Relient K
On Sunday (fittingly), Switchfoot and Relient K will stop at the Ryman as part of their co-headlining Looking for America tour — it’ll be probably the hundredth time these two bands have shared the stage.
Roughly a decade ago, I saw Switchfoot and Relient K perform together in Knoxville. It was one of the first concerts I remember paying for with my own money — money I’d earned bagging groceries. I was maybe 14. That’s an age when most people are still building up their own musical preferences independent of their parents’ influence. That was also the year I really got involved in my church’s youth group.
Many of the “cool” people in that youth group were very musically inclined, united by a distaste for the bland pop-lite dreck that made up the majority of Christian radio, but with an appreciation for the kind of Christian-inspired rock that appeared on normal Top 40 every now and then — Underoath, Lifehouse, Anberlin. Switchfoot and Relient K were among the leaders of that movement.
Both bands formed around the same time — Switchfoot in 1996 and Relient K in 1998 — in a Christian alternative-rock moment enabled by the world-beating success of U2 (who only flirted with the idea of going non-secular early in their career). Switchfoot and Relient K’s early work was similar, walking that line between singing about girls and singing about Jesus, but both were kind of silly about it. They had punny nonsense song titles like “Might Have Ben Hur” (from Switchfoot’s The Legend of Chin) and “May the Horse Be With You” (from Relient K’s The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek), and they both mixed in pop-culture references with abandon.
And while both bands kept making record after record, they each increasingly slipped into mainstream culture. The height of this for Switchfoot came in 2002 with the release of the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’ A Walk to Remember, which featured Mandy Moore singing the band’s “Only Hope.” That introduced them to a massive audience that would make their next record, 2003’s The Beautiful Letdown, a major success. For Relient K, the peak came a little later, with 2007’s Five Score and Seven Years Ago — their bestselling record to date, and one that earned them a No. 6 spot on the Billboard Top 100 chart.
Switchfoot
Those moments seem like they happened ages ago, but both bands are still extremely prolific. Switchfoot has toured at least once a year every year since 2007, and the band just released its 10th record, Where the Light Shines Through; frontman Jon Foreman has also put out several solo records and had a side project, Fiction Family, with Nickel Creek’s Sean Watkins. The band has ramped up charity efforts with its annual Bro-Am surf competition, and even released a documentary of its travels to accompany the 2012 album Fading West.
Relient K has also been touring on and off, but its roster of official members has been whittled down to two: Matt Thiessen (aka my high school crush) and Matt Hoopes, who are both based in Nashville now. They’re still making music, like this summer’s sprawling 16-track Air for Free. Thiessen also has side projects; he co-wrote a song for ex-girlfriend Katy Perry and helped produce some Owl City tracks. Still, when it comes to the mainstream, both bands now operate with a lower profile.
And both have changed since pumping out those early earnest Christian rock anthems. The world is a different place than it was in the early 2000s. Christian crossover isn’t really a thing people want right now, and so the bands have adjusted their music accordingly. Both bands have exchanged overt mentions of Jesus for broad metaphors of horizon lines and ocean waves. Both bands’ recent albums are enjoyable, but not in the hard, aching way that their best records (Vice Verses and Mmhmm) were. They’re not challenging musically or lyrically; they’re well-intentioned, yes, but kind of boring. They’ve ditched rock ’n’ roll for photo-montage pop more akin to OneRepublic than U2.
It’s difficult to say these things about bands that shaped me, that comforted me throughout teen angst and struggles with higher powers. I don’t listen to much Christian music recreationally anymore. Very little of it is interesting, and so much of it is patronizing or representative of values I don’t share anymore. For so long I answered questions of musical taste by mentioning these two groups, long past a time when it was cool to mention them — that tiny sliver of time in 2006. Now I write about music, so I hear way more of what’s out there — it’s hard to waste my time on a record that feels phoned-in when, like, Lemonade exists.
I’ll always love Switchfoot and Relient K, and I thought it would be in an ongoing way — that they would keep making music that moved me. But maybe it’s time to put away things that belong to a certain span of time. Maybe these new records will reach a whole new generation of Switchfoot and Relient K fans, maybe they won’t. Maybe this Ryman show will be filled with teens, like the venue where I saw them 10 years ago was. More likely it’ll be filled with longtime die-hard fans, the ones begging them to play “Dare You to Move” or “Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been.”
And I’ll relegate the bands to my throwback Spotify playlist, a graveyard for the music I needed at one point in my life, but which I don’t need any longer.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
