Take a look, it's in *some* books
A True Believer explainer
*EDIT* I have been working on this post for a week and a half. Really wanted to put it up before I played Fallon last night but I think some nerves leading up to the performance distracted me! This has felt like writing a paper for school. I’ve researched and cross-referenced and ultimately, I’ve learned even more in the process. All that being said, I’m not an authority on any of these topics. More a student. I think it’s really important that you do your own research if you read anything particularly interesting here. Knowledge is power. And there are a lot of folks in power who don’t want us to have knowledge.
Did my second longer-form interview for the album a couple weeks ago. I’m finding it kind of impossible to answer questions about all the life that is still unfolding. Who's to say what’s really happening? Does that stop me from talking? Not a chance, pal, but I’m rolling my eyes right along with you. I’ve noticed, in these interviews, we always end up going backward for context. Not sure if I’m the one steering that or if it’s the writers. Suspecting it’s probably me. Maybe more on that another time.
Sometimes I think I black out for an entire interview. Pieces of it will come back to me over the days that follow. It should never be such a big deal. It seems clear this is some type of PTSD— too many negative yet formative experiences with “the media” in my teens and even twenties. But BOO-FUCKIN-HOO, let’s talk about one of the bits from the latest interview that I can’t stop thinking about.
Joe Coscarelli asked me what is my favorite lyric I’ve ever written.
To be clear, I officially do not have a favorite lyric of my own but I’m really proud of “True Believer” and felt like highlighting that in our conversation. This song is not easy to explain succinctly but I figure, at least here, we have the room to go line by line and talk about everything from the personal to the historical context. I hope it helps paint a fuller picture of the song for anyone who may be interested.
VERSE 1
Tourists stumble down Broadway
Cumberland keeps claiming bodies
All our best memories were bought
And then turned into apartments
From the top, I’m trying to establish that we’re in Nashville. Vaguely describing the downtown scene, the gentrification, and the prioritization of tourism over local livelihoods. So much has been leveled in just the last 10 years, or made over to make way for new tourist attractions and charmless, astronomically-priced condos. My main hope for our city lies in community organization and outreach programs. And public radio. And Dolly Parton.
The club with all the hardcore shows
Now just a greyscale Dominos
I saw one of my favorite mewithoutYou shows at The Muse. Coheed and Cambria, Blindside, Shai Hulud… I saw other kids my age play there in their local punk bands. It was a grimy, perfect all ages venue and I wish I’d been home more as a teenager to experience it more than I did. The parking lot backed up to the “World’s Largest Bookstore” which was the first porn shop I ever saw the inside of, and their bathroom was a hell of a lot nicer than the one at The Muse. I miss it all. Now it’s Domino’s that looks dead all the time. While we’re at it, let me mention that for all the money spent on development, architects must be bored out of their minds. Where is the whimsy? :(
The churches overflow each Sunday Greedy Sunday morning
There’s some double meaning, invoking U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as a means to point back to multiple violent civil rights conflicts which were given the name “Bloody Sunday”— most relevant here, the brutal attack on peaceful protestors in Selma, AL at the height of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Maybe obvious but I am just conflating all of this history with the historic hypocrisy of The Church.
Gift shop in the lobby
Act like God ain’t watching
Kill the soul, turn a profit
Nashville and Franklin, TN are chock full of churches. We’ve got em all! It’s very normal for the mega-churches (why are there mega churches and why aren’t they paying taxes?) to put coffee shops in the lobby that are across the way from a gift shop that will sell all sorts of faith-based trinkets and whatnots, including books written by the pastor and/or the pastor’s wife, etc. This capitalistic, advantageous skew on faith is extended to the giant business that is the Christian Contemporary Music/worship music industry— a whole different story that other, more qualified people are better suited to tell.
What lives on? Southern Gotham
I got really obsessed with The Penguin show. The older I get, the more I appreciate shows that portray corruption and/or dystopian societies in fantastical, more surreal ways. We’re living in it all the time, whether you choose to see it or not.
