Welcome to the fallout
Switchfoot (Dare You to Move)
Welcome to resistance
The tension is here
The tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be
The Dream
Years ago I had a dream. A dream to make music.
A dream to make a living making music.
A once upon a time kind of dream that danced that line between fairy tale vision and potential reality.
Like all great music dreams should begin, mine begins with the legendary bastion of grunge rock, Pearl Jam, covering their song Daughter for school spirit day. The intermittent drum lessons that colored my childhood, managed as they were with the aid of a rickety, no named brand budget kit, a mere step up from the pots, pans and pails I banged around on under the tutelage of a particular elementary peer and prodigy, had graduated to a swanky new Pearl set leading into my grade 10 year. I was a self made developing musician, a basement drummer surrounded by much better studied and studio quality professionsals, who was given a stage by a group of my peers, a moment that would eventually bleed into years of endless basement jam sessions with a rag tag mix of “riff raff” friends with a shared interest in these basement level passions. Those jam sessions would bleed into what became many years as the primary worship drummer at my church. A bit of a juxtaposition with my metal head days; two worlds colliding and weaving their way through the different iterations of hopeful bands and projects that would follow.
As I was chasing my dream, seeds of a different kind were quietly being planted by the relationships I was building with a small group of 12 year old kids finding their way in our still at the time small and fledgling house church turned established community.
The Beautiful Letdown
I’m in my mid-twenties. I’m looking back at a litter of failed band projects. I was dealing with the sudden departure from my life of a pivotal part of that dream and process; a close friend whom had an opportunity to see his own dream fulfilled. It was, in many ways, a time of crisis. One of those moments that asks of you, just how important is this dream, and what do you do when this dream seems to be veering back towards the realm of fairy tale without the necessary happy ending?
I decided to take one last shot at turning the dream into a reality. A decision that had some inspiration from the outside; while I was in the midst of this pursuit, another group of young musicians from California found themselves in a similar space asking similar questions of themselves. As their story went, an indie record had earned them a spot opening for some established names. What was meant to be their breakout record, an album that would gain the title The Beautiful Letdown, faced one of the greatest obstacles of that time- rejection from the big wigs. And, as they tell that story, not just rejection but rejection a mere 30 seconds into their audition.
The ways into the industry were not the same then as they are today, with most paths following a similar road chasing a cherished spot at one of the big labels. Thus the question for them was the same- just how important is this dream, and what do you do when this dream seems to be veering back towards the realm of fairy tale without the necessary happy ending? They answered the challenge by risking an independent release, choosing to believe in the record rather than allowing the rejection to seal its fate. The Beautiful Letdown would go on to be their breakout album, only on their terms and as their project.
That story would carry with me as I met with another close friend, a guy also named Dave and who also shared the same birthday as me, one of the few to only remaining musical voices in my life at the time, and dreamt up a new possibility. Sitting there in his bedroom, together we set out on this venture to build a project that could get us where we wanted to be on our own terms- making music.
Fast Forward: Years of hard work and struggle brought that dream slowly to life, bringing in a front person, writing a bunch of original songs, putting together a recording and a couple makeshift tours east and west, and eventually bringing in the help of a local band manager as part of an effort to make a real go of it.
I was on the precipice of experiencing what I had spent so long striving for. In fact, for a while I was living it in its earliest stages. Little did I know I was approaching another important intersection. Those seeds that had been planted through my relationship with that handful of students had been growing and aging alongside my dream. And it was on one of the biggest stages of my life that I realized I was, in fact, at a point of crisis- follow the story of the band through to its ultimate conclusion, or leave it behind so that I could be there for these now grown adolescents heading into their graduating years.
It was in this moment, on the bigness of that stage, listening in the background to this hopeful band manager laying out the game plan with our front persons (which included getting the “notes” that I needed to cut my hair and change my image) that I began to reflect on my dream. For as silly as it might sound to some, I would call it a prompting of the spirit. I was compelled to wonder about what fueled my dream from its early moments. Was it a dream to make music? Or was it a dream to play music that invested in the lives of our primary target audience- that younger generation I had been journeying with alongside the creation of this band? When I realized that what got me most excited was the latter, I knew which road I had to take.
So I stepped out of the band. To be honest, there was a real sense that I taken the thing as far as I could. What the band would become seemed to be developing into its own thing, a very different thing than I had once imagined. I felt like I had brought it far enough to prove to myself that I could do it, that I had gotten to where my dream had long imagined I wanted to be. But as life does, this wasn’t without a small bit of irony. Not long after I left the band, they would find themselves sharing the stage with Switchfoot.
