Gsus Saves: My fondness for music and love/hate relationship with religious kitsch collide

I managed to grab a ticket to see Lifehouse play at the Showbox SODO here in Seattle tonight (for those of you who sleep at midnight rather than go to work read "last night").  Openers for the night were Mindhead a band from Mt. Vernon, Wa they were quite good and I picked up a CD after the show.  I had a blast, I've been a fan of Lifehouse for over a decade. It was very strange seeing so many teenagers at the show, perhaps as strange as when I profess my love of U2's Joshua Tree album... the one that came out the year I was born.  I was very excited to see a guitar tech wearing a t-shirt with a chord chart and the words "Gsus Saves" on it. I like that kind of thing, either mocking cliched religious phrases or the old religious kitsch passed down by very religious relatives that most consider too gaudy and weird to display. I currently have a magnetic Jesus on my fridge (a gift to my roommate) that can be dressed in various outfits, from business suit to pope to sheep costume. I take my faith seriously which is why I think I do it a disservice if I can't have a laugh at the cliches and misuse of it. Thus, the Gsus Saves shirt simply had me in a better mood for the show, I had a stupid smile on my face the whole night, it did dim a bit when I had to run to catch a bus to get to work on time tonight but it was an awesome night nonetheless.

Jason Wade - Lead Vocals, Guitar

The set was awesome, they took requests and played a lot of the songs from the album that came out when I was a teen.  There's also something wonderful about the base and the driving rock in the louder, faster paced songs. I don't just like to hear the music I like it to shake my ribcage.

An oddly placed older gentleman (he looked much older than my dad, I'm guessing a healthy 70s?) next to me seemed a little surprised when I would get really excited about the obscure requests people would make from the band's early work but he seemed to be quite familiar with most the music himself.  One song, a cover of a song originally recorded by Sue Thompson and written in 1952, "You Belong to Me" (1,000,000x better than anything Taylor Swift has ever dreamt of writing but then I'm partial to 1950s music) Jason Wade- Lifehouse's lead singer- said he had only played a couple times before (I assume he meant live).  He recorded it for the Original Shrek film and I distinctly recall recognizing his voice when I saw the movie back in the day and scanning the credits until I saw his name.  [The things we had to do before "google it" entered the modern lexicon.]  I do prefer Wade's rendition but I love the song whenever I hear it played.  Someone also requested Storm, another OLD OLD favorite, it does appear on the Who We Were album but back in the early days of peer sharing I was an aspiring hipster looking for the obscure stuff, perhaps the best sort of music downloading fan in those days.  I bought the albums that were available but anything out of print I hunted for on Napster.  Back in those days I was in love with music in general but listening to Lifehouse felt like something different all together.

Ben Carey - Guitarist

One major event in my life coincided with the arrival of Lifehouse on the scene.  It was the moment when I finally decided to make my faith my own, I was raised in the church but this was the time when I really became a Christian.  Nowadays I still have a very real, very tangible faith and no one I spend time with can deny that I take it very seriously yet religious language makes me cringe.  Sometimes I cringe because it's cheesy, mostly because of the Christian music industry and the commercialization of my faith.  I personally like Jon Forman's (lead singer of the band Switchfoot) response to the unsettling debate over whether or not his band was still a "Christian Band" when they broke out of the Christian niche market (I prefer to call it a self-imposed ghetto) and hit the main stream, he has written and said so much about it that I hate to limit it to one quote but I encourage you to google "Jon Foreman Christian Band" in any case here is just the beginning of my favorite bit that Foreman has written on the subject

"To be honest, this question grieves me because I feel that it represents a much bigger issue than simply a couple [of my band's] tunes. In true Socratic form, let me ask you a few questions:

Does Lewis or Tolkien mention Christ [by name] in any of their fictional series?

Are Bach's sonata's Christian?

What is more Christ-like, feeding the poor, making furniture, cleaning bathrooms, or painting a sunset?

