Band #98 - Operating in two worlds
The show before the big show
The thing about rabbit holes is that sometimes you have fallen down them before you know what has happened. And time is lost in bulk.
An opportunity came up to catch Switchfoot at the Palace tonight. It doesn’t take long to summarize what I knew about the band when I got the ticket yesterday. Being a natural born surfer like so many native Calgarians, I knew their name is a surfing term, which makes sense since they are from San Diego. They rose to fame in the first half of the 2000s, in my mind as part of a new wave of big and bold radio rock bands - the next generation after groups like Collective Soul, Live and Nickelback a few years earlier. And I knew exactly one of their songs - huge 2003 radio hit Meant to Live, which is a really good tune, and really brings you back 20 years to when it came out. And that’s pretty much it. I’ll admit that I was a little surprised that they were still around, and that they were popular enough to sell a lot of tickets at The Palace.
Now, about that rabbit hole. I had no idea when I looked up the band’s bio that I was about to spend a couple hours learning far more than I have ever known, or ever really wanted to know, about contemporary Christian music.
The degree to which Switchfoot is a Christian band is up for debate - led by the band itself. The members are openly Christian, but they don’t want to identify as a Christian group. They have had mainstream record labels for much of their existence. But their songs are popular on Christian radio, and they play at Christian festivals regularly. And the Dove Awards - the Christian equivalent of a Grammy, presented by the Gospel Music Association - have named them Artist of the Year once, and awarded them top Christian Rock Record four times. They do have a mainstream Grammy as well, but it was for best Rock Gospel Album in 2011, so it hardly strengthens their case that they aren’t Christian artists.
The band has had an interesting identity crisis around this Christian label. Around the time that Meant to Live went big, they turned their back on the CCM world, and stopped playing Christian festivals or venues. It was a bold stance, but three years later they were on the cover of CCM Magazine (a real thing, it turns out - or at least it was), and headlining big Christian festivals again. I wasn’t in the room, and I don’t mean any disrespect, but this sure feels like a case where principle was eventually eclipsed by the bottom line. The Christian band label can make it tough to attract the attention of mainstream critics, but after a while bands don’t need the critics as much anymore because of an established reputation. So, it makes sense that they would decide not to turn their back on the Christian music world, and the ticket and record buyers that are part of it, even if they don’t always lean enthusiastically into the label.
I’d heard Meant to Live a couple dozen times over the years without a doubt. Like so many big radio anthems, though, I had never really noted the lyrics. After reading about the band’s inclinations, I had to revisit what they were saying. And it’s pretty amazing to me that it hadn’t been obvious before. If asked to sum the song up in three words, I would go with ‘very Heaven forward’.
Reading about Switchfoot’s identity crisis over the years made me curious about Christian music festivals in general. Deeper into the rabbit hole I went. I had never really considered their existence - largely because I’m not the target market. There are more than 30 major Christian festivals still going in the U.S. today, and that’s well down from the peak - Christian festivals have struggled in recent years just like non-Christian ones. Being obsessed with live music as I am, I have heard of a large number of the mainstream festivals out there, and follow many closely to feel jealousy or disdain each time they announce their lineups. I had not heard of a single festival on the list of big Christian ones. Some of them are or were really big, though. And Switchfoot had at some point played at all of them. It’s amazing what can hide in plain sight if you don’t know to look for them. As the great Aladdin once said, it’s ‘a whole new world’.
After having read all about - and into - Switchfoot’s relationship with the Christian world, I had no idea whatsoever what to expect heading into this show. This is not a new phenomenon in this challenge - I didn’t know what to expect heading to an Italian dwarven metal show, a Japanese screamcore gig, or festivals of the blues or jazz variety, either. But there were a lot of questions I was curious about here. Would the crowd be more prominently nostalgic anthemic radio rock fans, or those who look a little higher for inspiration? [Felt like more the latter] Would Switchfoot’s alternate identity have been obvious to you if you went to this show without having visited a rabbit’s home for a couple of hours beforehand? [It would have been very obvious that there was a little different feel to things, and a little more talk about, for example, gifts and gratitude than most shows. But it wasn’t glaring.] Is it going to be a really boring night to be a bartender at The Palace? [Yes.] Should I wear the cross necklace pendant made of the ends of antique silver spoons my mom gave me a few years before she died - just in case? [I was fine without, but wouldn’t have been out of place with.] Why in the world did my mom give me a cross necklace pendant made of the ends of antique silver spoons? [Still don’t know. Probably never will.] So many questions.
