jepsen keep songs pretty light and upbeat, there’s a sadness and introversion that hides the lyrics beneath even the most dance-floor-worthy tracks.
SMALL CHANGE IN THE UNIVERSE. The daughter of a British documentary filmmaker, Shura uses a documentary-style motif throughout Nothing’s Real, featuring audio of Shura as a child speaking and singing. Also in the vein of a documentary, Shura sings about her breakup in the third person “Make It Up.” Other songs, like “Indecision” and “Kidz ‘n’ Stuff,” on the record talk about this (or another) breakup and preludes to that breakup, like “What’s It Gonna Be?” and “What Happened to Us?” But in “Make It Up,” you feel the breakup that just happened. You’re on the train riding home realizing you’re not going to see that person again. You don’t answer the phone when your friends call because you’re grieving. You release you have the power to change your mind, and so does that other person. But you came to that decision, or they came to it, because of someone’s unhappiness.
ONE LINE ACROSS TOWN. A relationship isn’t about the big days but the ordinary ones. So the quieter tracks on a record make it lasting. You come for the hits and stay for the personality. Melancholy doesn’t have to make a downer of a record. This was the case for Paramore‘s After Laughter and the same is true for Nothing’s Real. A breakup can make a damn good record, but it doesn’t have to be bitter. The lyrics of Nothing’s Real argue that Shura is a good person with a lot to offer. She deserves more than to be put on the back burner when “you’re at the beach.” Sometimes you have to break up because you deserve more than the other person can offer. And that’s pretty sad, as a statement on the other person’s ability to love.
I‘m not going to go on and on again about how much I admire Ryan Clark‘s talent. I talked about in January and February. I think I’ve touched on the talent of former Project 86 guitarist Randy Torres. Torres left Project 86 to work as an engineer with Aaron Sprinkle making legendary Tooth & Nail albums, then went to work as A & R for the label, toured with Anberlin on their New Surrender tour, and finally landed a job with Microsoft, then doing sound design for films and video games. Somewhere between their busy schedules, Ryan Clark and Randy Torres crowdfunded an album and an EP as a new project, unrelated to Demon Hunter, called Nyves. Rather than being heavy on the guitars and screaming lyrics, the project takes on a dark electronic-meets ’80s progressive metal sound perfect for a gloomy day like today.
A FIRE OUT OF BREATH. Spring in Korea is both blessed with beautiful flowers and warmer days and cursed with terrible air quality. The 벚꽃 (Cherry blossoms/Sakura) are in full bloom today, but the western winds are the 황사 (Hwangsa, Yellow dust from the Gobi Desert that joined with the industrial pollution of China and South Korea) made the air quality frighteningly bad. Outside you can that the air is thick. On days like this before Corona many people wore masks. The thin air often gives me a headache and one year caused me to be short of breath when exercising. These days it’s best to stay inside and run an air filter if you have one.
YOU’RE A LIGHT THROUGH A PINHOLE. When choosing my song today, I listened to both Nyves’ projects. I noticed that their 2015 album Anxiety had more positive songs and ended with a positive message on the song “Light.” Pressure, however, ends on this song, building on the cliche, “The devil’s in the details.” The penultimate song “Common Ground” may get its own blog posting this year, as it talks about how polarized the world has become. Some days, weeks, months, and years are covered by the thick clouds of despair. We wonder if the dust will ever lift and what we’ll be left with. Will the winds shift, blowing the dust out to sea? This song warns us from seeking a quick solution, one that offers a thread of “light through a pinhole” but hides its “devil in the details.” Ultimately, isn’t that what a devil does? Takes advantage of weak spots and uses fear to manipulate us?
We all have to pay the bills, and musicians are certainly no exception. Randy Torres formerly of Project 86 works in sound design. Dan Koch of Sherwood writes music for adverting. Stephen Christian is a music pastor. All of these examples, though, have kept the band separate. The Fold released two records on Tooth & Nail, but never achieved the greatness of their label-mates, save a Grammy nomination for the packaging of their sophomore record. Though having a smaller fanbase than other Tooth & Nail bands, The Fold started partnering with brands, writing theme songs, most notably Lego’s Ninjago, for which they performed exclusively for seven years.
I SPENT A LONG TIME BUILDING LADDERS TO THE STARS. The songs this weekend are whimsical stories. Yesterday, the canon story, and today climbing to the stars, meeting a “friendly meteor beside the moon” who tells the speaker to “be yourself and watch the stars come to you.” This fun pop-punk song along with the album art reminding me of Charon sculling his boat on the river Styx, but not in a depressing way. Who wants to live forever? Who wants to outlive their peers? For much of human existence, early death was a reality. Thirty-five was once considered old, but yet we’re living long and longer these days. And now there’s talk of trans-humanism, scientific advancement that will allow us, or the most wealthy of us, to upload our consciousness to the cloud and download it onto a younger body. If this ever happens, people will have to grapple with problems eighty years often cut short.
THESE BONES DON’T STAND A CHANCE. Being someone who has used the pandemic as a time to catch up, I fear the future every day. I fear poverty. I fear losing my loved ones as I get older. I don’t think a teenager ever thinks they will wake up in a thirty-three year old body, but I’m fearing how fast the calendar pages are turning. I’ve heard people say they think life is long. I don’t remember the last time I was bored. It seems there’s always something to fill up my time. And yet, I wonder, does there come a point when you say, I’ve lived a good life; I’m ready for it to end? On my darkest days when I think I’d rather be dead than face what’s up next, but on the way to work I almost step in front of a bus and I start fighting for my life. Perhaps it’s our mind that wants to live forever, but our bodies protest in the end.
