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| Switchfoot kicked off their Columbia Records deal in 2003 with The Beautiful Letdown imploring each individual to seek a more meaningful life through faith and service to others. Their upbeat combination of rock and pop has been well-received and their message will never be outdated. |
(2005) Music Review |
| This
page was created on February 01, 2005
This page was last updated on
May 14, 2005
Legend
of Chin here
New
Way to Be Human here
Learning to Breathe here
The
Beautiful Letdown here
— MUSIC REVIEWS INDEX |
| DETAILS |
| THE HIGH NOTES:
- 2003
San Diego Music Award for "Album of the Year," and “Pop
Album of the Year”
- 2002
San Diego Music Award for “Best Adult Alternative”
- 2001
San Diego Music Awards for "Best Pop Album,” and "Best
Pop Artist"
- 1997
San Diego Music Award for "Best New Artist"
- 5
songs included on the Gold certified soundtrack "A Walk to
Remember"
- Over 50 songs usages
on major TV (WB, FOX , CBS, Columbia, MTV, ABC, and Disney)
- New “Meant
To Live” video playing MTV, MTV2, and Fuse
- Gibson Guitars' 2001
Les Paul Horizon Award (awarded to guitarist/lead singer Jon
Foreman)
Rarely
does a rock band combine explosive guitars with an intense
longing for meaning. Jon Foreman and Switchfoot, however,
yearn for something more than what pop-culture is selling. "If I'm content as an artist to write a hit song
or have a platinum record, then I'll have failed a lot of my
fellow human beings," says Foreman. "We have the best jobs
in the world because we play music for a living and love
doing it, but we didn't get into this to try and sell something.
For us, it's about communicating and connecting with people
on a different level."
That
stance earned the Switchfoot vocalist/guitarist and his bandmates
(brother/bassist Tim Foreman, keyboardist Jerome Fontamillas
and drummer Chad Butler) an invitation to attend last December’s Nashville summit for DATA (Debt, AIDS,
Trade for Africa), the charity organization founded by U2’s
main man Bono to promote AIDS awareness and debt relief for developing
nations. “It was incredible,” says Foreman, who’s
worked with Sudanese refugees in the band’s hometown of
San Diego. “Here’s a guy who has all the money, fame
and notoriety that anyone could ever want, and he’s passionately
talking to us about a bunch of poor people in Africa who will
never buy his records. Listening to him speak was definitely
a life-changing experience.”
When
the meeting ended, Foreman walked over and handed the U2 frontman
$40. “I told him I owed it to him for sneaking
into a U2 show in London a couple of years ago,” he says. “He
laughed and told me he did the same thing when he was younger.
We spoke for a while and then he gave the money back, saying
he felt he had already been compensated. To be honest, I was
relieved because it was my last $40 and I needed the money to
get home.”
As
for his involvement with DATA and its cause, Foreman says, “I talk about it quite a bit in interviews and from
the stage, but I’m careful not to be annoying about it.
We’ve never really been a political band. Our songs are
more about the politics of the heart than they are about foreign
politics. I don’t think we can solve the outside problems
until we solve the ones within.”
On
the Columbia/RED Ink debut The Beautiful Letdown, Foreman opens
up with self-revelatory songs about hope, love, faith and the
desire to be more than what he’s been sold. In spacious
settings, the singer connects with subtle emotional power, surveying
a landscape of mediocrity in “More Than Fine,” digging
for painful truths in title track “Beautiful Letdown” and
stepping on a distortion pedal to scream about the dissonance
of the modern age in “Ammunition.” On lead single “Meant
To Live,” inspired by TS Elliot’s “The Hollow
Men,” he strives to survive in a world where love and hate
breathe the same air.
“It’s not a dark album, but it talks about
dark things that have happened to me,” says Foreman. “A
lot of the songs are about the hope that’s deeper than
the wound and how that’s something that we can really hold
onto. I think that’s something that kids are picking up
on and taking with them.” He pauses and adds, “Don’t
misunderstand—I have no delusions of grandeur thinking
that our songs will single-handedly change the world. But change
is possible and I definitely want to be a part of that. We always
make it a point to talk to people outside after the shows, and
I recently had a kid come up to me and give me a big hug because
he was so affected by ‘Dare You To Move’ (from The
Beautiful Letdown). Apparently, he was going through some really
rough times and wasn’t sure if he wanted to live anymore,
but heard the song and was inspired. That’s incredible.
On days when you’re wondering what you’re doing playing
a show in some small town in the middle of nowhere, you think
about moments like that and realize that you’re part of
a bigger story than your own.”
Musically,
Switchfoot draws as much from the Police and James Taylor as
from the Beatles and Stevie Wonder to create swirling guitar
pop, full of effortlessly arching melodies and textures that
shift in continual, sensual motion. “We’ve
never fit in any of the genre boxes,” says Foreman. “I
think that diversity is our strength.”
