Music

From left to right, musicians Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker are dressed in black and cast in the warm glow. They stand in a cascading line next to one another, staring off beyond the left side of the photo with waves in the background.

boygenius / Chuff Media

AT THE CLOSE of the music video for “$20,” all three bandmates of boygenius — the young indie band turned chart-topping supergroup —  cut their palms and swear a blood oath to each other. As I watched it for the first time, I couldn’t help but feel drawn toward prayer — is this what love looks like? It is subversive to hold on to the tenderness of friendships in a world rife with violence. But boygenius, consisting of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, refuses to do anything less in their debut full-length album the record — a searing homage to their love for each other. It is nothing short of divine.

Ringing with angst and affection, these songs meld post-grunge guitar riffs with heartfelt existential threads. In “Satanist,” they respond to ruminations in Ecclesiastes 1:2, “Everything is meaningless,” by singing, “If nothing can be known, then stupidity is holy.” By embracing the finitude and vapor of our existence, they, like the Teacher in Ecclesiastes, “[make] peace with [their] inevitable death” (from the song “Anti-Curse”).

Yet, amid all the nihilism, there’s joy. Boygenius’ gushing piano ballad “Letter to an Old Poet” nods to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, in which the Austrian writer and mystic offers this instruction: “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance.” Boygenius finds this love in friendship.

7-10-2023
The cover for Sojourners' August 2023 issue, called "The Paradox of Poverty." Small figurines of a white couple in fancy garbs stand on top of a tall stack of silver and gold coins. There are other figurines below working by carrying around dollar bills.

CSA-Printstock / iStock

How the “welfare state” is designed to subsidize affluence rather than fight poverty.

Aarik Danielsen 3-20-2023
The cover for the music album ‘And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow’ by Weyes Blood. The artist, Natalie Mering, has long hair and looks to the side. She wears a low-cut dress with her upper chest exposed. A warm light glows from within where her heart is.

And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow, by Weyes Blood

A STORM BLOWS through Weyes Blood’s fifth album, And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow. A cold front of disillusionment meets the swirling tones of songwriter Natalie Mering. The effect is gorgeous and staggering.

Sounding both in and out of their time, these songs fuse darkly majestic orchestral arrangements with pop elements such as drum machines, synthesizers, and the occasional guitar. If history took a later start, this could be our classical music. Weyes Blood (pronounced “Wise Blood,” a nod to Flannery O’Connor’s novel set in the “Christ-haunted” South) has said that she craves sanctuary acoustics.

Billowing and hymn-like, “God Turn Me Into a Flower” is the album’s truest prayer. “It’s good to be soft when they push you down,” Mering sings. She sings to stand firm, but never aspires to twist into bramble: “... it’s such a curse to be so hard / You shatter easily and can’t pick up all those shards.”

Kaeley McEvoy 11-21-2022
The cover art of Maggie Roger's music album 'Surrender', which features a black-and-white closeup of the singer's eyes.

Surrender, by Maggie Rogers / Capitol Records

INDIE-ROCKER MAGGIE Rogers says she feels her emotions in her teeth: Anger and love make her gums pulse and jaw tighten. Rogers’ second studio album, Surrender, is testament to what happens when we unclench our jaws and give our emotions room to breathe.

“This is the story of what happened when I finally gave in,” Rogers said in the trailer for Surrender. The result is a cohesive journey through the many questions that plague our grief-stricken culture. Offering both solace and space for unanswered questions, the album, released last summer, is an invitation to dance — to surrender to the coexistence of beauty and suffering in the world.

Da’Shawn Mosley 9-25-2020

The album is titled The Ascension but, I’ve got to be honest, Sufjan Stevens’ latest masterwork has me feeling the lowest I’ve felt about this country since the start of quarantine.

