Trapt‘s breakthrough single “Headstrong” from their major label self-titled debut record had appeal to many musical genres. The song was massive, reaching number 1 on the rock and alternative charts, number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, and number 4 on the mainstream top 40, or the pop radio chart. This was a unique time when a scream in a rock song didn’t necessarily disqualify it from hitting pop radio. But the band was never able to repeat the success of their debut record.
I’VE BEEN FOOLED BY ALL THE ILLUSIONS IN MY HEAD. Trapt’s followup record, Someone in Controlwas released in September 2005. The band’s debut album’s success helped their sophomore record debut at #14 on the Billboard 200 album charts. But lack of a major single and poor reviews plagued the album’s success. Two of the singles the band released chatted on rock radio. “Stand Up” even reached number three on mainstream rock. Today’s song, “Waiting,” though, only reached #20. A scathing review by Blender magazine attacked the singer Chris Taylor Brown’s (not to be confused with the R&B singer Chris Brown) vocals and lyrics about the singer’s claims to mental instability. This would certainly not be the last time the singer or the band would suffer attacks when in 2020 Brown took to Twitter with MAGA rants and eventually Trapt was banned from the platform due to Brown’s controversial stance on statutory rape. For most this was the final nail in the band’s coffin. Following Someone in Control, though, despite being asked to leave their label Warner Bros. Music due to low sales, the band still continued to get big tours and even score minor hits. Poor critical reception in 2005 seems to be due to the critics being no longer fond of the hard rock side of Nu Metal and Indie and Emo gaining their favor.
I’D MAKE IT RIGHT IF YOU WANTED IT. I cautiously offer up a recommendation of today’s song, “Waiting.” The band is problematic, and I don’t really want to support them. But Trapt reminds me of the angry white boys who hung out in their basements smoking cigarettes or pot cursing the women who wouldn’t date them and cursing the men who wouldn’t employ them. The funny thing is that Trapt’s lyrics weren’t the prime example of this anger. You could hear it in the Nu Metal of Korn and Limp Bizkit. But I remember it best from the post grunge, bands like Seether, Staind, Cold, Three Days Grace to name a few. Emo sounded uplifting compared to some of their dark lyrics. And the fact that many of these bands became members of the far-right is probably some graduate work waiting to be written or a fascinating book to read. Today’s song “Waiting” features singer Chris Taylor Brown’s urgent, not overwrought as Blender suggests, vocals begging the listener, someone he loves, “to get that feeling once again” right now if possible. The urgency in his voice makes listeners feel that he isn’t quite in tact with his emotions, unstable. It’s a believable persona that we hope is untrue.
Someone once compared releasing an album on a major label to giving birth. They say it takes about nine months. There’s the actual making of the album, which in most cases, takes longer than the making of a baby, with preproduction, songwriting, and recording. The process before and in the studio is only half to two-thirds of the process. Then there’s the mixing, mastering, and promotion. But a lot of the process is waiting; waiting for the record label to pick the right day to release the record–to make sure Adele isn’t going to release a record the same day. And the promotion–making sure that the singles are evenly spaced for maximum effect on radio–something that major labels have failed at in the mid-’00s as we’ve talked about Mae, Acceptance, Copeland, and others.
MEET ME BEHIND THE MALL. Taylor Swift certainly had been bullied by the music industry for much of her career. But with a fanbase of avid music buyers–millions of buyers at that–Taylor’s pregnancy with her eighth album didn’t need nine months. In fact, just releasing folkloreon a lark was the best thing for the record. Taylor’s folklore was written and produced during Covid lockdown, yet the record does not reference the issues of the day, but rather features Swift’s most poignant writing. Swift released a prologue to the record in which she says that the album “started with imagery.” The dusty old images and stories the singer had been sitting with for years. And while the album doesn’t tell a cohesive story, there are stories and connections within the songs. Swift is meticulous in leaving clues and Easter Eggs in her songs for her fans to find deeper meaning. The prologue references today’s song, “august” as part of the imagery that inspired the album. She writes, “The sun drenched month of August, sipped away like a bottle of wine.” Swift confirmed that there is a trilogy of songs on the record, and fans believe that “cardigan,” “betty,” and “august” make that trilogy.