For the longest time, the tallest building in our city’s skyline was the AT&T building on Commerce Street, downtown. Locals call it The Batman Building. If you were driving north on 65, you used to have a perfect view of it, smack dab in the center of where the interstate splits around the city’s center. It was an icon of our city. Now, you can only really see it from the north side of the city. Can you see why it’s “The Batman Building”?
CHORUS
I’m the one who still loves your ghost
I reanimate your bones with my belief
Really, these words came out before I could think of what they meant. I don’t have an explanation but I could try and probably come up with a thousand. It’s only been since writing my first album, Petals For Armor, that I started to understand that words are spells. There are certain songs from my solo discography that contain lyrics that I think would go into my own personal spell book. This chorus is one of them.
VERSE 2
They put up chainlink fences underneath the biggest bridges
Ever since moving into Nashville proper from the suburbs, I have heard local leadership talk about what they are fixin’ to do to care for our homeless population. Nashvillians have long heard plans for affordable housing and dedicated low-income neighborhoods, etc, which never seem to make it off paper. (“Overall, the general feeling is that people want to see action and are tired of yet another plan.”)
Earlier this year, I was driving near Berry Hill and noticed a giant chainlink fence had gone up under one of the bridges. My heart sank, and I took a photo of it so I wouldn’t forget. They’re always closing encampments and moving these people with no real solution. Meanwhile, the condos, apartment buildings, and hotels downtown have multiplied faster than we can fill them. The city is bloated but empty. Just full of gas and tourists and tourists with hot chicken gas.
On a far more positive note, for those who don’t live in Nashville or who may be new to the city, we have an incredible local paper called The Contributor, which is sold all over town by our homeless neighbors for $2. Straight from the wiki: “The publication's content focuses primarily on social justice issues as they are framed by politics, music, art, culture, sports, homelessness, and poverty. It is written by local journalists as well as people experiencing homelessness or working within the homeless community.” It’s such a great way to stay plugged in to what’s happening locally. Recently, they even posted a field guide for an upcoming special election on their site. (P.S. You can even donate directly through the site if you’d like!)
They pose in Christmas cards with guns as big as all their children
There was a congressman in town who went viral for his family’s odd and extremely dissonant Christmas portrait. In it, they all stand together, big smiles on their faces, in what looks like a foyer of a fancy home in Brentwood or Green Hills, TN, holding up their big ass assault rifles together like it’s something to be proud of. Like it makes any sense at all. There are 3 children. The smallest kid in the photo looks to be the same size as the gun the mom is toting. Of course, the kid isn’t holding a weapon. Maybe he was one year too young? Only 2 years later, the very district this congressman represented would be affected by a mass shooting.
It feels appropriate to mention here that growing up in the Deep South in the mid-90’s made being around guns feel pretty normal. I had a stepbrother then who loved to hunt and shoot skeet and would run around the house pretending he was in the Marines. At some young age I was given a BB gun, probably by his father who was my first stepfather. I’d aim with all the concentration in my little kid brain and try to shoot a clean hole through a leaf. Could never bring myself to hunt so my fascination with guns ended before it ever began. But there was definitely a desensitization that began at a really early age, for me and most of the kids I knew in Meridian and Collinsville, MS. Even after moving away from that particular culture, up north to Franklin, TN, there were still plenty of boys my age who would go out to the country for skeet shooting. I tried it a couple times but hated the way those big guns would kick back at you like they were punishing you for pulling the trigger. It’s just not my thing and while I wish it was no one’s thing, I have at least some base level understanding as to why there are people who genuinely do believe it’s not the guns.
Anyway, it appears most Americans believe in common-sense gun policy. This particular excerpt from the same article behind that link was also very interesting:
“The National Rifle Association, the most powerful gun rights lobbying group in the country, was originally founded to support sports gun and hunting culture. But as hunting became less popular, the gun lobby took another tack to sell guns: emphasizing their use for protection and “making the Second Amendment their focus, billing gun ownership as a right for people anywhere and everywhere,” says Villarreal.”