Produced
by John Fields (Andrew W.K.) and mixed by Chris Lord-Alge (Goo
Goo Dolls, Michelle Branch), Tom Lord-Alge (blink-182, Rolling
Stones) and Jack Joseph Puig (John Mayer, No Doubt), The Beautiful
Letdown entered the Billboard Top 200 this past spring at #85.
The album, which The Orange County Register described as “…a rousing rock testament of hope, dreams and
inspiration,” can attribute its early success to lead single “Meant
To Live,” which hit the Top 40 on the Modern Rock Chart
(its companion video, directed by Laurent Briet (Radiohead),
subsequently went into rotation on MTV2). Meanwhile, the band
has been tearing up venues across the country during a three-month
sold-out headlining tour. In addition to selling out four nights
in Los Angeles, the quartet shared festival stages with the likes
of Jane’s Addiction and Audioslave and recently performed
on “Last Call with Carson Daly” and the “Late
Late Show with Craig Kilborn.”
Foreman
credits the album’s raw, live edge to the
band’s DIY attitude. “We didn’t want to waste
time screwing around in a $1000 a day studio,” he laughs. “So
we did all the pre-production in my bedroom. When we finally
recorded the album, we did the whole thing in two weeks. John
(Fields) works fast and so do we. There were no lunch or dinner
breaks—we worked straight through and it turned out great.
You can ruin things if you spend too much time in the studio.”
The
Beautiful Letdown comes three years after Switchfoot’s
third independently-released and critically acclaimed album Learning
To Breathe. In between the two discs, the band won the 2001 ASCAP
San Diego Music Award for “Best Pop Album” and “Best
Pop Artist,” won the 2002 ASCAP San Diego Music Award for “Best
Adult Alternative and contributed five songs to the gold-certified
soundtrack for the Mandy Moore film A Walk To Remember (including
a duet with Foreman and Moore). “We were at the movie premiere,” recalls
Foreman, “And David Hasselhoff was sitting behind us bawling
his eyes out with his daughter. It was a bit surreal.”
Over
the course of the past several years, more than 40 Switchfoot
songs have been used for several nationally televised shows,
including “Dawson’s Creek” (five songs), “Regis
and Kelly,” “Felicity,” and many more. “The
context in which the songs are used can be pretty funny,” says
Foreman. “I remember writing a song about spiritual longing
and then seeing it played back during a hot tub scene on some
show. The songs can wind up very far from the edge of the bed
where they were originally written.”
Switchfoot’s roots can be traced back to the beaches
of San Diego in the mid-‘90s, when the Foremans and Butler
connected as surfers (Fontamillas joined in September of 2000).
Though they competed in national surf championships on weekends
and earned product endorsements from equipment companies, the
real bond came from a common love of music. They decided to form
a band, chose the name Switchfoot (a surfing term), put themselves
through months of sweaty garage band workouts, and then hit the
road. After just 20 gigs, they signed with re:Think records and
released Legend of Chin in 1997. They’ve averaged 150 shows
a year ever since, while selling more than 400,000 copies of
their first three albums (Legend of Chin, New Way to Be Human
and Learning to Breathe) combined. Shortly after recording The
Beautiful Letdown, Switchfoot signed with Columbia. The album
has since become the band’s fastest-selling record to date.
“Tim, Chad, Jerome and I have seen pretty much everything
over the past six years,” says Foreman. “We’ve
been at this ever since Tim graduated from high school. But this
all feels like a new chapter. I think this album is where our
future begins.
|
| POSTER |
|
SWITCHFOOT
REVIEWS
BY JACOB SAHMS
Jacob is the Director
of Youth Ministries at Bon Air United Methodist Church and
serves as the volunteer campus minister for the non-denominational
Fellowship of Christian Athletes at his alma mater, the University
of Richmond (VA). |
Switchfoot kicked off their Columbia Records deal in 2003 with The
Beautiful Letdown imploring each individual to
seek a more meaningful life through faith and service to others.
Their upbeat combination of rock and pop has been well-received
and their message will never be outdated. If Bono has indeed
transcended the role of rock star to social activist, the inspiration
of Jon Foreman, Tim Foreman, Chad Butler and Jerome Fontamillas
strikes at the apathy that possesses much of the world. Just
as one must start back with Joshua Tree to
fully appreciate Atomic Bomb, one
must journey through The Legend of Chin,
find a New Way to Be Human, and therefore
graduate from Learning to Breathe 101
to see the intricacies of the Letdown.
I’ll tackle some of those ‘inspired’ songs
from the first three CDs, brought together in The
Early Years: 1997-2000(released 2004), and then
reflect on Letdown in light of Switchfoot’s
lyrical history.