Epic Records

FIONA APPLE’S 2020 internet takeover began the moment she released her newest album, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, in April. This cyber movement was not orchestrated by Apple, who does not have any social media accounts, but rather by the countless women tweeting, Instagramming, and exulting over the album. I probably have the algorithm to thank for the prevalence of these posts in my feed, as they were mostly from my demographic—millennial women with overflowing collections of books and high-waisted pants. Yet, algorithm or no, the joy I witnessed was completely organic, and if you’ve heard the album, you’ll understand why.

Many people’s introduction to Fiona Apple is not her strong, eclectic body of work. Instead, it’s her infamous speech at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards in which she exhorts viewers, especially adolescents, not to model their lives after “what we think is cool.” After that, Apple seemed to vanish from the public eye, emerging every so often with an absurdly long album title that tied bundles of complicated songs together.

I’m beating around the bush with the word “complicated.” What I really mean is “angry.” Fiona Apple is one of the few women in music who is allowed to be furious in an unpretty way. She has become a secular patron saint for prophetic women whose insight makes them vulnerable to the ridicule of others.

Jamar A. Boyd II 10-28-2019

Kanye West performs at the Way Out West festival on Aug. 13, 2011 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Credit: Shutterstock. 

Kanye West draws upon the storied history of black communal worship and gospel music. 

Aaron E. Sanchez 9-03-2019

Image from Xavier Badosa via Flickr 

Dylan’s Christianity had less in common with Jesse Jackson’s and had more in common with Jerry Farwell’s. It fit comfortably within the perspectives of a reactionary Christianity that blamed liberalism and the Civil Rights movement for the nation’s religious, moral, and economic decline. The end times were near and the nation needed to prepare for God’s wrath.

Aaron E. Sanchez 8-13-2019

Shocked and saddened citizens of El Paso, Texas paying their respects to the memorial wall created just outside the parking area for the Walmart store. August 8, 2019. Credit: Shutterstock. 

“Amor Eterno,”or Eternal Love, was written in 1984 by the famed Mexican singer and song writer Juan Gabriel, or JuanGa, after his mother passed away. It has become a standard that is played at funerals, wakes, get-togethers, and even restaurants across the U.S., Mexico, and the world to remember family and loved ones who have passed away.

Kyrie Mason 4-03-2019

Rapper Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn, aka Future, performs at a SXSW concer on  Marcg 16, 2016. Via Shutterstock

The themes associated with “Gangster rap” and its successor, “Trap music,” are often thought of as being as far away from Christian morals as the east is from west. Heavy on percussion and profanity, its tracks hit hard and depict the violence of black life interspersed with tales of excess, sex, and money. While some may discount hip-hop music as vulgar entertainment, it indicates a people’s great hunger for getting more out of this world.

Anna Sutterer 2-13-2019

Image via Anna Sutterer/Sojourners 

Christian music singer/songwriter Ellie Holcomb released her first children's album, Sing: Creation Songs, in September with an accompanying children's book called Who Sang the First Song?. In January, she and her partner, Drew Holcomb, frontman of Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, dropped an EP called Electricity.

 

John Duffy 11-27-2018

Volodya Senkiv / Shutterstock

On November 12, news broke that Christian songwriter Kurt Kaiser had died at 82. His work, which included memorable songs such as “Pass It On” and “Oh How He Loves You And Me,” spanned nearly 50 years. Kaiser’s name appeared on more than 25 albums and he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers for his contribution to Christian music. One of his songs remains one of the most important in my life, some 30 years after first hearing it. 

Christina Colón 11-09-2018

The Many: Darren Calhoun, Hannah Rand, and Leslie Michele. 

The Many is an indie folk/gospel, liturgically-grounded worship band that creates music for people to sing together. Assistant Web Editor Christina Colón spoke with producer Gary Rand, manager and writer Lenora Rand, and lead singer Darren Calhoun, to learn more about how The Many is creating liturgies that speak to issues of injustice and leave room for lament.

Gareth Higgins 10-26-2018

'Blaze' is the story of Texan movie star Blaze Foley, played by Ben Dickey, and his wife Sybil, played by Alia Shawkat.

