I’ve been writing a series of blogs on the songs that make up my most recent release, a covers project entitled “Through Songs I Was First Undone.”  The moments I’ve had with the artists whose music makes up this album have been sacred moments. These artists and their songs have been central to the necessary undoing of the expectations and limitations I habitually place on God and humanity.

Here is part one of why Nine Inch Nails’ “Head Like A Hole” is on the album:

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.)

I’ve been writing a series of blogs on the songs that make up my most recent release, a covers project entitled “Through Songs I Was First Undone.”  The moments I’ve had with the artists whose music makes up this album have been sacred moments. These artists and their songs have been central to the necessary undoing of the expectations and limitations I habitually place on God and humanity.

Here is part two of why Tom Waits’ “Georgia Lee” is on the album:

The song’s opening line “cold was the night, hard was the ground” is an echo of Blind Willie Johnson’s haunting 1927 recording “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, When They Laid My Savior Down,” a song of lament for the crucifixion and death of Jesus.

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

Last month, I did a short interview with Soul-Audio about the new album.  Here is an excerpt from my conversation with content editor Andrew Greenhalgh:

“Soul-Audio: Earlier, in reference to Waits’ “Georgia Lee,”  you talked about the subject matter of openly and honestly questioning God, i.e, “Why wasn’t God watching, listening, whatever.”  And said that, “I live there a lot of the time. I have a suspicion that many of us do.” Now, I totally concur with that. We do live in that state of questioning, even though we don’t always own up to it. And truthfully, a lot of Christian music doesn’t openly address these questions; rather, they seem to offer up simple platitudes as opposed to tackling the issues head on. Is it important for you to address these kind of questions? And why do you feel as though the industry, the CCM one, anyway, is more reluctant to do so?

Justin: I find a great sense of normality in songs like Georgia Lee; songs that reflect a disconnect between man and God. My experience of faith has been that it is a difficult road to travel on and ‘choosing to believe’ at times is a sacrifice of pride and intellect that I am unwilling to make. To trust God in the face of deep tragedy is most often not as simple or easy as waiting for the tension of minor chords to resolve into major chords which reinforce the soaring, full-throated declaration that “I will praise You in this storm.” While I think that declaration is beautiful and necessary in its place, so is the song that says “My boat sank and I lost everything I cared about.. where the hell were you?”

I would further add that there is something at least equally redemptive in giving legitimacy to these expressions of frustration and doubt. After all, before Job said to God “Surely I spoke of things I did not understand” he.. well… spoke of things he did not understand. It is BECAUSE of his courage to confront God on what he saw as unjust action that he came to really KNOW what he had previously taken for granted.

It’s important for me to voice these things on a few levels. For myself to make my own soul known to me; art serves this purpose in my life.. I am able to read myself more clearly in the things I write, especially as time passes after a recording. I also believe it’s important to create space for the many of us who live here to have a sense of normalcy in our doubts.

As you mention, there is plenty of space provided for those more ‘certain’ about their faith; I am hoping to provide some room for the rest of us.

As regards the reluctance of the CCM to do or not do anything in particular, I can only guess; not knowing very many people working in its ranks anymore. I know that it is that it’s much harder to sell a story that makes people uncomfortable; a complicated or unresolved story. The CCM industry is just that: an industry. It’s not a church and we often expect of them the same principles we do of our local congregation. The job of an industry is to sell things. A Christian industry sells Christianity. A Christianity shrouded in mystery is a hard sell. Certainty? Well, that we can do.”

Read the whole interview here

(You can read Part 1 here.)

“In the beginning,..”  there was no stuff.  There was darkness and void… it totally sucked.

God knew it sucked and so He went about making it not suck.  He did this in a very interesting way.

So, while there was no stuff, God made light by which to see the stuff God would eventually make.

And when God had made the light, “God saw that the light was good.”

The light was “good”…

um…

…good for what?  There’s no stuff. Stuff had not been made yet.  The purpose of light is to make stuff see-able.. So that we would know what we were buying… and eventually returning or replacing (which is another story).  That’s the point of light, is it not?

But before light was good FOR something,.. God called it “good”?

God then went about saying the same thing about just about all the stuff He was making… Even before we were there to use it…

The seas were “good.”  The vegetation was “good.” and on and on.

All the stuff was good simply because He saw it that way… simply because He had made it.  Creation was (and is) of value to God because it is His,.. not because of it’s usefulness.  So that the innate value of all things would rest in its relationship to the Creator. Not it’s usefulness to other parts of Creation nor it’s nearly arbitrary value in the Marketplace…

All Creation has value,
All Creation is good, because He is… and it is His.

I think we have this understanding of value almost entirely upside down, backwards and inside out (much like I do when trying to fold a fitted sheet… it’s a travesty.)  The dominant value system is so driven by and distorted by utility and profit that we struggle to find value in the the poor, the developmentally disabled, the unborn, the elderly, the Raiders… the least of these.

This is where I believe art is central and necessary for the human heart: In art, the value-relationship between Creator and Creation is expressed more clearly than just about anywhere else.  A piece is not worth what it sells for.  Be it 99c to $1.29 for a digital track or $30 to $5M for a painting, the monetary scale hardly tells us anything about a work’s ultimate/inate value.  What makes a song or a sculpture worth something or “good” generally has little if anything to do with the money it generates.

I believe we must come to this understanding in relationship to one another.  I also believe that embracing this value system as it is expressed in and through art is a key to that understanding.

This is part of why, in a time when the ‘value’ of art is seemingly in constant flux and negotiation…

-“Tweet about it and get it for free!”