SALT AIR, AND THE RUST ON YOUR DOOR. Taylor Swift has talked about her love for numerology on several occasions, and her albums are often full of meaning in numbers. Today’s song is track 8, just like how August is the eighth month of the year. Furthermore, folklore‘s release seems to coincide with the timing of this song. Taylor surprised the public on July 24, 2020, and many listeners and critics called folklore a fall album. But what’s a fall album without something illicit that happened over the summer to talk about? Like a steamy affair or even a surprise indie record by a big pop star? The story that fans have constructed of the “high school love trilogy” is that three high school kids, James, Betty, and Inez, are involved in a love triangle. Betty’s song is “cardigan.” The lead single from folklore is a sweet, dusty acoustic track that finds the speaker realizing her worth when someone discovers her worth. Today’s song is said to be when James cheats on Betty with Inez during summer vacation. According to the song, James takes Inez’s virginity, but she realizes that James was never hers. James then tell his regret in “betty” after the rumors circulate when school starts again. Today’s song revels for a time in young folly. It feels so real in the moment, but the summer dream abruptly ends when the setting of a seaside vacation town boards up its windows after the tourists leave. The song is clearly fiction, and in retrospect, probably “Blank Space” was too. But “Blank Space” is the kind of story for a Rory Gilmore who has been through far too many “august” situations and learned nothing from it.
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 & the Destroyers, 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. Unfortunately, Len was unable to capture the hooks in their only hit twice. In fact, the band kind of rebelled against hooks in the rest of their music, much to their detriment. It’s also worth it to check out why this was the only song we’ve ever heard from Len in the 8-minute documentary from True Rock N’ Roll Stories(see below).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. So what does this song mean for today? It’s been a really rainy summer in Korea and extreme weather is taking over the globe. There’s so much to bring us down. Life is looking different every summer. So that’s kind of why we need to remember the good: those simple summer days when we didn’t stress about heatwaves causing wildfires that might burn down your home. Please don’t steal my sunshine–but also, don’t turn it up to 11!
After listening to the 2011 M83 record Hurry Up We’re Dreamingseveral times the last few days, I started to think about how each of the songs on the record seem to illustrate scary images in a way that makes the listener feel in control of those scary things. Take for example today’s song, “Midnight City.” The central image of the song is a car the speaker is waiting for in the middle of the night. The feeling of a dream can make this mysterious car a positive thing. But we all know that a dream can change in an instant, and that car could belong to a serial killer. Fortunately, M83 keeps the entire album on the positive side of mysterious. So, I wanted to curate a playlist about dreams, mostly positive and mysterious dreams. Enjoy!
“Grace” was one of the first hits for the South Korean electronic indie band Adoy. The song opens their 2015 debut EP Catnip. In a recent interview with Front Row Livelead vocalist Oh Ju-hwan and keyboardist Zee talked with Rob Herrera while they were on their first U.S. tour. The two musicians talked about their writing process in Adoy. Although Ju-hwan is the lead singer and sings in English, he is not fluent in conversation, so Zee often handles the English questions and translates the interview questions and answers. So why then, would a band choose to write their songs in a language their lead singer wasn’t fluent in?
WHY DON’T YOU TELL ME? AtCornerstone 2011, the year before the festival folded, Blindside flew from Sweden to sub-headline on Saturday, July 2nd, just before Anberlin closed out the main stage. The show was incredible. The band had just released their first album since 2007’sBlack Rose EP, With Shivering Hearts We Wait, an album that pushed the band into electronic and pop influences. One of the things I remembered from the show was that guitarist Simon Grenehed rather than lead singer Christian Lindskog introduced all of the songs. I wasn’t sure why. I’d seen interviews with the band and Lindskog had spoken. Now Adoy is not Blindside, nor is Korean Swedish, but I find it interesting when bands from non-English speaking countries make an artistic choice to sing in English, whether it’s A-ha or Scorpions or the Japanese pop-punk band ONE OK ROCK. And then you find yourself traveling, even just a few miles north of the border in Quebec, listening to French DJs playing American music with a few French rock bands that seem to be everything that’s missing in the American scene.