Lastly, I really love Everytown.org and have worked with them a little bit in past years. They are an incredible resource for education on gun policy and happen to be the largest gun violence prevention organization in America. This chart compares gun policies state-to-state with their respective gun violence rates. You should definitely click through to see the entire study, it’s pretty incredible.
They say that Jesus is the way but then they gave him a white face, so they don’t have to pray to someone they deem lesser than them.
I’ve spent nearly half of my life now deconstructing my faith. It’s too much to get into here, and certainly not the time, but occasionally it can come out in my writing. Here, I’m singing about the irony of worshipping a Middle Eastern man while simultaneously being racist and unaccepting as fuck, which white Evangelicals / Christian Nationalists have proven themselves to be, time and time again. The “they” here… anyone the shoe fits, but most especially those who are in positions of authority and leadership, whether that’s in church or in government. Growing up, I remember being told that God holds those in leadership to a higher standard of accountability. Instead, in this timeline, rapists, racists, and swindlers become presidents, while “Christians” carry the banner for them. Make it make sense. Semi-unrelated: I’ve been thinking about the theatre of Evangelical Christianity (think Righteous Gemstones or a Charlie Kirk vigil) …that’s really all. Just thinking.
The South will not rise again
Okay, so I think most of us know this already but just in case: The Confederate States of America lost the Civil War and had to rejoin the Union. The thing is, there is so much we were not taught in school about this moment in our history and in fact, so much history was twisted so as not to taint the illusion of the South. For the Confederacy, this was a war to protect a southern economy dependent on chattel slavery. I’ve only just recently learned about The Lost Cause Myth— which is just essentially a whitewashing of the Confederate plight. It downplays the role of slavery as prime motivation for the war.
When we don’t know our true history, we learn nothing about how not to re-live it. “The South will rise again” gets thrown around by folks who have never been taught nor bothered to learn the weight of these words. The phrase is accredited Jefferson Davis, who was elected as president of the new Confederacy. While I was doing some internetting, I found this and my god. You can read the despicable words of the very men who risked it all for their racist, capitalistic greed. It’s wild to see documentation of such a pivotal moment in US history. These men were monsters protecting the institution of slavery. Never forget that that is what the Civil War was about.
Til it’s paid for every sin
I believe that, before we can realize this concept of equality - before any equitable future - it’s going to first take spiritual and intellectual understanding of the damage that’s been done to all people of color in our country. That takes education, which means learning our real American history. The true history of our nation is one that our current administration is hellbent on erasing. Once again, without the opportunity to acknowledge these ugly truths, how can we learn and do better? Beyond scratching the surface of the disparate realities taking place here in America, it might do us all well to learn something about epigenetics, which could, in my personal opinion, give way to more empathy and understanding through illumination. White people simply cannot understand the traumas we’ve been spared simply by being born white. For Black Americans, so many of these traumatic, historic events weren’t even that long ago.
To further press the point of just how not long ago… Something cool from fashion week this past month, which was dubbed, “a roll call of our living history”:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Strange fruit, hard bargain
Probably the densest of the lines from this song. I’m just pointing to more history here. There’s a loose double entendre with the hard bargain line, which is why I decided not to capitalize in the actual lyrics pages.
For those who don’t know, “Strange Fruit”, the song, watch these:
The lyrics were adapted from a poem called “Bitter Fruit”, written by Abel Meeropol after he’d seen one photograph of a lynching. He wrote it in 1936. This poem was put to music and later performed by Billie Holiday at New York’s Cafe Society, in 1939. Her performances of this song were extremely controversial. So much so that the government got involved. (These links are just 2 of so many articles on the topic. Some of which will include far more historical context. It’s an important deep dive if you’ve ever questioned the utility of art in our society and yes, even our politics.)
