I was always into the idea of music. Yeah, I had some raw talent. And I worked on that, but, overall, I was more into the IDEA than the actual perfecting of the craft. Had I realized where my true “calling” was, I would have pursued that a bit more diligently when I was young(er) and perhaps I would be in a different place right now. But I digress…
So, what does one do in the 7th grade? With friends who play guitar and keys and drums? One forms a band! So we did.
We started off playing covers and then moved towards writing our own material. Unfortunately, we were pretty clean cut with few “life experiences” we could write about. Christian music was still in early development and worship music hadn’t yet been born. The angst of life or tales of lost love weren’t subjects we were familiar with. So, our writing suffered.
Fast forward several years as I finally found my general “home” with the music industry and I had the opportunity to work with fantastic songwriters (Jen Knapp and Barry Dean to name a couple). They had “experiences”! Divorce, abandonment, lost love, family expectations, hurts beyond understanding… Lots of great material t write about, if not just to inspire the poet to express themselves and expose inner feelings. They wrote these tapestries of words.
Then I listened to LF. Ugh.
The word I typically use for our lyrics is “trite”. Simple basic messages. Typical Christianese. Predictable rhymes. We set up an issue and solved it in 4 minutes. Or never even setup an “issue”. In some ways, some of our lyrics were judgmental. We called out people for acting a specific way. Or NOT acting a specific way. Perhaps that is/was typical of the time and format. It dawned on me subconsciously at the time and then certainly later in life that we were just too “good”. We didn’t have those experiences to pull from. We were churched kids growing up in churched homes singing church music to the church. Were we to write about fake experiences? We did that a bit, and as I look at those songs, they don’t come from a place of honesty. They come from a place of perception.
It’s all we really knew.
So, for the past several decades, I have somewhat tried to distance myself from LF. I would go on the road again in a heartbeat. And I loved nearly every bit of what LF did. The music. The production. The travel. The meeting people. All of it. I loved it. But, in comparison to what I then had the opportunity to work with… well…
I remember the time where I decided to go see Jen after the big split. Dean and I drove to Tulsa. Didn’t tell Jen we were cooking and certainly didn’t try to see her. I was trying to stay under the radar but (for what reason I don’t remember) wanted to see her. The last thing I wanted was to be recognized. But I was… “Hey! I know you!” (Here it comes…). “You were in that band that came to my church a while ago.” Recognized for the band I was in that she saw, perhaps a decade earlier. We were already 5 years past breaking up.
But, I digress…
The work I did with other artists was important and valuable. And, I so wanted my “success”, whatever that meant in the music industry, to be from those experiences. But, perhaps some of the biggest impact I was a part of was actually LF.
Every few years it’s suggested that at some event at church, LF should sing. And, for the most part, I loathe these “opportunities”. But, this past June, CBC celebrated 50 years and we played again. And through that experience, I realized I was wrong about distancing myself from LF. It was something that greatly influenced me. Some of my current involvements can be directly traced back to what happened in/with LF.
One of the biggest realization is that we actually DID what we did. People talk a big game of intentions all the time. In fact, I do as well. No talk. No intents can substitute for actually DOING something. And we DID it. Yeah, there was lot son help along the way. But, we made indie records at a time far removed from that being cool, accepted or easy. We toured across the country long before the internet and cell phones were commonplace. We wrote music that impacted people, before we were in our 20’s. We stuck together.
Ok, our lyrics didn’t win any awards. But the music was good. It was interesting. And though none of us were super musicians separately, when we came together, a sort of “magic” happened. It clicked.
Will we ever play together again? Not sure. There are still some old wounds and issues that tend to plague most bands at some point. But, When the magic happens, even after 25 years since we were really “together”, I’ll admit it, it’s fun. And no excuses need to be made.
I was wrong.