I WAS ALWAYS WAS DREAMING OF A DAY LIKE TODAY. In the interview with Rob Herrera, Zee explains that Adoy tried writing in Korean, but felt that sound of English better illustrated their lyrics and the concepts behind their songs. The concept? Zee explains that an Adoy song is about “lifting” and “floating in the air” because they feel that sound promotes a feeling of youth and vitality. Zee explains that he usually writes the lyrics, but sometimes Ju-hwan or other members will write in Korean and Zee will translate the lyrics. A few years ago, the band was on a radio show on a Seoul English K-pop/indie station talking about their upcoming record Loveand performing songs from Love and Catnip. Before playing the song “Grace,” Zee told the listeners that the song was about an impending serious conversation in the car, when two lovers are about break up. But does the relationship still stand a chance? So that “floating in the air” feeling that Adoy’s music gives the listeners is contrasted with the melancholy of the fear of a break up. “Grace,” lyrically, is similar to “Bike” on the band’s follow up EP in that both the happiness and the inevitability of the couple’s breakup are told in a calm and positive tone in the nostalgic song. Still, the twinge of sadness in the lyrics aren’t intended to kill the vibe of the song. Played in a largely non-English speaking country in trendy cafes and restaurants, the smooth sounds of Adoy can serve as furniture music, music that sets a mood but not a conversation piece. Well, today, Adoy, you set off the conversation, and we’re all a litter sadder because of it!
grabs listeners with a funky ’70s-Jazz-influenced track, “Music for a Sushi Restaurant.” The avant-garde production, scatting, horns, and minimal (though somewhat complexly layered in meaning) lyrics are simultaneously the most and least pop way to start a record. Harry’s House is a record that jumps all over the place stylistically track to track, yet “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” is a bombastic-themed track–horns, ’70s-inspired tracks–to an otherwise laidback singer. But the imagery of a girl so hot you could fry an egg on her?
What a bizarre way to open an album, and possibly a little unappetizing, but I have been suffering from diarrhea for two days and everything I eat quickly leaves my body.
MUSIC FOR A SUSHI RESTAURANT, MUSIC FOR WHATEVER YOU WANT. Last month, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding talked about the horn themes on Harry’s House on their podcast Switched on Pop. The duo made the connection between Styles’ recent inclusion of horns on the record with Styles’ Peter Gabriel influence, particularly on his massive 1986 hit “Sledgehammer.” During an interview with Howard Stern, Styles said that the overall mix of the song made it one of his favorites of all time. Styles then performed a cover of “Sledgehammer” on Howard Stern’s show. What Sloan and Harding noticed, though, was how Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” was really about horns blaring when to heighten the melody. Then then proceeded to give a musical history of the zeitgeist of horns in ’80s music, starting with Lionel Richie‘s 1983 mega-hit, “All Night Long.” The difference between these two songs, though, is that whereas “Sledgehammer” has punctuated horns throughout the chorus, “All Night Long” is a slow build-up of momentum, each chorus building from a synth pad to synth horns to real horns and finally going all out on the final chorus of the original 6-minute non-single version of the song. Styles recorded some of his records at Peter Gabriel’s studio and seemed to take a cue from “Sledgehammer” by going all in on the horns on the album’s opener.