I think “Strange Fruit” is the greatest protest song of all time. Because it demands we acknowledge the horrific injustices that have resulted from white supremacy. It describes in detail the sight of Black human being hung from a tree. And while some may think these horrors are a thing of the past, the lynchings have never stopped. Just this month, news broke of a young Black man, Trey Reed, found hanging from a tree on Delta State University campus. I do call it a lynching, despite what was originally reported as cause for death by local officials. The police in Mississippi have shown no reason to be trusted. I was born and raised in Meridian, til age 12, and heard of officers who had ties to the KKK. Then, of course, there’s the Goon Squad in Jackson, MS. I was really glad to hear that Trey Reed’s family retained Civil Rights attorney, Ben Crump, and that there will be an independent investigation of his death which will include an independent autopsy. The NAACP recently posted about this case and the caption read, “While we await more formal autopsy reports and information, we offer this piece of history with a level of certainty: Our people have not historically hung ourselves from trees…” I think that’s a good place to leave this part.
*update* Trey Reed’s independent autopsy report came back.
Hard Bargain - capitalized, this time - is a historic neighborhood in Franklin, TN that offers low-to-moderate families an opportunity for home ownership and more. Williamson County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country and to live there now days you kind of have to be rich. The co-founders of the Hard Bargain Association saw this coming a long time ago and created the org as a means to preserve this neighborhood against the kind of gentrification that has turned Franklin, TN into an unattainable dream for most families.
How the Hard Bargain neighborhood came to be is an incredible story. Some of that history is laid out in this sign, which sits in front of the McLemore house, just a very short drive from Historic Downtown Franklin. The crux of the story is that a formerly enslaved man, Harvey McLemore, bought this land from his former enslaver and used it as a means to create generational wealth for over 100 years. If you want the entire story, check this page on their site. The fact that Mr. Harvey used good business sense and a heart for his people to create opportunity for a thriving community is deeply inspiring to me.
Till the roots, Southern Gotham
You know the “Southern Gotham” bit. Let’s talk about the first bit.
Here, “Till” is spelled and capitalized this way because it is my tiny tribute to Emmett Till. To be honest, I am having a very hard time writing about this because the more I look to find the right links or videos to help share his story, the sadder I feel. This was such a senseless act of evil. Emmett was only 14 when he traveled from Chicago down to MS to visit family, and he never returned home. His mother, Mamie, insisted on an open casket funeral so that the whole nation would have to see what a mob of racist men did to her baby. He was barely recognizable in a photo first published by Jet Magazine, which sparked the galvanization of the Civil Rights Movement.
Carolyn Bryant, the woman who accused Emmett of making verbal and physical advances at her, later admitted to lying on the stand. She was quoted as saying, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” The men who murdered Emmett Till came clean as well, not long after being found innocent, detailing the lynching of an innocent child in horrific detail to a magazine that paid them $4000 for the story. Of course, the men were found innocent at the time of the trial. It was an all-white, all-male jury. The only punishment they ever got was a fucking pay out.
There are so many videos and articles about Emmett Till’s life, death, and legacy. I’m including one of those but the second video I’m linking is equally educational, just in a different way. It is a beautiful string arrangement written by Akenya Seymour for Palaver Strings in tribute to Emmett Till. It’s deeply moving and honoring of him as a whole person. A beautiful boy who was very much alive until evil people took their hatred out on him.
I’m the one who still loves your ghost
I reanimate your bones with my belief
Well, that’s the whole song. I hope this was enlightening and/or motivating in some way! Truthfully, upon “finishing” this post, I feel a great deal of dissatisfaction. I know I’ll never be able to say enough. Action > words, of course.
Have you ever heard the Angela Davis quote, “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist”? You can find racism in the root system of just about any issue you may care about. I encourage you to recognize the intersectionality of these issues and find where your hopes, passions, and interests align with the fight against a racist, capitalist ideology. Wishing you courage and peace of mind! And curiosity.
Let’s keep learning.