I am an impatient fool. Knowing that the rest of the album surely will be great, I should definitely just wait until Noah Gundersen releases his newest album before I publish anything about it. At this point it is difficult to say what the album is even named! The tour is If This is the End Tour, named for the first new single. But then the tour has A “Moment Like This” VIP Experience, so maybe the album is Moment Like This. I don’t know.
Either way, the point is that I cannot wait even to know the album’s title. Its second single compels me to write. So here goes…
As anyone who has been willing to hear my monologues on the subject already knows, I respect Noah Gundersen’s music, artistry, and honest lyricism a great deal. I was so proud to have my review of his 2021 album, A Pillar of Salt, published on Mere Orthodoxy. And as I clearly stated there, Gundersen’s music is not something I would consider “cheerful.” No, his songs are often pretty glum. He has made a musical career of being honest about the pain he sees in the world. It is hard. And it is beautiful. And I love it.
Additionally, Gundersen has been quite frank over the years about his disenchantment with his Christian upbringing, as well as the general worldview that religions offer. I, as a follower of Jesus Christ, ache to hear someone so earnestly wrestle with his spiritual frustrations. It is still beautiful, but it can be a fairly painful experience listening to his music sometimes. Two songs in particular have consistently brought tears to my eyes.
So when I tell you that the first two singles from this new album come from a positively hopeful and contented place, please believe me. Noah is doing a new thing.
During my research for the review of A Pillar of Salt, in my Googling I accidentally stumbled upon Gundersen’s wedding website, so I was aware that he would be married last summer. At the time I wondered what that might mean for his music.
Well, it has made an impact. In describing the process of making the new album, Gundersen says as much. As a freshly married man in his early 30s myself, I was hoping that Gundersen’s experience would mirror mine to some degree, as I’ve grown up with his music since he and I were college-aged.
When the first single was released, I heard the shift immediately. Noah has finally found a bit of personal peace with his wife, if not God.
So if this is the end,
there’s nowhere I’d rather be,
no one I’d rather see the end with.
Tell god on his throne to leave us alone
if this is the end.
In the balance of the song, Gundersen describes his little slice of marital bliss, finding peace in a simple life.
There’s beer in the fridge
in this place that I live
with the love of the woman I live with…
Two dogs and a cat…
I listen to music,
and I work in the yard,
and when the snow comes I’ll probably go crazy,
or maybe I won’t,
cause I’m taking it slow…
The turning of the seasons gives me something to believe in.
I just recently finished reading D. C. Schindler’s Love and the Postmodern Predicament: Rediscovering the Real in Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. I will not go into a deep analysis of his philosophical arguments; 1) because I am sure I wouldn’t do them justice, and 2) because it would be unnecessary. But the book’s blurb will help introduce the reason I am bringing it up:
The computer has increasingly become the principal model for the mind, which means our most basic experience of “reality” is as mediated through a screen, or stored in a cloud. As a result, we are losing a sense of the concrete and imposing presence of the real, and the fundamental claim it makes on us, a claim that Iris Murdoch once described as the essence of love. In response to this postmodern predicament, the present book aims to draw on the classical philosophical tradition in order to articulate a robust philosophical anthropology, and a new appreciation of the importance of the “transcendental properties” of being: beauty, goodness, and truth… beauty is the gracious invitation into reality, goodness is the self-gift of freedom in response to this invitation, and truth is the consummation of our relation to the real in knowledge.
On A Pillar of Salt, Gundersen himself laments reality mediated by technology, screens, and social media. So it is encouraging for me, who so appreciated the common-sense arguments of Schindler’s book, to hear that Gundersen is finding sure footing in an embodied existence, encountering the cyclical realities and goodness of nature, slow and sure and mundane as it can be. And if Schindler is right, what Gundersen is encountering in his grounded life, with all its personal-responsibility and interpersonal-reciprocity, is love, goodness, truth, and beauty, the essence of transcendent reality, culminating ultimately in God.
But that is getting ahead of ourselves, and ahead of Gundersen, for sure. Let us simply remember Schindler’s basis of love and reality as we wade into the second single from Gundersen’s unnamed release, ‘Swim’.
Now, what ‘Swim’ does, which is so masterful, is explicitly revisit some recurring and very specific poetic images that Gundersen has employed in his earlier albums. Comedians use something similar, a trick called a “callback,” when they return to an earlier joke at the end of their set, as a sort of sign off. Callbacks reward the active listener. They usually get a good laugh.