IF THE STARS WERE EDIBLE AND OUR HEARTS WERE NEVER FULL, COULD WE LIVE WITH JUST A TASTE? It becomes clear that Harry Styles has a bit of an oral fixation, at least in his writing. Later on the record in “Daylight” Styles says, “You’d be the spoon / Dip you honey so I could be sticking to you.” On “Keep Driving,” the second verse describes a breakfast. Sometimes, food and sex are interconnected, but not in a George Costanza way. Recall the oral pleasures Styles sang about on his last record, Fine Line, in “Watermelon Sugar.” “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” takes a more savory approach, but the idea of having “just a little taste” seems a little more actual than metaphorical in a Harry Styles context. In the introduction to Violet Blue‘s The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio, Mary Roach descriptively describes the unique flavors she experienced eating in a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo and she related the uniqueness to performing oral sex. In the first chapter of the book, Violet Blue reminds readers that “it’s an undeniable fact that my mouth is a sex organ.” The author goes on to explain that she, like many others, gets sexual pleasure merely from giving oral sex and that exploring why the act itself gives the giver pleasure is both healthy to understand and healthy to explore. And if we think about how sushi and fish are often euphemisms for female genitalia, the song makes a bit of sense. It’s an interesting discussion, but let’s not make it personal: four days of suffering from food poisoning have me desiring neither sex nor food.
Opening Third Eye Blind‘s debut record and becoming the fourth single from the record, “Losing a Whole Year” is quintessential late-’90s rock. The song chronicles the ending of a relationship between the speaker and a “rich girl.” When the relationship starts to cool and as the sex stops being so great, the speaker begins to think that the whole relationship was a waste of time. Lead singer Stephan Jenkins penned the lyrics after hearing the riff that guitarist Kevin Cadogan played.
RICH DADDY LEFT YOU WITH A PARACHUTE. Stephan Jenkins is one of the most interesting rock stars I’ve read about. Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and then going on to forming a Shakespeare-inspired rap duo called Puck and Natty, Jenkins brought a variety of new experiences into the alternative rock scene when his new band Third Eye Blind debuted in 1997. Alternative Rock is a hard to define genre, but it is best described as rock that has been influenced by another genre. For Third Eye Blind, being from San Francisco and their temerity in embracing their San Francisco influences–the drug culture, hip hop, and queer culture–set a liberal tone for the latter years of the Clinton Administration on rock and pop radio. Third Eye Blind was, in a way, several apparent contradictions. Jenkins writes intimately about drug use, and not just casual drug use. The band’s first single, “Semi-Charmed Life” details a relationship between two people constantly getting high on Crystal Meth. But Jenkins was college-educated, something not usually associated with hard drug use. Furthermore, for the late ’90s no rock bands were queer-affirming, but Jenkins claimed queer culture as his San Francisco heritage, even penning the song “Jumper” about a gay kid who committed suicide. People questioned if Jenkins was himself gay.
I REMEMBER YOU AND ME SPENDING THE WHOLE GODDAMN DAY IN BED. But Stephan Jenkins has only had public relationships with women, starting with a high-profile romance with South African actress Charlize Theron and later a relationship with singer-songwriter Vanessa Carlton. Whether “Losing a Whole Year” was based on a real relationship or not, Jenkins claims, “the words were how the riff makes me feel.” The specific details about a rich girl from Bernal Heights who grows bored with her lover to experiment online with the “pierced queer teens in cyberspace” remind us not only of our breakups–the seemingly wasted days and nights learning someone else’s desires, preferences, and anatomy: knowledge that is not easily transferred into other subjects, thus is, as Ted deems breaking up with Robin on How I Met Your Mother, “The emotional equivalent to earning an English major”–but it reminds us of time passing and how else we may have lost a whole year. Today is August 1, the eighth month of what sounds like a horrendously futuristic time: 2022. Supposedly, yesterday George Jetson was born, so there should be flying cars within the next 50 years! Just a check in, am I wasting my time? I hope not.
Jennifer LopezA.K.A.J-Lo hasn’t released a full record since 2014. However, with singles, acting, activism, business endeavors, and gracing the red carpet, the now fifty-two year old cultural icon is just as relevant as ever. But in the mid-’00s, Lopez did fail to stay relevant. In 2011, she reemerged with her seventh studio record Love? and as a judge on American Idol. In 2014, she divorced singer and father of her twins Marc Antony and released her latest record, A.K.A
AND NOW, YOU’RE ON MY SKIN. In 2021, J-Lo broke off her engagement with New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez (a.k.a. Arod) and later started dating old flame, actor Ben Affleck. Affleck certainly wasn’t the singer’s “First Love,” but the two were engaged in 2002, but following the release of their critically-panned film Gigliand the stress of the ever-present lens of the paparazzi, the two called off their engagement. Lopez said of that the end of that relationship was her “first real heartbreak.” Up until this point, Lopez had been married twice, albeit shortly, and had had several high-profile romances. Lopez said of her ten-year marriage with Marc Antony, “a bandaid to the cut” of her breakup with Affleck. But if the goal of learning history is that we don’t make the same mistakes as we do in the past, “Bennifer” is back together. And while the tabloids still have their day with the singer and the actor, the two have determined to not let media be a wedge between the two.
