beloved: story behind the song
When I can’t sleep, and everything feels wrong and broken, I pick up my guitar.
2020 was a horrible year for pretty much anything other than songwriting.
Ours is a fractured world where community is hard to find. When we can’t find community, we settle for tribalism instead. If a community is defined as a group of people united by a common love, tribalism is her evil twin: united not by love, but by hatred or fear. Tribalism is a knee jerk response to a world that feels overwhelming. This fight or flight impulse that is within me as well: to fear and hate that which I do not understand, that which is different than me.
“Beloved” is my response to the tribalism within and around me.
I wanted to set the tone for the album with this song: addressing the listener as you and seeing myself in the face staring back at me. Could it be that maybe we need each other? Maybe we need our differences?
Beloved is a song that attempts to see “you” as you are, rather than as an “it” that can be commoditized or used. Love is only possible in this exchange. In this surrender, this humility, this intentionality.
“Beloved” attempts to define my highest worth as a human as one who is beloved, not what I can achieve materially. In this realization of identity, my fear, my doubt, my panic is put in the proper context. Yes, these do exist- but these fluorescent lights are hard to see in the orbit of a much larger star. I may be seen as a number, or an “it” by the world around me, but that is not my identity. Nor is it yours.
This is the only song on the record that we wrote with our producer, Tony Berg. The chord changes in the chorus of this song were inspired by a Zoom call with Tony, (they’re deceptively tricky- the melody leaves the original key and comes back without letting the listener know what happened!) It’s rare for us to write a song with the producer. I think it’s only happened a couple times before. There’s a line in this song that’s even more unique: it was written specifically to Tony. It’s almost as if the song breaks character and addresses a conversation that isn’t referenced in the song itself. I don’t think I’ve ever done that before.
“And I still don’t think I’m wrong,
To be so earnest in these broken longing songs.”
Funny thing is, I knew I didn’t have to tell him that the line was for him. He knew. During this line, if you listen closely, there’s a background vocal that sings “broken breaking songs.” It’s the wrong lyric, but I wanted to leave it in there because I love the disagreement. It shows that even in my resolve I still am a bit unsure.
Music can be a communication that transcends lyrics, and the journey of this record was certainly a long road. But at the end of the album, I am so thankful not only for the music that they made but the friendship that formed along the way. The album felt like a living experiment of the songs: In a world that is falling apart, is there something stronger than the differences that can bring us together? I suppose the answer might be summed up like this: in spite of our differences, I truly love Tony, and I feel loved by him as well.
lost ‘cause: story behind the song
“Love is the responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling - the equality of all lovers…” - Martin Buber
Revolution is easier than repair. War is easier than reconstruction. Rust, dust, and decay are always at work and everything burns. Entropy is always tearing at the seams of all of us.
So, when we got to war, is this our logical, rational choice? Or in these dark moments are we simply acquiescing to destructive forces much larger than ourselves?
Creating something beautiful is so much harder than tearing it down. It’s the same on a granular level: It’s easy to fall in love. It’s a lot harder to stay in love.
Entering into a relationship with another human soul is a surrender.
“Are we a lost cause?
Or are we just lost ‘cause
We’ll never see the future we refuse to be
If I’m your lost cause
It will be your loss ‘cause
You’ll never see me as I am, the possibility:
That I’m not the enemy.”
fluorescent: story behind the song
“You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.” - Plato’s Republic
I was watching the slow demise of a moth outside of a gas station window. He was struggling in vain, in a futile attempt to reach the dusty fluorescent glow beyond the window pain.
I looked back down at my cell phone and marveled at this strange light that often holds me captive. The moth and me: both of us transfixed, consumed by a hopeless pursuit, a glow that can never be acquired. How many lights that I have chased seem to shine so bright until I see them for what they truly are? How many hours have I wasted running after phantoms that could never offer me meaning or truth?
On a cloudy night, the artificial light shines brighter than the stars. And what dark days are these- Looking for light, Looking for meaning, Looking for purpose... Like a flower bending towards the sun, we are inclined to all end up chasing the brightest thing we can see. A ghost, a myth, a fear, a fancy...
I looked back to the moth and wondered, which endeavor was more absurd? A moth, spellbound by the artificial glow of a gas station fluorescent light? Or me: looking for love, meaning, purpose, acceptance somewhere within and beyond the LED screen of my iPhone. Both of us chasing ghosts on a summer’s night.