When I think of progressive rock, I think of music that hasn’t been refined enough to make it to radio. The lyrics are a little too strange. The instrumentals go off on tangents. Don’t get me wrong, I like long guitar solos, but prog. rock gets a bit pedantic. Then I heard Hidden Hospitals’ 2016 album Liars. The band calls themselves a progressive rock band, and honestly, I haven’t heard anything like it before. Like progressive rock albums, it took me a few listens to get into Liars. But track after track reveals intricate song structures met by lyrics that could be easily passed over, but when they sink in, pack a punch. According to an episode with lead singer Dave Raymond on Matt Carter’s Break It Down podcast, Raymond grew up listening to Hip-Hop, but it was rock shows by bands like Emery and Anberlin that got him interested in performing music that would become Hidden Hospitals.
FINDING REAL’S LIKE PULLING TEETH. Today’s song tells the whimsical story of a child playing hide and seek. He finds a cannon and crawls in and falls asleep only to be awakened by a bang. Next thing he knows he’s flying in the air. In the air he sees that not everything is as it appears. Mixing the metaphor with the simile: “finding truth is like pulling teeth,” tells us that it’s theoretically easy to find out the truth, but it’s painful. And that’s where today’s sermon begins. I first learned the word deconstruction in literature class at Adventist university. I learned what deconstruction was, but I was taught to be careful with it. You can break down a text to analyze what it doesn’t say. You can turn it on itself. You can point out how the author is flawed in writing it this way. And that’s fine if you’re analyzing Joyce or Shakespeare, but don’t you dare do it to the Bible. However, that being said, of all the required religion classes I took–and a few extras to get a minor in religion–we briefly talked on canonization, how all books of the Bible that we have today were accepted. This is an unspoken article of faith. We can trust that the men at the Council of whatever it was in faith accepted the real Bible and everything else was uninspired.
I FIND WOLVES IN SHEEPS CLOTHING. Descartes is the father of deconstruction. Descartes first deconstructed and reconstructed the world based on logic, rather than through accepting what others said about it. He accepted only one truth, “I think, therefore I am.” While not everyone can get a masters in engineering before stepping on to a plane to realize that flight is possible, I wonder why Christians who hold the scriptures so dear know so little about the processes of how it came to being what it is today. Why do only pastors read Greek or Hebrew? Why isn’t knowing the original languages important? Why don’t we research the origins of the canon? From my experience working for the church, I learned that your personal belief means very little as long as you sacrifice to keep the system in power. Once I learned that truth, it set me free. But it also made things quite complicated.
If you’re driving through Columbus, Ohio you can tune your radio to 88.7 and find out where music is going. First hitting the airwaves in 1996, the radio station went worldwide via SkyAngel satellite network. RadioU plays Christian Rock and has been home to artists who would otherwise never hit the radio waves. However, bands often disappear from the playlist over time. This can because the band changed their sound or their message. Artists like the Newsboys, Audio Adrenaline, dc talk, Jars of Clay, and Jennifer Knapp were played in the ’90s and first few years of the ’00s, but the listeners didn’t like the direction that those artists took in their later careers. Other groups like Copeland, Mae, and MuteMath started out with RadioU and “got too big,” or at least that was the story. Sometimes they will pick up groups like Thrice, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, and Paper Route, in the middle of a successful career. But is it where music is going? Maybe not these days.
TAKE IT SLOW. Partly because of RadioU many bands sprung out of Columbus. Relient K, House of Heroes, Everyday Sunday, and John Ruben are just a few artists from this part of the Buckeye state. However, none are more successful than twenty one pilots. The duo makes Spotify and record sales lists most musicians only dream of. Their fanbase devoted to the band like K-pop followers. Known as The Clique, many interpret the lyrics of the songs as a direct message to them. Long time fans even bully new fans on social media and call out those who aren’t true fans. As I talked about earlier this month when I wrote about Mae, there are some cults I just could never follow. However, while I don’t agree with many of Mae’s musical choices, when I hear twenty one pilots, I wonder WTF is this? Seriously, what are you kids listening to these days? Emo-Rap? What is going on here? I don’t think I can be friends with anyone who loves Imagine Dragons and twenty one pilots. Maybe, but everyone I’ve met who likes these two groups–we’ve had issues. I do invite the challenge.
WE DON’T DEAL WITH OUTSIDERS VERY WELL. That being said, “Heathens” is kind of thought provoking. The remix done with another group that has grown up to disappoint me with their mostly banal music. MuteMath deserves a story of their own. After the split of Earthsuit, a short-lived New Orleans-based Christian Rock band, vocalist/rapper Paul Meany took about half of the band to MuteMath. The band’s first EP sounded promising, but their debut record was boring. The follow up featured a song on the Twilight soundtrack and the songs were more interesting, but albums after Armistice were lacking–something. Maybe the vocals of Earthsuit’s Adam LeClave? While at times bland, I can’t doubt the musical talent of MuteMath. They add an interesting edge to the “Heathens” (remix).
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE HEATHENS. The word heathens is Christian slang for someone who is an outsider from your group. It’s often said in a joking way about when friends are acting too “worldly.” Sometimes it’s meant to be harshly judgmental, like in the original sense of the word. Lyrically, “Heathens” deals with darker sides of humanity. The reality that we don’t know our own friends well enough to know their true intentions, much less a stranger’s. We want to say, “I knew him. He would never would do that.” Yet time and time again we see the news stories of another “murderer sitting next to you.” Netflix is filled with docu-series of people who never suspected the cold-blooded killer who went to their church or worked in the next cubical. Another pastor becomes involved with a sex scandal. Didn’t see that one coming. Rather than deflecting blame and assuming goodness, this song recognizes that “you might be one of us.”
Mixtapemotions 