This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
One of the brightest of a new cadre of young rock stars, Semler stands strong, helping chart the landscape of a new type of faith-based music.
In EPs, singles, and tours crisscrossing the country, Semler, whose real name is Grace Baldridge and uses all pronouns, is speaking vulnerably to an audience longing to share their outsider experience with others. The Semler fanbase is known in some places as “Semler Staff,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to church camp. It’s a representation of the folks who have found themselves following and supporting Semler’s musical career — queer folks of all stripes, radicals and rascals, adherents and heretics.
And on Feb. 21, Semler is releasing their debut album and returning to the themes and sounds that catapulted them to the peak of iTunes Christian charts — the first openly queer person to do so. Far from a restrictive, sanitized music meant to appease conservative powerbrokers, the project stands as a testament to what’s possible when Christian music is honest.
In our interview, Semler spoke about vulnerability in music, avoiding the pressures of being a “Christian artist,” and why parenting makes them sound like a Fox News contributor.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio, Sojourners: It’s been almost four years since our last interview, which blew my mind. What have you learned about making music in those four years?
Grace “Semler” Baldridge: The main thing I have learned is that honesty and vulnerability in songwriting is a superpower. It’s not something to be afraid of. It’s not something to shy away from. That instinct and impulse actually will hold back your songwriting.
It’s opened up my whole world. And that has been a lesson. On a pragmatic level, if you continue playing an instrument and continue to write, you’ll be impressed with yourself. I’m a better songwriter. I’m not the strongest singer, but I’m proud of my vocal performances and how, even in my thirties, my voice has gotten better. If you keep doing the thing that you are called to do in music, you’ll improve.
Your lead single is a re-recording of “Jesus from Texas,” and I remember seeing you say on social media that you turned down an offer to sell the song. Can you share more about that?
Totally. It was last year and “Jesus from Texas” was having a little bit of a moment on TikTok, and a deal came along to buy the rights for 10 or 15 years.
It’s one of my favorite songs I’ve ever written, and it really was the song that changed everything for me personally and professionally. And, also, being an independent artist is extremely hard. So, when someone is offering you cash up front, it’s not an email that you skip.
I did think about it. I took the meeting and everything. But I’m really happy that I held onto “Jesus from Texas,” because I really believe in the integrity of an album, and I felt as though this song squarely needed to live on this album.
It was enticing purely for the cash flow — you imagine, “Okay, what could I do? What kind of music videos could I shoot? What other art could I bring to life?” Because it’s just really difficult to figure out how you’re going to budget when you’re independent.
For me, on this occasion, the integrity of the project was more important. But it was cool to hear about. Rarely do I get those types of emails. I was excited to just be noticed in that regard. I can’t lie.
Anytime someone says we want to offer you money for this thing you’ve made —
You think of your songs as little kids. I was like, “Someone wants to give you a scholarship! ‘Jesus from Texas’ is going to college!” And then I was like, “You’re staying home!” [Laughs]
When we talked four years ago, I had asked you about the hope for acceptance in the contemporary Christian music industry or building a new industry. You said, “Any institution built under capitalism will be corrupt, so do you want to do that again in the name of God? … I’m not saying it’s impossible, but to do so responsibly, you would want to be really careful on how you would build that up.”
It feels like you’ve kept that effort to do it responsibly.
Honestly, it’s not something I’ve thought about too much. It’s not as though I’m fielding a lot of offers that would test or challenge my ethics in that regard.
A benefit to being an independent artist — there are the downsides, there are very difficult parts of it — is that I get to set the terms of my artistry, the community, and my hopes of what I’m trying to build here.
I don’t have a label. I have people that help me, but it’s a very small outfit and it’s friends of mine that have become collaborators. I’m really able to focus on creating music that I love, that inspires me, and speaks to what I believe in.
Then we figure out what the budget is for each endeavor. There’s no label that’s like, “We’ve got to get back your advance!” There’s no advance.
OK, but I want to ask about this less from the money angle and more about the pressures of being a “Christian artist.” You’re not the traditional image of a Christian artist, but your music has circled these common themes of deconstruction, queerness, faith, and so on. Do you feel the pressure as an artist whose work is so openly tied to a faith experience?
I don’t feel pressure. Only because, from the very beginning when people might have been introduced to my work through Preacher’s Kid, I tried to say with the songs: I will disappoint you. I am an imperfect practitioner and person of faith. You’ll find me on bad days. You’ll find me on good days. I will mess up. I have messed up. And I don’t hold an expectation of perfection from you.
Have you disappointed people in the Semler community?
I’m sure I have. That would be for other people to share, but I’m sure that there were occasions when people in my life or people that I’ve collaborated with felt that I didn’t take their suggestion seriously. Or I made a joke that they thought wasn’t kind. Stuff everyone does to a degree. I don’t think I’m, like, Godzilla to the people in my personal life — actually, I watched Godzilla Minus One recently, anyway, you know what I mean.
I always felt it was unfair we put that pressure on Christian artists. To be so “nice” all the time starves a person of what makes us human. Christian artists never really had the ability to be imperfect and to be messy.
I’ve yet to see a fan in your comment section telling you how disappointed they are in you. Maybe that’s because you never set out to be an avatar for their expectations or their faith. You said you watched Godzilla Minus One recently?