We don’t need the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave anymore, our postmodern prisons are much more entertaining.
if i were you: story behind the song
“Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” - Fyodor Dostoevsky
“If I were you,
Then you’d be me”
Advice doesn’t come with a gift receipt. Often the giver of this generous gift is more excited to give than you are to receive.
We are each different souls, with different experiences, and different understandings of the world. So much of this album was born from a disagreement, the friction, the tension that arises from our differences. We want to find a way to peace. And so, we look to the ones who agree with our perspective. But is unity homogeneity? Or can differences by tolerated? Even needed?
How can any of us ever see a different perspective if we all think exactly alike? Maybe there’s a love that transcends differences, that reaches across division and disagreement to find that which we hold in common.
This song with tracked as a three-piece, just like we tracked our first record when my brother was still in high school. It was an unintentional throwback to a simpler time of life - one of the few days at Sound City where all five of us weren’t there. I played Tony the song idea and he said, “Let’s track it!”
This entire song is built on a premise that is fairly tongue-in-cheek, even a bit humorous. I love how the sun begins to reach towards a transcendent truth, only to fall again into a parody of humanity’s pride.
“What if me and you
Were in each other’s shoes?
Could we rise above the scars
That we both put each other through?
I think I’m ready to try us
To put the past behind us
Maybe I’d be ready to try
If I were you.”
the bones of us: story behind the song
There’s more than skeletons in the closet. There’s dead dreams, lost ideas, false hopes, and forgotten plans. Time is a strange engine. It lurches forward in fits and starts. Seasons pass like days, and a night can stretch for eternity.
Who are we now? Whoever we are, it’s not who we were.
I remember when we first began to rehearse this song, it felt like we fell into a trance and stumbled on what a daydream would sound like if you played it on the guitar.
This is a tune that digs at the bones of the past with an eye on the future. Am I fighting for me? Maybe… Am I fighting for us? Yes… But most of all, I’m fighting for you.
splinter: story behind the song
Our consciousness is a strange and remarkable gift. To know, to discern, to choose- what a miracle!
And yet, there are moments when my sanity comes into question. Times when I feel close to the edge of reason and folly, when I recognize how fragile my mental stability truly is. And maybe I’m not the only one‽
Hypnagogia is the technical term for the transitional state of consciousness between waking and sleeping. During hypnagogia, it's common to experience involuntary and imagined experiences. Your body is at rest, but your mind has long left the room… racing from hopes to fears, from facts to fictions, futures to phantoms.
The instability of 2020 made it hard for me to get to sleep. My thoughts would go racing forward, and for the first time in my life I knew what an anxiety attack felt like. Of course, if my mind needed any help getting weird, on my bedside table there’s a screen filled with distractions, illusions, allegiances, and more. But I don’t need war on the TV, or on my phone. No, the battle is much closer to home. My mind is at war. I lie awake in bed.
The trouble is with me, for I am all too human… I want to do what is right, but I don’t do it. Instead, I do what I hate… I want to do what is right, but I can’t. I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway…
“Who can take these broken splinters from my head?”
I love Tony’s daughter’s voice in this one. Originally, the chorus felt much more abrasive and brittle. I asked Tony if he knew of a singer that could lend her voice to the track to help smooth my vocals. And he suggested Z. She’s amazing and, being that Switchfoot is a family band, I love that the Berg family is well represented on the album.
i need you (to be wrong): story behind the song
You say you know it all. I say, I think you’re wrong.
And you are. At least a little wrong. Which is to say that we all have a blind spot, we just don’t know what we don’t know. All along we both were wrong.
For this album, we didn’t want to write songs. We wanted to write feelings. And this song was no different. The bones of this song were written a decade ago, collecting dust on a shelf at the studio. But Tony heard some magic in it and so we dusted it off. And as we began to play it together in our studio, we felt like it got to the core of what we were feeling in 2020.
Maybe that’s cause this song was birthed from a season of personal friction. Insecurity. Doubt. Fear. Inside and out: who can I trust? Who am I?
Maybe the good guy / bad guy dichotomy only works in kindergarten. That the truth is much more frightening: that I am Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Both. And so are you. And everyone else.
