The odd thing about this understanding of “being saved” is that, since I’ve followed Jesus, it has all the more grated against my experience of life and faith.  My ‘conversion’ didn’t take place all in a moment and certainly has been a happy experience at times but never consistently.  My being “saved” never felt like something snapped into place after which I was then on my way.  I’ve experienced the waxing and waning of actual change in my life and the same waxing and waning of faith that my life’s change is authentic and lasting.  Less than a one-time agreement, it’s been more like fits and starts, in all honesty.

Sara Miles, in her book “Take This Bread” writes: “Conversion isn’t a moment: it’s process and it keeps happening, with cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt.”

A process of cycles and seasons.  That sounds like it.  Something more like the growing of a branch connected to a vine.. born invisibly, growing in shoots and perhaps too quickly… needing to be pruned.. growing again and bearing fruit.. but then.. Fall.. Winter and the long, dark hope that Spring will come again, bringing a greater abundance of fruit.  The work of a good gardener, salvation is not the magic and surgically sterile removal of my life from “this world” or even the mystical transcendence of my own base humanness.  It is the strange, messy and (dare I say) unfinished business of becoming a complete human being… one like Jesus.

Magnolia is one of the only movies I have ever gone back to the theater to see.  Cast with the likes of Julianne Moore, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and WIlliam H. Macy, there really isn’t a weak performance anywhere in the movie (unless you hate Tom Cruize instinctively,… which is really more about you than the movies you see).

I watched Magnolia the first time with my wife and some friends.  Our friends didn’t care much for the film, commenting that it was “bizarre,” “pathetic,” and “unlikely.”  We agreed that those were accurate descriptions but, to the contrary, Amy and I both thought those were exactly the elements we enjoyed most about it; it was so much like life as we knew it.

Along loving the story, the cinematography and the performances, I also fell in love with the movies soundtrack and in doing so, discovered Aimee Mann.  (little did I know she was the vocalist for the band Til Tuesday, whose single “Voices Carry” echoed through my head through much of the late eighties).  My understanding is that much of the Magnolia’s motivation and theme is derived from Aimee Mann’s music.  In fact, a few of the character Claudia’s lines are directly lifted from Aimee Mann lyrics.  In one case, she turns to Officer Jim Kurring, who is desperately in love with her and says

“Now that I’ve met you
Would you object to
Never seeing each other again.”

…which is the opening line to the song “Deathly”; a song I seriously considered covering for Undone. Instead, I chose the “Save Me.” which was written specifically for the film and is one of the the most pivotal songs in my musical history.

Much of its importance to me is strictly musi-technical.  Its darker tone, melancholy mood and seemingly-too-slow tempo don’t add up to “Save Me” being a downer song at all.  In fact, Save Me is incredibly catchy and has plenty of the energy one would want in a pop song.  What was revelatory for me was that It’s life and energy are not fabricated by bright, shimmery guitar tones or an uplifting, major-chord-driven chorus.  The song is alive because of the tension within it; a tension that never resolves but keeps the song trudging from verse to chorus to bridge and and and on.  This element was liberating for me as a writer.  I could leave a song “in the dark” as it were and let go of the temptation to force a feeling of resolution in lyric or in tone.

Until I let “Save Me” sink into my skin a bit, I didn’t quite recognize how strong the temptation to “resolve” a song actually was. I believed, as do most young artists, that I was being entirely authentic and transparent in my work.  But even looking at my 2000 release “Father,” an album ostensibly about wrestling with my father’s suicide, I could see very clearly where a few of the songs were somewhat forced; at least in the way I finished them… as if I was tying together broken limbs with pretty bows and wrapping paper.   Mann’s work guided me to see that art’s job was seldom to resolve.  More often, a great work affirms the mysterious nature of the human experience just as it is, which is a form of redemption in and of itself.  In this light, I would even go so far as to say that to force a resolution is to give in to the fear that a true resolution might not be there at all; that I must create or even fake it.  It strikes me that this is what is most disappointing about much art in the christian marketplace.  Not that it’s cheesy or even that it’s particularly bad; what is most disappointing is that it is insincere.  I wanted to distance myself from that temptation and the machinery that is angled toward giving in to it.