Gundersen, however, in keeping with the hope that I contend is so obvious in this new song, offers not only a return, but also a new heuristic key to reinterpret the callback, turning past pain into current blessedness. For those unfamiliar with his back-catalogue, ‘Swim’ may just be a nice song. For those who know his music well, on the other hand, this is the deepest breath of fresh air Gundersen could give his fans.
‘Swim’ opens with the speaker telling his beloved what he thinks love is and what he thinks it is not:
I’ve been trying to tell you,
but I just don’t have the words.
Love is not an ocean or a panicking bird.
It’s dancing and beating the drum,
staring down the sights along the barrel of a gun,
less the parts and more the sum.
Gundersen is being modest. Though he might not have precise words, he has beautifully evocative words, and this verse is reminding us of how he’s tried to conceptualize love in the past, in older songs.
He says that love is not an “ocean,” though he uses oceans and other water-based imagery throughout his discography as a metaphor for love and the heavy burden that life can be. He says that it is not a “panicking bird,” but on A Pillar of Salt he says, “If you had been listening, maybe you would’ve heard the sound of my heart like a panicking bird” (referring specifically to a panicking bird is an blatant callback to his last album). He says that love is less the parts, but on A Pillar of Salt’s deluxe release, ‘Part of Me’ suggests that love can look past the ugly bits: “If you give part of you to me, my love, I will give part of me to you.”
In ‘Swim’, however, it seems Gundersen is recognizing that only offering a part, while holding back the whole or the sum, is hardly love. Instead, we must give our beloved all, warts and scars and the rest. Dancing and drums and gun barrels are not recurring images in the discography, but even if the new album offers no further interpretation, at least we know something new has been suggested. Gundersen is reinterpreting, or at least viewing from a different, hopeful perspective, images that he has used in the past to communicate something heavy and painful.
The chorus goes on to say that love takes a commitment beyond just offering portions of a whole, beyond just dipping our toes in the water:
So hold your breath underwater
till you’re strong enough to swim,
past the edge, so much farther
than you have ever been.
As already mentioned, Gundersen uses ocean imagery a whole lot in his music: oceans and rivers and currents and depths that plunge our heads under the flood and threaten to end our struggle. Like Mumford and Sons’ Delta, Gundersen uses open water to represent the fear of never being able to find footing or even see a shoreline.
In the chorus of ‘Swim’, Gundersen uses another water image from A Pillar of Salt (Deluxe). In the song ‘A Pillar of Salt’, he describes his inability to commit to a common faith (maybe one he could share with his mother?). He asks, after acknowledging the pain that this causes her, wouldn’t it make sense that he would be stronger after all this time keeping his head above water all on his own:
So take my hand for one more dance,
slowly ’round the kitchen.
I know that I’ve been worrying you
with all these long aching glances
back over my shoulder.
But honey, it’s just what I have to do.
Will all this time treading water
make my legs that much stronger?
This song, verified by my best man, is emotionally overwhelming. The love and care of the mother, which comes from a position of earnest faith, is countered by the obstinate and no-less-earnest faithlessness of her son. The aching chasm open between these two, who do indeed love each other, is almost unbearably heart-breaking. Maybe it does not hit every listener as hard, but that pain is there, trust me. Believers praying for a loved one to turn to God might know what I am talking about. They too might feel it in the lyrics.
And so, when the speaker of ‘A Pillar of Salt’ laments that he is still treading water, he is not only utterly exhausted by the effort it takes just to keep life going, but he is also holding a brick of relational responsibility and disappointment over his head. It is all so heavy.
In ‘Swim’, instead of bemoaning the situation in which he feels like he should have, but has not made much progress, the singer recognizes that in order to move forward the way he wants to he should not wait until he is confident he can handle everything himself. Instead, he dives in with another, with a woman he loves, and he knows he will just have to do whatever is necessary to keep them both alive and well. Not a bad image of marriage.
If ‘A Pillar of Salt’ is one of Gundersen’s songs that hits me the hardest, emotionally speaking, the song he references next is truly numero uno. The second verse unravels me:
Call me,
call me by my name.
Heaven knows that I’ve been carrying the shame
of trying but never hard enough.