MISTAKES, I DON’T WORRY ABOUT THEM NO MORE. “First Love” is one of Max Martin‘s minor hits, reaching only 87 on the Hot 100. The song comes from a conversation between Lopez, Martin, and producer Cory Rooney had a conversation about relationships and how hard relationships are. Somebody said that they wish “the one” was “the first one” because it would save all parties from a lot of pain. Martin soon after presented Lopez the demo during a lunch break filming American Idol. The result was a catchy song capturing a complex feeling in a simple song. The music video for the single features English model David Gandy as Lopez’s love interest. Filmed in the desert, the sweltering black & white video is sexy. Perhaps the stylistic departure for the singer, a electro-pop rather than the usual hip-hop oriented song, is to blame for why “First Love” wasn’t huge. The concept behind the song is as interesting as it is flawed. I tend to not believe in “the one,” despite having been in a seven-year relationship with someone I want to spend the rest of my life with. I think about how I wasn’t ready to meet my current partner when I was younger, still figuring things out. I needed the heartbreak to make me ready to fall in love with the right person. But that’s just me. Rather than dithering between first, second, third, or forth loves, let love happen naturally.
Mae‘s sophomore record, The Everglow, is to this day their most beloved record. The band released the album in 2005 and rereleased it the next year as a deluxe edition with bonus tracks and a read-along booklet designed to enhance the listener’s Multi-sensory Aesthetic Experience in 2006. With the band’s releases of demos and two full-length records, Mae fulfilled their contract with Tooth & Nail Records. Later that year, the band signed with Capitol Records and began recording with legendary producer Howard Benson. Singularitywas released in the summer of 2007 and was the only Mae record to be released on Capitol.
SMOKE-FILLED CASINOS, BUT WHAT DO WE KNOW WE’LL TAKE A CHANCE.
Singularity is a unique album for Mae as it features a rock and New Wave sound not featured on the prior records. Drummer Jacob Marshall and keyboardist Rob Sweitzer named the album Singularity based on their discussions from a book by physicist Paul Davies. Marshall said of these conversations, “There is so much more for us to learn and understand and these ideas inspired us to question everything.” The lyrical content of Singularity seems to deal with finding meaning out of chaos, which is alluded to in the band’s making-of documentary. In a nutshell, Mae is addressing questions of evolution, theistic or atheistic, but coming to a conclusion that life has a purpose. “Crazy 8s,” the second song on Singularity, builds on the self-doubt in the first song, “Brink of Disaster.” The optimism of being in a band and “making it” flooding the lyrics on Destination: Beautifuland The Everglow are absent in many of the songs on Singularity. Now the band is “chasing heaven as it fades into black.”
The infinite symbol looks like an 8 turned on its side. Photo source.
WOULD YOU STAY WITH ME TONIGHT? The gritty bass and guitars contrast with the beautiful musicality of the chorus. The verses of the song detail a kind of
useless energy that you can do nothing with all the while avoiding the most important things in life. Bearing in mind the multiple meanings of the song’s title, “Crazy 8s” evokes several kinds of chaos. The song possibly takes its name from a card game, often played by children, in which the goal of the game is to discard all cards. However, the song also seems to allude to a race track in the shape of an 8 or the infinity symbol, hence showing a kind of futility. On The Black Sheep Podcastby HM Magazine, Mae’s singer Dave Elkins, and guitarist Zach Gehring talk about the tension in the band during the recording of Singularity. They talk about the tension in the band that came with the pressure of recording with a major label and the disconnection between the band members due to the recording process. On a recent episode of Aaron Sprinkle and Matthew Schwartz’s podcast Moontravelingwith guest Jason Vena of Acceptance, Sprinkle and Vena recalled the aggressive micromanagement from Acceptance’s time on Columbia Records. Mae, too, quickly departed from their major label as they wanted to produce music more experimentally. Today Mae has 104K monthly listeners on Spotify. Experimental bands that question everything rarely have a place on major labels or Christian Indie labels back in the early ’00s.