Legend of Chin
 The Legend of Chin (1997)
kicks off with the manic tunes “Bomb” and “Chem 6A” as
the themes of oppressive apathy and self-doubt seem to cloud the
mind. Both songs touch on the lure of mind-numbing media and the
fact that couch-potatoe-dom cannot be avoided when staring at the
pictures on the TV screen. “Life and Love and Why” asks
many of the hard questions about life and belonging that will be
answered later in Learning and Letdown. “Could
it be true/Can life be new/And can I be used” asks Foreman,
wondering what about his life could be renewed and used for a greater
good. He seems to have a decent idea about the answer to his own
question but poses it with uncertainity in the final verse: “Could
it be all that I am is in you/Could it be this/Could it be bliss/Can
it be you/Can it be you.”
So
the singer’s worth may be found in his relationship with
the other (rather than in self), emphasized again in “You,” a
postlude to “Life and Love,” as “hope is
not in what I know/Not in me/It’s in you.” Who
is the “you?” I have my bets… but “Ode
to Chin” knocks the question out of the park: “Life’s
more than girls/God’s more than words/You’re more than
this.” There is already established category of what
God isn’t—He’s not just mechanical, rhetorical
or theoretical—and Switchfoot spends it’s musical history
trying to dig deeper. Chin leaves their
listeners with an understanding that things are often confusing,
complicated, and painful, yet hopeful. And the pushing point is
that Switchfoot thinks we should all reach out and use what we
have to help others who need help. (Now, where have I heard that
before…?)
Click any song below to listen to a sample mp3.
1. Bomb 2:45
2. Chem 6a 3:11
3. Underwater 3:46
4. Edge of My Seat 2:45
5. Home 4:02
6. Might Have Ben Hur 2:38
7. Concrete Girl 5:05
8. Life and Love and Why 2:53
9. You 4:13
10. Ode to Chin 2:13
11. Don't Be There 4:22
Total Running Time: 37:53
New Way to Be Human
 New Way to Be Human (1999)
explores the themes of purpose, forgiveness, and belief from
the very beginning, as the title track states: “You’re
a new way to be human/Where my humanity bends/To a new way to
be human/Redemption begins.” Here
I think that Foreman’s Christian theology really takes off.
When Jesus Christ broke into human history as fully God and fully
human, we experienced a closing up of the “impossible space” between
who we are and who we could be. This song admits to human incompleteness
but recognizes that the “God of redemption” could break
into human apathy and form new beings who become heroes, even when
it appears that all the heroes are gone.
The
truth is that it Jesus as fully God/fully man isn’t
always easy to accept—human beings doubt! “Sooner or
Later” includes the prayer “I look to find You/Down
on my knees/Oh God, I believe!/Please help me believe” and “Let
That Be Enough” echoes that with “Let me know that
You hear me/Let me know Your touch/Let me know that You love me/And
let that be enough.” Even when we have head or heart
knowledge, Switchfoot recognizes the need for help from the other
side of that belief—we can’t do this on our own. Rather,
we require God’s help to believe in Him! The constant tension
between the ‘common sense’ knowledge of God’s
presence and the necessity of God’s presence swing
the individual back and forth between despair and hope. The bottom
line for New Way is still hope, as “I
Turn Everything Over” and “Under the Floor” outline
the individual’s complete surrender of everything he’d
been holding onto, so that the plans God has made can be fulfilled
(Jeremiah 29:11-14).
Click any song below to listen to a sample mp3.
1. New Way to Be Human 3:38
2. Incomplete 4:14
3. Sooner or Later (Soren's Song) 3:59
4. Company Car 3:13
5. Let That Be Enough 2:39
6. Something More (Augustine's Confession) 4:00
7. Only Hope 4:13
8. Amy's Song 4:30
9. I Turn Everything Over 3:21
10. Under the Floor 3:55
Total Running Time: 37:42
Learning to Breathe
 “I Dare You to Move” is
the song from Learning
to Breathe (2000) that was later included in Letdown—for
which I will present two possibilities. One, “you”/Foreman,
now a bigger player in the music scene, is being critiqued
for his faith and music, exploring a misstep or the difference
between “who you are and who you could be.” Two,
the “you” in question is Jesus Christ who has recognized
His mission, the goal of His life, and is being dared by the
narrator to lift Himself up off the floor (as the infant child?
of the not-yet-empty tomb?) and make a difference “between
how it is and how it should be.” The narrator hints
that maybe redemption and forgiveness wait with this “you,” and
that he cannot escape from his mission, closing with the line “Salvation
is here.” Either way, the questions require some
thought on our part. What is waiting to be done that will go
undone if we don’t get off the floor? Who needs our help?