Maybe our enemy is not ignorance, but illusion. I need you to be wrong.
the hard way: story behind the song
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies.” - Don Quixote
Tony Berg doesn’t remember ever hearing the song “Fix You.” He’s not a Coldplay fan, so this is no surprise, but it made the last chorus that much more humorous to me, thinking that he didn’t know what song I was referencing. Here’s my two cents on “Fix You:” It’s a beautiful melody accompanying an offensive proposition. “Fix me? Really, Chris Martin? You will try to fix me?” You fix the dripping faucet or a pet. You cannot fix a person. You can only love them or walk away.
Or maybe you can try to fix yourself? This is a song about that long, hard look in the mirror. *
(* disclaimer “The Hard Way” is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. It’s a lighthearted tune that surely has nothing to do with my own ridiculous mistakes along the way.)
Throughout the tune I’m picturing this bumbling Don Quixote narrator mumbling platitudes like, “I learn best from my mistakes” and “it all works out in the long run.” It’s an upbeat song that turns heartbreakingly honest near the end of the track.
I love the sonic textures on this track. The Beach Boys like harmonies on the intro are dissonant and sweet, sad but strangely triumphant. The verses have Chad playing chopsticks on the drums, Tim and I motoring along, Drew coming in for the classic guitar line on verse two. Then back to the 60’s for the post chorus and the bridge.
wolves: story behind the song
Sometimes the wolves keep you up at night. You can hear them in your mind, howling outside the gate in the dead of night. You roll over and pull the covers closer. And then you shoot up in bed in a cold sweat with the terrifying realization that the wolves are inside the gate already, howling to get out. Fear, panic, despair, depression… the wolves are within me.
This song was written many years ago, in a hotel room in Berlin. I had spent all day with my head in museums and books, adrift amongst the complexities of “the grey city” deep in the heart of Europe. Bonhoeffer, Hitler, Einstein. War, revolt, revolution, hope, and hunger. My thoughts were casting long shadows on the conflict that I felt inside.
Out of the hundred tunes we originally sent Tony, this was the song that he first fell in love with. We liked it too: “wolves” had been in the running for every album we’re made since “Nothing is Sound”, but we could never find quite the right approach. Tony’s input was to lean on the original recording. Which is what we ended up doing. The vocal you hear on the record is the one that I sang the night I wrote it in Berlin 15+years ago. It’s a dark, off-putting song, so it’s only fitting to hear a ghost from the past: singing into his laptop microphone in the middle of the night in Berlin.
backwards in time: story behind the song
I didn’t graduate from UCSD, instead I chose to drop out and play music. Nevertheless, my “almost mater” still sends me newsletters and ways to give them money. One of the articles caught my eye- a philosophy professor tackling the subject of time. (I think I remember even his name was time related, like a misspelling of calendar or something)
It got me thinking: If time is a “stubbornly persistent illusion” what would happen if we were able to journey outside of time? If we could go back, would we take the same path if we knew what we know? Would we make the same mistakes? Or did the mistakes that brought us here give us the insight to even call that decision a mistake?
My understanding of the professor’s insight was that the past, the present, and the future are comprised of the same “truth” even if it looks different to us. And if there is truly a way back, maybe redemption and forgiveness are the only way forward.
We recorded portions of this song in reverse, to give the listener a swimming, floating feeling. After all, reversing the tape might be the only time travel we’ve got.
electricity: story behind the song
This album was not made to fit into any form of where music is at today. It doesn’t lean into any features or playlist trends. It is an attempt to be ourselves. To make the album we and we alone could have made. So even though most of the modern musical world is centered around singles, we still spend enormous amounts of time fighting for the sequence of an album.
With that in mind, the last track on the record plays a crucial role for the listener. Musically, Electricity’s diversity helps to tie up the loose ends of the album, diving into textures from the 60’s till now. And lyrically, I love that the song embraces time spent with “the other.” Come on, hang up and hang out.
If we’ve learned anything from the previous song on the record, there’s no way back to simpler times. Cell phones are here to stay. But there’s an electricity and a connection that no technological advance can replace: presence. Human touch. Eye contact. Conversation. Laughter.
This is an album embracing “the other.” The one that angers you. The one that makes you laugh. The one that makes you cry. The one that annoys you. And the one that loves you.
Our hope is that after this song, the record stops, and you enter into a candid conversation with this other. What happens next? Maybe laughter? Maybe tears? Who knows‽
The beauty of embracing the other as they are is the unknown of what comes next. It’s a surrender. It’s a journey. It’s an embrace.