There is a schism between the sacred and the secular in all of our modern minds. The view that a pastor is more Christian than a girls' volleyball coach is flawed and heretical. The stance that a worship leader is more spiritual than a janitor is condescending and flawed. These different callings and purposes further demonstrate Gods sovereignty. Many songs are worthy of being written. Switchfoot will write some, Keith Green, Bach, and perhaps yourself have written others. Some of these songs are about redemption, others about the sunrise, others about nothing in particular: written for the simple joy of music. None of these songs has been born again, and to that end there is no such thing as Christian music."

(Brackets represent my slight edits to aid reader understanding)
Truth be told however I think the first time I heard someone say something to the effect of "We're Christians in a band, not a Christian band" May have been in an interview with Jason Wade. To those of us who truly appreciate music we need to be ready to acknowledge that maybe, just possibly (and by this I full intend you to read "definitely") "Christian Music", that is to say the kind of music that is produced in the "Christian Music Industry" and sold exclusively in "Christian Stores" with no hope of escape, well... it sucks.  Any band on an exclusively Christian label that turns out to be any good usually gets a record deal in the main stream and, if they weren't already, bombarded with accusations and questions relating to them "selling out".  Good bands seldom start, and NO good band ever stays, on Christian labels- nor should they.

I love music from a variety of genres, the older I get the more I learn that my tastes in music are not as eclectic as I once thought they were.  Living in Miami I realized that I don't like latin music, that's not a slight to latin music I just don't like it.  I have learned to appreciate most music, that which is vulgar and demeaning I will not appreciate, 4'33" as a statement about the music around us is beautiful, 4'33" as an actual song is a waste of 4 minutes and 33 seconds, and honestly songs that say Jesus a lot for the sake of filling some sort of quota or a rock band at a Christian festival whose cred is judged on how many times they pray rather than how hard they rock is... well.. "a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal" noise, cacophony.  I have found that I more deeply appreciate songs of struggle and wrestling with God.  I think, even before I was aware of it, that's why I love Lifehouse's song "Storm". I love the Psalms of Discontent in U2's Pop and Achtung Baby, the ones the general Christian community seems to turn from.  I had my zealous phase in which the world was only painted in black and white shades of morality that centered on eloquent lists of don'ts and high judgment.  Music, starting with Lifehouse never became subject to that rigid world.

Regardless of any particular faith background - or lack there of- I like music, and I still LOVE Lifehouse.  I've always been somewhat fascinated by group dynamics and how members come in and out of a band, Lifehouse doesn't have the same make up that they had when they started which isn't typical for the bands that usually land on my playlist but I like the dynamic, I liked the old dynamic too but life changes a year ago I was primarily concerned with feminist interpretations of Thomas Aquinas' work, and comparative genocide with an emphasis on the Holocaust all in a place about as geographically disparate from my current location as one can manage within the continental United States. Considering my inclinations as an avid concert goer I'm simply disappointed that this was the first time I was able to attend a Lifehouse concert in all these years.

And so, to close out my love letter to my favorite band (well, at least in terms of Longevity, as you may be able to tell from this post "favorite band" is a fairly long list) I would like to offer a small humorous story of waiting in line for the concert:

Upon getting into line I discovered I was immediately behind a pair of teenagers who had no shame in telling me all about the meet and greet they had with the band and how "Jason is SO cute", but "he was pretty cocky".  Mind you, having been an adolescent girl once myself, to a fifteen year old girl an attractive older man who doesn't engage in flirting at their teenage level seems cocky. Not long after having been informed of the attractiveness of various band members one of the girl's fathers slipped into line, I must tell you he cannot be old enough to have a teenage daughter that's crazy.  Also the man was drop dead gorgeous (not even kidding, wish I could've covertly taken a non-blurry picture) but, you know... he was pretty cocky.  ;)

EDIT:
I found a couple videos from last night that someone posted.  They're of "You Belong To Me", "Simon" and "Storm".  "You Belong to Me" and "Simon" are pretty shakey but the audio is good, and then "Storm" has good video and audio although there's a girl near the person recording who seems to want to have a running dialogue with the song that almost comes off as heckling, granted I suppose I understand the excitement.  I couldn't hear her last night so all was well.