They’re Only Chasing Safetyis an important album both in Christian music and Emo. The fourth studio record from Underoath was a reinvention of the band. First, the band’s prior lead singer, Dallas Taylor, left the band while the band was on the Vans Warped Tour in 2003, touring for their third record, The Changing of Times. Between the band’s third and fourth records, half of Underoath’s members changed, but since 2004, the band’s lineup hasn’t changed. Frontman Spencer Chamberlain took Taylor’s place on unclean vocals and together with drummer Aaron Gillespie on clean vocals, the two created the band’s first iconic record, an album that set the standard of hard-edged Emo and screamo.
CAN YOU FEEL YOUR HEARTBEAT RACING? I’ve written a lot about Underoath, mostly about who they are now and how everything they are doing now is a reaction to who and what they’ve done. They’re Only Chasing Safety is an album about six Christian young men, straight out of youth group, going into ministry–out into the world–without actually living in it. While some of the edginess of the record very well may have come from lived experience, the immaturity in the lyrics on their fourth album seem to come when they superimpose a Christian message on the issues that flood the record. While lead singer Spencer Chamberlain has said that Underoath actually never wrote Christian songs except for the final track “Some Will Seek Forgiveness, Others Escape,”from listening as the other bandmates recalled their experience in Underoath, the band’s culture and lyrics align with the ‘youth group’ culture of the era. Some examples of this youth group culture includes an outward display of piety on Warped Tour, members of Underoath leading worship, drawing other bands to attend. And then there was the accountability–a Christian term for checking in on fellow Christians, often based on a mutual agreement, to keep other Christians from backsliding, or deviating from the path prescribed by one’s own understanding of the Bible. Accountability worked for a while, until the band came to often violent realizations that each member had vastly different beliefs. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
I NEVER THOUGHT WE’D MAKE IT OUT ALIVE. The second song on They’re Only Chasing Safety, “A Boy Brushed Red Living in Black and White“became one of Underoath’s biggest songs, despite the fact that 1) they refused to play it in concert for many years and 2) they refused to make a radio edit to reduce the screaming that could have marketed the song to mainstream radio. The song deals with a sexual relationship that is unhealthy for both the speaker and the girl the speaker is sleeping with. It is clear that the unhealthiness of the sexual relationship in this song, though, comes from a deeply rooted belief in purity culture, or the idea that sex outside the confines of marriage is wrong in every case. One management decision that the band did acquiesce to was change the lyric in the bridge. Timothy McTague and Aaron Gillespie talked on the It’s All Over Podcast (formerly BadChristian) about how Tooth & Nail Records‘ A&R manager Chad Johnson strongly suggested changing the lyric from “a sucker for that whore” to “a sucker for that,” the pronoun that referring to a lifestyle of promiscuity rather than a particular person, especially because the song was supposedly written about a real person. The band has gone on to sing the song both ways in concert. But I think Johnson was right to encourage the band to cut the word. From the context of the song, it doesn’t seem that the girl is doing anything worse than the boy. While 40-something Underoath bandmates certainly will have a different view about sex today–no, sex isn’t going to kill you–, too often, both in and out of Christian culture, men make unfair comments on women’s sex drive. She wants it too much, she’s a whore; not enough, she’s a prude. She’s either a temptress or the future mother of your children, and inadvertently, “A Boy Brushed Red” seems to play into that Christian narrative. Today’s song is a relic of the past, but I hope for a little more responsibility with the band’s platform moving forward. In other words, for a band that now chooses to employ the full English language, they should fucking use their words responsibly!
Mixtapemotions 