Yeah, I did! It was so good. I love horror movies and my wife, Lizzie, does not. But she likes thrillers and disaster movies. She actually finds them very comforting — we should unpack that. So, Godzilla is a really nice merging. And Godzilla Minus One was a big hit for us. It’s really a very sweet movie. Have you seen it?
At least five times. I wrote about it too.
[Laughs] Oh, okay. Not to get into the weeds, but you want to see the monster. Like, when the movies don’t show you the monster, to me it just feels like lazy filmmaking. Show us Godzilla, show us who we’re scared of!
Zachary Lee, a Sojourners contributor, interviewed Godzilla x Kong director Adam Wingard for RogerEbert.com, and Wingard said basically the same thing.
OK, I have to get us back on track. What was your main intention heading into this album?
After I put out Preacher’s Kid, there was a really unexpected response to it, and I became a little self-conscious of the production, which now I’m very fond of because I realized that it was honest and really a capsule of where I was at the time. But effectively — it’s Preacher’s Kid (unholy demos) — they were just demos that I shared and promoted on the internet.
From that point forward, I remember telling the producers I worked with, who were friends of mine already, “If this becomes a thing, if I’m really able to do music, then I want to go back and record some of these songs to the production I was thinking about.” I really wanted to almost revisit some of the themes of Preacher’s Kid.
As I started going on this journey of touring my music, there was such a shedding that happened in my personal life while I was writing my songs. I was doing so much processing while playing. It became clear to me that this was a full album, especially when my wife and I welcomed our daughter.
A new stage of life was opening up, I could feel this chapter close, and I wanted to close this with a nod to how it started, which is why I think the production on this album is different from [my previous EPs] Night Aches and Stages of a Breakdown.
250211-semler2.png
We really took a big swing with this album, and it feels like a culmination of this public deconstruction that I’ve gone through, and I am hopeful that if you listen to the album front to back, it will leave you in a better place than when you started, because that is how I’m feeling currently.
And this is, probably for a while, my last Christian offering. I remember finishing it and just feeling this is what I would want to say, and this is the journey I’ve been on, and I’m really proud of it. It’s been four years of working this out, and it’s culminated in this body of work.
The third track, “Always,” I couldn’t tell if it was about God or a girl. You really are a Christian artist! [Laughs]
I love that you said that; it’s the one song on that album that I didn’t write at all. That was written by my friend Zach, and he’s had that song written for years.
He’d always play that song, and that chorus would get stuck in my head for years. I kept writing my own version of that song. So, when it came time for the album, I went to him — hat in hand — and I was like, that song has cut deeply into me since the first time I heard it, and I would love to cut it for this album, and I would be honored if you would produce it.
I was really nervous that I wouldn’t make him proud. I’ve never cut someone else’s song before.
And it’s definitely — when I first heard it, it reminded me of those Christian, “Jesus or boyfriend” songs. That’s why I related to it — the sentiment of “I love you, like I always did.” The push-and-pull dynamic was something that I remember feeling so fervently when I was closeted.
It was a highlight of the album for me. You mention your baby, what’s it been like putting your kid into your art? [Semler’s daughter appears in the music video for “Jesus from Texas.”]
It’s weird. It’s so difficult to talk about her, because she is just the very favorite part of my life. All the cliches you hear are true and more. I’m just so inspired to be the best version of myself. I’ve struggled in the past with my mental health and finding reasons to live, “why am I here?” — a sense of purpose. I have this really renewed sense of how incredible it is to be here and to be alive. I’m just so thankful I get to spend time with her.
She’s never really heard any of my songs. I’ve never played them for her.
We don’t really do screens at this time either, but we showed her the “Jesus from Texas” music video and she’s pointing at the screen like, “baby!” and I said, “yeah, that’s you, baby! That’s you.”
I just really love — I feel so honored to be her mom. I just — it’s extremely cool. I feel very cool. It’s a great time.
What’s it like raising a kid in gender expansive and queer ways?
It becomes so apparent with having a baby that you just — let the baby be the baby! That’s what we always say. “Let the baby be the baby, let kids be kids.” They’re going to like what they like, and they won’t like the things that they don’t like.
You also realize how much work goes into gender and how much we gender things. We [socially] really go out of our way to say, “boys are like this, and girls are like that.”
She’s really into hats. I guess she sees me wear hats a lot, so she wears a variety of hats. She wears some of my dad’s hats that have military ships on them, and you don’t need to — just let the baby be the baby!
It’s a new frustration of mine, the fearmongering we hear from conservatives about queer people and queer families. You realize how weird they are actually making it. Everything is over-sexualized from them, because we’re just over here letting kids be kids. I sound like a Fox News commentator, don’t I? I just want kids to be kids, but when you say that, you have to explain it.
Frances is around gender-expansive people all the time, people with different pronouns — it’s just not as spooky as the news makes it out to be.
I don’t want to be overly romantic about it, but your child wears hats because you wear hats. Is that not just the most beautiful and humbling thing in the world? That someone wants to be like you?
It’s incredibly sweet. One of her first words was “hat.”
Got something to say about what you're reading? We value your feedback!