My 2002 release “Trust” was, as a whole, inspired and fueled by the musical revelation I found in Aimee Mann’s work.  From guitar and drum tones to chord progressions and even lyric choices, Trust was shaped by the freedom to leave songs in the dark; to create a tension and allow that tension to sustain the life of a song and even an entire album.

You can listen to a full length video preview of my “Save Me” at the top of this blog.
You can pick it up at iTunes or at my Online Store.

Maybe you remember the video; a troupe of impossibly beautiful models in an unfurnished, dilapidated mansion, lip-syncing to George Michael’s newest single.  The video had many MTV viewers asking questions like “What on earth was that about?” and “Is there another room available in that house?”  MTV kept the “Freedom” video in heavy rotation for a long while and the song stuck around the Billboard top ten for a several weeks.  In some ways, it’s pop success makes all the sense in the world;  It was/is an incredibly well-written pop song with about as memorable a melody as any I can think of from that era.  Yet, there is another element of the song that resonated with me.

At a time when video was still king of the music marketplace, George Michael did not appear in the “Freedom 90″ video at all.  Now, It doesn’t hurt to be replaced in your video by the likes of Naomi Campbell but, nonetheless.. MTV rotation at the time directly correlated to record sales.  His previous hit “Faith” was seriously bolstered in its success by the video, which featured both George Michael and George Michael’s buttocks.  It was arguably the biggest song of 1988 and one can hardly think of the song without the image of GM’s glutes shifting to and fro.  It clearly worked to have GM in the video. He was, after all, a sex symbol as well as a musician.  So… go with what works.. do what sells.  But he refused to appear in the video at all.

George Michael’s sexual identity was directly tied to his marketability as an artist. Being a hunky dude was part of what made him sellable as a member of Wham! and as a solo artist.  Being a hunky, gay dude was not quite as marketable to pop-culture’s army of bubble-gum chewing 13-17 year old girls.  ”Freedom 90″ was, in many ways, an announcement that the artist was no longer willing to compromise his identity for the sake of marketability.  Or, as the song’s most revealing lyrics have it: “I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me”

The interplay between identity and possession in any system of relationships can be treacherous. Even in personal settings, a perverted sense of ownership/possession can destroy a relationship and bring great damage to one or both parties involved.  Nobody wants to be “owned.”  In fact, it is this very idea that one person possess/own another person like a product that is of the horror of human trafficking; possession of a person strips that person of their “personhood.”  Obviously (or at least I would hope) the nature of this interplay becomes even more delicate in the circus that is the entertainment world. An artist or performer can very easily become less of a person and more of a product sold by the marketplace; whose tastes, personality, language, behavior etc… are more a reflective of what the market finds valuable than what “true” to that person’s soul.

I know this is an old storyline; one that regular folks like you and I don’t have much sympathy for. We don’t have much room left for Lindsay Lohan or the like.. I get it.  But the truth is that something of the same possessive spirit that sets the stage for the sex-slave trade also sets the stage for celebrity culture; a culture in which we celebrate, support, judge and condemn people from a distance so far as they serve our purposes and our ideals.  We want our sports figures to be role models and are shocked when they act foolishly. We want our celebrities to honor their commitments and lament their decisions to live otherwise.  We need our public religious figures to uphold our moral ideals at a higher level than we even expect of ourselves and are crushed to learn of their very human failures.

These men and women cease to be men and women.. they become projections of our “ideal selves”… of they way we wish we lived, the power we wish we had, the body we wish we were in and on and on. We don’t want them to be complicated, fragile, unfinished, human… because if they are only human, then we must be “only human” too.  And it often disappoints us that we are complicated, fragile and unfinished; their relational, financial and moral failures temporarily justifies and then highlights our own…

George Michael’s sexuality, like the sexuality of most any celebrity, was/is subject to approval of the masses who claimed some sort of ownership or possession of him (*This takes a very interesting twist in the case of christian-culture celebs who are more often presented as nearly a-sexual).  He wanted freedom from that, which he sought by way of publicly announcement; this song was part of that process.