Always folded when the dealer called my bluff.
I always wanted something better,
always out of reach.
Now, this may not sound all that emotionally charged, but bear with me. Familiarity with the general feel of Gundersen’s discography will add some heft to his desire to be recognized by name, by who he truly is. It will add meaning to his recognition of the shame he feels at saying he cares but not acting like he cares. It will inform us about his desire for more and better without being able to get those things for himself. This general reference to his lyrics is pretty weighty.
But the single line, “Always folded when the dealer called my bluff,” calls back to ‘GOD DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS’ on WHITE NOISE B-SIDES. This song hits me in my most sensitive spot, and though I can kind of explain why, I probably will never be able to fully encapsulate what I go through when I hear the words. The only time I know my wife of 3 months has seen me cry is when I asked her to listen to the song with me.
The chorus of ‘GOD DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS’ goes:
Cause I wanted you
to make my bed
and sleep in it
so I could rest.I wanted you
to know my hand
and understand
that I was bluffing all along.
Without faith and a god’s arms to fall into, in the face of unremitting relational disappointment, ever playing the macho, self-sufficient type, the speaker of this song is too wrapped up in his own hubris to let another person in, to let someone else give him the help he so desperately needs. In song, his honesty shines through, exposing what his actions mean to keep hidden: true vulnerability.
He wishes that someone else would “make his bed and sleep in it,” a clever turn of phrase. In other words, he wants someone to make his decisions for him, to bear the responsibility of those decisions, and to give him love and comfort at the same time. He keeps himself and his cards hidden behind hands of independence, but in reality he just wishes that someone would call him out of his buffered self. His self-sufficiency is a bluff.
But perhaps why this song hits me so hard is that I think this feeling is universal. The speaker in that song does not have his stuff together. He is barely holding on, perhaps like a 30-year-old musician trying to make a living on his art. Still, even 30-year-olds who are gainfully-employed with a healthy family life and a solid faith in God can feel the same way. Life is hard. It is exhausting treading water for decades. Bearing the full responsibility for your life, let alone other dependents, can break your back if you cannot shed the weight from time to time. We all crave someone to share the load. Self-sufficiency is not just Gundersen’s bluff. We are all bluffing when we pretend to be doing this all on our own.
Back to ‘Swim’. Gundersen recognizes this history and knows that each time someone loved him well enough to call his bluff, to offer him love and personal connection, he folded. He threw down his cards, left the table, and hoped he might have better luck next time, maybe when he could keep his poker face.
But by the time he wrote ‘Swim’, things were different. In his mid 30s, Gundersen was finally able to let down his guard, to jump in, to marry the woman he loves, regardless of the ocean of unknowns ahead of them. He committed to love, something his songs have always claimed that he wanted.
The chorus returns with the final bridge, and let us take it in halves:
So I’ll hold my breath
underwater till I’m strong enough to swim.
Past the edge, so much farther
than I have ever been.
Early in Gundersen’s career, he released Ledges, and on the title track, speaking of edges that should be dove off of, he sang these words: “I wanna learn how to love, not just the feeling, bear all the consequences.” I believe we have found the culmination of those hopes in ‘Swim’.
I confess I’m scared of drowning
just like I’ve always been.
But all of this is meaningless
if I’m afraid of diving in.
In L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience, the philosopher argues that we can never really knowingly evaluate something like the decision to marry. Once married, our priorities, perspective, and experience will shift so dramatically that we will be an entirely different person, one who likely would have evaluated the decision differently than her pre-married self. The “reasonableness” of the decision cannot survive the transformation.
Gundersen is saying something similar. His fear of the ocean, the threat of drowning, may have impacted his decision to marry, might have kept him from diving in. But as someone who has been so honest in his songs, for someone who has expressed such an earnest desire for connection, the many years of fear and waffling and honest self-reflection are completely meaningless and self-defeating until he is able to overcome them and commit to the process and his person. He must be transformed before he is a new person.
Noah Gundersen has found love. He married her within a year of me marrying mine. And I can speak for myself and say that no one has brought my life more joy, meaning, love, and hope than my wife. I earnestly hope that Noah can say the same thing. I pray that his vulnerability and love will direct him to a still higher love.
All told, regardless of where love leads him, I know for a fact that I will always eagerly await Noah Gundersen’s newest album.