How can we be used by God to make a difference?
The
title track once again talks about how life knocked the singer
down again unexpectedly, and that “You” is the only
one who can break his fall, who can teach him how to crawl, who
can teach the singer how to breathe, who can take him “there.” “Love
is a Movement” documents God’s giving His life to “put
motion inside my soul,” renewing Switchfoot’s attack
on human apathy and serving as a good model for their present agenda
through DATA (providing funds and other aid for those suffering
from AIDS, another U2-supported endeavor; see www.datadata.org).
Switchfoot (and U2) wants nothing to do with “cold religion” and
everything to do with a forward movement toward loving others and
serving those in need.
The Gospel according to Switchfoot is well documented in the
second half of Breathe: “The
Loser,” “Erosion,” and “Living is Simple” all
talk about life in terms that echo the Beatitudes. How? The losers
win, erosion makes a person whole, and living is dying in three
role reversals. Foreman writes that he is selling out by admitting
that he wants to lose, with a “contract pending on eternity,” the
backbeat of the last becoming first. The Holy Spirit is called
upon to wash away his sins because he desires to live by dying
to himself.
The Beautiful Letdown (2003)
 Having
traveled from despair to surrender and from a struggle for consistency
to hope, Switchfoot showcases the journey itself in The Beautiful Letdown. “Meant
to Live” raises some of the same questions that peppered Chin: “Have
we lost ourselves?...Maybe we’ve been living with our eyes
half open, maybe we’re bent and broken.” “This
is Your Life” can be boiled down to a life-altering question: “are
you who you want to be?” How does someone make that
kind of decision? It must come from knowing what matters most and
by comparing yourself to that standard.
Switchfoot
starts back toward the center by urging people to take responsibility
for their actions. In “Ammunition,” Foreman
sings that we as a community are the problem, that we can’t
blame our issues on other people but must recognize that we’ve
butchered love itself. To reassert love, “Dare You to Move” is
reintroduced on this disk (see above comments) and immediately
followed with “Redemption,” and this shameless allusion
to the Jesus’ appearance to Thomas (Gospel of John, Ch 20): “I’ve
got my hand in redemption’s side/Whose scars are bigger than
these doubts of mine.” This act of redemption by Jesus
Christ for the disciple who admitted his doubts also leads to “The
Beautiful Letdown,” recognizing that we can’t make
it on our own, that fame and fortune aren’t enough, and that
we are called to share what we know to be true.
The second half of Letdown also
touches on prior Switchfoot themes. “Gone,” resumes the battle
cry for the love movement, even referencing U2’s Bono for
his efforts in drawing attention to the AIDS epidemic in Africa
through DATA. In “On Fire,” the passion for living
clearly comes from an intimate encounter with a “you” outside
of self, possibly a romantic ideal but more probably God. And “Adding
to the Noise,” the band encourages turning off whatever static
is keeping their listeners from taking action.
Finally, for a final Biblical hurrah, Letdown closes
out with “Twenty-Four,” which serves as a complete
package of what Switchfoot has sung all along. Beginning with many
illustrations of how the singer is dead last, and filled with many
excuses for his own problems, it quickly turns to seeking the help
of “Spirit.” Foreman writes that “you’re
raising the dead in me,” once again referencing the
resurrection of Christ but this time he places himself in the narrative
by calling himself the ‘second man’(Luke 23)— the
man who accepted Christ as he prepared to die next to him on the
cross. Foreman also references Genesis 28 as well, where Jacob
wrestles with the angel and becomes Israel, with a new name and
a new identity. He does recognize that he wants more than a name,
a cause, or a feeling, he wants a relationship with this Spirit
that gives him the song to sing, and provides him with new life.
- Meant to Live - MP3
- This Is Your Life - MP3
- More than Fine - MP3
- Ammunition - MP3
- Dare You To Move -MP3
- Redemption - MP3
- Beautiful Letdown - MP3
- Gone - MP3
- On Fire - MP3
- Adding To The Noise - MP3
- 24 - MP3
In Conclusion
Having
listened through the albums back-to-back, I’ve heard
the changes that Switchfoot has made as they’ve matured into
a rock and roll band for the 21 st century. From grunge and hard(er)
core to guitar driven poprock, Switchfoot’s sound is more
pleasing to the ear and the lyrics have deepened and broadened
over time. Even more, the ideas that the group have wrestled with
have become more complicated and more everyman as the group aged.
No longer ‘merely’ dealing with depression and human
relationships, the group has taken their sound out of the garage
band/youth group audience to the broader scale ‘out there.’ Along
with their need to bring the sound further has come a need to see
their growing fame and fortune put to good use: for the good of
those in need and to the glory of God who is “raising
the dead” in all who listen.
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