I was in touch with my emotions..  and yours.
I read Poe, Ginsberg and Kerouac.. and understood.
I went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show… and knew every word

I also listened to the Smiths…  The jangle-y, sparkling guitar tones of Johnny Marr set the backdrop for modern music’s most dramatic lyricists: Morrissey.  Lyrics such as

“If a 10-ton truck kills the both of us
To die by your side is such a wonderful way to die.”  (from There Is A Light That Never Goes Out)

Were set to music that might just as well have supported something more like

“I bought a dog to day, a yellow lab he is
He’s just a puppy, and he’s cuddly and so cute”

But it was (and is) exactly that juxtaposition of happy and sad that resonated deeply with me as an adolescent.  Then again, maybe it’s less of a juxtaposition and more of a mix.. Happy with sad. The music the Smiths made celebrated a collision of these two emotions that was… well, true.  Seldom had I experienced a sadness (especially up to that point) that was all shadow, through and through.  Something about the experience of sadness always had a the buzz of energy to it… of life… the thrill that I was feeling something.

Only later and at a sufficient distance from my adolescence did I start to grasp what all that was about; That, in a culture addicted to pleasure; a culture that spends billions in the attempt to avoid pain and maintain it’s high, feeling something low, something negative was redemptive.. In the experience of sadness, I became more acquainted with the fullness of my own humanity.

Makoto Fujimura writes about sadness as a more acceptable aspect to Japanese culture, saying…

“…the Japanese traditional culture affirms vulnerability and loss. Japanese poems and paintings… are full of sorrow and sadness, and their poetic tradition of “mono-no-aware” can be literally translated “beauty in the pathos of things.”  They already recognize that, on this side of eternity, we must see the beauty in an empty cup.”

The music of The Smiths captured this for me.  I saw the beauty of my empty cup through the lens of songs like “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want This Time.” Here’s my cover of it:

You can pick up my rendition of the song at iTunes
or my Online Store

6 “For three sins of Israel, even for four,
I will not turn back {my wrath}.
They sell the righteous for silver,  
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

7 They trample on the heads of the poor 
      
as upon the dust of the ground 
      
and deny justice to the oppressed. 
      
Father and son use the same girl 
      
and so profane my holy name.

8 They lie down beside every altar 
      
on garments taken in pledge. 
      
In the house of their god 
      
they drink wine taken as fines.

This echoes in my heart:
…They sell the righteous for silver, 
and the needy for a pair of sandals.

Because somewhere there is a child or a family whose freedom has been compromised so that the already-wealthy don’t have to pay “full price” for shoes.

So does this:
….In the house of their god they drink wine taken as fines.

The wine in some religious ceremonies during Amos’ time had been purchased with money collected from unfair and unethical fees and punishments imposed on the vulnerable and poor. It rendered the celebration of religion detestable in God’s sight. While this kind of crookedness is the exception, there is still much of christendom built on the backs of the unknowingly manipulated.. the swindled.. those who came to the Church to find a place of rest and belonging but instead found a place of emotional manipulation and trickery; Peoples’ actual needs for health, growth and community taken advantage of in order to support the expansion of their shepherd’s career in religious industry. I see these things with the same level of anger as Reznor does,.. but also with a touch of sadness that the original recording of Head Like A Hole doesn’t portray. Which is why I wanted my arrangement to reflect not only the anger but the grief and lament of God for the abuse of power.

It is rumored that the original recording of Head Like A Hole features a one-take of Reznor’s lead vocal (meaning that he only tracked once and left it alone,.. flaws included). The rawness of his voice is then set against the driving, mechanical construction of the song’s arrangement. This tension between the human and the mechanical is what I believe gives the original track such beautiful power. My choice was to move in the opposite direction, .. So I had a cylon sing my part…. Actually, what I mean is that I wanted to make the whole thing feel human… To tap into lament and sadness rather than simply rage; hoping that the tension created would be enough to sustain the song. So, if you listen carefully to the beginning of my rendition, you can hear the creaking of the piano and even hear piano player Ben Shive breathing (I forgot to list that in the liner notes: “Breathing Noises: Ben Shive”)

You can pick up my rendition of the song at iTunes
or my Online Store

Pope John Paul, in his 1990 letter to artists, encourages artists with the notion that  “Every genuine inspiration contains some tremor of that ‘breath’ with which the Creator Spirit suffused the work of creation from the very beginning.”  I am of the opinion that, insofar as genuine inspiration contains something of the character of God in creation, then perhaps it is equally true that there is art whose inspiration contains something of the character of God in grief or even in anger.  In this category, I’d place bands like Rage Against The Machine, Bad Religion and Public Enemy… Bands and artists who and are articulate voices of dissent in relationship to abusive and/or corrupt power centers.