IN THE FILM BLAZE, directed by actor Ethan Hawke, happiness is rare and meaning always seems slightly out of reach, just around the corner. An unconventional, compelling biopic of Blaze Foley, a country musician who died too young, and violently, Blaze is a challenging alternative to familiar rags-to-riches tales. It’s rags-to-slightly-more-fashionable-rags, where the loneliness of the road is never salved by the acclaim of a crowd, the price of art being the very life of the artist.

As a movie about the pain of making music, it’s up there with Tender Mercies, Coal Miner’s Daughter, and Dreamgirls. As a biopic it gets closer to the inner life of its subject than most—Ben Dickey’s hypnotic lead performance embodies the drive to write, to sing, to perform, even if no one’s watching. “He knew the value of zero,” says iconic songwriter Townes van Zandt in the film. Van Zandt is played by Charlie Sexton, one of van Zandt’s cultural heirs and a frequent member of Bob Dylan’s band. The value of zero here is the notion that what we’re most called to in life is authenticity, whatever the reward.

The work of liberation is long and hard, but music is one way we are sustained and renewed. I asked women in the throes of decolonization, activism, community organizing, pastoring, and liberative writing what songs encourage them as they engage in the work of justice and resistance. Here are their responses. 

Chris Karnadi 10-02-2018

Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino has become a cultural icon. From his comedic work in Community to his acting in both Marvel and Star Wars franchises to his writing and producing of the critically acclaimed show Atlanta, the versatile Grammy-nominated artist is a creative force. Throughout all of this commercial and critical success, Donald Glover has refused to frame his work as a product; instead he wants to offer a participatory experience, a religious experience even.

The Editors 7-31-2018

Dan Reynolds, subject of the documentary, Believer.

Singing in Exile

On A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints, Taiwanese-American artist SueAnn Shiah reimagines hymns “for those who have been driven out of the church because of their race, gender, or sexuality.” With warm vocals and spare arrangements, Shiah invokes hope for those currently “stranded in the wilderness.” sueannshiah.bandcamp.com

Faith and Imagination

In A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle, Sarah Arthur digs deep into the personal journey of the influential and sometimes controversial A Wrinkle in Time author, revealing what L’Engle can continue to teach us. Zondervan

Anna Sutterer 7-12-2018

Image via Anna Sutterer 

And then jazz enters the scene, a music that grapples with chaos and comes out with soul. In the tension of clashing notes and melodies, fingers flying across valves and keys, the band finds a groove that communicates the experience of the civil rights movement

Christina Colón 7-09-2018

Image via Bekah Fulton/Sojourners 

Ramirez: I think like what you said, it's taking the side of the broken, the beaten, and the defeated. It’s knowing that when you say, “You just gotta lift yourself up by the bootstraps,” that not everybody has boots to be lifted up by. Justice looks like that. It looks like taking the side of the one being accused, the one being pummeled, not even just today, but throughout history because there are whole people groups who have been pummeled. Justice looks like giving people a taste of a true Jesus. Jesus would go to the woman at the well even if all of culture said not to, even if people looked down on him, even if it might have been bad for his reputation, that’s what he did. So often we like to tell good stories and take pictures of refugees and orphans somewhere else, but we very much like to ignore the causes that we should be fighting for here. For me, that's what justice looks like.

Charles L. Howard 2-15-2018

It is an awful and awesome time to be Black in America. I hear the voices of those who came before say “it always has been son.” Yet the last few years have been especially psychologically traumatizing and awful. The images of unarmed Black bodies being shot, choked, and killed by police officers looping on television and social media and the lack of justice or accountability around many of those murders have haunted me. The resurgence of (and the unhelpful media attention given to) a racist White nationalism. The introduction of policies and executive orders that seek to dismantle progress that took decades to build. And the ascendance of a bigoted fearful president who rose to political power on lies about our first Black president, lies about other minorities, and by playing to the siege mentality of many White Americans. All of this has been added to the daily micro and macro aggressions we experience and the contorting demanded of us to calm white neighbors, colleagues and classmates. It is exhausting. Maddening. Awful