This tour was the tail end of The Beautiful Letdown World Tour. The Beautiful Letdown was their fourth album, which came out in 2003, and the one that contains their biggest hits and had their best success. They had been signed by Sony after releasing their first three albums through Christian labels. Sony executives weren’t happy with the album when it was delivered to them, though, so it was sent to a smaller subsidiary label - RED Ink. That could have been the death of the record, but this thing had legs. It peaked as high as #16 on the Billboard 200, and it had the 10th longest run of any album in the 2000s on that most influential of charts. And it spent a record breaking 38 weeks atop the Billboard Christian music chart, and it was the second best selling Christian record of the decade. All in all the album has sold more than 3 million copies.
This tour was a play through tour - which has become very popular. That means that they played the album in it’s entirety. It was the second such show I have seen in the last month. And the near-capacity crowd at The Palace - which means somewhere around 800 people I would guess - were very excited to be hearing it. A good portion of the crowd wasn’t alive when the album came out, or were just in diapers at the time. But they were there, and very excited about it.
Have you ever jumped on a trampoline with another person? If you get your rhythm just right, you can jump much higher than you would ever to be able to yourself. It’s magic - and improvement on the sum of the parts. But if you aren’t quite on the same wavelength then your knees buckle, and it’s like your feet are buried in concrete. I felt a bit like the latter tonight. The crowd was FIRED UP. And I wasn’t quite getting why.
I listened to the album twice yesterday. I listened to it twice today. I just don’t get it. It has one pretty great song. And another pretty good song that sounds a lot like the great song. And then I’m lost. It’s stylistically all over the place. It’s short on hooks. It’s not great musically. Jon Foreman, the lead singer, sings fine, but not more than that. It just feels like another album from 2003 - neither more nor less.
And I wasn’t really buying the show, either. The band wasn’t nearly as tight as I expected a 25 year old act to be. Foreman is charismatic and sincere, but a long way from a top tier vocalist. The sound, which was mixed by their own sound guy, wasn’t particularly loud, but the bass was cranked up so that the floor was vibrating wildly below your feet. Whenever that’s done that much I wonder what the band is compensating for. The lights were designed for a bigger space, so they shone right into your eyes. I’ve been to a lot of shows in the last five and a half months, and this was not an elite one.
But then I looked around at the rest of the very packed room, and I started to wonder what I was missing. The crowd was intensely excited when the show started. They sang along to every word of every song. At a couple of points Foreman kept looping the same lyric over and over because the crowd was singing it so enthusiastically. Foreman did a couple of walkabouts through the crowd on a railing between levels in the room, and people were reaching up to grab his hand as he passed, like it was their chance to embrace a hero. Couples were singing into each other’s loving faces as they heard a favorite song. This show that really wasn’t working for me was really, really working for a whole lot of people. Clearly it wasn’t meant to please me. And when I recognized that in my own head I enjoyed it more. The beauty of music is that it doesn’t have to be a universal experience. Not everyone gets deeply excited about the same stuff. That people get excited about something is all I really care about.
I don’t want to sound like an old man on my rocking chair chasing kids off my lawn. There were things I enjoyed. The rendition of Meant to Live was killer. They did a cool thing at the start with a video effect of an invisible graffiti artist tagging the back of the stage with the name of the album. Foreman did a very nice job of introducing and thanking the crew that makes it all work for them - the guitar tech, sound and lights guys, tour manager and merch guy. I like when bands do that. And the keyboard player told a great story about how he turned Jon down when he was asked to join the band 21 years ago because he had just gotten a real job. It was time to settle down. Then he started the real job. And on the second day he quit, called up Jon, and asked if they still needed a keyboard player. And they did a neat thing where they killed the house lights and got people to use the lights on their phones. It was amazing how bright it made the place. There were things I liked - especially after I let myself get over all the things I really didn’t like.
If that was all too long for you to get through, here’s what it comes down to. I didn’t love the show. But it definitely wasn’t for me, and that’s cool. The people who it clearly was more for were loving it, and I’m happy for them. I won’t seek out another opportunity to watch them enjoy a Switchfoot show, but I’m happy for them.
The details: Switchfoot, The Palace Theatre, Calgary, Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 8 pm
Up next: We arrive at the ultimate goal of this challenge - 100 bands - exactly a year before the original target date when we see two of the best Canadian bands of the last 15 years together on one stage next Tuesday night.