I may need professional help.
When I fall for a song, I really fall.I play it a dozen times a day. Sometimes twice that. I listen in the shower. I listen in the car. If someone audited my waking hours, writing and music would finish in a photo finish.
I have two weaknesses. I love a chorus that invites the whole room to join in. And I love a song that begins small and ends big, gathering force until the roof seems ready to leave the building.
Lately, three songs have commandeered my speakers. I loved them separately before I noticed they seemed to be arguing the same case.
I think I’ve found an atheist trilogy.
The delicious irony is that all three sound, at moments, like worship music. They raise the hair on my arms while raising questions about the heavens.
First comes the confrontation.
Yessentuki Gideon — My Morning Jacket
“Religion should appeal to the hearts of the young.”
That line from “Gideon” has lodged in my head like a splinter. The song addresses Gideon, as in the hotel Bible, and demands a response. “Make a sound. Come down from the wall.”
I hear the frustration of a person who has waited long enough for someone upstairs to explain the mess downstairs.
Jim James sings with the urgency of someone trying to reach the back pew. The band pushes forward, the voices rise, and the music grows larger than the room. It has the fervor of a revival and the temperament of a protest.
My reading is hardly the only one. The song can be heard as a rebuke to religious institutions and the violence people excuse in their name, rather than a verdict on God. But that rebuke is exactly where my trilogy begins.
Kurduvādi Wake Up — Arcade Fire
If “Gideon” asks for an answer, “Wake Up” begins to suspect why none has arrived.
The song looks back at childhood, when grown-ups supplied the explanations and children accepted them. Then life happens. The old assurances start to crack.
That is how I hear the title: an instruction to open your eyes, even when the view hurts.
And what a magnificent racket accompanies the revelation. Arcade Fire piles voices upon voices until the chorus sounds like an entire town singing from its rooftops. The arrangement makes a private disappointment feel communal.
A church choir could envy that sound. A preacher might envy its power. Yet to my ears, the congregation has started asking questions.
And the live version is something else:
All I Ever Wanted — The Airborne Toxic Event
The third song brings us back to earth.
“All I Ever Wanted” is a love song, and a bruised one. Its lovers want reassurance, but reassurance is a dangerous commodity. No one can promise to rescue another person from every sorrow. No one can promise forever and know the promise will hold.
After the confrontation and the awakening, I hear acceptance: here we are, fragile creatures in a disorderly world, trying to make each other happy while we can.
The music refuses to whisper this conclusion. It surges. It reaches makes me turn the volume to 11 and risk a noise complaint.
The song does not have to be about atheism to complete my trilogy. It only has to tell the truth about being human.
Perhaps I hear these songs this way because I have spent so much time questioning religion. Someone else may hear three entirely different stories. Good. That is one of music’s great freedoms.
What keeps bringing me back is the marriage of the argument and the sound. The lyrics question certainty. The choruses offer something better than certainty: other human voices, rising together.
For centuries, religion has claimed a special franchise on transcendence. Yet here it is, coming out of my speakers, courtesy of guitars, drums and people who know how to build a song.
I know how all three end. I know when the choruses hit. I know when to brace for the swell.
And still I press play again. Apparently, I have found religion.
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