When I listen to Gold by Starflyer 59, I’m immediately drawn back to my senior year of high school. I drove a red 1991 Chevy S-10 around my hometown for hours and hours listening to music, mostly by myself and sometimes with my brother Andrew. During that school year (‘96-97), gas was only about 95 cents a gallon, and I had a part-time job—otherwise I would have done my moping riding around on my bicycle like I did earlier in high school. I could fill up the tank of that tiny truck for only $10, but we aren’t here to discuss the geopolitical hijinks that created such low prices for crucial commodities at another time. Suffice to say, the late ‘90s were a wild time to be alive.
I hadn’t always been a mopey teenager, though. Sure, I had moments of frustration over some girl I liked, feeling misunderstood at school, feeling under-appreciated at church, and other cliches of adolescent misanthropy. But in general I had a sunnier outlook. Being happy made sense to me, and more than that, I didn’t like being a sullen teenager. I preferred being the sort of bright, shiny, happy-go-lucky kid that teachers liked having in class.
That changed going into my senior year, in a big way. It took some quality therapy to help me parse what happened in any intelligible fashion. Simply put, after pouring myself heart and soul into the activities of the church and school I attended from 8th to 11th Grades, I felt summarily judged, cast aside, and castigated for making decisions they didn’t like. Even though I had prayed on these choices and sought approval from my parents, they didn’t meet with the expectations the church leadership had for me—even though they had never once talked to me about the ideals they supposedly had for my life.
When you combine all of that resentment, anger, and angst about my future with requisite teenage malaise about wanting to leave one’s hometown for college, and growing up in general, it made for a really frustrating year of my life. At the time, the worst year of my life.
My response? To withdraw into my emotions. If I wasn’t at school, work, or church, I drove around the Golden Triangle in my truck listening to music. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to, and most of my friends at the Christian school didn’t like the same music I did. This created an intense time of musical exploration for me, as I had just enough money to buy new music on my terms. And since I was paying for the gas, oil, and insurance on that little red truck, I could play whatever I wanted to.
I always had a box of cassettes with me, and I played them in a Blaupunkt cassette deck I’d bought for myself. While I could afford to buy CDs to play at home on my stereo, I couldn’t afford a CD player for the truck. This meant I bought lots of blank cassettes for copying my CDs so I could have a cassette copy of all my favorite albums.
What does this have to do with Starflyer 59? Everything. I first heard about the band in 1995 by reading CCM Magazine and purchasing a couple of cheap Tooth & Nail samplers at the local Christian bookstore. Between the crush of over-driven guitars and the mumbled, mournful lyrics, Gold was exactly what my ears and soul needed to hear. Silver is often the album you’ll see on open-minded lists about the best shoegaze albums but I preferred the band’s second album.
The band’s sole permanent member, Jason Martin was never going to wow me with the same quirky turns-of-phrase as his brother Ronnie in Joy Electric. And he definitely didn’t bother with the Jesus-Per-Minute ratio of Contemporary Christian Music, whether pop or alternative. Instead, he turned rudimentary sentiments from everyday life into siren songs for the bleary eyed and frustrated. And his doleful musings matched the tone of the music he wrote. By mixing The Smiths with The Cure, Blur, and My Bloody Valentine—secular bands he name-dropped specifically in interviews—he introduced me to a new world of music. He gave me a soundtrack for my resentment by offering emotional space wherein I could release my adolescent tension and achieve (temporary) catharsis.
The music of Starflyer 59 didn’t resonate with me because I was another angry, disaffected, or moody member of Generation X, but rather because the music gave me permission to feel my angst and frustration—something I’d never experienced before. When you grow up in a religious tradition that equated a bad mood with bad behavior at best and bad salvation at worst, you quickly learned to either mask your true feelings or be comfortable with “praying through” on a regular basis. And because I wanted to be liked and to be a good kid on his best behavior, I opted to be in a good mood and do whatever was asked of me all the time.
It’s not that listening to Starflyer 59 made me moody or encouraged me to stay in those darker emotional places. The songs of Gold allowed me to feel those feelings and still love Jesus, which was a revelation in and of itself. It also helped me feel understood: I wasn’t alone in my hurts, pains, and frustrations with being a good Christian.
A lot of Christian music is designed to keep moods elevated artificially. But the older I got and the more I learned, I was increasingly drawn to artists who blur those lines and admit there is occasionally some grey in the world. With Starflyer 59, Jason Martin put us in the middle of his everyday world, singing songs about romantic love, his career as a truck driver in his dad’s business, random philosophical musings, and simply growing up. Through it all, he anchored his liner notes with some variation of this simple prayer: “All praise and glory to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.”
Gold featured a darkly hopeful thought from Psalm 34:18 as its bedrock sentiment:
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (NIV)
Most Chrindie fans of my generation are disaffected ‘90s kids who fell out of love with boring Christian radio. Many of us have some sort of sob story related to Gold and a crushing romantic experience. For decades, Martin has disavowed any connection between the themes on this record with any personal relationship issues he was going through at the time. However, apocryphal stories from Gene Eugene recounted in the liner notes for 2000’s Easy Come, Easy Go box set speak of finding Jason blearily working in the studio late into the night and until the sunrise during the recording process for the album.
Whatever the real story might be, it was hard to avoid the emotional impact of tracks like “When You Feel Miserable” which opens with: “Time waits for no one but you I’d wait for so long / But still I feel the times of your rolling eyes around here / Take a walk with a sweet girl, so sweet you know it’s true / But you’re wasting away, I just wish it would stay.”
The mournful cry of “Indiana” intones: “Stay, these days and you will find / All the hurting here will die/ be better when you’re mine and we’ll stay / The basket and the blue of your eyes / The basket and the blue skies and your eyes.”
On the murmuring piece de resistance of “Messed Up Over You,” Martin declares: “Tell it long, so true, sweetly to me / So long, so blue, completely over you / But now and now, and now I’m messed up over you.”
What does all this mean? It means that a dude from Southern California and the rotating assortment of friends and collaborators he’s created music with since 1993 helped me be OK with not feeling OK. I needed to hear that on so many levels during my senior year of high school. I was so ready to leave high school and go to college, but I also didn’t like feeling angry about my church, my school, and the leadership of those institutions. I’d spent my entire adolescence being told that rebelling against and disagreeing with the spiritual leaders in my life was sinful and the first step on that slippery slope to Hell. Yet, I felt a profound sense of mistrust towards them because of how they treated my family in general and my future specifically. Hence, my predilection for driving around aimlessly in that little red truck whenever possible.
Thanks to Starflyer 59 and Gold, I had a soundtrack for my feelings and a guidebook for my frustrations. Through Jason Martin, I learned about shoegaze, Britpop, Pet Sounds, tremolo pedals, alternate tunings, analog recording methods, growing old, being comfortable in one’s own skin, coping with loss, following your passions with purpose, and just taking care of business day in and day out. It felt like he was an older sibling, a role model I never had as the oldest of four boys. I also learned how to view the Bible in a new light, seeing as how folks like David, Job, Abraham, and even Jesus regularly asked questions and expressed doubt about their respective situations. If those spiritual role models could be pissed off and moody about their lives, maybe my struggles weren’t really that sinful either.
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