I would also include Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails in this category, though to a lesser degree.  NIN generally tends toward more emotional and interpersonal angst but in songs like Head Like A Hole, Reznor’s ferocity gives focus to frustration and disillusionment on the grander social scale where critics like those mentioned above most often function.

Head Like A Hole was written and released at the end of an era which saw an almost unprecedented expanse of American wealth and prosperity.  In the perspective of some, this growth came coupled with a spirit of greed and self-interest that went almost entirely unchecked if not blatantly celebrated.  Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” is often cited as a dramatic accounting of this spirit.  Interestingly, the rapid generation and accumulation of wealth throughout the 80’s runs parallel to a much slower than expected decline in the poverty rate.  For the 13-15% of Americans who live below the poverty line ($19k per year), the 1980’s embodied the proverb “rich get richer while the poor get poorer.”

My memory of this same time period is also riddled with religious scandals of such variety, frequency and crookedness that perhaps only the phrase TrageComedy is appropriate or even remotely accurate.  From televangelists swindling members out of thousands of dollars to shady financial exchanges between high-profile ministries and politicians to seemingly perpetual sexual assault and misconduct allegations and even to one mislead brother locking himself in a tower and suggesting that God would actually kill him if he didn’t come up with a few million dollars.

Despite the fact that by the 1989 release of “Head Like A Hole,” I was only fifteen, I distinctly remember having an awareness that men and women of power were corrupt and that, almost as a rule, they wielded that power selfishly if not maliciously.  It seemed (as it often still does) that all we have to work with is self-interest and that our best hope is to unbridle that self-interest in the off-chance that some “invisible hand” would guide even our worst intentions and schemes to a more beneficent end.  Unfortunately, that scenario seldom seems to play itself out.

So, as comedic as some of the foibles of the 1980s may have been, at least from a distance, I’m also convinced that much of the mistrust my generation feels towards our central institutions (and most profoundly the Church) stems from the social and emotional damage done during the 1980s.  Out of this space of negativity and mistrust emerged “Head Like A Hole” as an anthem of sorts, with Reznor screaming

“No you can’t take it
No you can’t take that away from me
Head like a hole.
Black as your soul.
I’d rather die than give you control.”

You can purchase the track at iTunes
or at my online store.

(Part 2 coming soon.)

Listen to the interview HERE!!

I find the layers of contrast and tension created by Wait’s word choice here captivating and at the same time unsettling.  Waits begins a song about the apparent inattentiveness of God to the death of a runaway by referencing a song about the death of God Himself in Christ; a song that, in turn, is written and performed by a man who, like Georgia, was poor, black and largely unnoticed until after his death.*  All of this in one line. Genius.

So, in a nod to Waits’ choice to nod lyrically to Blind Willie Johnson, my recording of the song begins with an audio-nod to Pedro the Lion’s “The Longer I Lay Here.”  Listeners will hear 6 beats of click-track to begin the song.  The click is normally hidden but, like Bazan who produced “It’s Hard To Find A Friend,” we left the click exposed.  Bazan chose to let the click track remain throughout the entire song.

The parallel here is a reflection of the way I receive Georgia Lee as a listener, which is much of why I covered it for the album.  Listeners like myself are drawn to songs of like Georgia Lee and the larger bodies of work by David Bazan/Pedro the Lion because these songs provide words and shape to a very real experience of God that has little media attention paid to it: His absence.

The suffering of children at the hands of foul men or corruption of any kind often leads us along a line of questioning which comes to a tumbling, awkward end in an eerily empty space… eery because it is the space we thought we would find God, smiling knowingly, with a cup of hot chocolate and all the answers our shaken hearts desire about suffering, death and the like.. but many do not.   Though this doesn’t at all represent a loss of faith, it is nonetheless a place of desperate, soul-wrenching tension… a place in which one must choose against ones “better judgement” when responding to the question “Why wasn’t God there?”

(At another point, I’d like to take a more philosophical look at the experience of God’s absence or disappointment with God in the context of faith.  For now, I’m going to stick with the song’s place on the album in the light of that same tension.)

Waits’ song doesn’t answer it’s own question.  Nor should it be required to.  It is enough for the song and artist to ask it; to create space  for the tension between assurance and doubt.  In fact, the temptation to answer such questions prematurely is partly what makes some contemporary christian art seem so disconnected or shallow.  It communicates a disregard for what I have come to know as an authentic and vital aspect of faith: doubt.

