From the Salmon

Thanks to the Pepsi iTunes Music Promotion and to a particularly lucky 20 oz. bottle of Mountain Dew (apparently about 0.7% of a lethal dose), I’ve won a free song at the iTunes Music Store.

Any song suggestions?

I’m really, really close to springing for Bright Eyes’ “Land Locked Blues” (thanks, Kristen), but the rest of the album sounds intriguing enough that I may just have to buy the whole thing.

Sam Beam, the Floridian singer-songwriter behind Iron & Wine, has shown a remarkable ability to scrape away the outer layers of other songwriters’ material to lay bare the roughness beneath. I first encountered Iron & Wine on a B-side reinvention of the title track of The Postal Service’s Such Great Heights EP. Beam took an airy, hushed approach that brought to the surface an ache and longing that the original had hidden under laptop clicks and indie-pop hooks. Last December, I finally got the chance to see Iron & Wine perform live, and Beam gave a similar treatment to New Order’s “Love Vigilantes.” He didn’t so much cover the song as interpret it, speaking the song in a tongue that opened my eyes to the heartbreaking story New Order had obscured behind a veil of jaunty synthpop.

Since Iron & Wine’s 2002 debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, Sam Beam has gradually reinvented his own sound, lovingly polishing each successive release a little bit more than the last. In contrast to the rustic bygone-era sound of his early work, Iron & Wine’s Woman King EP practically shimmers. Beam finds eager new partners for his usual acoustic guitar and breathy vocals — ringing dulcimer arpeggios, raucous piano punctuation, even driving percussion. The final track barrels on to climax amidst a battle of droning fiddles and crunching electric guitars. While I would happily consume a half-dozen more Creeks, I have absolutely fallen in love with the lushly developed sound of this disc.

As the title suggests, Iron & Wine gives us six songs that are inhabited — even possessed — by women. And what women! A righteous regal warrior. A lusty, treacherous queen facing an ominous fate. Mary. Jezebel. Lilith. This is epic, mythic, Biblical territory. And Beam attacks these songs with the vigor that his heroines demand. Only “Jezebel” and “In My Lady’s House” harken back to the gentleness of his previous work. Yet even in Jezebel, the dogs roam hungrily just outside the window.

Woman King EP was released today on Sub Pop Records. Sub Pop offers a free mp3 download of the title track.

Before I decided to write about my own musical journey, Brandon’s post took me back to a time when all I listened to was “Christian Contemporary Music.” As I mentioned previously, one of the first uncomfortable memories that came to mind was of getting way too pumped up over Petra’s “This Means War!” And as I commented over on Brandon’s site, this also reminded me of a time when I was very, very young and my favorite hymn was “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

It turns out that Brandon G over at Born-Again Liberal was thinking along the same lines, because later in the day, I came across his post “The Lord’s Propaganda.” In reminiscing about the songs he learned as a kid growing up in the church, Brandon remembers one called “I’m in the Lord’s Army.” I remember singing this song as well, but I hadn’t remembered the lyrics until Brandon reminded me:

I may never march in the Infantry,
Ride in the Calvary,
Shoot the artillery.
I may never zoom o’er the enemy,
But I’m in the Lord’s Army.

I’m in the Lord’s Army, (yes, sir!)
I’m in the Lord’s Army, (yes, sir!)

In my memory, there were most definitely motions that went along with this song (marching, riding, shooting(!), flying and saluting), which made it a favorite for the kids in my Sunday School or Vacation Bible School. In the interest of figuring out how on earth a song like this ended up in the canon of Christian kids’ songs, Brandon dug a little bit into the song’s history. He discovered that the song was from one of the World War eras, and that the original lyrics contained the line “I may never fly over Germany.” He continues:

That’s right: the song wasn’t just modeled after war propaganda; it was, in itself, war propaganda. They took the importance of the war that America was drilling into its citizens and used it to try to make children behave, as if to say that they could do their part in supporting the war by being good little Christians.

Which brings me back to “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” A cursory search into the history of this hymn revealed that Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould wrote the hymn in 1864 (in England, so this had nothing to do with the American Civil War) as a processional for children celebrating Whitmonday (the day after Pentecost Sunday).

Let me just say that I love hymns. Give me Newton or Watts in four parts any day of the week. But every now and then as I’ve gotten older, I’ll sing something that I’ve sung all my life, and it will make me supremely uncomfortable. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” is one of those hymns:

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before:
Christ the royal Master leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see, His banner go.

Now, I don’t have children. And I’m not yet a pacifist. And when I was younger, I was as fascinated by tanks and fighter jets as many of the other boys my age. Hell, even now, I enjoy kicking me some alien butt with a plasma gun from time to time. So I don’t think that it’s just the Baby Patton part of these songs that bother me. I think that what bothers me is the idea that I was encouraged as a child to think of myself as a Christian Soldier in the Lord’s Army.

“But it’s only a metaphor,” you might say. “Besides, Paul uses that metaphor himself when he talks about the ‘Armor of God.’”

Fine. But I think metaphors matter. The image we have of God matters. And this one troubles me.