20 Years Later: The Beautiful Letdown
Its funny. Perhaps this is what makes art, any art, timeless. Listening to an album at one point in your life can speak something quite different 20 years later. I recently had the privilege of attending The Beautiful Letdown anniversary concert, a tour in which they performed the album front to back. It was a last minute decision, shaped by something of a pilgrimage- I was in the middle of reading the recently released biography on the life of Martin Luther King and simultaneously looking for somewhere to go in the fleeting days of summer before my current job in the school system kicked back into gear. Switchfoot was playing in Birmingham, Alabama. The Birmingham area was where so much of what I was reading in this biography had occurred. Plans for a solo trip took shape, and off I went with that formative album functioning as my soundtrack.
This is your life
Switchfoot (This Is Your Life)
Are you who you want to be?
This is your life
Is it everything you dreamed
That it would be when the world was younger
And you had everything to lose?
20 years later I find myself asking similar questions about my life, just from a much different vantage point. Driving through the mountains of Tennessee and into the Alabama foothills, I found these songs urging me to look backwards rather than forwards, leading me to assemble the many ups and downs of my journey since leavinng my dream behind into an existential crisis regarding my legacy. I imagined, walking in the footsteps of one of the world’s greatest dreamers, what the story of my life might tell having chosen the path that I did. Was it everything I dreamed. Am I who I want, or wanted to be, now that the world is much older?
I’m not sure I settled on much of an answer. In fact, driving down those Alabama highways, an immenses sense of my many failures loomed large. I did however find along that journey particular moments of clarity.
I remember, following a lengthy day of visiting Montgomery and travelling the well trodden path to Selma, which included visiting the areas literary inspirations, deciding to get off the interstate and travel the backroads back to Birmingham. I was surrounded by forests of tall, thin oak trees, weaving their way through the foothills and upwards back towards the city that marked the entry point to the areas Red Mountain. Intermittent rain storms had quietly worked their way southward, helping to break the humidity. I had the windows rolled down and the sunroof open, letting the coolness of the gentle downpour inform my reflections on the darkness I had encountered that day in the story of Alabama’s, and America’s history.
That’s when these lyrics really hit home;
Life is not what I thought it was
Twenty-four hours ago
Still I’m singing ‘Spirit,
Take me up in arms with You’I want to see miracles
Switchfoot (Twenty Four)
To see the world change
Wrestled the angel for more than a name
For more than a feeling
For more than a cause
I’m singing ‘Spirit, take me up in arms with You’
And you’re raising the dead in me
Here is what I can say with a fair degree of certainty- the longer I live the bigger the world gets. And the bigger the world gets, the more the particulars of a story draw it back in. A close listen to The Beautiful Letdown can demonstrate its keen sense for this inevitable relationship between the story of the self and the story of the world it sees. To ask, am I who I want to be, is to ask am I who I want to be in relationship to the world I see and experience. In the song On Fire, the band also imagines that our relationship to the world we see exists within the broader question of Gods relationship to the world..
And you’re on fire
Switchfoot (On Fire)
When he’s near you
You’re on fire
When he speaks
You’re on fire
Burning at these mysteries
In some real sense, to encounter and see the divine is to see the world through that lens, and subsequently to find our relationship to the world through our relationship to the divine. That’s where we can dare to wonder and imagine, “when everything inside me looks like everything I hate, You are the hope I have for change.” Words that ring out from those places of darkness and defeat, amidst the dreams and the seeds of dreams still unexpressed, locating places of transformation in the mystery.
I’m standing on the edge of me
I’m standing at the edge of everything I’ve never been before
I’m on fire
Burning at these mysteries
Where “Every day we borrow brings us one step closer to the edge of infinity”, leading us to ask “Where’s (our) treasure? where’s (our) hope? This is the ultimate point of clarity that emerges from Dare You To Move, singing “maybe redemption has stories to tell.” Or the words of Meant To Live, which echo with equal parts lament the proclamation, “we want more than this world’s got to offer.” Or to sing the song of The Beautiful Letdown;
It was a beautiful letdown
Switchfoot (The Beautiful Letdown)
When you found me here
I will carry a cross and a song
Where I don’t belong
I don’t belong
To see my story through the words of these songs 20 years later was to hear these words speaking to the many points of crisis and failure and joys and successes that mark my journey, and reshaping them against the echoes of a greater dream. I might not be making music, but my life nevertheless continues to sing a song. 20 years ago I would want to tell that young dreamer that the greatest melodies come from marrying that song to the mystery that hold them loosely. That the world you will find through a lived life will demand that mystery in order to sing a new song “between who you are and who you could be. Between how it is and how it should be”.
When the world was younger I had a dream. The older the world gets, the more I realize that the dream is in the living.
The Stories of my Life 