The empty spaces we sometimes find ourselves in are part of a mature emotional and spiritual landscape.  It is about these spaces that works like “The Dark Night of the Soul” or “The Cloud of Unknowing” have been written, assuring those on a journey of faith that there is nothing broken; that this is part of what the map looks like.  In “Caring For Words In a Culture of Lies” Marilyn McEntyre notes that it is in the silence after a sentence or the space left at the end of a line where a reader actually has the ‘space’ to engage, to receive and to process… to more fully know what was just written (or spoken, or sung).  She calls this “the hospitality of our own silences.”

Wait’s “Georgia Lee,” and the space that follows it, has been a hospitable silence for me.

You can purchase the song or the album here
You can also find it at iTunes

My first knowledge of Tom Waits actually came by way of Primus; a band I listened to incessantly as a teenager.  Wait’s appears on Primus’ dark and quirky 1991 release “Sailing The Seas of Cheese.” He is featured on a track entitled “Tommy The Cat” as the voice of Tommy, who is, of course, a cat.  Interesting bit of trivia: Primus backs Waits on the opening track to “Mule Variations,” the same album from which we get the song “Georgia Lee.”

Waits wrote Georgia Lee with his wife, Kathleen after the body of 12-year old Georgia Lee Moses was found off Highway 101 in Petaluma, CA, just north of San Francisco.  Discovered on Aug 23, 1997, Georgia had run away and was missing for over two weeks before her absence was noticed; a more common occurrence in low-income or impoverished areas.  In fact, just four years earlier, the absence of Polly Klaas, a 12-year old girl from an upper middle class neighborhood in the same county as Georgia Moses, had stirred outrage and action nationwide.  Major celebrities and news outlets committed hours of time to finding her.  Polly’s kidnapper and eventual murderer was arrested and is now on death row.  The man who killed Georgia was never found.

“Not to make it a racial matter,” Waits said “but it was one of those things where, you know, she’s a black kid, and when it comes to missing children and unsolved crimes, a lot of it has to do with timing, or publicity . . . and there was this whole Polly Klaas Foundation up here, while Georgia Lee did not get any real attention.  And I wanted to write a song about it.”

Road-Side Monument for Georgia Lee in Petaluma, CA

I don’t at all mean to belittle the time and energy spent searching for, mourning and remembering Polly Klaas.  Nor do I believe Waits intended to do so.  Quite the opposite in fact; that a child goes missing from their home or neighborhood should be cause for all regularly-scheduled programming to pause.. any child…

And perhaps it was simply “to do with timing” that there was so much attention paid to the finding of one child, while another child’s absence and death can be simply read as the lay of the land. I’m not suggesting that media attention is the most accurate measure of our concern for life but the nightly news is at least some reflection of collective consciousness; some reflection of what things are of value to us;  what things we are watching, listening to and present to.

A year after services were held, Waits is quoted as saying about the service “I guess everybody was wondering, where were the police, where was the deacon, where were the social workers, and where was I and where were you.”

So while it might not be CNN or FOX or even the local paper, it has to be someone, doesn’t it? Isn’t that what our hearts demand?.. that someone is watching, someone is listening, someone is there for the other child? for every child?

“Where were her parents?  What kind of parent allows their child to run away and doesn’t call the police?” we ask.  All the while knowing that parents are not always good parents; sometimes parents are only children themselves, as Wait’s writes:  “A lot of kids are raising their parents.”

“So, If not her parents,” we concede “then what about her neighbors?  What kind of neighborhood lets one of it’s little ones simply disappear?”  At which my own heart sinks because I do not know the names of children who live only a few units away from me.

What kind of world is it, then, in which the in the foundational institutions set in place to facilitate the development of young life so consistently fail?

This progression of questions about the broken nature of things leads us to the One whose world it is… or at least to the places we expect to find Him.  The SF Chronicle reported that Waits attended Georgia Moses’ memorial service, “sitting quietly at the back of the crowded church.”

Why wasn’t God watching?
Why wasn’t God listening?
Why wasn’t God there?

If not the news networks, the families or the neighbors.. If not the world He made, then must not God Himself protect the most vulnerable among us?

Part 2 coming shortly…

You can purchase the song or the album here
You can also find it at iTunes