-“Tell your friends about it and get it for a deal plus a second copy!”

-“Get your parents to think about tweeting about it to their friends and they’ll get a free copy of it, plus a shirt that reads ‘My parents thought about tweeting about Justin McRoberts’ new album and all I got was this lousy shirt’.”

.. I really wanted to do an album that was simply worth doing. It is not the most marketable thing I could have done at this point and though I hope folks enjoy it and support me when I release it, I honestly would have done the project were there no prospect at all for sales.

Now, don’t get me wrong; i’m not ‘against’ free music downloads and new forms of consumer media exchange.  In fact, I (heart) Noisetrade.. I
really do.. But Noistrade is not an end in and of itself.  Those behind the experiment are people who value art and are counting on medium of Noisetrade to help create a culture in which art is a good worthy of our social and financial support.

Art communicates value in a way that very little, if anything, in all this world communicates value.  My songs are not worth what listeners buy them for.  Their value simply cannot be measured in that way.  This album will not have been “worth it” if it sells well; it is worth it because the songs are good; and the songs are good because there is something of God in/about/through them…

…just as there is in all art… just as there is in you and me.

The first musical purchase I ever made was a the Police’s “ Synchronicity.”  I bought it on tape.  This wasn’t so much because I had incredibly discerning taste as a 9-year-old (in fact, my second musical purchase was “Chipmunk Punk” and I loved it with equal fervor).. it was that I lived in a neighborhood with a few older boys who did have excellent taste in music.  Because of these neighbors and their musical taste, I grew up on a steady diet of The Rolling Stones, Journey, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Run DMC and a whole grip of others including the aforementioned Police.

Of course, they didn’t only pass the music along to me; they taught me to listen to it.  Not as background, or something to listen to while heading somewhere else.. It was the destination.  I would get in my friend’s car and drive.. headed nowhere in particular..  just so we could listen to music on his stereo.  Sure, we were normal boys; we painted our faces and pretended we were spies or Green Berets sneaking through our own back yards. But we also donned black and white make-up, tore up some sleeveless shirts and put on a lip-synced concert of Kiss’ “Dynasty” for the our parents and their friends.  I assume they were proud.. between the safety flares we had stuck into the ground and the make-up running into my eyes, I don’t recall seeing their faces.  It was in experiences such as this that I learned to love music.

And that was just the beginning.

I remember being at the Warfield in San Francisco in 1987, bummed that we showed up so early to see The Cult.  I had never heard of the other band and braced myself for the excruciating boredom often associated with sitting through an opening act.  45 minutes later, I picked my jaw up from the floor and asked the mohawk next to me who that amazing band was.  “Dude” he said, placing his huge tattooed hand on my shoulder, which smelled like clove cigarettes and mouthwash, “they’re called ‘Guns n Roses.’  They’re from L.A.  They’re aaaaawwwsome.” And they were.

I remember seeing REM at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum, playing songs from the album GREEN and being transfixed along with about 19,000 others when it got quiet enough in the basketball arena for Michael Stipe to sing “You Are the Everything” without the band… through a bullhorn.  We slept in the parking lot of the Coliseum and went to see U2 on the Joshua Tree tour the very next night.  The Bodeans opened the show followed by the Pretenders.  I held hands with 60,000 strangers and sang “How long to sing this song?” for a solid 10 minutes after the stadium lights came on to tell us that it was time to go home.

More recently, I remember watching Tom Waits sing “Day After Tomorrow” at the tail end of the Daily Show and hitting ‘mute’ as the song faded so that the commercials Comedy Central runs wouldn’t ruin the vibe… I wanted to sit in that moment for a while.  There was something special about it.. more than special.. was it sacred?

Well.. I suppose that is something I am comfortable saying about my new album and the song choices I made…

I believe there is as much of God in the songs of Glen Phillips as there is in the songs of Phillips, Craig and Dean; as much of the Kingdom revealed in the songs of Tom Waits as in the songs of Chris Tomlin.  It is my opinion that to believe otherwise is to believe in a god too small to truly be God.

In a book entitled “For The Life of The World,” Alexander Schemann (a household name for obvious reasons) writes..

“The world is a fallen world because it has fallen away from the awareness that God is all in all… And even the religion of this world cannot heal or redeem it for it has accepted the reduction of God to an area called ‘sacred’ as opposed to the world as ‘profane.’  It has accepted the all embracing secularism which attempts to steal the world away from God.”

The moments I’ve had with the artists whose music makes up this new project have been sacred… undoubtedly.  It is key to note that these sacred moments have, for the most part, taken place outside of the boundaries of the christian marketplace and the ‘area’ generally reserved for the the activity of God.  These artists and their songs have been central to the necessary undoing of the expectations and limitations I habitually place on God; expectations of how, where and through whom God is revealed.  I recognize God in their art and I believe it is a duty, as an artist and a christian, to point Him out where He is and celebrate Him there.

Here is the track listing:

1. Georgia Lee (Tom Waits)
2. You Can’t Always Get What You Want (The Rolling Stones)
3. Save Me (Aimee Mann)
4. Fly From Heaven (Toad The Wet Sprocket)
5. Wildflowers (Tom Petty)
6. Head Like A Hole (Nine Inch Nails)
7. No One Is To Blame (Howard Jones)
8. Stripped (Depeche Mode)
9. Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want (The Smiths)
10. Freedom 90 (George Michael)

You can purchase the album here.

Not too long from now, I’ll be sharing a bit more about the heart of this project philosophically.  In the meantime, here’s your second sneak peek at Through Songs I Was First Undone: George Michael’s “Freedom 90.”