There’s a lot that I could write at this point about the conflation of patriotism and faith, the creeping Americanism in the church, the statements of Gen. Boykin and others about our army engaged in a fight against Satan. But let’s save all that for another time…

What worries me is that I see a tendency among Christians today to see our relationship with the rest of the world as one of conflict. We use terms like “culture war.” We talk about how we’re “under attack” by nebulous secular forces. We wall ourselves off and put up defenses. We attack. We say some pretty awful things. Quite frankly, we hate. I’m in no way saying this is all we do, but I think that if you’ve spent a decent amount of time in the American church, you know that there’s some truth to this.

I find this troubling because, on a very basic level, I think it makes it easier to live with ourselves if we think that we can point to something outside of us as being “what’s wrong with the world.” And if we could only defeat this enemy, all would be well. I see this from Christians (and non-Christians, for that matter) on both sides of the political spectrum. I do this. If we just get this law passed or this candidate elected or these people on the courts and on and on....

And those things matter; I’m not trying to say that they don’t. Lord knows I’ll be writing about them a bunch in the future. But they miss the point.

In his book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller writes about attending a protest:

When we were done, I started wondering if we had accomplished anything. I started wondering whether we could actually change the world. I mean, of course we could — we could change our buying habits, elect socially conscious representatives and that sort of thing, but I honestly don’t believe we will be solving the greater human conflict with our efforts. The problem is not a certain type of legislation or even a certain politician; the problem is the same that it has always been.

I am the problem.

I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest.

By thinking of ourselves as Christian Soldiers locked in a battle against the forces of whatever, we’re able to distract ourselves from our own brokenness, our own pride, our own greed. I am the problem.

Furthermore, I think that the image of the Church at War makes us unable to fully embrace the idea of the Church as Healer. In everything Jesus said and did, he sought to make whole the brokenness of those around him. The world he entered expected him to triumph as a warrior; instead, he ministered as a healer. And I think God wants the same from us. God doesn’t want us to win. He wants us to heal.

And it’s a shame that they don’t write catchy children’s songs about that.

I began my day yesterday by reading a great post over at Bad Christian about Brandon’s musical journey. As I checked my nets from time to time throughout the day, I found that I was catching more and more folks with music on the mind. I know I’m a little late to the game, but this is something I’m likely to write about a lot. So we may as well start here.

Brandon writes about an on-again-off-again infatuation with music. For me, it’s been more of a torrid affair. That started in childhood. And… Well…

OK, so that metaphor didn’t go where I had hoped it would go. But as I was growing up, I was alway surrounded by music.

My parents were very musical people, who almost always had the radio on or a record playing. During those years, I listened to a lot of classical music. When I moved to a new school in fourth grade, and my teacher asked the class a series of questions so that we could get to know each other better, most of the class listed a song from Thriller as their favorite, since it was dominating the charts at the time. Me? Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. Um… I wasn’t very popular.

Like Brandon, I also went through a pretty fierce CCM phase. When my parents weren’t playing WFMT (Chicago’s classical station), they were playing WETN (from Wheaton College) and WMBI (from Moody Bible Institute). So I had a Steve Camp pin on my jean jacket. On Easter, I’d find myself truly moved by Carman’s “The Champion.” As I mentioned in the comments of Brandon’s post, I seem to remember dancing around my room, fist pumping, singing “This Means WAR!” Needless to say, this disturbs me on so many levels. More on that feeling later, but for now… Thanks, Petra! (Ack! They’re still together!)

Eventually, I figured out that there were other stations on the radio and I became interested in the music that my friends were listening to. Since it was the mid-80s, most of it was really as silly as CCM.

All of this is only prelude to what music has become for me. Then, music entertained me and even moved me. Or at least manipulated me. Now, it still entertains me, but it also feeds me, shapes me, and sustains me.

If I try to trace the transition, I think it leads back to a moment and a man. The moment, oddly enough, happened when I was rocking out to the Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter.” My father pulled out one of his Simon & Garfunkel records and I was on my way.... The man was one of my high school youth group leaders, who let us hang out in his basement apartment listening to his killer stereo in the dark. He introduced me to Peter Gabriel, Harrod & Funck, Robbie Robertson, and the early days of the Vigilantes of Love. I’d never experienced anything like listening to “Mercy Street” in the dark through first-rate headphones. And in all my years of listening to Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith, I’d never heard lyrics like Mr. Simon’s or Mr. Mallonee’s. I had found something that had, in Brandon’s words, filled that “CCM sized hole in my heart.”

From there, the stream winds a lot, through folk and jam bands and folk and bluegrass and folk and indie and back to folk again. Willy Porter‘s “Angry Words” and Bruce Cockburn’s “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” got me through some dark days. ShawnandToriandAniandDar sang me to shore. My best man gave me Ani and the Judybats and Marc Cohn and Carrie Newcomer and Lyle Lovett. Dave Matthews, Vertical Horizon, Little Sister and Guster led me to my wife. Brandon offers David Wilcox, the Indigo Girls, Kelly Joe Phelps and U2. I see him and raise him Richard Shindell, the Story, Peter Mulvey and Iron and Wine.

In later posts, I hope to share more about some of the songs that have meant the most to me. But tonight’s post is more about the journey. And I’m probably already boring you. And I’ve got a dinner date with my wife, who I met at a concert nine years ago tonight.

I also look forward to highlighting and adding to some of the other great posts I read yesterday. But not now. Now I have to do a very scary thing for me… Hit “Publish” and send this out for all to see.